August 28th, 2025 by Dreamland Staff, Micheley Kowalski

With all of the movie adaptations, retellings, and cliches that popular culture loves to bandy about regarding Jane Austen and her novels, maybe the last book you want to pick up is “Pride and Prejudice,” or “Persuasion,” or “Emma.” I’m here to suggest that you may want to give one these novels, or any of her others, some attention this year, as it marks the 250^th anniversary of Austen’s birth (she was born in December of 1775). These three are my favorites, and choosing one of them is probably as good a place to start as any. 

At first blush, these novels may come across as relatively uneventful domestic dramas, preoccupied with the machinations of courtship and marriage. Without close reading we could simply leave it here – that these are comical narratives, with delightful and incisive characterization, and all conflict happily resolving in a marriage or two.

In this way, Austen’s novels are often tossed in the same category as “romance,” and for those feminists among us (hopefully all of us?), the preoccupation with marriage and social positioning may feel outdated and unrelatable.

However, I invite you to read across the grain a bit and notice the ways in which Austen comments on the plight of women at this time. When reading in this way, it’s not Mr. Darcy’s handsome figure and Pemberly estate that make him swoon-worthy, but more likely his tendency to care for and protect the women in his life that make him our hero. Sometimes Austen’s most biting criticism of social systems comes from the mouths of her most ridiculous characters, a way of weaving in the political that was possible in post-French Revolution England.

Austen also shines in her use of free indirect discourse, a sly technique where her third-person narrator slips in and out the perspectives of various characters, often with the complacent reader unaware of the bias at work. Austen is considered a master and forerunner of this technique, with novelists like Flaubert coming to it later. 

Regarding her readers, Austen famously said, “I do not write for such dull elves as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.” Maybe pick up a copy of “Sense and Sensibility” the next time you see one at Ukanuzit and give it a try. There are a few different levels here – you can read it for the romance (nothing wrong with that), but also see if it’s possible to slow down, watch as the main characters grow and develop (none of them is perfect), and see what other values are at play in these domestic dramas. You may be surprised at what you find. 

We’re reading “Persuasion” for our December Dreamland Book Club book (meeting December 4) to celebrate Austen’s birthday. If reading her work as part of a group might be encouraging, we’d love for you to join us!