Jane Austen at 250: Shashi Deshpande on the ‘perfect artist’ who reinvented the novel

Two thousand twenty-five is the 250th anniversary of the birth of the English novelist Jane Austen. England plans to celebrate the event in a big way, with gala balls, exhibitions, costume parades, live lectures, podcasts, happenings in the places where she lived, besides much else. BBC Arts, which has already made a serial, Miss Austen, focusing on Cassandra, Jane’s sister, announced a three-part docuseries, Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius. The announcement of this serial spoke of Austen as one of our most important and best-loved writers. All this will gladden the hearts of Austen admirers and lovers. However, one can’t help wondering: Why is this woman, who lived and wrote in great obscurity and was almost unknown in her lifetime, being so honoured? Even after her death, a time when few lucky writers attain posthumous fame, she was not much known. Her own publisher, John Murray, remaindered the unsold copies of her novel after her death. Murray had not been a very supportive publisher earlier, either. Asking Walter Scott to write about Emma in the Quarterly Review, he gratuitously added, “It wants incident and romance, does it not?” Claire Tomalin, Austen’s biographer, rightly calls Murray a disloyal publisher.

Austen had many critics after her death. Charlotte Bronte called...

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