Big anniversaries are coming up in 2026: 200 years since the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, 250 since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 250 since Adam Smith published “The Wealth of Nations.”
But an anniversary this month deserves special attention, too — Dec. 16 marked 250 years since the birth of Jane Austen, one of the greatest novelists who’s ever lived.
She’s still read today, and millions of people who’ve never so much as peeked into the covers of “Pride and Prejudice,” “Sense and Sensibility” or “Emma” know Austen’s stories from their film and television adaptations.
The “Jane-Austen-on-film industry . . . reached critical mass in the ’90s, and since then it’s basically been James Bond for women,” First Things senior editor Julia Yost told a near-capacity audience at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, on the day of Austen’s 250th.
Silver-screen takes on Austen’s books have starred A-listers like Gwyneth Paltrow, Hugh Grant and Keira Knightley.
Some are costume dramas set in the 19th-century English countryside Austen wrote about — others, like the 1995 hit “Clueless,” are modernized.
But are the original books just fancy chick lit?
“I’ve taught Jane Austen in the classroom for over 30 years,” said English professor Inger Brodey, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, at the AEI panel.
“And when I first started teaching, my classes were about half male, half female. Now they’re about 98% female. There was the rare guy who’s taking the class because either his girlfriend or his mother really wants him to. Whereas any smart . . .”
She didn’t need to complete the thought.
College gentlemen, there’s a lot taking an interest in Austen could do for you.
That’s not just because of the coed ratio, though — Austen’s works are a roadmap to emotional maturity, especially as it involves love.
She’s no romance novelist, and she was a sharp critic of her own era’s romantic movement, with its emphasis on spontaneous feeling and high-voltage emotion.
Her novels might seem starchy at first, but read on and it’s clear how modern she is: She’s not defending old-fashioned relationships in all their formality, she’s showing why the rebellion against those relationships didn’t work out — even if the old relationships were more likely to be about wealth and status than affection.
Twentieth-century critics who thought Austen was obsolete after the sexual revolution are today the ones who look naïve. Austen saw what was coming because it was already getting started in her lifetime.
The highly regulated social order Austen’s novels begin with is a backdrop to measure her characters’ waywardness against, and if it’s all very subtle by 21st-century standards, that’s part of the fun.
Not that Austen is above being as rude as Shakespeare can at times be: “Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals,” says Mary Crawford in “Mansfield Park.” “Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.”
And like Shakespeare, Austen takes a keen interest in how commerce and property rights shape the world in which her characters — and real people — live.
The England of Austen’s lifetime, in the early 19th century, was at a tipping point between being an aristocratic, traditional, agrarian society and an individualistic, liberal and commercial one.
Austen understood what was good and bad about both the old system and the new — insights helpful in the 21st century as we navigate upheavals of our own.
She died in 1817, age 41, without ever making much money from her writing.
Yet her books are staples of the publishing industry today, with editions readily available from Penguin, Oxford University Press and a host of others.
Despite that, she’s still not as popular as she deserves to be, with men as well as women.
From economics to religion to marriage — and all these things together — her books are an education as well as evergreen entertainment.
“That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with” was the judgment of one best-selling contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, in 1826.
Make it a New Year’s resolution: Read more Jane Austen in 2026.
Like the Declaration of Independence and “The Wealth of Nations,” her works have stood the test of two centuries and more for a reason.
They are grounded in truths about human nature, and those truths are expressed in ways that enchant as well as instruct.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
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