Such establishments served a need in their time. Progressive families were often unguided about what to do with their bright young daughters, who required the connection with learning but not the expectations that might follow. Mr. Austen, perhaps, thought the curriculum at the Abbey School too light for the amount of tuition he was paying; he brought both girls home near the end of 1786, shortly before Jane’s eleventh birthday, marking the end of her formal education.

At home conditions were more invigorating than at any girls’ school. There were interesting new neighbors, particularly Anne Lefroy, a spirited, learned woman, enormously admired by young Jane Austen. Jane’s oldest brother, James, still at Oxford, was often at home, producing ambitious theatricals in the barn, and it is quite possible that Jane took a role in an enactment of Sheridan’s The Rivals. More interesting yet was the arrival at Christmas, 1786, of Jane’s French-speaking cousin Eliza, who had been born in India to Philadelphia Austen Hancock, and was now married herself to a French count, Jean de Feuillide, and the mother of an infant son, Hastings. The household at Steventon was transformed during the visit of these exotic relations by a dose of French worldliness that affected all the Austens and enchanted, especially, young Jane. French manners, French books, French attitudes widened the intellectual and social reach of the family, enlivening routine life.

There were more family theatricals in the following years, in which Jane almost certainly took part. And, at the same time, she was reading. Everything we know about the family tells us that her reading was likely to have been unsupervised and random. Her father’s bookshelves would have been open to her, and probably this good-hearted, busy man did not trouble to direct her choices. There existed very little that might be called children’s writing, and so she plunged directly into the adult world of letters. Not much is known about what she read, except for Dr. Johnson’s essays from The Rambler and La Fontaine’s Fables choisies in French, brought to her as a gift by her cousin Eliza.

More important, when considering the life of Jane Austen, is that all the family read novels, a form that must have seemed to them very much as early television struck its mid-twentieth-century audience. The Austens, as far as we can tell, were not particularly discriminating, enjoying inferior novels alongside the works of Richardson and Fielding. Established novelists, junk novelists, writers of romance—these classifications had not in the late eighteenth century been firmly established. Even as a child Jane Austen seemed to be thinking of herself as a future novelist, and one who would create more resilient characters than those drawn by the popular writer Mary Brunton, the author of Self-Control. Austen wrote, comparing herself to Brunton: “My Heroine shall not merely be wafted down an American river in a boat by herself, she shall cross the Atlantic in the same way, and never stop till she reaches Gravesend.”

The novel as a form was in its infancy, and the wonder of the new genre blunted criticism, for here on the page were living, reflective men and women facing real predicaments and expressing genuine desire. Here, in fact, was all that was immediately knowable: families, love affairs, birth and death, boredom and passion, the texture of the quotidian set side by side with the extremities of the human spirit. And here, too, was the specter of a woman’s future, the great questions over which there was little control: Was it better to be alone and in some sense intact? Or better to be coupled—and compromised, denied freedom but awarded the respect of society?

3

JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS are about intelligent women who take themselves seriously, but not solemnly. Each of the Austen heroines possesses an implicit moral system and an impulse toward improvement that seems to require no exposition or justification, no wrestling with ethical dilemmas, no laborious arrivals at the gates of perception. A steadiness of nerve prevails. The perfection of behavior, the refinement of sensibility—these were the natural conditions Jane Austen urged upon her men and women and upon us, her readers.

The young often read Austen’s novels as love stories. Later, more knowing readers respond to their intricate structures, their narrative drive, their quiet insistence that we keep turning over the page even though we know the ending, which is invariably one of reconciliation and a projection of future happiness in the form of marriage. But what did marriage mean in the context of these novels? Not a mere exchange of vows repeated in church. Marriage reached beyond its moment of rhetoric and gestured, eloquently and also innocently, toward the only pledge a young woman was capable of giving. She had one chance in her life to say “I do,” and these words rhyme psychologically with the phrase: I am, I exist.

Still later, readers come to appreciate the novels’ comic brilliance, laughing out loud not just at situations, but at turns of phrase. As a whole, Jane Austen’s work presents a consummate artistry that is almost impossible to deconstruct, but which revolves around the fusing of moral seriousness with comic drama. Jane Austen’s writing with its wit, elegance, and narrative control outshone that of her contemporaries and those Victorian novelists who came after her. It is almost as though she reinvented and stabilized the wobbly eighteenth-century novel—which seemed unable to stare at itself, to know itself—and made it into a modern form.

The novel, though a relatively late literary innovation, almost immediately crowded other forms aside. Its roots can be traced to travel writing, to essays, to narrative poetry, to lives of the saints, and to the French or Italian novella, but as a form it went off like a firecracker in the 1740s with the work of Richardson and Fielding.