The following first appeared in the Irish publication Position Papers (positionpapers.ie) on December 1, 2025. It is reprinted here with permission.

It is a truth not (yet) universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a large grievance must be in want of someone to punish. That is a bit of a chunky rephrasing of the famous opening lines of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, “it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single gentleman in possession of a large fortune must be in need of a wife.” My version refers to the spate of Austen commentary, as the 250th anniversary of her birth approached–it is today! December 16–that casts her as a proto-feminist, chafing resentfully under the yoke of patriarchal oppression.

It is an undisputed truth that Austen remains a perennial favorite of female readers including those who style themselves feminists. One might expect her novels to be too thematically problematic to suspend indignation sufficiently to enjoy her glittering wit and satire, strong character delineation and masterly narrative control. Of course, that is massive compensation for any ideological begrudger. However, to acknowledge Austen fanhood, she, along with her fictional heroines must be shown to have an undeclared sense of life’s unfairness under what journalist Jo Ellison called “the patriarchal gloom.”

Ellison’s comment referred to Georgia Meloni. For Ellison, Meloni is dominated by her “testosteroid” peers despite being a leader who bestrides the political stage as a tone setting, agenda shaping, confident politician. This is exactly the same reality denying, grievance justification we hear as feminists comb the novels for clues that Austen saw the world through the same lens as themselves. It is easy to see how tempting, even necessary, it must be to claim such an icon of female success and accomplishment for the feminist cause. The fact that she was and remains such a towering literary figure within an inputted sexist culture raises the question of how a more inclusive cultural milieu could possibly have made her more successful than she was and continues to be?

At any rate, Jane Austen is so captivating that readers of all ideological leanings fall under her spell. Books imbued with a polemical or satirical message aren’t so immersive because the writer will only ever be partially vested in the world of her creation, keeping, as she must, a detached censorious eye that leaves space for disdain and criticism to resonate. In fact, readers tumble happily into her finely ordered world. She delights in her creation even as she pokes good humored fun at foibles, eccentricities, fixations and fancies as they play out in her intimately connected, social and familial settings. As one critic put it succinctly, her books are “equal parts social critique and a love letter to humanity.”

The stories in Austen’s six great, completed novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey are set against a very settled order of life and offer a welcome escape from our own fractured paradigms. It’s not just the social institutions that are reassuringly firm. Mores and social conventions are equally so. Even the landscape too has a grounded, well-tended, solidity. In the great outdoors, characters refresh themselves in natural beauty as Marianne Dashwood gushingly does in Sense and Sensibility. London and Bath, as the seasons change, offer for many, though not all, what there is of urban excitement. The place people call home is always the anchor and most of the great scenes of confrontation, reconciliation and romantic encounter and declaration take place there.

Austen’s characters are very sharply delineated from their first introduction. Yes, they develop and discover more about themselves as the story unfolds, usually just catching up with what the reader already knows rather than taking us by surprise.  Within an established societal order, personal status is determined by one’s place within family and social circle. In modern novels, as in modern life, characters move in a more socially mobile and personally shape-shifting world. Sally Rooney, speaking about the two characters in her book, Normal People, said that each of the couple was what their relationship made them. “Marianne would not be the same character if she was in a relationship with another man, or another woman.” Austen’s characters’ identities are more deep-dyed. Her Marianne is defined by the same emotional intensity and high-minded idealism (albeit in a different register) in both her ill-starred infatuation with Willoughby and her mature love with the worthy Brandon.

The crisp clarity of Austen’s characters is a measure of her artistry but that artistry, no less than Rooney’s, is shaped by the world that formed her imagination. Was she comfortable in that world with its class demarcations, its boundaries for her as a woman, its strict ideas of propriety?  The answer is in the serene, good natured, hope-filled flow of her work, not in the gimlet-eyed search for purportedly telling details to validate feminist confirmation bias. In her books, her deserving characters flourish. Those who defy and dishonor the social and moral norms do not. Where paternal overreach is defied in Northanger Abbey and good sense is clearly on the side of the rebelling son, it is significant that the father relents in the end, if grudgingly.

What then of the delicate but deadly irony and ridicule for which she is famous? Her attacks are levelled as much, if not more, against her own sex than against her male characters. There are no asymmetries of power between the sexes, though not in the modern understanding of the term. Indeed, everything does hinge on marriage and family, but that is as true for men as for women. Marriage is the nuclear cell of a flourishing society. Roles are allotted within a very defined, narrow frame of choice. Male characters are no more than the custodians of, often entailed, estates. Younger sons have to find livelihoods in the navy or the church if they can’t find a woman of fortune to marry. In one of Austen’s particularly lively verbal jousts between hero and heroine, Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey tells Catherine Morland that “the man is supposed to provide for the support of the children; the woman to make the home agreeable to the man.” To modern ears, this sounds sexist if not misogynistic. However, domestic duties were not considered a trivial pursuit in Austen’s England. Home was the place where small children were nurtured and taught. Social entertaining, for those privileged to pursue it, took place within the home and its organization fell to the woman of the house. As we know from characters like Pride and Prejudice‘s Mrs Bennet, and Lady Catherine de Burgh and Emma‘s Lady Russell, the important task of showcasing the family and arranging introductions with a view to a marriage or career advancement fell to women.

Some of these women, if they were widowed and by a certain age most were in early 19th century England, had responsibility for the management of wealth, allowing them to enforce their will on errant heirs. Lady Catherine de Burgh not only had the disposal of clerical livings in her power but expected the young clergyman concerned to choose a wife with her approval. Both Edward Ferrar and Willoughby, hero and villain respectively of Sense and Sensibility, were beholden to the despotic power of Mrs. Ferrar and a Mrs. Smith respectively. Securing their inheritance was dependent on them not offending the powerful dowagers with their behavior and choice of bride.

Austen curiously enough gives us vividly memorable pictures of domineering women rather than men. Lady Middleton and Mrs. John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility both rule both their households and their less capable and happily acquiescent husbands without raising eyebrows. Austen’s most dislikeable characters, and she certainly gives us plenty of scheming, money grubbing, dissolute men, are women. None of her male characters attract the odium of the selfish, ingratiating, greedy, utterly snobbish Mrs. Norris of Mansfield Park and the absurdly haughty, foolishly opinionated, but full pursed Lady Catherine. The reader is primed to await their comeuppance from their first introduction. Male folly and venality, by contrast, tends to evoke more indulgent bemusement.

There are senseless women as well as senseless men. Emma Woodhouse’s late mother, was characterized as a lady of good sense apart from the singular lapse of “judgment that made her Lady Woodhouse,” the wife of the simple-minded but wealthy Sr Walter Woodhouse Bart. The smallest social cells may be matriarchal or patriarchal. It is true that women with fewer options had to make compromises like the intelligent Charlotte Lucas, friend of Elizabeth Bennet, who married the ridiculous Mr. Collins whose proposal Elizabeth famously rejected. Charlotte told the surprised Elizabeth that “happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.” Security and status, and presumably a will to make things work, can be sufficient. In balance, it should be noted that Mr. Collins is also marrying without much, if any, love to satisfy his tetchy patroness who wants to see him suitably settled. For the likes of Mr. Collins or anyone like him in the small social pools of his time, options were very limited too.

Financially compromised men could also be pressured into marrying better off women they don’t love, as happened to the deservedly luckless Willoughby.  In Emma the motherless, eponymous heroine is influenced by family friend, the prudent and practical Lady Russell, not her father, to first reject Captain Wentworth because of his apparent lack of prospects. It’s easy to take a jaundiced look at the ruthlessly mercenary scheming but in Jane Austen’s era what was called “an imprudent marriage” could lead to a life of demeaning misery. Her one down-at-heel heroine, Fanny Price, comes from such a marriage but is fortunate to be plucked, from among her many siblings, to be adopted by her wealthy aunt and uncle. In that light, we can empathize with Charlotte Lucas’s apparent hard-headedness.

When it comes to more systematic social criticism, however, it is simply not there, however people may try to strain the text. Austen never ever probes the dark colonial hinterland of her social landscape, though there is a fleeting reference to the slave trade in Mansfield Park. Neither does she address ethical issues with regard to the rigid and exploitative class structure of her age. She simply didn’t see them with our eyes.

Universities weren’t open to the women of Austen’s day. While one can never be certain when an author is projecting her own views onto a character, there are times when there are reasonable grounds for thinking so. When Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey somewhat tentatively tells the clever Oxford student, Henry Tilney, that she reads novels, supposing that he would only read books about serious subjects, it is easy to hear the great novel writer herself in Catherine’s spirited justification of her choice of books. “I read it (history) as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with war or pestilences in every page . . .  and hardly any women at all.” For her, there is much more to be learned about the human condition in stories “in which,” in the words of Catherine, “the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature . . . are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” Austen compared her work to a cameo artist, confined to a small frame, oblivious to the sweep of world events that surrounds her subjects. While Catherine may feel intellectually inferior to the clever Henry, she is exasperated by the empty-headedness of his fellow Oxford student, John Thorpe. Cleverness and good conversation aren’t necessarily linked at all to formal education. “What passes for conversation,” as Catherine Morland sarcastically observes, is a charge that can be levelled at either gender. Nothing could be more vacuous than the ramblings of a John Thorpe, a Walter Woodhouse or the many other men she holds up to unflattering light.

Austen’s satire targets the foolish, the snobbish and the very many, of both sexes, for whom wealth and status are motivators so strong as to override good judgment and emotional ties. The unceremonious ejection of the presumed wealthy Catherine Morland, from Northanger Abbey by General Tilney, on discovering that she was not the heiress he believed, is an example of how natural feeling is shaped by calculated interest. In Mansfield Park, the deference paid to the wealthy Mr. Rushworth draws the scathing comment, “if this man did not have twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow.”

Austen’s lack of bitterness towards human weakness argues a fundamental belief in its goodness. What she portrays in her characters she sees among her own loved ones and in herself. In one of many prayers she penned for family devotions, she writes “Incline us O God . . . to judge (our fellow creatures) with that charity which we would desire from them ourselves.” The moral scaffolding of her small world are the institutions of state, church, marriage and family. “The laws of the land and the manners of the age,” as Catherine Morland puts it, set parameters for human behavior and call it into check when it strays beyond them.

On this occasion of the 250th anniversary of her birth on December 16, 1775, there is no shortage of ahistorical, revisionist interpretation casting her as a closet feminist. The fact is Austen’s work shows she was as grounded in her world, its mores and conventions as any of her female characters. The rigid class structure in the early stage of the industrial era, the country’s successes in foreign wars and expanding trade abroad were the mainstay of life in the large houses. Many fortunes were made in the army and navy and her books are dotted with captains, and officers. Two of her own brothers rose to the rank of admiral in the royal navy. “Many a noble fortune was made during the war,” we are told in Persuasion. Such an unqualified remark offers no hint that the author felt any moral ambivalence. Is it likely that Jane Austen would take issue with what is viewed today as systemic sexism and misogyny while remaining completely uncritical of the greater disparities and injustices in both her immediate and wider world? Perhaps, it is the disintegration of moral and cultural “givens” in our own time that has led today’s crisis of identity and incessant questioning of everything that existed before yesterday?

Artistic exuberance emerges from the restraints and rhythms of artistic form mirroring a society so constituted. Ultimately, Austen’s world is delineated by its Christian contours. Even though faith is not thematically developed, the omnipresence of vicars sets a tone. Two of her heroines are, like herself, the daughters of clergymen. No less than three of them, Eleanor Dashwood. Catherine Morland and Fanny Price, marry clergymen.  Her clergy, whether venal or virtuous, silly or solemn, are signifiers of a world order whose morals and manners are shaped by Christian belief. The reassurance of her tidy, ordered and deeply moral world is no small part of her enduring appeal. That may not be a truth, “universally acknowledged” but I venture to say, it is one, at some level, “universally” felt.

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