Jane Austen is one of the great writers of English literature because no reader and no period exhausts her books. Something always escapes from a reading while every reading enriches. Like the town of Lyme in Persuasion, the novels ‘must be visited, and visited again’. In this respect the comparison with William Shakespeare, often made in the mid– to late nineteenth century, is apt. She shares with him, too, a rare crossover appeal, achieving both academic and popular status: the object of scholarly analysis and cult enthusiasm. Inevitably there is uneasiness across the boundary: the academy worries about studying work with such mass appeal, such easy intimacy with film and television, while the public has become irritated by the exploiting, deconstructing, abstracting, genderising, politicising, and sexualising of their heroine. Despite differing readerly anxieties, however, nobody can doubt that Jane Austen serves something of the Bible's former function: helping to make a shared community of reference for the literate English-speaker, her work insinuates itself into the way we think and talk – or wish to talk. This is a more visual than literary age, but for many of us Jane Austen's novels still function as the works of Radcliffe, Burney, Cowper, and Scott did for her heroines, saturating our minds and attitudes.

Not a life of event

Her biography depends on written evidence outside her novels, for she is one of the least overtly autobiographical of authors: there is no female writer or witty older spinster in her works and no heroine who rejects marriage as she did or who lies on her sickbed mocking hypochondria. Almost all the information on Jane Austen comes from her family, mostly from letters written to her sister Cassandra, who selected some as souvenirs and rejected others, long before there was any notion of their being of any importance to the wider public; they begin in 1796 after the earliest works had been drafted. The letters are augmented by pious memoirs from her brother and nephew, the ‘Biographical Notice’ (1817) by Henry Austen and A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870) by James Edward Austen Leigh, both of which stress the familial, constricted nature of her life and lack of romantic passion.