Radical or reactionary, bitter spinster or witty feminist: will we ever know the real Jane Austen?

This year is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, and what Professor Hermione Lee once called the “English tradition of affection and sympathy for Jane Austen” is thriving. Several new books are being published, the BBC is producing a new documentary, Substack has multiple Austen book clubs. But how well do we really know Britain’s most beloved author?

Though each of the new books has merit, they all claim Austen for modern concerns. Inger Brodey argues Austen undercut her own happy endings about marriage. Devoney Looser says Austen is wilder than we know. Janet Todd says “living with Austen”, and imbibing the lessons in her work, can change your life. Rebecca Romney has written about the women novelists who influenced Austen. 

This is nothing new. From the 19th century’s “dear aunt Jane” biography written by Austen’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, to modern feminist readings, Austen has been claimed by more ideologies than she could ever fit. She has been a reactionary and a radical, a bitter spinster and a witty feminist, an evangelical and a moderate believer, a hater of her society and a staunch Tory, an old romantic and an underminer of marriage.

In 2018, Lucy Worsley wrote about Austen and domesticity, taking a feminist angle. In 2016, Helena Kelly presented a thinly evidenced image of Austen as a radical, interested in evolution and female masturbation. We always find the Austen we want to find. This can be bewildering. Can we ever put aside our own concerns and understand the writer on her own terms?

There is a version of Austen still locked in the academic library. Recent scholarship has revealed that Austen’s novels are engaged in debates about Enlightenment philosophy, steeped in contemporary ideas, particularly the work of Adam Smith and David Hume. 

As the Austen and Smith scholar Shannon Chamberlain told me, “Austen shared her keen eye for the complexities of human behaviour with the Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith.” These thinkers, she explained, had developed a model of human behaviour that was no longer based on theology and the Fall, but was particular to humans, born out of empirical observation. “Austen imbibed these ideas and created characters who tested them out . . . Smith and Hume and others were pioneering new kinds of moral inquiry. Naturally, Austen was interested.” 

That is the Austen I want to see this anniversary year. Not the writer we adapt to our own ideas, but the thinker engaging with the ideas of her time. Jane Austen the worldly philosopher.

In 2004, Peter Knox-Shaw published Jane Austen and the Enlightenment, arguing that Austen was not a reactionary (as Marilyn Butler had argued in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, one of the best books about the author), but was instead a centrist Enlightenment thinker. Since then, more work has been done looking at Austen’s overlap with Enlightenment philosophers, especially the father of economics, Adam Smith.

In 2015, two economists, Cecil Bohanon and Michelle Albert Vachris, wrote Pride and Profit, documenting the many parallels between Austen’s work and Smith’s book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is a fascinating study.

Smith argued that people want to be praised and to be praiseworthy. That they want to be loved and to be deserving of love. Smith says we must be virtuous to be happy. His virtues are prudence, benevolence and justice. His vices are pride and vanity. “The proud and the vain man . . . are constantly dissatisfied,” he writes. The route to virtue is through “self-command”. Therefore we must achieve “superiority over the most ungovernable passions of human nature”.

Self-command is a question of willpower, education, habit. It comes from being bred in “the bustle and business of the world” when we are exposed to “violence and injustice of faction”. To those who are miserable, Smith advises in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “do not mourn in the solitude of darkness . . . Live with strangers, with those who know nothing or care nothing about your misfortune.” 

In Sense and Sensibility (1811), Austen’s first published novel, Elinor Dashwood is sensible while her sister Marianne is full of big, overwhelming feelings. Elinor has these qualities too, but she keeps control of herself. Elinor has self-command, Marianne doesn’t. The phrase “self-command” occurs eight times, always about Elinor.

Both sisters are separated from their lovers. Elinor discovers that Edward is secretly engaged. A third of the way through, Marianne’s lover, Willoughby, abandons her. Their neighbour, Mrs Jennings, takes them to London where they are exposed to all manner of rudeness, indolence, vanity and pride. They must control themselves around these irritating, vulgar people, who are all gossiping madly about poor Marianne’s love life. The two sisters react quite differently to the situation.

First, Marianne was enchanted by Willoughby’s vanity, showing off with him, taking risqué carriage rides and giving the impression she was engaged. Now, she writes to him in desperate secrecy, a serious breach of etiquette. When he cuts her off, she stays in bed all day, avoiding people — the opposite of Smith’s advice. Elinor is suffering too. But Marianne cannot see it because Elinor is better at “living with strangers”, as Smith puts it. 

When Marianne discovers Elinor has known about Edward’s secret engagement for four months, she is astonished. “Four months! . . . So calm! So cheerful! How have you been supported?” A sense of duty, says Elinor. “I owed it to my family and friends.” More Smithian yet, Elinor tells Marianne,

. . . after all that is bewitching in the idea of a single and constant attachment, and all that can be said of one’s happiness depending entirely on any particular person, it is not meant — it is not fit — it is not possible that it should be so.

Or as Smith writes, “The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seem to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another.” 

The unrestrained Marianne accuses her sister of lacking all feeling. Elinor retorts hotly. Her problems have been “hanging on my mind”, she says. She had to “appear indifferent where I have been most deeply interested”, and to “contend against the unkindness” of Edward’s relatives. She tells Marianne:

If you can think me capable of ever feeling, surely you may suppose that I have suffered now. The composure of mind with which I have brought myself at present . . . have been the effect of constant and painful exertion.

This is the moment when Marianne grows up. “Oh! Elinor,” she cries, “you have made me hate myself for ever. How barbarous have I been to you!” Now Marianne makes a plan for her moral education and says her memories of Willoughby “shall be regulated . . . checked by religion, by reason, by constant employment”. As the economists Bohanon and Vachris write, both Smith and Austen prioritise self-control as a means of achieving balance and self-improvement. By attaining the skill of self-command, Marianne is able to cultivate virtue.

Smith’s ideas inform Austen’s most beloved novel too. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), the idea of pride is Smithian. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith writes of the proud man:

He disdains to court your esteem. He affects even to despise it, and endeavours to maintain his assumed station, not so much by making you sensible of his superiority, as of your own meanness. He seems to wish not so much to excite your esteem for himself, as to mortify that for yourself.

This is exactly what Darcy is like at the Netherfield ball. When Lizzy tells Darcy he hates everyone and he tells her she wilfully misunderstands him, that is also a Smithian moment. “The proud man,” Smith writes, “is commonly too well contented with himself to think that his character requires any amendment.”

However, it is telling that Lizzy and Darcy do retain some pride, even when they have learnt their lesson, whereas excessively humble characters, the obsequious clergyman Mr Collins, require more improvement. As Smith says, “It is better to be a little proud than . . . too humble.” Self-command shouldn’t lead to priggishness, but to one’s personal moral development. 

What marks out the capacity to improve, in Smith, is being able to see ourselves as an “impartial observer” would see us. That’s what happened to Marianne when she finally saw things from Elinor’s point of view. Smith calls self-deceit a “fatal weakness of mankind” and says it is “the source of half the disorders of human-life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or, in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable.”

That reformation is the basis of the plot of Austen’s novel Emma (1815). Emma is unable to see herself in the light in which others see her. She makes serious errors about who loves whom, and comes close to ruining people’s lives with her clumsy matchmaking. She represents Smith’s “man of system”, someone who is so “enamoured of the beauty” of their own plans that they cannot see their errors. Knightley acts as the impartial observer: he can see what Emma cannot. His advice about her conduct turns out to be the right advice. 

Emma is unable to improve morally until she takes Knightley’s advice. Like Marianne, she must learn to see like those with more self-command. It is when Emma sees things as Knightley does that she is able to reform. “I doubt whether my own sense would have corrected me,” she acknowledges to Knightley. As Bohanon and Vachris write in Pride and Profit, the impartial spectator provides moral order in the way that Smith’s invisible hand provides economic order.

The opening line of Pride and Prejudice may be her most famous, but Austen’s take on the complexities of human relations and understanding is best captured in a line from Emma:

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

Austen is not a novelist of certainties or ideologies. She has a philosopher’s understanding of the subtle ways in which human nature works. She knew, as Smith did, that “man [is] the immediate judge of mankind”, and that we all want to be loved and deserving of love. That might be her most radical lesson of all.

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