Today (16-Dec-2025) marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen.
In recent years, I’ve slowly been working my way through Austen‘s back-catalogue, one novel per year. This is to honour a drunken deal made with my sister-in-law four Christmases back. We’d been talking favourite authors down the pub and agreed to send each other some books to read. So she received some Kathleen Jamie, and I ended up with the Complete Works of Jane Austen. Not fair! I was DUPED!
(This, incidentally, would be the same Jane Austen who notoriously replaced my hero, Charles Darwin, on the back of the £10 note. That would be the same Charles Darwin £10 note that I actively campaigned for. I like my sister-in-law, but you can only push a disconcertingly handsome, mild-mannered brother-in-law so far.)
What can I say? So far (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma), Jane Austen has not been my cup of tea. It’s tolerable, but as a self-confessed fiction philistine, I have to say I find it rather Austentatious. Having watched and enjoyed an excellent TV documentary series about Austen earlier this year, however, I now appreciate the characters I didn’t like weren’t supposed to be particularly likeable, and that Austen was often trying to be humorous, rather than coming across as inadvertently humorous—which I guess tells you a lot more about my capabilities as a reader than hers as a writer. In my defence, I did admit to finding Emma more entertaining than Austen’s earlier efforts. Far, far more entertaining to me, however, were Austen’s unwitting double-entendres, which I’ve been texting to my sister-in-law every time I spot a new one:
”But, my dear, we must touch up the Colonel.”
—Sense and Sensibility
“She has a very good notion of fingering, though her taste is not equal to Anne’s.”
—Pride and Prejudice
she set off again in quest of her former acquaintance, and the evening was spent in the satisfactions of an intercourse renewed after many years discontinuance.
—Pride and Prejudice
Once fairly in the dockyard, he began to reckon upon some happy intercourse with Fanny
—Mansfield Park
Again, I fully appreciate deriving this kind of puerile amusement from her writing reflects far more on my lack of sense and sensibility than it does on Ms Austen’s universally acknowledged talents as an author.
One person who very much enjoyed Jane Austen’s writing, however, was none other than my hero and yours, Charles Darwin. During a six-month stay with the in-laws in Staffordshire in 1840, Darwin managed to get through a phenomenal amount of reading, including the likes of Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and some Shakespeare (rating Richard II as ‘poor’). He also polished off no less than three Jane Austen novels, recording them in his reading notebook as follows:
Mansfield Park. Sense & S. […] Northanger Abbey. Simple Story.
As book reviews go, it’s perhaps not the most informative, but I reckon the shrewd businesswoman Ms Austen would have been delighted to record the blurb “Simple Story—Charles Darwin” on the back of the next paperback edition of Northanger Abbey.
Hey, perhaps that should be my next campaign!
Happy birthday, Ms. A! With such a ringing endorsement from Charles Darwin, I must admit I’m now kind of looking forward to Northanger Abbey.
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