Who is the greatest British writer of all time?
According to a 2022 poll of 2,000 Brits, the answer is Jane Austen.
While we may debate the correctness of this poll’s conclusion (William Shakespeare, anyone?), what’s beyond question is that Jane Austen remains remarkably popular with British and American readers alike–even 200 years after her death. Film and TV adaptations of Austen’s work, for example, have proliferated in recent decades, the latest installment being PBS’s “Sanditon,” a “Jane Austen inspired” TV series. Regency period dramas are perennially appealing to modern audiences.
Jane Austen deserves this high place among British writers. Her wit, elegant prose, and profound study of human character render her a novelist of the highest caliber. In Austen’s analysis of human frailty and frivolity, nastiness and nobility, manners play an important role and offer something unique to contemporary readers. In fact, some of her popularity with people today may be due to the allure of a lost world of civility that her novels depict. Austen shows us the value of gentlemanly and ladylike behavior according to time-honored tradition. While modern, independent, and equality-minded Americans find intricate rules of etiquette a bit stifling, we seem to be at the same time paradoxically fascinated by them, like a mysterious and beautiful artifact from an antique and exotic land. And with good reason….