Afterword

Summary

There is no complete and easy answer as to why Jane Austen, a novelist who enjoyed a modicum of success during her lifetime, nowadays has such a wide appeal, while the most popular writers of her period – those whom she herself admired – Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott, are rarely read for pleasure. It seems that Austen's fiction – like Sir Walter Elliot's face – has aged well ‘amidst the wreck’ of her contemporaries. I have suggested that her success is due to her unrivalled creation of plausible characters and their idiolects, her melding of emotional analysis and psychological acuity with social satire and comedy. Also, size may matter: Austen's minimalist narrative style distinguishes her from both her contemporaries and the great writers who followed her in the nineteenth century, the Brontës, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Henry James. She ‘lop't & crop't so successfully’ (L, p. 202) throughout much of her creative process until only a fast-paced narrative remained – the ramblings of Scott's colourful peasant folk may safely be skipped, as can the satirical spates of Burney's whimsical oddballs, but readers who mistake Miss Bates's compulsive chatter as equally immaterial to the plot will find themselves lacking pieces in the puzzle that is Jane Fairfax's secret engagement. And Austen's novels do not contain any of the tedious excursions characterising the fiction of her period: to omit ‘long Chapter[s] – of sense’, ‘an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte’ (L, p. 203) was her conscious aesthetic decision – one which may have lost her critical appreciation among reviewers at the time but which has ecured her popularity in a century when literary didacticism has fallen from fashion.