Bennet, unlike the Reverend George Austen, has no profession. The Bennet family members are more seriously divided in their interests and in their characters than the Austens. It is less possible to imagine them, for example, merging their energies and putting on a play for one another’s entertainment. Their conversation never achieves the Austen elegance and erudition. Their social awkwardness, partly because of Mrs. Bennet’s risible nature and Mr. Bennet’s morose obstinacy, is an exaggeration of the Austens’ unease.

Where then did Jane Austen find the material for her novel? Every writer draws on his or her own experience; where else could the surface details of a novel’s structure come from, especially a novel as assured in its texture as Pride and Prejudice? But it is not every novelist’s tactic to draw directly on personal narrative, and Jane Austen, clearly, is not a writer who touches close to the autobiographical core. There is, famously, the gift of an amber cross from her brother Charles and its fictional translation, in which it becomes the topaz cross Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is given by her brother William. But this is a mere narrative point, not a whole narrative parcel. Some readers have found a resemblance between the fictional Mr. Collins and the real Samuel Blackall, but so little is known about Mr. Blackall that the likeness remains pure conjecture. It is also suggested that the wicked, ruthless Lady Susan is drawn from stories about a wicked Lady Craven, the mother of the Austens’ neighbor Mrs. Lloyd, but if this is so, Jane Austen has taken the character of the bad mother and given her intelligence and energy.

It’s true that Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey experiences Bath society much as Jane Austen did, and almost loses her writing desk just as Jane Austen lost hers, probably during the period in which she was writing Northanger Abbey. But these explicitly matching autobiographical moments are rare.

We talk sometimes about “the world of Jane Austen,” even though there is no such nicely furnished and easily identified world. Or, rather, there is a specific culture Austen inhabited, that century-lapping time frame 1775-1817, but it is a time too variable in its components and too poised for change for us to think of a seamless and stable “world.” Much of what she puts down on the page is an England frozen in time, idealized, universalized.

Her novels are set in contemporary England, but her characters and their adventures are of the imagination—so much so that it might be thought to be a deliberate choice on her part to separate life and literature. She may, like many novelists who preceded and followed her, have been anxious to avoid injuring or embarrassing others by borrowing the material of their lives. The cruelty that colored her juvenilia had moderated, and she had become, if we can use her own word, more “particular.”

Undoubtedly, like her contemporary novelists, she also saw novel making as an excursion to an invented world, rather than a meditation on her own. She mentions real places—London, Bath, Lyme Regis—but her heroines live in fictional villages—Highbury, Langbourn, Kellynch.

With great clarity, she marks off the territory she is willing or unwilling to tackle. Whole widths of human activity are excluded. The presence of the military, so crucial to a book like Pride and Prejudice, is sketched in, but the professional activities of soldiers, the historical context, is left out. There is no mention in the novels of new discoveries in science, though we know the Austens were familiar with Edward Jenner and his work with the cowpox vaccine. She reports faithfully the rhythms and concerns of daily discourse, but never strays into those conversations to which she could not have been a direct witness. We hear women talking to men, women talking to other women and to children, but we are not admitted to those closeted conversations when only men are present. In the same way, declarations of love between men and women are abstracted, summarized and indirectly delivered. As for sexual life, it is assumed rather than alluded to.

One of the widest areas of absence is the religious life, and this has led some to think that Jane Austen herself was an unbeliever. A daughter of the manse, a person who attended church with great regularity and took part in family prayers, Austen says not a word in her novels about the consolation of spiritual life. No one prays, no one blesses. No one is caught in the midst of worship. There is no evidence that she and Cassandra, in all the hours they spent together, discussed their faith or lack of it. It is true that the novels—and her life—are crowded with clergy.