The Lefroy family, perhaps to make amends for the Tom Lefroy debacle, attempted a piece of heavy matchmaking with a young clergyman, Samuel Blackall, but between Blackall and Jane there existed a cloud of mutual indifference. She sensed, humiliatingly, that she was not noticeably sought after at balls, writing to Cassandra, “I do not think I am very much in request—People are rather apt not to ask me till they could not help it . . .”

As First Impressions took shape, the Austen family, those eager aficionados of the novel, followed the fortunes of Jane Bennet and Mr. Bingley, of Elizabeth and Darcy, as though they were real people, neighbors whose entanglements and betrayals touched each of them. Mr. Collins, perhaps the most fully comic of the Austen characters (and possibly modeled on Samuel Blackall), moved into Steventon with his obsequies and absurdities and lack of sense, providing welcome laughter in a bleak season.

It is sometimes thought that the Austen novels are dense and slow moving. The opposite is true, as her readers know. She mastered, early on, the ability to move scenes briskly along. Moments of perceived inaction contrast sharply with abrupt psychological shifts. Always there is the sense that she knows where she’s going, even in the midst of digression. This assured narrative voice anchors and sustains the human drama, and it is a particular pleasure for the reader to find important moments buried in paragraphs that pretend to be flattened asides.

First Impressions, much later renamed Pride and Prejudice, turned on the human capacity to judge—or to misjudge—the difference between appearance and reality. Was Darcy ever as disdainful and distant as Elizabeth believed, or did a girlish longing for drama—a drama in which she is the self-selected heroine—exaggerate her response to him and distort her initial impression? She certainly has doubts about her own judgment following Darcy’s first and unanticipated declaration of love. Immediately after, when she finds herself alone, she sits down and cries for half an hour. The crisp precision of that half-hour bawl is typically Elizabeth and typical of Jane Austen, too. A fifteen-minute howl would show lack of sensibility and a full hour, lack of sense. Weeping, in Elizabeth’s case, gives way to “agitated reflections,” and by the next morning she turns, sensibly, to the remedy of “air and exercise” and to a serious rethinking about Mr. Darcy’s motives.

Elizabeth Bennet is a brilliantly drawn and attractive character, and the novel is so subtly paced that even after repeated readings readers find themselves growing tense as the story progresses, preparing for disappointment, fearing that Elizabeth has gone too far this time, that she has, through pride, through rigidity of mind, lost the one person capable of rescuing her and giving her the life she deserves.

It is difficult to love Darcy, though readers are attracted to something glittering and hard in his personality. There is always a sense that he is behaving with a little too much dignity, that he is in some sense doing Elizabeth a favor by falling in love with her, acting against his best instincts and caving in to a fatal male weakness, sacrificing himself however nobly, and paying altogether too much attention to the shallow, spiteful Bingley sisters.

The “voice” of the novel is not delivered with the mature Austen measure, but is instead a cry of youthful anguish, the acknowledgment that one’s parents often present an acute embarrassment. The silly are allowed to lead the sensible into peril. And parents are capable of separating their children from their destinies, simply by being parents: blockish, awkward, old-fashioned, countrified, and coarse. In novel after novel the Austen pattern is replayed, the non-Darwinian emergence of brilliance from a dull dynasty: Elizabeth Bennet’s ravishing intelligence, Fanny Price’s perfect balance, Anne Elliot’s assurance and sense of self—all these women overthrow the throttled lives they are born into and the oafish parents who bring them into the world and then leave them adrift. There is a sense in which Jane Austen wrote not so much about marriage as about the tension between parents and children, the inevitable rupture between generations and the destruction that carelessness and inattention to these bonds can bring about. We are led inevitably back to the question of her own parents, and the glazed cleverness, and perhaps care, with which she covered the Austen biographical tracks.

Because her bright, splintery dialogue is so often interrupted by a sad, unanswerable tone of estranged sympathy, stirred by complacent acts of hypocrisy or injustice, the reader of Austen’s novels comes again and again to the reality of a ferocious and persistent moral anger. It is a manageable anger, and artfully concealed by the mechanism of an arch, incontrovertible amiability. Even her own family, her close circle of readers, may have missed the astringency of her observations.

Her own reading had comprised sentimental novels and novels of terror. These models must have disappointed her in some way, failing in their connection to the life she knew existed and proving incapable of illuminating the subtle shifts of feeling between people as they came to know each other. Probably she found the novels she read just a little absurd, and for a time she was able to rejoice in the humor and horror they provided. It was their exaggeration that made them absurd, but the real absurdity lay in their preoccupations, the strangeness of the human dilemmas on the page. What she wanted, and what she accomplished, was the dramatization of the familiar, the recognizable; and though Pride and Prejudice is closer to being a romance than any of her other novels, it takes as its subject the very issue that Jane Austen was struggling with at the age of twenty-one.