Where to Start with Jane Austen: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Jane Austen — whether to begin with Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, or Persuasion. A complete reading guide to Austen's novels.
Jane Austen (1775–1817) is the most beloved English novelist of any period — the author of six novels that have never been out of print and that are as freshly read today as when they were published. Her subject is the marriage market of Regency England, but her actual subject is the relationship between social constraint and individual moral judgment; between what people are supposed to feel and what they actually feel; between the performance of social role and the inner life that the performance conceals. Her wit, her psychological precision, and her narrative control are unmatched in English comic fiction.
Where to Start
The Essential Entry Point: Pride and Prejudice (1813)
The best first Austen — and for good reason. Elizabeth Bennet is Austen’s most brilliant and most explicitly self-aware heroine; her prejudice against Darcy (based on his pride, his interference in Jane’s romance with Bingley, and Wickham’s plausible lies) and her eventual recognition of her own errors constitute the most satisfying pattern of misjudgment and correction in Austen. The social world of the Bennets — genteel poverty, five daughters who must marry, Mrs. Bennet’s anxieties, Mr. Bennet’s amused detachment — is Austen at her most comedically precise. The novel’s famous opening sentence (‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’) is the first joke.
The Mature Masterpiece: Emma (1815)
Austen’s greatest formal achievement and her most rewarding novel on rereading. Emma Woodhouse — ‘handsome, clever, and rich’, with ‘a disposition to think a little too well of herself’ — is a heroine who is wrong about almost everything but whose intelligence and warmth the novel insists on nonetheless. The plot is constructed around a series of misreadings of social situations that Emma, convinced of her own perspicacity, consistently misinterprets. The revelation in the final section — what Emma has been missing throughout — is Austen’s most sophisticated narrative trick: everything has been visible to the reader who was attending, and invisible to Emma, and the two perspectives illuminate each other.
The Most Emotional: Persuasion (1817)
Austen’s last completed novel — and the most emotionally direct. Anne Elliot is Austen’s most fully felt heroine: older than the other heroines (27, ancient by the marriage market’s standards), already in possession of a mature understanding of her own feelings, and required only to wait while the circumstances that separated her from Captain Wentworth eight years earlier are eventually reversed. The novel is Austen’s least comedic and most romantic; the letter that Wentworth writes to Anne (‘You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.’) is the most directly emotional passage in any of her novels.
Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Austen’s first published novel — a contrast study between the sensible, self-controlled Elinor Dashwood (sense) and the romantic, emotionally demonstrative Marianne (sensibility). The plot follows the Dashwood sisters’ reduced circumstances after their father’s death and their navigation of the marriage market. The novel’s moral argument is more schematic than Austen’s later work — Marianne’s romantic excess is punished, Elinor’s restraint rewarded — but the characterisation of both sisters is detailed and affectionate. The best starting point for readers interested in Austen’s account of emotional self-control as a social and moral necessity.
Northanger Abbey (1818)
The most satirical of Austen’s novels — a parody of Gothic fiction (the novels of Ann Radcliffe) in which the bookish, innocent Catherine Morland visits Bath and Northanger Abbey and misreads both places through the lens of Gothic romance. The novel is the most formally self-conscious of Austen’s works; the narrator frequently comments on what novels are supposed to do and what Austen is doing instead. Lighter in moral weight than the other novels; excellent as an introduction to Austen’s comedy.
Mansfield Park (1814)
Austen’s most morally demanding novel — and the one that readers who love the other five most often struggle with. Fanny Price, the heroine, is the most passive and most morally correct of Austen’s heroines: she will not participate in the amateur theatricals that everyone else is performing, and she refuses to marry Henry Crawford despite pressure from everyone around her. The novel has been read as an anti-slavery text (the Bertrams’ wealth comes from plantations in Antigua) and as Austen’s most direct engagement with moral integrity versus social performance. Essential eventually; not a starting point.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Jane Austen?
Pride and Prejudice (1813) is the universal starting point — the novel with the most immediately engaging plot (the Bennet daughters' need to marry well, Elizabeth's resistance to Darcy, the misunderstandings that must be resolved before they can find each other), the most famous opening sentence, and the heroine who most directly embodies Austen's comic intelligence. Persuasion is the best starting point for readers who want Austen's mature, more emotionally serious mode; Emma for those who want her most formally complex character study.
What is Pride and Prejudice about?
Pride and Prejudice (1813) follows the five Bennet sisters — primarily Elizabeth, the second daughter, whose wit, intelligence, and independence of judgment distinguish her from her more conventional sisters — as they navigate the marriage market of Regency England. Elizabeth's initial dislike of the wealthy, arrogant Mr. Darcy, and the mutual prejudices that must be overcome before they can acknowledge their love for each other, is Austen's most immediately pleasurable plot. The novel is simultaneously a romantic comedy, a social comedy about the pressures of genteel poverty on women with no right to earn, and a character study of Elizabeth Bennet's moral education.
Is Austen feminist?
Jane Austen was writing within a world in which women had no independent legal or economic existence — no right to own property, to vote, to work in any profession, or to refuse a husband chosen by their family. She was not a feminist in the political sense; she never argued publicly for women's rights. But her novels are deeply feminist in their investigation of the social constraints that reduced women to their marital status, in their insistence on the moral and intellectual seriousness of her heroines, and in their comic exposure of the male characters whose vanity, arrogance, or stupidity the women must accommodate. Emma, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park are the most explicitly critical of the marriage system.
What is the best order to read Austen's novels?
The conventional reading order for Austen's novels is: Pride and Prejudice (most accessible, most immediately engaging), Sense and Sensibility (the most obvious contrast in sensibility between sisters), Emma (the most formally complex and the most rewarding on rereading), Persuasion (the most emotionally serious, written last), Northanger Abbey (the most satirical and the earliest in conception), and Mansfield Park (the most morally demanding and the most frequently misunderstood). Many readers read Persuasion second rather than fourth, finding its emotional maturity a welcome contrast to the lighter tone of Pride and Prejudice.
