She is the only heroine Austen refers to in such a familiar and affectionate way. Austen sometimes spoke directly to the reader, even going as far as calling Fanny Price “My Fanny” in Mansfield Park.Perry, the apothecary in Emma, and Georgiana Darcy, Mr. There are several important characters in her novels who do not actually speak a word of dialogue, such as Mr.The weather showed the novels’ chronology and even shaped events, like in Persuasion, when the rain forces Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth to seek shelter in a shop, and he must watch Anne whisked away by his competition, Mr. Austen was the first novelist to describe small changes in the weather.Weston says Emma has “the true hazle eye,” “pretty height and size,” and a “firm and upright figure,” but Austen merely describes her as “handsome” in the novel’s first sentence. Jane Austen didn’t describe what her heroines looked like, though some characters are described through the eyes of other characters.The subsequent discussion of the meaning behind what characters call each other was fascinating and informative. Mary Musgrove, Anne Elliot’s sister in Persuasion, is the only wife in Austen’s novels to call her husband by his first name.I learned many things from What Matters in Jane Austen?, including: I certainly noticed many of these things when I read the novels, but clearly I have only scratched the surface of Austen’s work! He also touches on the works of other authors from the period, Regency social mores, and Austen’s life to put her work into context. Mullan answers these questions in great detail, providing plenty of examples from each of Austen’s six novels ( Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, and Sense and Sensibility) and even two she didn’t finish ( Sanditon and The Watsons). John Mullan, an English professor at University College London, explores such topics as the importance of age in Austen’s novels, whether she wrote about sex, why blunders play a major role in her plots, what makes her characters blush, and what are the right and wrong ways to propose marriage. What Matters in Jane Austen? Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved answers 20 questions relating to the novels of Jane Austen.

What matters in jane austen