Charles Dickens was born in Hampshire, but when you cross into the county from Sussex the sign reads: “Hampshire—Jane Austen's county.” Only one other English county identifies itself by a literary son or daughter in this way; but then Warwickshire does have Shakespeare to boast about. Jane Austen's star seems to rise on and on. The recent spate of film adaptations may be over, but they were anyway the consequence, not the cause, of her popularity. Her influence extends even into lowbrow fiction: the heroes of most cheap romances are either Darcy, Heathcliff, or Rochester. (It is curious, or maybe not, that all three heroes should be the inventions of maiden daughters of English parsons within a period of 50 years.) Nor has Austen's accessibility, and the favor of the common reader, put off the highbrows. Her reputation among professors and intellectuals seems to be greater than ever.

Austen's vast readership enables her to be described in superlatives. She has possibly given pleasure to more men in bed than any woman in history. As many men may have fancied themselves in love with Elizabeth Bennet as with Claudia Schiffer. Pride and Prejudice is likely to be the most re-read book in English. And more than with any English author except Shakespeare, Austen's admirers have wanted to know about her life, which was famously not very long and not very eventful. So here are two new biographies.

One side-effect of this appetite for the details of Austen's life has been the light that it sheds on social history. The Austens have found themselves perhaps the most intensely studied small gentry family of the time. What may strike us most, in the consideration of Austen's background, is the fluidity and the mobility of English society. Both David Nokes and Claire Tomalin look back to the origins of the Austen family. (And both, surprisingly, go in for the old heritage shoppe business of transcribing “the” in eighteenth-century documents as “ye”: a very filly practife.) The Austens were tradesmen in Kent who made money and lifted themselves into the lower reaches of gentility. But for complicated reasons, having to do with deaths and wills, the early life of George Austen, the novelist's father, was difficult and insecure. Still, he got himself to Oxford and into a college fellowship; he was handsome and he married well.

His sister exported herself to India in the hope of picking up a husband there, and married a man much older than herself. Her only child, Eliza Hancock, was probably the illegitimate daughter of the great proconsul Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal. She in turn was to marry first a French count who lost his head in the Terror, and then her first cousin, Jane Austen's brother Henry. Jane's mother, Cassandra Leigh, came of more aristocratic stock. The family seat, Stoneleigh Abbey, is a baroque mansion of palatial size. There was a barony in the family, and Jane was also related through the Leighs to the Duke of Chandos, one of the grandest grandees in the realm. But grand connections did not mean grand living, and she and her parents were short of money for most of their lives.

The same fluidity can be seen in the fortunes of her brothers' descendants. From her eldest brother James, who was regarded in his youth as the literary one in the family, comes a dynasty of clergymen, dons, and civil servants, with at least one author of a published book in each of the next five generations; this branch of the family provides us with almost all the information we have about Jane, outside her own letters and writings. Another brother, Edward, who was adopted by a rich childless couple called Knight, rose into the upper gentry and became “county,” with great houses in Kent and Hampshire. His family declined gently through the twentieth century. (Chawton House, in the shadow of which the novelist spent her last years, was recently sold to a Californian Janeite who made her money in computers.) Francis was the more successful of the two sailor brothers, rising to a knighthood and the exalted station of an Admiral of the Fleet. Charles, despite ending with an admiral's rank, had a life dogged with misfortune; and so far did his descendants sink on the social scale that one of his great-grandsons became a grocer's assistant, another a bricklayer.

Jane Austen understood all this social flux. Her women may have the chance to make a brilliant match, but they also face the danger of a penurious spinsterhood. If they attract a suitor who is below them in the social scale, they may have to weigh the odds and decide whether to accept the opportunity at hand, or to hold out for the uncertain chance of something better.

Some may wonder if another biography of Jane Austen is really needed. If there is to be one, however, it could not be done much better than it has been by Claire Tomalin [in Jane Austen: A Life]. This is a life written with sense and sensibility. Tomalin's judgments are convincing, her style is easy and attractive, her sense of period is good. It is true that she is ready to risk some psychological speculation, but this is done with tact and restraint. Only in dealing with Austen's religion does Tomalin seem inadequate; and after providing a brief paragraph at the end of a chapter, she quits so embarrassing a subject as soon as she can. But Jane Austen was a seriously religious woman, who composed prayers for her private devotion. It is a distortion to underplay this side of her being.

Still, Tomalin is wise not to claim to know too much about her subject, concluding that “she is as elusive as a cloud in the night sky” and agreeing with David Cecil's verdict that she remains “as no doubt she would have wished—not an intimate but an acquaintance.” That, after all, is how we know most people. It is no great paradox to say that we get closest to Jane Austen by recognizing our distance from her.

But David Nokes displays no such reticence. His book is irreparably vitiated by the disastrous decision to invent motives, attitudes, and episodes with a novelist's omniscience. …

What is true is that Austen's juvenilia reveal an often boisterous, hoydenish, sometimes even surreal imagination. This suggests how self-conscious is the chastened surface of her mature work. Indeed, we may feel, if we read the books attentively, that the exuberance is still there as a potentiality kept in check, with the suppressed energy of a coiled spring. Still, as far as her life itself is concerned, surely the puzzle about Jane Austen is that she did not rebel. It is not as though restlessness was unthinkable: Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women appeared in 1792, when Jane was 21 years old.

One way of explaining Austen's apparent docility has been to present her as a Tory intellectual, whose books express a principled, fully worked-out opposition to the tenets of Romanticism. Yet one should always be suspicious of professors who try to turn geniuses into people much like themselves. We have the testimony of those who knew Austen that she showed no interest in politics and public issues. Though her letters seem to confirm this, they make uncertain evidence, since we know that her sister Cassandra destroyed many of them, and the lighter gossip had a better chance of survival. More telling is the witness of the novels themselves. Austen's heroines are intelligent (in the case of Elizabeth Bennet, very intelligent), but none has a trace of the bluestocking about her. Marianne Dashwood believes passionately in poetry and emotion, but she is not concerned with social or political debate.

Perhaps we may better understand Austen's strange quietude by considering the matter of her precocity. This takes us to the central mystery about the facts of her life. We know that in her early twenties she wrote first versions of the novels that we know as Northanger Abbey (then called Susan), Sense and Sensibility (then called Elinor and Marianne) and Pride and Prejudice (then called First Impressions). It was ten years or so before she returned to these manuscripts and revised or recast them. How radically did she change them?

Both Nokes and Tomalin suppose that the earlier versions were essentially the books that we have today. (Tomalin admits that this is a hunch, but Nokes's pose of omniscience allows him no room for hesitation.) Jane Austen is indeed an extraordinary phenomenon on any account, but if they are right, we are faced with one of the most astonishing occurrences in all literary history. Pride and Prejudice is perhaps the most perfect comedy of manners ever written in prose. Sense and Sensibility, a jagged, imperfect, and deeply poignant book, contains in its second chapter what remains the most sustainedly savage passage of satire in English literature: the scene in which Mrs. John Dashwood, in a sequence of 13 speeches, beats down her husband from his proposal to settle 3,000 pounds on his mother and half-sisters to the conclusion that he will be doing very well by them if he sends them the occasional piece of fish or game. Auden says of Austen in his Letter to Lord Byron, “You cannot shock me half as she shocks me, / Beside her Joyce is innocent as grass.” One might add that she etches her portrait of human selfishness and hardness of heart here with an acid more accurately corrosive than anything in Swift.

We thus face the possibility that prose fiction which matched and in some respects surpassed anything that anyone had produced anywhere was written by a very young woman with a rather slight education and very little knowledge of the world; and that these masterpieces then sat, unknown, in a country vicarage for a decade and more. A very few poets and composers have achieved greatness even in their teens, but it is hard to think of another novelist who has flown so high so early.

Well, the adolescent Jane certainly was precocious. Her juvenilia are probably the most widely read of any novelist's. Indeed, she is probably the youngest author to be at all commonly read, except for the nine-year-old Daisy Ashford, whose The Young Visiters remains unique in the world as the only literary masterpiece written by a child. Love and Friendship, a parody of the epistolary novel of sentiment written when Jane was 14, remains very funny, though it turns out that its most famous line (“We fainted alternately upon a sofa”) was stolen from Sheridan, and The History of England (“by a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian”), written a little later, provides a good many simple laughs; but one may still feel about these works as one does about the star turn at the school concert, that a part of our pleasure in the performance is the consciousness that the performer is remarkably good for her age. The teenage Austen was very bright, but she was not a prodigy.

Yet her mature work—whether she came to maturity in her twenties or her thirties—is utterly prodigious in its technical control. Whatever unhappiness and disappointments there may have been in her life, as an artist Austen is serene; and maybe she could afford to be quiet because she had such self-possession. When Emma and Mansfield Park were published, she jotted down her friends' and relations' opinions of the books, good and bad. Nokes sees her as touchy about the reception of her work, but Tomalin is surely right to say that “something like Olympian laughter arises from the page.” More than any novelist in English, more even than Henry James, Austen seems to know exactly what she is doing.

As great a writer as George Eliot was damaged as an artist by the disabilities of being a woman; excluded from what she once called “the Eleusinian mysteries of a university education,” she could not resist the impulse to show off her self-taught erudition (which was formidable). Jane Austen, by contrast, simply rests her confidence in the innate quality of her mind. In Persuasion, when Anne Elliot talks to Captain Harville—in the interchange overheard by Wentworth, which leads him to propose to her—we realize that we are hearing something extremely rare in literature: an intelligent, equal, and entirely serious conversation between a man and a woman. Almost any other writer would have had them talk about literature or politics (George Eliot would have had them discussing Sophocles), but Austen is content to demonstrate the heroine's intelligence—and able to bring the demonstration off—in a conversation simply about human relations.

Her technical command of form is seen at its most brilliant in Pride and Prejudice. When Coleridge said that Tom Jones had one of the three great plots in literature, he presumably had not read this novel; otherwise he would have needed to add a fourth. It is equally hard to believe that so elegantly complex a plot could have been devised by a writer in her early twenties, or that it evolved from an earlier, less masterly version—one of these two possibilities must be the case. The novel is a superb piece of machinery, and a part of our proper pleasure in the book lies in our appreciation of the quality of the engineering and the smoothness of the ride.

Pride and Prejudice is so perfect a novel that it is almost a point of honor with critics to find flaws in it. Tomalin suggests that the offstage wickedness of Wickham seems unconvincing: from what we see of him, he appears frivolous rather than evil. Maybe there is something in this, but the issue can be looked at another way. Austen is always a severe judge, with demanding standards; and in this respect, Pride and Prejudice is not as far away from Mansfield Park as people often think. She wants us to see that an attractive, engaging person may be not only selfish, but also vindictive.

The primary plot of the novel, of course, concerns the love between Elizabeth and Darcy, and most of the subplots can be expressed in terms of an ultimate marriage: Jane and Bingley, Lydia and Wickham, Charlotte and Mr. Collins. The other subplot is formed from the enmity between Darcy and Wickham. These five plots are woven together with exemplary skill, the crucial mechanism being the admission of two coincidences: that Darcy and Wickham, for quite separate reasons, should turn up in the same part of the country at the same time, and that the heir on whom the Bennets' property is entailed should happen to be the protegé of Darcy's aunt. That is just what a plot of a novel of manners should be: an essentially naturalistic situation given shape and neatness by the sort of coincidences that do occur from time to time in real life.

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen's mastery extends into the shaping of each chapter. Consider the very first of these. She will have heard readings from the Psalms in church almost every week of her life: their rhythms, with verse answering to verse, or half-verse to half-verse, echoing, amplifying, or explaining, must surely have sunk deep into her consciousness:

The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth in his handiwork. One day telleth another: and one night certifieth another.

Such are the rhythms of the most famous opening in English literature:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feeling or views of such a man may be on his first entering into a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

The first of these sentences is always quoted on its own, but Austen designs them as a pair, versicle and response, in unconscious echo, I think, of the cadences of the Book of Common Prayer.

These apothegms stand like the two pillars of a proscenium framing the stage. Abruptly the general gives way to the particular; the curtain rises, and we are plunged immediately, without a word of explanation about the setting or the characters, into the first scene of a comic drama: “‘My dear Mr. Bennet,’ said his lady to him one day. …” And the rest of the chapter is pure dialogue, more like what we expect from a play than a conventional novel. (Austen is, with Dickens, the most theatrical of English novelists; she loved playacting in her youth. This makes the censure of the amateur theatricals in Mansfield Park the more puzzling.) The perky inflection of “‘Mr. Bennet,’ said his lady” deftly signals the genre. We learn at once from the tone, as clearly as from the first tune in a Rossini overture, that this is to be a comedy.

The leading lady will not appear until the second scene. Lizzy's name, with the first hints about her different relationship to two parents, is increasingly slipped into the latter part of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet's conversations, so that we suspect that she is to be the heroine of the story; but as in Hamlet or Twelfth Night, the central character's first entrance is anticipated but held back for the moment. Finally, the first chapter is rounded off with a short paragraph summing up the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and the nature of their marriage, a beautifully unmanipulative paragraph because it crystallizes and clarifies what we suspect that we have already learned from listening to them talking to each other. To adjust the metaphor a little, the ironically detached sentences of aphorism and summary at either end frame the chapter, and everything in between is pure “stage action,” unmediated by authorial comment.

Very few novelists compose a chapter like this, with the shape and the balance of a piece of music. And this formal mastery extends throughout the book. We might think of the two proposals to Elizabeth placed in the middle of the book: they are contrasted in so many obvious ways, and yet they are alike as object lessons in how not to propose. The later chapters are conceived as a series of duets between the heroine and another character: Elizabeth and Lady Catherine, Elizabeth and Darcy, the two contrasted interviews between Elizabeth and her father, and so on. Diverse in character, these encounters are nonetheless in the comic mode—except for an instant when Mr. Bennet is trying to dissuade his daughter from marrying Darcy: “My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life.”

It is a marvelous and terrible moment, one of the most important in the whole book. (It was altogether fluffed in the recent BBC television adaptation.) Briefly Mr. Bennet drops the mask, revealing the deadness of his marriage, the emotional emptiness of his life. And he reveals something more: the long unspoken understanding between himself and his favorite daughter. He despises his wife. He knows that Elizabeth knows; and he knows that she knows that he knows. Almost any other writer, having conceived such a moment, would have milked it for pathos. With masterly restraint, Austen allows the cloud to obscure the sun for only a few seconds; and by the end of the scene, which is not long, the mask has been replaced, and Mr. Bennet is his usual, sardonically witty self. Virginia Woolf once said about Austen that “of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.” This is quite false. There is hardly another novelist of whom one may so readily say, “That chapter, that paragraph, that sentence is a moment of genius.”

Her quietness, and her acceptance of the limits that her sex and her time imposed upon her, may seem the more surprising because she understood loneliness, frustration, and emotional starvation so well. We can see this in Emma, along with Mansfield Park the most easily misunderstood of the novels. Since it is so familiar a fact to us that all of the novels have happy endings, we can easily miss that this is the one among them which looks as though it may well end sadly. The heroine is set up right at the beginning as a lucky, apparently secure person who seems destined (we suspect) to find herself brought low. The unfolding of the plot encourages the belief that someone at least must be left unhappy. Once Mr. Elton imports his bride from outside, there seem to be not enough men to go around: Jane Fairfax, Harriet Smith, and Emma herself all need husbands, and it appears that only two men, Frank Churchill and Mr. Knightly, are available.

There have been three—perhaps one should say two and a half—recent dramatizations of Emma: a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow, a film made by British Independent Television, and of course Clueless, in which the basic storyline is transferred to the ditzy, tony San Fernando Valley of today. Of these versions, Clueless shows the best appreciation of the book. What it recognizes, as the others do not, is that Emma is affectionate and lovable. (Austen's own remark, that she intended to create a heroine whom no one but herself would much like, has probably done a good deal to mislead.) Nokes is probably representing a common view when he describes Emma as a novel “in which the sins of selfishness and snobbery might receive their just rebuke.” It is true Emma thinks social distinctions important—but she is not a snob. She has no ambition whatever to raise herself beyond the circumscribed conditions of her life by a good marriage. Indeed, she thinks that she does not want to marry at all. Mrs. Elton is a snob, and Emma finds her snobbery repulsive. And far from scorning the dim, illegitimate Harriet, she wants her to share as much as possible of her own experience.

Clueless almost entirely ignores the Miss Bates subplot, but it is the only one of the three films to understand the famous scene on Box Hill when Emma hurts Miss Bates's feelings with an ill-judged joke. (The other two films represent it as a ponderous and premeditated piece of cruelty, which makes no kind of sense.) Clueless recognizes that it is an accident. Emma's life is so enclosed that even a picnic on a hillside a few miles from home is an escape. She is carried away by high spirits and a sense of freedom, and before she knows it, the wounding words have dropped out.

The person who is draining the life out of Emma is her father, Mr. Woodhouse. This is a brilliant portrait: there is perhaps not a word of criticism spoken of him in the entire book, he is genuinely a charming old boy, and yet he is a bloodsucker. For he is against life. Whenever anyone wants to have fun, his instinct is—so amiably, so solicitously—to prevent them. In Clueless, the father is made into a successful, driven lawyer, very unlike the idle potterer in the novel; but the film again understands that the father is needed by his daughter, as the object on which a warm heart can expend its affection, and that he is an incubus. Emma gets her man somewhat further from the end of the book than is usual, and this means that we can observe the joy burst forth from the silken constrictions that have bound her. Even so, dear Mr. Woodhouse continues to plot against her happiness up to the very last page. He will not give his consent to the marriage, because it would inconvenience him not to have his daughter constantly around him; and even when a spate of local burglaries frightens him into thinking he should have a younger man at hand, he wins a last petty victory for his selfishness. Mr. Knightley has to leave the home he loves and go to live in his father-in-law's house.

Mansfield Park is another study of the etiolating effect of emotionally barren comfort. It is the most somber in tone of the novels. Indeed, it is commonly said that Mrs. Norris is the nastiest character in any of them. (The honor ought to be bestowed upon General Tilney, but the genial, lightly satirical tone of Northanger Abbey leads many readers to overlook him.) Mrs. Norris is indeed meanly, grindingly unkind to poor Fanny, but Austen has the moral largeness to pity her as well as to hate her—and to recognize how much more harshly people are judged if they lack charm.

Many readers find Fanny Price too meek and too goody-goody to be likeable. In Nokes's words, “The real difficulty with Fanny Price was that she was a heroine who had nothing to learn. Conceived from the start as a figure of faultless, if modest, virtue, she had none of those engaging frailties, those girlish vanities from which it must be equally the task of a conscientious authoress and upright hero to rescue her.” But Austen is more subtle than that. There is scarcely a more desolating moment in fiction than the return of Fanny from her natural family's vibrant, noisy, slatternly life in Portsmouth, where she has been able to see her adored brother William after a long separation, to the barren comforts of Mansfield Park. For she is relieved to be back. To sit in the drawing room for hours by the dull, slothful Lady Bertram, whose strongest passion is a faint good nature: this is a relief! In Little Dorrit, Dickens tried to portray a heroine who was essentially pure and good and yet somehow touched with the taint of her upbringing in a debtor's prison, but he did not know how to do it; the alleged taint remains a datum, asserted by the writer but not realized in the story. Austen, by contrast, shows us a woman who is both virtuous and damaged.

Austen is often accused of judging too hardly the delightful, worldly Crawfords in Mansfield Park. But Henry Crawford does wreck Mrs. Rushworth's life, and Mary Crawford, in her pursuit of wealth and title, does come to hope for young Tom Bertram's death. Still, we cannot help liking them; such is the writer's cunning. Mrs. Norris, whom nobody likes, displays one virtue in a very high degree: loyalty. Charmless and emotionally deprived, she pours a passionate devotion upon the unworthy Mrs. Rushworth, and when Mrs. Rushworth is ruined by her adultery, Mrs. Norris remains faithful. Abandoning the small comforts of her own life, she follows Mrs. Rushworth into exile. People think that Austen is punishing Mrs. Norris, in the way that Dickens punishes the villains at the end of his books; but Mrs. Norris is punishing herself. She is perfectly horrible, of course, and yet she is capable of a degree of self-sacrifice that, to the Crawfords, would be unthinkable.

Fanny will finally escape from the emotional desert in which Mrs. Norris has wandered all her life. She will not, like Mrs. Norris, remain the poor relation for ever, dependent and looked down upon; and she will find a husband. Reality could be more unkind. Indeed, one may be struck by how much sadness there is in the lives of Jane and her family, especially in Tomalin's telling of the story. Jane's sister Cassandra lost her fiancé, who died of a fever in the West Indies; she had staked her whole happiness on him, and seems never to have considered another man. Jane's cousin Eliza not only lost her first husband to the guillotine, but her only child died in boyhood after many years of sickness, and she herself was to die agonizingly of cancer in her early fifties. Jane herself was parted from the first and perhaps the chief love of her life, the young Irishman Tom Lefroy, and never saw him again.

Years later, Jane accepted a proposal from a prosperous, foolish Hampshire squire, only to withdraw her acceptance the next day. The marriage would have given her money and comfort, but no doubt she said to herself what Mr. Bennet said to his Lizzy: “I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable unless you truly esteemed your husband; unless you looked up to him as a superior. Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage.” Such are the realities which lie behind these amazing novels, not concealed or evaded in them, but shaped to the purposes of comedy; with gaiety and courage of heart.