Professor John Mullan: 200 years on, why Jane Austen is still Britain’s greatest novelist

Imagine Jane Austen had not died on this day 200 years ago, aged only 41. Imagine that she’d had another decade or two of life (her sister, after all, lived into her 70s, her mother into her late 80s). She would have written — what, six more novels? Ten? For those, like myself, who regard her as the greatest novelist in the English language, it hardly bears thinking about. In the seven years before her death she completed six novels, of which four (at least) are among the most brilliant ever written. What could she have done with a little more time?

She would have achieved the literary celebrity that she just missed out on. She would have been feted in London literary salons, and met Wordsworth and Scott and Coleridge, and left us her copious correspondence with great authors of the day. There would be no challenging the weight of her achievement. For her problem in some people’s eyes is that she is just too light, too deft, too funny — her sentences come too beautifully and easily. A clever 13-year-old can enjoy and understand her fiction. Can she be that good?

Yes, she can. Anyone suffering from Austen-fatigue has perhaps seen too many film and TV versions of her stories. Forget them and go to the books again. For the screen adaptations keep on coming, not merely because of our love of Regency costume drama but because Austen was the greatest writer of novelistic dialogue. Try the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice, where, after those famous opening sentences, Austen just lets Mr and Mrs Bennet talk to each other for a couple of pages — and at the end of it we have a whole picture of a particular marriage.

Her novels crackle with life not because of what she writes about but because of how she writes. She is mostly absent from her books; she gives them over to her characters. Think of any memorable scene — Mrs Elton’s hilarious first visit to Emma’s house, Fanny Price watching Mary Crawford manipulate Edmund into taking part in the amateur dramatics, Anne Elliot’s bewildering meeting with Captain Wentworth after eight years’ separation — and what counts is not Austen’s understanding of what is going on but the heroine’s.