Jane Austen’s pompous heroes

Jane Austen has become the most revered and probably the most popular of the great English novelists. Not even the vulgarisation of her novels by those who have adapted them for television has impaired the esteem in which she is held. She is not only deemed amusing, which she is, but a wonderfully fair and judicious moralist. Walter Scott praised her ‘exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace  things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and sentiment’; and this judgment is probably one with which we may all agree. Many of course go further and come close to canonising her.    

There have always been a few dissenters, Charlotte Bronte for instance, and J. M. Coetzee, who tells us that because she finds ‘sex demonic’, she ‘locks it out’. I am not sure that he is right. Emma Woodhouse is a very sexy girl, while the man-hunting misses of Pride and Prejudice are surely sexually avid.