In Pride And Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet blushes furiously 'with shame and vexation' at her ghastly mother's indiscretions. Utterly modern: Jane Austen could be deadly accurate in her social nuancesĮqually fascinating are chapters on what makes Austen's characters blush (blunders, mainly, on which there is a separate chapter).Īusten's heroines are so sensitive that some of them blush because other people don't. Even more disturbingly, 'we can infer that Mr and Mrs Bennet have carried on an active sex life well into middle age'. Lydia Bennet, Elizabeth's sexpot of a younger sister in Pride And Prejudice, notoriously can't wait to fall into bed with the attractive philanderer, Wickham.īut Mullan finds sex lurking in much more unpromising alliances - in the tetchy marriage of John Knightley to Emma's sister, for example, whose five children in seven years indicate a once strong attraction. Some of the questions seem more Trivial Pursuit than Lit Crit: What Games do the Characters Play? Which Important Characters Never Speak? Is there Any Sex in Jane Austen? But the answers are highly entertaining, and reveal a quite unexpected aspect to the novelist and her books. John Mullan's brilliant notion is to show how Austen kept all these ideas in play by posing 20 questions about themes that recur in her novels. 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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