WHY WE READ AND OR WRITE ABOUT JANE AUSTEN by Janet Todd

Jane Austen's body of work delivers a nuanced understanding of life—especially as a woman, family dynamics, insights into the historical context of the period, and the social norms between men and women. For the last two decades, I have been fascinated by Austen’s diverse and massive fan following, scholars, and writers, and I love discovering why her words and characters still resonate with so many these two hundred years later. Once a month, since March 2024, I’ve featured one Austen fan to offer their insights.

I am delighted to feature critic, acclaimed novelist, editor, and biographer, Janet Todd, as my final guest of this yearlong series "Why Read and or Write About Jane Austen." —Christina Boyd

by Janet Todd, OBE

As a child, I didn’t read Jane Austen. A strange admission since I’m now a devoted fan! My young self devoured stories of solitary heroes battling wildernesses, other people, or inner demons. Love and romance seemed dull beside Gothic derring-do. If I’d had to choose a classic then, it would have been Wuthering Heights, not Pride and Prejudice.

Preferences change: Gothic lost its hold and, as I grew up, romance (as delivered by Jane Austen) proved less sentimental and cloying than I’d supposed, more about men and women on an inner journey than about swooning lovers. Reading the six Austen novels in a single wintry month, I also discovered that it was not a particular narrative I admired but simply the words: words in the right place, used sparingly, wittily, and cleverly. Jane Austen, this seemingly simple author of short, repetitive romances, became, for me, the mistress of style.

For my latest book Living with Jane Austen, I surveyed my life reading and working on Austen,

following her through the culture wars as she travelled through 1950s Marxist disapproval to

Second-Wave Feminist unease to mystification in French Theory—and on into the dwindling of Literary Study into Sociology. But now, far beyond the Academy—and largely through the films she has inspired—Austen had become a global phenomenon. Her popularity led to strange encounters—spinoffs where she’s a sleuth or therapist; after and other lives of her characters with vampires, werewolves, and seductive Texans—as well as to a fantasy of Heritage England.

Jane Austen fans promenade in their Regency finest during Jane Austen Festival in Bath (2014). Photo courtesy of Sophie Andrews of Laughing with Lizzie. I spy blogger Mira Magdo, author Sophie Andrews, and author Joana Starnes.

This last inspires a thousand Janeites to parade through Bath each year in Regency outfits. The result of all the activity is that Jane Austen makes community: you can talk to anyone who knows who Mr. Darcy is—or, most likely now—has seen him emerge from a pond with that clinging shirt. My other literary passions—I’ve written biographies of and edited Aphra Behn and Mary Wollstonecraft—are increasingly well-known. Like Austen, each now has a new statue. But you wouldn’t expect general familiarity with anything they wrote. There’s nothing in their work like that famous first line of Pride and Prejudice—or any creation like Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Austen’s novels inhabit my mind and are as familiar as memories of my own life. I remember some childhood Christmases, but no more than the fictional one in Highbury that moves from the warm Hartfield drawing room to Randalls, where Mr. Weston’s good wine causes havoc in Mr. Elton’s brain.

On a less fanciful note, I find the novels edifying. This isn’t a fashionable word, I know, but still, to me, the books deliver—in their ironic and oblique way—some good advice for living. They warn against grumbling and airing your ailments for example—advice I try but often fail to follow—and they caution against too much gossip and insufficient reticence. There’s a secure moral framework in Austen, however ambiguous her social comments seem to be: it isn’t necessary to say everything, true or not, or always to express your feelings; But it is necessary to have a conscience and listen to it. Bracing stuff!

Living with Jane Austen by Janet Todd. Publication March 25, 2025

I once found curious the early readers in the 19th and early 20th centuries who admired Austen’s minor characters while saying almost nothing about the intricate psychology of the main ones. I have now come to appreciate more and more these subsidiary satiric creations: Mr. Collins, Mary Musgrove, Robert Ferrars, and especially Mrs. Elton. In Living with Jane Austen, I made much of Mrs. E., of her almost modern instinct for tourism and her outraged response to the snobbish gentility she was encountering. I had a fellow feeling with her for, when you keep changing countries as I did, it’s very easy to be wrong-footed. And her imaginings are delicious. Who can forget that capacious bonnet, the basket with pink ribbons, and the ornamental donkey designed for the strawberry party?

To celebrate this ‘semiquincentennial’ year, the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, I was asked by Cambridge University Press to write Living with Jane Austen and prepare a new edition for a general readership. It was an honor to do both. It has been a joy to read through those six novels in order, along with the manuscript works and those jolly verses that breathe of a life amid family and close friends. I’ve edited many authors in a long life but with no other writer did I think, when I’d finished what is always a slightly onerous business, that I’d happily start reading the work over again.

That’s the genius and appeal of Jane Austen.

Janet Todd. Critic, novelist, editor, and biographer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jane Todd is an internationally renowned novelist and academic, best known for her non-fiction feminist works on women writers including Jane Austen, Aphra Behn and Mary Wollenstonecraft. In recent years, she has turned her hand to writing novels, publishing Lady Susan Plays the Game in 2013, A Man of Geniusin 2016 and Don’t You Know There’s a War On? in 2020. Her book Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden: A Novel with Pictures was reviewed  and recommended in Washington Post.

Janet has published and edited more than 40  books including the complete works of Mary Wollstonecraft (with Marilyn Butler), of Aphra Behn, and, as General Editor, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. She has compiled encyclopedias of women writers and written individual biographies:  Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life; Rebel Daughters/ Daughters of Irelandhttps://www.amazon.com/Daughters-Ireland-Rebellious-Kingsborough-Sisters/dp/0345447638; Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle ; Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Times, Her Novels; Aphra Behn A Secret Life  (2017) and Jane Austen’s Sanditon (2019).

Janet has worked in universities around the world including Ghana, Puerto Rico, North America and India. She was a professor of English Literature at UEA, Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities, before becoming president of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge (2008-2015), Cambridge where she established the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. She is now an Honorary Fellow of Newnham and Lucy Cavendish Colleges. In 2013, Janet was given an OBE for her services to higher education and literary scholarship.

You can connect with Janet via her websitehttps://www.janettodd.co.uk and social media.