Jane Austen (ranked) (sort of)
Underrated heroes, handsome ne'er-do-wells & wrestling with Mansfield Park
In 2023 I reread Jane Austen’s six finished novels. Here are my thoughts, in the order I reread them, and at the end is my official ranking of Austen’s couples. (These are vibes-forward takes, just so you’re prepped.)
Pride and Prejudice
Honestly I feel like some bookish sorts (myself included) want so hard not to be a basic Austen gal that they resist this book. I used to always say Persuasion was my favourite but rereading P&P this year reminded me quite how brilliant it is, and quite how much I love it. Sometimes things are just really popular because they’re really good.
Lizzy and Darcy are very hard to beat in terms of chemistry, flirting and drama. Lizzy is Austen’s wittiest heroine and in my opinion this is her funniest novel that isn’t satire (ie Northanger Abbey which officially The Funniest One). Ultimately, it’s got a bit of what makes all the other books work. It’s layered and nuanced but also very enjoyable and easy to follow. It’s thoughtful but with touches of gentle farce and some great plot twists. I would argue it easily has the finest cast of supporting characters - the Bennet family, the Bingleys, Lady Catherine, Mr Collins! Mr Wickham as the best and worst of rogues.When it comes to proposals, weddings, balls and big houses it gives you multiples and all of this on top of Lizzy and Darcy falling in love. Lizzy is clever but not arrogant, witty but not mean-spirited, moral but not dull, sensible but still playful all the while still feeling very real and flawed. And so perfectly matched with Darcy - they have proper, charged chemistry.
“My dearest sister, now, be serious. I want to talk very seriously. Let me know everything that I am to know without delay. Will you tell me how long you have loved him?”
“It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began; but I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”
Also for the record, I’m very much a 1995 BBC gal. I rewatch it regularly. I like the Joe Wright film very much - it has one of my all-time favourite scores and I like almost all the cast very much but ultimately I just can’t get behind Keira Knightley as Lizzy. It’s not even that I think she’s bad in it, I just don’t think her and her acting style are a good fit for Lizzy.
Sense and Sensibility
This and Northanger Abbey were the two books that shifted the most in my opinion of them on my reread. I’ve actually never reread this, so it was my first read since I was a teenager and as I’d never seen the 1995 film until now either (what a year for Austen screen adaptations 1995 was) I was fairly hazy on the details. My memory was of finding Elinor too sensible and Marianne too annoying, almost as though I entirely missed the point of it all (what I fear I have done with Mansfield Park? But more on that below). I genuinely loved reading it this time and I felt for them both very sincerely and am considerably more fond of them and the book. Elinor’s sense is much more understandable, moving and appealing to me and as an adult elder sister, I really responded much more to her intense eldest daughter energy. Equally Marianne’s sensibility is far more winsome and charming to me, therefore her heartbreak more affecting. While she would be exhausting to have as a little sister, I cannot help but enjoy someone so committed to Romance with a capital R - Marianne, you would’ve loved Moulin Rouge.
It is not Austen’s most romantic book, it isn’t her funniest book, it isn’t her most dramatic book (although obviously it has romance and wit and drama in there) but this maybe means it sort of falls through the cracks a little bit in terms of being people’s favourite. Not to sound like Lydia Bennet, but it could do with an on-page ball. But I really found this to be a very lovely, heartwarming and touching reading experience this time round.
Emma
It’s just not my favourite I’m afraid, and not because of Emma being ‘unlikeable’ - I actually love Emma. She is a menace in the best possible way and I actually think her independence, cleverness, confidence and flirting read very appealingly to a modern eye. I actually struggle to put my fingers on quite why I can’t love this book, especially as it’s the favourite of one of my very dear (and very wise) writer friends who knows it by heart. My two main barriers to the novel are that I think it is too long, with too many bits that are variations on a theme (I really like the whole Churchill/Jane/piano subplot but it takes so long to come to its inevitable denouement), and also that Knightley isn’t my fav. He’s much older than Emma, which, fine, but it comes up a fair amount how much time he spent with her as a child and he even says he has been in love with her since she was thirteen which is always a jumpscare. Johnny Flynn is certainly not book-accurate casting (but I’m on board).
There are other large age gaps in Austen’s novels, and other imperious men but the combo of those with the fact that he knew her as child just doesn’t sit great with me. He just loves to correct her and chastise her and it just feels kind of unsexy to me. I understand that he is a very decent, honourable man always quietly doing the right thing (although give me vulnerable, angrily in love Darcy any day) and I totally believe that they are super into each other, it’s just that I don’t want Emma to be “he has a point actually”. I want her to continue to menace Highbury with spurious rumours, high quality dinner parties and ill-advised matchmaking! Honestly maybe I’m just trying to over-intellectualise the fact that that the book just doesn’t do it for me like some of the others do. I want to like it more than I do! My cleverest friend thinks it’s the best one! I’m also kind of a Frank Churchill apologist, who is easily Austen’s most appealing and harmless rogue (maybe because he’s been played by Ewan McGregor, who knows).
Persuasion
This one holds a very special place in my heart because of all her books, I have the most visceral memory of reading it for the first time and being absolutely swept away. Reading Wentworth’s letter to Anne for the first time, I just felt like it was the most romantic thing that had ever happened and it still gets me every time. HALF AGONY HALF HOPE. I think the reason P&P probably just pips it as my favourite is that whatever mood I’m in, I always love going back to P&P whereas Persuasion suits a more particular reading mood. But when I’m after something a little more melancholy and thoughtful, there’s nothing quite like it.
Anne, as a slightly older heroine, more aware of her own mistakes, is easy to root for and understand. You feel for her without feeling pity for her, even as you feel how deeply she regrets turning Wentworth down. She’s incredibly kind but has learned how to stand up for herself, she’s empathetic (I love her friendship with Benwick), underappreciated by her ridiculous family and very perceptive. I think of all of Austen’s heroines, she’s probably the one I’d most like to be friends with. And oh, the pining. The chemistry with Wentworth. I think it’s got a real grownup sexiness to it because the leads are slightly older and know themselves and life better. The gradual realisation for us and Anne that Wentworth is still very much in love with her. The letter, goddammit.
I haven’t seen either the 1995 or 2007 screen version and I must before I shout too loudly about the lack of a good adaptation that is just to my tastes. I watched the Dakota Johnson film after rereading it and while I did not like it, I did not think it was an affront to film and literature as some people did. I didn’t mind Johnson as Anne even if I didn’t think it was ideal casting, and I very much enjoyed Mia McKenna-Bruce as Mary as well as thinking that Cosmo Jarvis made a good Wentworth. (Actually generally I thought the casting was pretty good). The script just wasn’t very good though, was it - Anne and her story are not a natural fit for the Fleabag treatment. (Let me have a go cowards!) I also didn’t like the clothes which are essentially historically accurate but with a slight modern sensibility. I think this is quite hard to land in a way that makes it worthwhile or interesting (Alexandra Byrne does a beautiful job with this is 2020’s Emma) and if it isn’t done cohesively and stylishly it just feels awkward.
Northanger Abbey
An utter delight of a novel, I absolutely did not appreciate this enough when I first read it as a teenager when I lacked the framework to truly enjoy this as it was written. A satire of gothic novels, but an affectionate one, it is Austen’s funniest book. Knowing, laugh out loud funny, charming and hugely entertaining, how can you resist a novel that begins like this:
“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings—and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters.”
There are more of my delighted feelings about Catherine and Henry in my ranking at the end but I love them very much. Henry is no brooding, tortured hero but a cheerful, witty, slightly odd man equipped with a charming sister and a gothic estate who is open about his enjoyment of Catherine’s personality from the outset. Not a man to inspire steamy fan fiction perhaps (although let me know if I’m wrong cause I’d read it) but I think he would make a great husband.
Also bonus mention for John Thorpe, Austen’s least hot ne’er-do-well, even if he is a very funny character. A braggadocious buffoon rather than a sexy rogue (his sister Isabella being the sexy rogue in this book). The sequence when John takes Catherine for a carriage ride and won’t stop talking about horses and gets everything wrong constantly is just brilliant.
I have become gently obsessed with wanting to adapt this for television and have decided to manifest this by mentioning it two thirds of the way into a very long post - a tactic I am sure will guarantee success. I think Isis Hainsworth and Will Sharpe would make an excellent Catherine and Henry.
Mansfield Park
I read this when I was a teenager but had next to no memory of anything that happened and reading it now was a bit of a puzzle box for me. Because Fanny is just too good and boring and everything interesting is happening in the background but then, that’s what the book is about - real integrity in face of glamour and pretence. BUT as a reader I want different things to what I want in person. It’s why I love Darcy, even though I would not love Darcy in real life. Yes, Fanny is reacting appropriately and understandably to her circumstances, but it’s more fun to read about a scandalous play, a hot, mean woman who hates clergymen and a chaotic shagger. I admire Fanny, sure, but I’m not particularly rooting for her. And it’s also just not romantic to me - Fanny pines for her cousin Edmund the whole novel, he only realises her true charms in the last pages, and also, you know, they’re cousins. Brought up together. Curiously, Austen even talks about how this means they shouldn’t fall in love, adding to my general feeling of confusion.
“You are thinking of your sons—but do not you know that, of all things upon earth, that is the least likely to happen, brought up as they would be, always together like brothers and sisters? It is morally impossible.”
I struggled to feel like I was getting to the heart of the book. I oscillated between “I get it but I don’t like it” to “I’m not sure I get what Austen is going for”. Fanny is very judgmental about her cousins and friends putting on a play but we know that Austen very much enjoyed going to the theatre and also writing and starring in home theatre productions. Obviously novels don’t necessarily reflect an author’s position but it just added to that curious puzzle box feel where I felt a bit wrong-footed about what Austen is really saying, with the mix of moralising and yet flashes of scandalous energy floating just out of reach. So much of it feels like Austen writing it with a real ‘make of that what you will’ energy.
I still had a nice time reading it, and actively enjoyed several sections of it but it also suffered from my essentially random reading order as this long, sensible novel didn’t make for an ideal follow-up to the silly, witty, joyful Northanger Abbey. Ultimately, whether I truly understand what Austen was going for or not, I can’t sincerely get behind Fanny as a heroine or Fanny and Edmund as a couple.
“Scarcely had he done regretting Mary Crawford, and observing to Fanny how impossible it was that he should ever meet with such another woman, before it began to strike him whether a very different kind of woman might not do just as well, or a great deal better: whether Fanny herself were not growing as dear, as important to him in all her smiles and all her ways, as Mary Crawford had ever been; and whether it might not be a possible, a hopeful undertaking to persuade her that her warm and sisterly regard for him would be foundation enough for wedded love.”
In terms of romantic declarations, it’s no “half agony, half hope” is it.
Austen couples, ranked
I was going to rank the heroes and heroines separately but I am going to factor in my feelings on them both to rank them together. The criteria are vibes. This is my personal opinion and also indisputable fact.
Anne Elliott & Frederick Wentworth - older, wiser, hotter
“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.”
Elizabeth Bennet & Fitzwilliam Darcy - if your man hasn’t gone to london to find your runaway sister and make his childhood friend turned mortal enemy marry her then dump him. (Bonus mention for Jane and Bingley as even though I am not good like Jane, I very much married a Bingley.)
Catherine Morland & Henry Tilney - I absolutely love these two as a couple and Henry Tilney is such an underrated hero. I love how into Catherine he is. I love that he’s a respectful flirt with a kind of weird sense of humour. I love that they bond over gothic novels. He’s gets as close to proto-feminism as any of these guys do. Catherine is somewhat naive and ridiculous but delightfully so and Henry fancies her from the moment he meets her. And honestly, what is love if not being charmed when your beau accuses your father of being a murderer.
Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley - as described, I love Emma but how you feel about George Knightley probably has a link to how much you like being told off by older men tbh.
Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars / Marianne Dashwood and Colonel Brandon
I am very fond of both Elinor and Marianne, but their love interests feel much more like background characters than any of the other heroes on the list. The men are really just there for the happy endings so Elinor and Marianne are the most ill-served by couples rankings. They are both nice, decent men. Arguably too decent and lacking any particular bite or charm. Colonel Brandon doesn’t even get a first name, which I think says a lot.
Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram - they are cousins.
There is actually (IMO) a wonderful Northanger Abbey adaptation with Felicity Jones as Catherine Moreland and JJ Feild as Henry Tilney. Carey Mulligan is Isabella.
Any chance of a Walter Scott or Sherlock list like this?