We know the marriages, the mistakes and the mortifications by heart. So why, more than two centuries later, do we keep going back to Jane Austen?

The first time I read Pride and Prejudice, I was young enough to think that I understood everybody in it. Mrs Bennet was the chief calamity of the Bennet household and Mr Bennet its chief consolation. He was clever, dry, perpetually amused by the people around him and possessed of a library into which he could disappear whenever they became particularly tiresome, which seemed to me then an eminently sensible arrangement for living. Mrs. Bennet on the other hand, was simply mortifying; and the matter seemed perfectly settled. Charlotte Lucas disappointed me rather badly; Lydia was an idiot; Lady Catherine was magnificent fun provided one did not have to know her; and Darcy, after behaving abominably for a considerable part of the novel, eventually became exactly as lovable as generations of readers had promised me he would. I closed the book feeling that everybody had been satisfactorily understood and put in their proper place. But I have read it several times since, and they will not stay there.

Years later I returned to Longbourn and discovered, with some annoyance, that Mrs Bennet was still mortifying but no longer quite so foolish, while Mr Bennet, whom I had once adored for retreating into his library and laughing at everybody, had somehow acquired the less charming appearance of a man who had spent twenty years doing precisely that while his family’s future went unattended. Austen had not altered a word. Evidently, I had.

Mrs Bennet remains dreadful, I should say at once; time has not performed miracles. But somewhere between one reading and another I began to notice the five daughters, the entail, the small and increasingly alarming fact that Longbourn would pass out of their hands when Mr Bennet died, and that the husband whose wit had delighted me so much had spent a good portion of his married life knowing all this and doing very little beyond finding his wife ridiculous. 

Charlotte, meanwhile, became less disappointing the more I understood what precisely awaited an unmarried woman without much money. Lydia became less a comic nuisance and more a very young girl behaving with the particular invincibility of someone who has not yet discovered that consequences exist, and even Elizabeth, whom I had once trusted almost implicitly because she was clever and because I liked her, began to look a little more dangerous in her certainties. Austen had been quite busy while I was away, considering that she had not altered a word.

Her 250th birthday in 2025 brought the exhibitions and festivals and performances one would expect, along with the pilgrims to Chawton, the beautiful new editions and all the affectionate ceremony which gathers around a writer whom several generations have come to regard as partly their own, and scarcely had commotion quietened down before Pride and Prejudice was preparing itself for television again, this time as a six-part Netflix production with Emma Corrin as Elizabeth Bennet and Jack Lowden as Mr Darcy. There will be arguments about him, naturally. There are always arguments about Darcy.

What interests me more is the persistence beneath all this. There are only six completed novels, and journeys in them are not especially long. News travels slowly, women go to dances, men call at houses, families dine together with varying degrees of success, people invite each other to tea. And yet the people remain strangely familiar.

The Uncomfortable Pleasure of Recognising Everybody

You don’t have to live in Hertfordshire or possess five daughters to recognise the Bennet household. It is enough to have attended a family gathering.

The astonishing thing about Austen is how quickly people are drawn complete under her pen. Mr and Mrs Bennet require barely a conversation before their marriage has laid itself out before us- twenty-three years of irritation, amusement, disappointment and habit compressed into the business of whether Mr Bennet will call upon Mr Bingley. Austen scarcely needs to tell us what sort of people they are because she lets them speak, which in the case of certain people is a mercifully economical procedure.

Mr Collins too scarcely requires description once he has begun. He belongs to that imperishable species of man who mistakes proximity to importance for importance itself, who has acquired one grand acquaintance and intends to feed off the distinction for the rest of his natural life, and who cannot say anything simply when there is a possibility of saying it solemnly. Lady Catherine, meanwhile, has survived two hundred years with equal vigour, asking questions which are none of her business with the perfect tranquillity of a woman to whom the concept of other people possessing private affairs has never seriously occurred.

Austen’s people are ridiculous in familiar ways, and  she does not usually enlarge them into grotesques because she does not need to. Vanity, if allowed sufficient conversational room, will very often complete the portrait by itself. However, there is something unnerving in how accurately she understands the small dishonesties by which people preserve a flattering opinion of themselves. 

Even Mrs Bennet, who can make the reader want to crawl and hide under the dining table, has worries which are not imaginary. Longbourn is entailed away from her daughters. Marriage is not merely romance in this world, however attractive Pemberley may be- it is shelter, income, future and respectability.

Mr Bennet, by contrast, has been allowed rather more romance by readers than he deserves. He is clever, and clever men have always received a generous allowance of forgiveness in literature. One admires him immensely until it becomes apparent that seeing a problem and laughing at it have not actually solved it, and that the library which once seemed so enviable is also a place into which he has been retreating from responsibilities that remained patiently outside waiting for him. 

Elizabeth is clever too, and much dearer to us than Mr Bennet, which makes her mistakes more uncomfortable. She likes Wickham because he is agreeable and because his story flatters an opinion she already wishes to hold. She dislikes Darcy because Darcy has injured her pride, and thereafter every piece of evidence seems wonderfully obliging about confirming what she already thinks.

Then comes the letter. We read it with Elizabeth and suffer the mortification of discovering that intelligence offers little protection against error when vanity has already decided which version of the truth it prefers.

A Woman Who Found the World Very Funny

For a writer so persistently associated with refinement, Austen contains an extraordinary number of people making fools of themselves. I sometimes wonder whether it’s the bonnets that have misled us. 

Austen is extremely funny, and what I love most is how little fuss she makes about the jokes. They are  rarely announced, rarely underlined, and very often left to unfold quietly through the absurd confidence of the person speaking. She will allow Sir Walter Elliot to admire himself with complete seriousness, or Mr Woodhouse to treat rich food as though it were a concealed weapon, and then simply move on.

Considering how much vanity, selfishness, silliness, officiousness and plain tiresomeness she has gathered together, however, the novels contain remarkably few people who are altogether monstrous. Emma wounds Miss Bates and the scene is painful precisely because Emma is not cruel by nature- she is careless, pleased with herself, accustomed to being admired, and for one ugly moment she enjoys the power of her wit in a direction where it ought never to have been pointed. Afterwards, she is ashamed.

Austen allows people to be foolish without making foolishness their whole substance, and perhaps that is part of the warmth one feels beneath all the sharpness. Her characters may be vain, pompous, tiresome or painfully self-deceived, and still remain sufficiently human to be loved, forgiven occasionally, or permitted the privilege of seeing themselves more clearly than they did before.

Every Generation Gets Its Austen

The novels adapt very, very well. Emma can move from Highbury to Beverly Hills, put on a yellow plaid skirt and become Clueless without losing the essential shape of herself. Elizabeth and Darcy have survived changes of country, language, period and social arrangement which would probably have bewildered Austen herself. Every few years somebody dresses them differently, discovers another handsome man capable of looking tortured from the other side of it, and sets the machinery going again.

And yet there is a piece always missing, and the missing piece is Austen herself.

We can reproduce Pemberley, cast the perfect Elizabeth, a sufficiently broody Darcy, and a tolerably embarrassing Mrs Bennet. What is harder to reproduce is the narrative intelligence itself, that strange little movement by which Austen slips towards a character’s mind until we are almost thinking with them, then tilts a phrase ever so slightly and lets us see what the character has not yet recognised.

That is why adaptations so often send readers back to the novels instead of replacing them. The story travels beautifully but the company of that inimitable narrator is much harder to pack.

We Read Her Again Because We Are Not the Same Readers

There is another reason I keep returning to Austen, and it has to do with the fact that upon each reread, I find the story to be different from the last time.

At seventeen, Mr Bennet was one of my favourite people in Pride and Prejudice. Now I still enjoy him, but I also find myself wondering why everybody else was left to live with the consequences of a marriage he had long since decided to treat as a joke.

And Persuasion has perhaps, altered the most. I do not think I understood Anne Elliot properly when I first encountered her. Or perhaps I understood what happened to her and mistook that for understanding what eight years of regret might actually feel like. Regret is not always dramatic and we go on with our lives thinking of somebody now and then, and then more often than we’re willing to admit, even to ourselves, until suddenly a large piece of life has gone somewhere we cannot follow it. Anne has lived that way for eight years, until one day Wentworth walks back into the room.

Rereading a good novel will more often than not make familiar books feel somehow different. We speak of returning to them as though we were returning to a house left exactly as it was, the furniture unmoved, and perhaps the house is unchanged. We are the ones entering with different eyes, different expectations, different disappointments and several opinions we once held very confidently and would now prefer not to discuss. We arrive carrying more with us.

So Why Austen, Still?

The anniversaries help, certainly. Adaptations help. Beautiful editions help too, if the number of flower-strewn hardbacks in bookshops is anything to go by. I am not inclined to sneer at this. Better women than I have been seduced by a pretty book. But fashion can explain why someone buys Austen once. Why readers return to her years later, why the same characters begin behaving differently despite the fact that the text has remained exactly where it was, is another question.

Part of it is recognition. Austen understands the peculiar mixture in which people generally come- vanity beside kindness, intelligence beside foolishness, generosity beside impatience, self-knowledge in one quarter and complete blindness in another. Families may be affectionate and unbearable in the same afternoon. A person may love deeply and behave badly. Somebody ridiculous may occasionally see something clearly while somebody clever may make a spectacular fool of herself.

Austen watches all this with extraordinary acuity, but she does not seem to lose patience with the possibility that people might become better than they have been- Elizabeth changes her mind, Darcy changes his conduct, Emma is ashamed, Wentworth forgives and Anne is given another chance.

Even the people who do not improve are seldom reduced to a single failing. Mrs Bennet is absurd and frightened. Mr Bennet is clever and negligent. Mary Musgrove is tiresome and lonely. 

Perhaps that is why rereading Austen does not feel like revisiting a moral scheme so much as returning to a house full of people we know well, too well– people whose habits are familiar, whose faults have not disappeared, and whom one somehow sees differently each time the door opens.

The carriages are gone now and letters no longer take days to arrive. Inheritance is no longer such a tangled affair and women may build lives which do not depend upon securing the nearest tolerable man with an income. But vanity, wounded pride, social ambition, bad judgement, meddlesome families, pride, prejudice, and the desire to be thought just a little cleverer, prettier, richer or more important than the person sitting opposite us have shown very little inclination to die out.

And so we keep going back to those drawing rooms, those muddy roads, those letters folded and unfolded until the paper has almost acquired a pulse of its own. Back to Elizabeth judging too quickly, Emma interfering where she should not, Anne waiting far too long, Marianne feeling everything far too intensely, Catherine Morland seeing Gothic plots everywhere.

Austen remains there, watching the whole assembly with her cool, amused intelligence, while the rest of us return at different ages and discover, usually with some reluctance, that somebody we had once judged very confidently has been waiting all this while for us to catch up.

Written by Nishat Hossain, a writer and reader interested in classics, contemporary fiction, reading culture, and the ways through which old stories continue to shape the present.