Jane Austen’s 250

16/12/2025 is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. 

Over the years, I have written about her characters, ethics, and technique, and she has such a firmly established place in the Western Canon that there’s no need to praise, so I’d like to write a bit about what Jane Austen means to me.

Two recurring themes in Austen’s novels that particularly resonate with me are balance, and the difference between appearance and reality (also a major theme throughout Shakespeare’s plays)—over and over again, Jane Austen writes about misperception and misunderstanding and hypocrisy and deceit… Mansfield Park is my favourite of her novels because it explores these ideas so well, because it’s the most complex and visual of her novels, and because it also conveys the sense of displacement, akin to the experience of an immigrant: Fanny Price doesn’t quite feel at home at Mansfield Park, but also doesn’t feel at home back at her parents’ house in Portsmouth.

But lately I have realised that there have been moments when I felt something like embarrassment, or defensiveness, about Austen because she is narrow, because she doesn’t write about death, because she doesn’t write about Big Ideas—that’s so foolish—is not love a serious theme? Is not courtship? Marriage? Coming to understand yourself, and grow, through love? Picking the right husband? Resisting the pressure to accept a man you know would make you miserable? Living and having feelings again at a time when you feel you have lost your chance of happiness? There is nothing trivial about any of this. Screen adaptations and (some part of) the fandom might turn Jane Austen into romance or chicklit, but she is subtle and serious, and I do think she is better than anyone at writing about love—about falling in love, about getting a better understanding of yourself thanks to love, about adapting and improving yourself for someone you love.

In her four masterpieces—Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion—Jane Austen explores different kinds of love, different aspects, different angles. She adopts different tones. She uses different techniques. Pride and Prejudice for example is light, bright, and sparkling, with lots of dialogue. Mansfield Park is sombre, and she uses more layers and metaphors. Emma is where she masters the free indirect speech, blending the voice of the third-person narrator with the voice of the protagonist, colouring your perspective of the scene. Persuasion is autumnal, her warmest and most romantic novel. I say Austen is narrow—and in some sense, she is—but these four novels are all quite different. She is wonderful. 

It is no wonder that 250 years since her birth, over 210 years since the publication of her novels, Jane Austen is still one of the most celebrated and beloved writers.