Obituary

The press announcements of Jane Austen’s death in 1817 were brief and failed to do her justice. here is how her obituary might look if it appeared in the Times of London today

- Jane Austen

Colin firth emerging from a lake wearing a wet shirt may not have been what Jane Austen had in mind when she wrote the character of Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, but the BBC television adaptation by Andrew Davies in 1995 helped to catapult her from household name to global superstar – and it did no harm to Firth’s career either.

Pride and Prejudice was one of Austen’s six mature novels, and over the past two centuries it has consistently been her most popular. The opening line, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”, has become one of the most repeated, and most parodied, lines in literature. She once described the work, which tells how Elizabeth Bennet only gradually comes to appreciate the charms of Mr Darcy, and vice versa, as “my own darling child”.

Austen was by no means the only female author of the early 19th century: Fanny Burney, the Brontë sisters and hundreds of others are represented today among the 16,000 books at Chawton House Library of Early English Women’s Writing, located in the Elizabethan manor house in Hampshire that was once her brother’s home. Yet Austen is the only one to have achieved such worldwide acclaim.

Pride and Prejudice was not the first novel she wrote – that honour goes to Northanger Abbey, which appeared posthumously. Nor was P&P the first to be published; Sense and Sensibility, originally named Elinor and Marianne and telling the tale of the Dashwood sisters and their respective journeys towards marriage, came out in 1811. It was published “on commission”, effectively at the author’s own risk. To the Austen family’s delight it quickly ran to a second edition. This led Thomas Egerton, the publisher, to inquire what else she had written, hence the appearance of