This book honours Jane Austen’s legacy through essays exploring Indian responses to her fiction

Jane Austen’s stories belong to all. But do we therefore need yet another book on Austen? Over the last 200 years, haven’t readers and critics said all that could possibly have been said about a writer of a mere half a dozen complete works? Haven’t we extracted every ounce of meaning out of her works the way the roadside vendor in India squeezes every drop of juice from the sugar cane? Aren’t the Austen fan clubs across the world keeping her on a ventilator and refusing to let her go? What more remains to be said about her or her works? One is tempted into appealing to the one holding this book right now, the way Austen did appeal to her readers in some of her works: “Dear Reader, please stay on. Austen is like that perennial well that always holds fresh water for whoever is pulling from it.” There are many serious and learned readers of fiction who have been spectacularly unimpressed by Austen. The Regency era, its norms, manners, endless dances and meaningless flirtatious socialising, the many sisters and overpowering aunts, and the fairytale endings that take no note of the political realities of her times is not a world in which one can breathe easy, some would say. At the same time, a Clara Winfield has a whole series of Mr Darcy novels which, in turn, are the source of many movies and TV adaptations. In July of 2023, there was a play titled Being Mr Wickham that opened to glowing reviews. In November 2023, there was the release of a book titled The Endings of Jane Austen’s Stories. Pride and Prejudice continues to be the source material for several variations available as e-book versions and on Audible. The year 2024 had Pride and Pursuit by Riana Everly; 2025 had His Cousin’s Betrothed by Iris Lim; Without Undue Pride by Heather Moll; and A Heart’s Secret by Ali Scott, among many others. Austen, who turned 250 in 2025, has managed to survive changing world orders and has found her way securely into the hearts and minds of readers far removed from her in time, milieu, and geography. It is her plot, character, and the handling of language that hold our immediate attention. Her ability to craft a scene, enter a character’s mind, describe a look, play hide-and-seek with her reader, her sharp insights into human nature, the fineness of her pen in singling out an ordinary unexceptional moment in time – in short, her wordsmithery – that is what holds your attention and entices you to move from one page to the next in a kind of breathless yet tranquil anticipation. Many readers admire Austen’s restrained experimentation with the narrative technique at a time when the novel was not an established genre. She did not draw direct attention to her storytelling style. Readers noticed the sting of her wit and the humour of her sarcasm, her use of irony and an under-the-radar satire, but the primary attention was paid to the content of her stories. The elements that held the plot together were her persuasive characters. Austen’s experiments with narrative style, however, were understated. Each of her novels tested a new way of telling her story. Her genius is most pronounced in Emma, which is like a mystery novel except that none of the clues are hidden from the reader’s view. Yet, readers feel misled at the end of the couple-pairing and have to read the novel again for two reasons – one to admire Austen’s craft and the other to wonder how they got cheated into not seeing the big picture despite knowing that Emma was wrong about almost everything. Why then did they not see what stared them straight in the eye? It’s impossible for someone to read Emma for the first time and not flip through the pages again to check on what they had misread or overlooked. Imagine Austen’s glee – peering through the pages of her book, she must be thinking: “Here’s another reader I gulled! But I didn’t cheat – I told them all I knew.” Secondly, she uses a magnificent creative ploy to help the plot develop smoothly. She makes use of link characters in this novel. Imagine a time when novels were handwritten and you could not insert a new page or rewrite tracts of your story without that affecting the entire story. Perhaps the concept of a flowchart, too, may not have been available. In such a situation, Austen would use her genius to develop a link character. So, how was Anne to know the truth of the heir apparent, Mr Elliot? Austen creates a character named Mrs Smith. This character comes out of nowhere. She is given a backstory and she holds the key to tie up the loose ends of the tale. She appears in the 17th chapter of a novel that has 24. She appears on page 165 of the total 254 pages. Austen is also adept at capturing moments of silence – awkward silences, embarrassing silences, pain-stricken silences, and the silence that is a response to something overwhelming. She uses this technique of what I would like to call a “stretch moment”. This is a technique that is used in cinema to great effect. The camera can pause on a person’s raised eyebrow for a second longer to convey an emotion. In verbal texts, this moment has to be imagined by the reader. The author can only so much nudge the reader into recreating this stretch moment. That moment in Lyme when Anne sees a stranger and Wentworth notices the stranger admiring her and she admiring the stranger in return, is a stretch-worthy moment: When they came to the steps, leading upwards from the beach, a gentleman at the same moment preparing to come down, politely drew back, and stopped to give them way. They ascended and passed him; and as they passed, Anne’s face caught his eye, and he looked at her with a degree of earnest admiration, which she could not be insensible of … Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly in a way, which showed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance – a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, “That man is struck with you…” So much happens in that one instant in which not a word is spoken and yet so much is exchanged that a reader who were to skip these parts and look only for animated dialogues between characters would be a loser, while a cinematic eye would hold on to this fleeting moment and linger lightly on it for an extra second. Austen was also a pioneer in the consistent and sophisticated use of free indirect speech (now referred to as Free Indirect Discourse), which she perfected in novels like Emma and Pride and Prejudice. As one is introduced to the four Big Male Writers (the BMWs) who “fathered” the genre of the British novel, we see Austen remarkably uninfluenced by them as she seeks her own voice. Take a novel like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) – this story is like a fictional biography. The narrator introduces himself as Robinson Crusoe and continuously makes use of the pronoun “I” to record his life’s adventurous events. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is a first-person narrative account in a part-memoir, part- travelogue, part-biography kind of fiction that uses fantasy elements to make a critical commentary on reality. In Richardson’s Pamela (1740), we see Pamela through the letters she writes – this direct voice is occasionally interrupted by the third-person narrative voice but the reader is quickly drawn to the first-person narrations. Henry Fielding, in his The History of Tom Jones (1749), uses predominantly the third-person omniscient narrative voice. Austen does something extraordinary for her times. She combines the voices of the third-person narrator with the character’s first-person voice in such a refined manner that it becomes difficult to delineate one voice from the other unless one is very alert to the transitions. The narrator slips into the character’s mind and slips out of it effortlessly. In Emma, through the use of such a narrative technique, the author gleefully misleads an invested reader. So lost are we in looking at the world through Emma’s eyes that it takes us till the end of the novel to realise that this narrator was not very reliable. This is a technique that is mastered by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood in her novel Surfacing where the narrator does not just play guessing games with the reader’s imagination but deliberately lies. From her socially awkward, neurodivergent male characters who are helplessly reticent to her depiction of very “forward” women who chased the men of their choice, and through her representations of implicit illicit sex in all her novels (including in Northanger Abbey), Austen’s courage to defy her social times and her sophistication of style are unmistakable. Readers may miss the subtleties of her work and may be carried away completely by her seemingly simplistic plot of the girl-meets-boy variety of romance. But when Austen wrote casually to her sister Cassandra that she only wrote for those “who had a great deal of ingenuity themselves”, she perhaps had a prophetic inkling of her certitude. Excerpted with permission from 250 Years of Jane Austen: Indian Responses, edited by Meenakshi Shivram, Orient Black Swan.