Jane Austen, worldly philosopher.

My piece in the FT this weekend.

This weekend, I have a piece in the FT Magazine about Jane Austen and Adam Smith. Here’s the opening.

This year is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, and what Professor Hermione Lee once called the “English tradition of affection and sympathy for Jane Austen” is thriving. Several new books are being published, the BBC is producing a new documentary, Substack has multiple Austen book clubs. But how well do we really know Britain’s most beloved author?

Though each of the new books has merit, they all claim Austen for modern concerns. Inger Brodey argues Austen undercut her own happy endings about marriage. Devoney Looser says Austen is wilder than we know. Janet Todd says “living with Austen”, and imbibing the lessons in her work, can change your life. Rebecca Romney has written about the women novelists who influenced Austen.

This is nothing new. From the 19th century’s “dear aunt Jane” biography written by Austen’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, to modern feminist readings, Austen has been claimed by more ideologies than she could ever fit. She has been a reactionary and a radical, a bitter spinster and a witty feminist, an evangelical and a moderate believer, a hater of her society and a staunch Tory, an old romantic and an underminer of marriage.

In 2018, Lucy Worsley wrote about Austen and domesticity, taking a feminist angle. In 2016, Helena Kelly presented a thinly evidenced image of Austen as a radical, interested in evolution and female masturbation. We always find the Austen we want to find. This can be bewildering. Can we ever put aside our own concerns and understand the writer on her own terms?

There is a version of Austen still locked in the academic library. Recent scholarship has revealed that Austen’s novels are engaged in debates about Enlightenment philosophy, steeped in contemporary ideas, particularly the work of Adam Smith and David Hume.

As the Austen and Smith scholar Shannon Chamberlain told me, “Austen shared her keen eye for the complexities of human behaviour with the Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith.” These thinkers, she explained, had developed a model of human behaviour that was no longer based on theology and the Fall, but was particular to humans, born out of empirical observation. “Austen imbibed these ideas and created characters who tested them out . . . Smith and Hume and others were pioneering new kinds of moral inquiry. Naturally, Austen was interested.”

That is the Austen I want to see this anniversary year. Not the writer we adapt to our own ideas, but the thinker engaging with the ideas of her time. Jane Austen the worldly philosopher.

The piece goes on to look at the ways Smith’s ideas occur in the novels, particularly Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. I draw on the work of Cecil E. Bohanon and Michelle Albert Vachris, among others.

Read the whole thing here.