Jane Austen

Tony Tanner's study of Jane Austen draws on two decades of his reading and writing on her work. It takes up the questions that have long preoccupied her closest readers. Tanner asks how a novelist confined to a narrow social world could achieve such a broad view of her times, and how she registers a stable social order that was shifting quickly during her lifetime. He also examines how she handles the sexual tensions and brutality concealed beneath polite conduct, and how characters hemmed in by social restraint manage to speak to one another at all.

The book follows Austen's development across her novels, from the more cheerful early books to the darker and more skeptical Persuasion and the unfinished Sanditon. Tanner traces a shift from accepting a social order built on land, family, money and strict propriety, to insisting that those values be tested and proven, and finally to doubting them and even turning against them. He sees her moving from a limited, locally rooted optimism toward a fuller grasp of the whole society around her.

Written for readers of Austen, scholars and those who doubt her standing, the book argues that she remains a major novelist whose work speaks to the present as well as to her own era.