Jane Austen's novels

During the coronavirus lockdowns and feverish 2020 election cycle, I decided to read all of Jane Austen's novels. I like her ironic humor, and I was ready to visit another place and time, at least for a while. I had read a few of them many years ago, but it had been so long that I'd forgotten the plots for all except Pride and Prejudice. 

I liked the novels this time more than I did the first time. She wasn't sentimental and she didn't manipulate her readers with maudlin emotions, like Dickens at his worst, though she wasn't quite as funny as Dickens at his best (Pickwick Papers and Bleak House).

Her essential conservatism appealed to me more than when I was younger. She valued restraint, family bonds, loyalty, piety, preservation (even of landscapes and houses), and propriety. She was clear-eyed about her characters' personality flaws and foibles. In many of her books there wasn't a straightforward villain - similar to real life, in my experience.  

Another common theme was uninvolved, weak, or absent fathers, and the bad influence that can have on their children. 

Even the worst Jane Austen is well worth reading, but this is the order I put them in.

1. Northanger Abbey - very funny. "But Catherine did not know her own advantages—did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward."

2. Mansfield Park - what if Elizabeth Bennet didn't have good morals, and a duller girl did? Also, ouch: "In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete: being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry."

3. Pride and Prejudice -  classic for a reason. "there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten a woman had better show more affection than she feels."

4. Persuasion - struck by this brutal description of a bad son who died at sea "that he had been sent to sea because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross"

5. Sense and Sensibility - somewhat more cookie-cutter than her better novels but still enjoyable. "Elinor now found the difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event, however certain the mind may be told to consider it, and certainty itself." 

6. Emma - I enjoyed the scenes with her hypochondriac father

7. Lady Susan - interesting to have a main character be evil. However I don't like epistolary novels. "My dear Alicia, of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a man of his age! just old enough to be formal, ungovernable, and to have the gout; too old to be agreeable, too young to die."

8. Sanditon - only down this far because she could only write 11 chapters before her untimely death. I really liked it though and am trying the best rated completion on Amazon. "I make no apologies for my heroine’s vanity. If there are young ladies in the world at her time of life more dull of fancy and more careless of pleasing, I know them not and never wish to know them."

9. The Watsons - another incomplete work, this one an early novel she left unfinished. She worked in some of the scenes and characters to later books.