The Legacy of Jane Austen
When people ask me what I like to read, my first response is “Jane Austen,” as if that’s a genre by itself. Pride and Prejudice and The Great Gatsby were the single two books that led me into the world of the classics in high school (I forget which one came first), and I’ve been a huge Jane Austen fan ever since. So naturally, when I learned that I was visiting Jane Austen’s house with my study abroad program, I went full fangirl. In the midst of reading Persuasion as a class, we left busy London for the countryside and hopped between towns before landing at Chawton House for a day, Austen’s family estate.
The house at Chawton is exactly what my romantic self hoped for a historic English home: outer walls crawling with ivy, wooden floors creaking so much that I was nervous as I walked, a library that smelled so strongly of old books that our tour guide told us to keep breathing in that wonderful smell. The estate is rich with history and portraits of the significant figures in Austen’s extended family (our tour guide introduced us to her favorite game: count the creepy baby portraits… there were a lot). And sure, I could gab on about history and the fascinating successes and scandals of the family, but that’s not what I sat down to write. I sat down to write about my favorite author and who she was and why I admire her as much as I do, even excluding her skill as a writer. So we leave the historical Chawton House and take a jaunt down the street to Jane Austen’s real house, situated on the old estate property that is now dappled with houses and adorable cafés. This is where Jane wrote the novels that are on my shelf today.
The entrance to Jane Austen’s house
The dining room is towards the front of the house, and in the corner is a teeny tiny table: Jane Austen’s writing desk. This is where every day, she spent hours writing with pen and paper in the light coming from the window, tucked away from the bustle of the house. She wrote and published all of her major works from this unimpressive little table and spent the rest of her time helping with household chores, visiting her cousins at Chawton House, writing letters, and enjoying the company of her beloved sister, Cassandra. One would think someone living this kind of life wouldn’t have much to write about; what could be so interesting about domestic life and dinner parties? Where is the adventure, the tragedy, the obstacles to overcome? And yet, Austen managed to write six novels from this little table in her dining room, and they are considered some of the best novels in the English language.
There is an episode of New Girl where one of the main characters, Nick, is determined to write the zombie novel that he has always wanted to write. Though he has never really accomplished anything, he considers himself a writer and one day is inspired to finally write. But when he sits down at his laptop, he is faced with insurmountable “writer’s block” and tells his friend, Winston, that he thinks the problem is that he hasn’t had enough life experience “like Hemingway.” After all, Hemingway fought in a World War and spent the rest of his life drinking and traveling Europe, having all kinds of adventures that inspired his novels. So Nick drags Winston down to the zoo and takes a flask along with him, and this is his idea of a Hemingway-esque adventure that will fuel his writing, leading to a very iconic New Girl quote: “OK, are you just drunk at the zoo right now?”
That was a bit of a fun digression, but my point is that Jane Austen was not Hemingway. She wasn’t seeing people die in the trenches, and she wasn't following the Spanish bull-fights. She wasn’t the Brontë sisters, either, inspired by plague and acres and acres of eerie moorland, filling her novels with tragic heroines and haunted mansions. And I’m certainly not against Hemingway and the Brontës (though I have yet to really enjoy a Hemingway novel 🫣), but there is something so beautiful to me about what Austen does in her work. Like other great writers, she sees the human condition and all its beauty and complexity, but she sees it in the mundane. She is like Jo in Little Women, who finds that when she writes a story about her sisters and their “boring,” domestic lives, she creates something that is truly worth reading.
Jane Austen’s writing table
By writing about characters who live fairly “normal” lives and women who spend their time doing the things that were standard for women in Austen’s time, Austen is saying that these stories are worth writing. In our culture today, women are admired if they are strong or powerful or a “girl boss,” if they defy stereotypes and act more like men. Media is full of these kinds of stories, and for some reason, the first one coming to mind is Mulan (one of my favorite Disney movies). Girl dresses up as man, joins the army, and saves China. This is all well and good, and it makes for an exciting story, but the women in Austen’s novels are very feminine. They dress up and go to balls, they embroider, they write letters. And though they’re certainly not perfect characters, many of them are incredibly admirable. In their small ways, they do defy stereotypes, and they do so with grace and often with humor. Austen gives dignity to the women who aren’t dressing up to fight in wars, who aren’t powerful or masculine, whose lives depend on marrying rich. Her stories aren’t exciting in the sense of containing duels or murders or madwomen locked up in the attics of mysterious houses, but they’re beautiful.
Unfortunately, Austen gets the reputation of a “romance novelist,” as if her books are the 19th-century versions of the romance books that you buy in an airport bookstore. And yes, her books are romantic, and I love them for that. But they’re also profound stories of friendship, sisterhood, coming-of-age, miscommunication, and cultural injustice. Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility explore relationships between sisters, both good and bad. Persuasion is a story of patience and virtue and forces that the reader to ask, “Who in my life influences me?” Emma has some of the most vulnerable and wonderful depictions of female friendship I’ve ever read (I cried), not to mention quite possibly the most romantic engagement scene in the history of literature. And Mansfield Park is primarily based on Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, an earl who adopted his mixed-race niece into his home and raised her as his own daughter in English upper-class society. Austen used everyday stories to explore the human condition, and she didn’t need to go off and fight in a war to do so.
Jane Austen’s garden (not pictured: college students playing dress-up in Victorian clothing and talking in really questionable British accents)
In short, I love Jane Austen. She’s loving, she’s hysterically funny, she’s romantic, she’s relatable, and she elevates the stories that society says aren’t worth writing. From the little table in her dining room, she left a literary legacy significant enough that a group of college students flew across the Atlantic Ocean to visit her house. She’s an inspiration to women, to readers, to writers, and to anyone who doesn’t think their life isn’t important or grand enough to matter. She’s a humble genius who never set out to change the world, but that’s what she did. And I will always be grateful to her for that.