Ranking Jane Austen

I’m teaching Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in my British literature course this semester, and I decided it would be a good excuse to read her other novels. Before last year I’d only read S&S and Emma, which I read last spring and enjoyed a great deal (though, as you’ll see, it only receives a middling rank in my list below).

Ranking Austen’s novels is exactly the kind of literary sacrilege I need to entertain myself with books these days. My ranking has only one criterion: how much pleasure the book brought me. It goes almost without saying that I enjoyed reading every title on this list. Austen may well be the greatest prose stylist of the English language in addition to being one of the keenest observers of human nature.

I’ll try not to spoil the plots of the novels as I rank them, though it’s almost impossible to spoil the plot of an Austen novel. Exactly what you think will happen from the very beginning will inevitably happen. The pleasure—and reading Austen is a lesson in pleasure—consists in all of the ways in which the inevitable is delayed.

6. Northanger Abbey
The novel lowest on this list is also the greatest departure from Austen’s formula. It’s a parody which relies in part on your familiarity with tropes of Gothic literature to appreciate. It’s also the most self-conscious of Austen’s books: she rouses herself to a defense of novels in general, wherein “the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” All this is right and just, but the hallmarks of Austen’s appeal are in less than full force here.

5. Mansfield Park
Despite the fact that Austen’s novels are essentially and powerfully conservative, they rarely come across as preachy. Mansfield Park occasionally does. Coincidentally, it’s the one book that almost drew from me a yawn. We learn what Austen’s vision of poverty is: being only able to afford rude and disobedient servants. Fanny Price, sweet as she is, has little personality outside of being good and shy. Nevertheless, she offers what you expect from one of Austen’s heroines: longsuffering love, a misunderstood heart, and unappreciated virtue.

4. Emma
Emma Woodhouse is loud, controlling, and thinks too highly of herself. Yet you still feel her concerns and participate in her disappointments. The various intrigues she gets herself into are a lot of fun, and much of the novel’s humor is at the expense of the protagonist. Austen’s unparalleled wit manages to be at once incisive and compassionate. It might be possible, at first glance, to mistake Austen’s satiric eye as indicative of a radical politics. But the only real villains in her novels are those who flagrantly disregard society’s rules. If you’re not a scofflaw, you’re at worst charmingly absurd.

3. Sense and Sensibility
Even my third-favorite Austen novel must fall somewhere on the list of my all-time favorite novels. This is a very ill-defined list, and I can’t say whether ten or a hundred titles are on it, but I’m reasonably certain the next three are. These three are Austen at her most formulaic and the height of her powers: two well-bred sisters in somewhat straitened financial circumstances secure spouses for themselves. Elinor, the eldest, is not the focus of the narrative, but her heroic displays of reserve and discretion are perhaps the most moving parts of this novel. Yes, there’s also a third sister.

2. Pride and Prejudice
Now there are five sisters, but really there are still only two and one plot point. Pride and Prejudice is merely Sense and Sensibility perfected. Elizabeth is a smarter, better judging, more deserving Marianne. She’s rightfully confident in her own good sense and doesn’t scruple to talk back to her social superiors. Jane doesn’t quite measure up to the heroics of Elinor in S&S, but Darcy is the Batman of the Regency era, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

1. Persuasion
Why is Persuasion the best Jane Austen novel? It’s the most Jane Austen of them all. It’s a short book, and it packs in everything you could want. There’s not much fluff here: only one extra sister. Much of the story has already transpired by the first page of the novel, and the protagonist is an actual adult. The emotional climaxes, where everything is revealed and the unsaid is finally said, are Austen at her best—and most contrived, and most maudlin—but that’s what you came for, and that’s exactly what you get.