Jane Austen

Jane Austen was a clergyman’s daughter who lived all her life in Hampshire and Bath among her family, never married, and published four novels anonymously in her lifetime, two more appearing after her death at forty-one. Pride and Prejudice and Emma are the ones the lists assign: courtship comedies in a few country families, told with an irony so exact that the reader learns to distrust every character’s judgment, including the heroine’s. Scott admired the fine touch he said he lacked; later readers found under the comedy a moralist as severe as Johnson.