Jane Austen's Uncommon Compassion

"Austen's afterlife is another story. Just before her death, as she prepared her novel "Northanger Abbey" for publication, she added a preface to entreat the public "to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes." The period, places, manners, and opinions that Austen wrote about with such bracing perceptiveness have long since vanished, but Austenmania is going as strong as ever."

"Austen's life was short-she died in 1817, at the age of forty-one, with her last work, "Sanditon," still unfinished. Her life as a published writer was shorter still. Though she completed a draft of her first novel, "Sense and Sensibility," in 1795, she did not manage to bring it out until 1811. The authorship of that book was credited merely to "a Lady;" none of the four novels that she published in her lifetime bore her name."

A weekend of violence occurred, and the President's responses are exacerbating the situation. December 16th marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth at Steventon in Hampshire. Austen died in 1817 at forty-one, leaving Sanditon unfinished, and her publishing career was brief; Sense and Sensibility was drafted in 1795 but not published until 1811 and was credited only to a Lady. None of her four lifetime-published novels bore her name. Austen warned readers that manners and opinions change over time, yet contemporary enthusiasm for Regency costume, Bath pilgrimages, and semiquincentennial celebrations demonstrates enduring popular fascination.

Read at The New Yorker