CELEBRATING 250 YEARS OF JANE AUSTEN

Jane Austen was born on 16th December 1775 at Steventon Rectory, a handsome, rambling old house with ivy-covered walls and books in every room – the sort of place you can still find tucked down a country lane if you drive west of Basingstoke and listen for the sound of birds. A quiet child, Jane grew up alongside six brothers and her beloved older sister, Cassandra. She was famously shy – indeed no portrait of her that was painted during her lifetime shows her face. Jane grew up reading, observing and listening, and developed a wry sense of humour that would come to define her novels.

Yet don’t be fooled into thinking she simply chronicled the comfortably middle-class gentry lifestyle of country balls and polite conversations over tea and scones. Her works are packed with social anxieties and tensions, from money to class, to marriage. Jane’s works are novels of manners and satirise the constraints in which many unmarried women of her time lived. Jane saw, better than many other authors, how little room there was for a woman to move freely in the world — and how clever women had to be to live with dignity in it.

During Austen’s lifetime, her books were published without her name. “By A Lady” was all that appeared on the title pages –  a genteel anonymity enforced by her era that deprived her of any authorial identity. Today, her face is printed on British £10 notes. Her legacy is quite the journey in itself.

It was her brother Henry who posthumously revealed to the reading public that their favourite author was, in fact, the clergyman’s daughter from Steventon. From there, her reputation grew steadily — through the Victorians, who saw her as a moralist, to the Edwardians, who adored her irony, and into the 20th and 21st centuries, when she became a feminist icon, a cinematic mainstay, and some might say, a brand in her own right.

And yet, what’s remarkable is how little dust has gathered on her pages. Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet remain as compelling as ever, perhaps even more so now, in an age where people are far more likely to meet their partner on dating apps rather than at balls or assemblies.

The morals and messages within Austen’s stories mean different things for different people; reading Persuasion at 20, for example, is not the same as reading it at 40 (who would have thought that being single at 28 classes you as a spinster?). Austen’s woven words grow up with readers, as their perspective on life and society broadens and changes.

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The bicentenary-plus-fifty is being marked across the UK with a kind of quiet fervour — rather appropriate, one imagines, to Austen herself. Chawton House, where she spent her final years, is at the heart of it all. The historic manor –  part archive, part pilgrimage site for Austen lovers –  is staging a beautifully curated exhibition titled Jane Austen: Then and Now, featuring rare letters, early drafts, and responses from contemporary writers.

In Bath, the Jane Austen Centre is offering walking tours tracing her steps through the Georgian crescents she once so drily satirised. Online, readers are marking the occasion in the way of the day –  through the #JaneAusten250 hashtag, filled with everything from heartfelt essays to Austen-themed picnic reels (bonnets optional, of course).

Publishers, too, are joining in. Lucy Worseley has re-released her Austen biography, newly titled Jane Austen at Home: 250th Birthday Edition; Kathryn Sutherland has recently brought out Jane Austen in 41 Objects, a tactile biography that explores a collection of everyday items that formed Jane’s life and image, from her muslin notebook in which she wrote stories, to her family’s quilt, to Mr Darcy’s famous shirt.

Ask any Austen admirer –  and there are many, myself included – why her stories endure, and you’ll hear a common answer: She understood people, and wrote about them with a clarity, wit and emotional precision that characterises her works.

Her novels are not about empire or murder or the fate of nations, but rather the everyday dangers and concerns facing the domestic sphere. They are about conversations in drawing rooms, a misread glance, a hesitation before a letter is opened. And yet, within that quietness, the stakes feel profound. Love and security, freedom and reputation – all hang in the balance, and may be irreparably damaged at any given moment.

Jane Austen may have lived her whole life within the circuit of a few English counties, but her imagination stretched far beyond the hedgerows. Austen knew the world she wanted to write about, and she trusted that knowing it well was enough to write something lasting. That’s perhaps the greatest lesson she leaves us, 250 years on: you don’t need to conquer the world to understand it. Sometimes, a well-timed pause in a conversation says more than a war ever could, and this literary subtlety is one of Austen’s greatest achievements.

And we read her still – not solely because she shows us a prettier, more glamorous past, but because she understood people, in all their flawed, funny, and frustrating glory. We, her readers, can see elements of all her characters in our friends and families today, from the romantic fripperies of Marianne and the bashful awkwardness of Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, to Emma’s haughty arrogance in Emma, to Mrs Bennet’s despair of her daughters in Pride and Prejudice. People were then as people are now; that is the essence of being human, and in the end, what could be more modern than that?