Now universally acknowledged

Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, by Claire Harman

What does Mr Darcy look like? Anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice will be able to give an answer. I believe that he is tall, square-jawed, beetle-browed, slightly weather-beaten and dark-haired. Is any of that at all controversial? But on returning to the novel, we find a strange thing. The one feature in that list which I would have thought beyond dispute is that he has dark hair. This, however, is what Jane Austen has to say about his personal appearance. On his first entry, he is said to have

a fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien …The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr Bingley.

A little later, Elizabeth says that ‘he has a very satirical eye’. When he and Wickham meet again unexpectedly, Austen comments that ‘both changed colour, one looked white, the other red’. Towards the end of the novel, Kitty calls him ‘that tall, proud man’. And that is pretty well about it. Austen very rarely gives anything approaching a personal description of a character, and loses almost nothing by her decorous omission. Darcy might perfectly well be ginger; and yet not one reader in ten thousand by now believes him to be anything but black-haired.

The accretions, sediment and barnacles which have attached themselves to these six great novels in the past 200-odd years are Claire Harman’s subject. Jane Austen’s celebrity was not a completely posthumous phenomenon. Cognoscenti recognised her subtlety and, above all, her naturalness during her lifetime. If there is sometimes an aspect of literary perverseness in the way her contemporaries admired her, the Prince Regent’s enjoyment was clearly sincere, commanding her to dedicate Emma to him.