Do you want to start by telling me what you love about Sense and Sensibility?

Sense and Sensibility is a different kind of choice from the others. I wouldn’t say that I loved it the best. I wouldn’t even say that I loved it as much as I loved Northanger Abbey, which I didn’t put on the list. But I’m fascinated by it, because it has changed shape over the years for me as I reread it. I am currently writing a book about rereading, so I’m thinking a lot about what happens when you reread things. I started off with a sense of Sense and Sensibility as a rather stereotypical novel – very much like a lot of 18th-century novels that I’ve read. There is a good sister and a bad sister, and the bad sister gets reformed and everybody lives happily ever after. But as I kept rereading it, I started to realise that it is actually a very dark novel, probably the darkest of Austen’s novels.

Why?

In the first place, because of the very real sense of financial danger which hovers around the characters, or at least the characters one likes. There is nothing like it elsewhere in Jane Austen (except the family of origin of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, which is even more horrifying, I suppose). But thinking of the marriages at the end, there’s been a lot been written about Marianne’s marriage to a much older man, an anti-romantic marriage. But Elinor’s marriage is also not very attractive. Edward, unlike any of the male protagonists of the other books, appears to be a seriously depressed man. He’s a mama’s boy, he has never accomplished anything in his life and there is no sense of his having a vocation as a minister – that just seems to be what he ends up doing. One can’t anticipate a very cheery life for Elinor and Edward. As for Colonel Brandon, he is, to my mind at least, a very attractive figure. But he is certainly not the figure that Marianne would dream of and it seems as though she has willed herself to accept him, rather than accepted him out of real feeling. It’s true that Austen says that Marianne learned to love him. But, still, it isn’t a very cheery marriage. In all of the novels except Pride and Prejudice, at the end Austen gives you some suggestion of difficulties coming in the marriage. Usually that’s fairly light-hearted. But it’s not light-hearted in Sense and Sensibility. It seems to be a dark novel masquerading as a light novel, and I find that very interesting. 

There are too many things that I want to ask you, so I think for now I just have to go on to the next book. Can you tell me what you think is interesting about Pride and Prejudice?

Pride and Prejudice is a very special case for me at the moment, because I’ve just produced an annotated edition with some 2,000 annotations. I remember in the 1970s there was a Penguin edition of Pride and Prejudice, annotated by Tony Tanner, who I think was a wonderful critic. In his introduction he points out that he has only one footnote, and explains that that is because Austen doesn’t need any annotation – she speaks to everyone across the centuries. Now I absolutely agree with that statement; it’s true. I have read Pride and Prejudice, I would guess, 40 or 50 times. I’ve taught it at every level of college, of graduate school. I’ve taught it to faculty seminars, I’ve written about it many times. And when I was asked to annotate it, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the idea. I was finally persuaded because I thought I could annotate it out of my head – I know the book practically by heart. I was so wrong. Reading it while thinking about what one might want to know in order to understand it better, I found out so many new things and realised, really for the first time, what a complex novel it is. I think it’s always been my favourite, as it’s many people’s favourite among Austen’s novels. But I was always vaguely embarrassed by that as a scholar, because I didn’t think it was the best. I would say Persuasion is the best of her novels. But Pride and Prejudice is the one I loved the best. I loved it because it’s a fairytale; it’s about the poor girl growing up and marrying Prince Charming…

You say you discovered new complexities as you were doing the annotated edition. Can you give me an example?

One of the criticisms that has often been levelled at Austen is that she lived during the era of the Napoleonic Wars and she never mentions the wars in her novels. Reading through Pride and Prejudice this time I noticed something that I’d never noticed before.