There is a real tough-minded pragmatism in Austen's view of a young woman's prospects in life, and it came from personal experience.Īs the unmarried daughter of a family with social pretensions but not much money, she knew exactly how unforgiving the marriage market was, how narrow the line was between the triumphant happiness of a successful match and a miserable existence as a governess, or the unmarried carer of a querulous parent. Jane Austen's age when she wrote her first novel Most of her plots involve the journey of a young woman from self-delusion to good sense - at which point, we feel, she has earned the right to a nice husband, a comfortable income and happiness.ġ4. John Mullan's new book strips away these layers of familiarity and shows us Austen as she really is: often acerbic, sometimes unkind, cruel or even coarse, always deadly accurate in her recording of the social nuances that still make her stories so utterly modern.Īusten invariably punishes a lack of self-knowledge in her heroines. Whether we have actually read Jane Austen's novels or just watched their screen versions, we assume a familiarity with her and her characters and yet, somewhere along the way, something of her startling originality has been obscured by these adaptations. For a generation of television viewers, the image of Colin Firth as Mr Darcy in the BBC's adaptation of Pride And Prejudice, emerging dripping from the lake, (and eclipsing all other Darcys, past, present and future) represents the archetypal Austen hero: strong, wealthy, moral but arrogant and with a hint of a secret past.
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