Some will mark the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth quietly, by reading the novels. For them, it will be more than enough simply to turn the pages of Emma or Persuasion; to read and absorb that unequalled prose for the umpteenth time. But if you’re the kind of person who enjoys more public-facing (let us not say more cheesy) commemorations, then the coming months are nothing if not action-packed. So much is in store, in fact, that the New York Times recently put “Jane Austen’s England” – a realm that embraces the counties of Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Surrey – ahead of the Galápagos Islands as the No 1 place to visit in the world in 2025.
Let us begin in Bath, for as Catherine Morland puts it in Northanger Abbey: “Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?” (Her creator, of course, was less of a fan, and liked to satirise it.) In September, the city will host an anniversary edition of its Jane Austen festival, to include a costumed promenade through its streets and a ball with a seaside theme inspired by the uncompleted Sanditon. Naturally, the chance to wear a sprigged muslin dress or pair of tight breeches will be thrilling for some, but if role-play is not your thing, there’s always tea and a Bath bun to be had in the elegant confines of the Pump Room (Austen once wrote in a letter of “disordering my stomach with Bath bunns”).
At Chawton in Hampshire, where she lived for the last eight years of her life, Jane Austen’s House will stage Austenmania!, devoted to screen adaptations of her books; it will also host a “dress up day”. At Winchester Cathedral, where she’s buried, a statue by Martin Jennings will be unveiled and the manuscript of her poem To the Memory of Mrs Lefroy exhibited for the first time. (Anne Lefroy, a friend and an early encourager, died in a riding accident in 1804.) More excitingly, perhaps, No 8 College Street, where Austen died on 18 July 1817, is to open to the public, also for the first time. Finally, in Southampton, where she lived between 1806 and 1809, her travelling writing desk, on loan from the British Library, is on show at God’s House Tower; made of mahogany and with a concealed drawer, it was given to her by her father when she was still a teenager.
Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, on 16 December 1775, the daughter of an Anglican rector. She wrote six novels. Four were published during her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility (1811); Pride and Prejudice (1813); Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published in December 1817, the year after her deathafter her death in July that year. She had begun another novel, Sanditon, but left it unfinished. She also left behind the short, epistolary novella, Lady Susan, and another unfinished novel, The Watsons. Her writing brought her little fame during her life but since her death at the age of 41 her novels have rarely been out of print.
To my eyes, all this is joyful; how wondrous to see a writer sail on like this down the centuries, more cherished than ever. But it’s also rather hectic: a superficial blur of which Austen herself would doubtless rather have disapproved. In the end, it is important to go back to the books, to their wit, their wisdom, their clever plots. And with this in mind, we asked a range of Austen lovers to name their favourite characters and to tell us why. Personally, I don’t agree even the slightest bit with what Nicola Sturgeon has to say about Austen’s characters generally, but like her, I have a special fondness for Anne Elliot in Persuasion, Austen’s last completed novel. Anne’s early brokenheartedness and hard-won lucidity always move me – and who could ever read the pages in which she and Captain Wentworth reaffirm their love for one another without feeling that their heart may be about to burst?
Helen Fielding
Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet is probably my favourite character in all literature. I was about 14 when I read Pride and Prejudice and it was the first time I saw a woman who I recognised and wanted to be. Elizabeth Bennet sees the ridiculous in people. She’s also full of joie de vivre and really plucky – she stands up to Mr Darcy and sticks it to him. She has integrity, too, and the courage to say no to Mr Collins and see if she can marry for love. Then she manages to make a self-mocking, very sophisticated joke, telling her sister that it might have been when she saw Mr Darcy’s great big house that she fell for him. She’s still a role model, and I suppose I took a lot of her qualities for Bridget.
Helen Fielding is the author of Bridget Jones
Monica Ali
Emma Woodhouse in Emma
“I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Austen’s famous declaration about Emma, the meddlesome matchmaker, know-it-all and inveterate snob, might have been mischievous, but “handsome, clever and rich” is a description unlikely to engage the reader’s sympathies. Possessed of boundless confidence, Emma blunders and errs, and adroitly reasons away her worst mistakes. These mental gymnastics, served up in Austen’s trademark style, are as hilarious as they are self-serving. And yet. Emma is my favourite, and not just because it’s joyous to read between the lines to see what she cannot see. Ultimately, Emma has a good heart. She is ashamed of her mockery of Miss Bates when Knightley delivers a stern rebuke. She overcomes her prejudices and is happy for Harriet when she eventually marries Robert Martin. And Emma is the exemplar of the dangers inherent in strong and instantly formed opinions, in being convinced of our own moral and social rectitude. In this age of hot takes, swift condemnations and tribal attitudes, we could all do with being a bit more like her.
Monica Ali is the author of several novels, including Love Marriage
Frank Cottrell Boyce
Jane Austen herself
My favourite Jane Austen character is definitely Jane Austen. No matter how vivid and immediate the scenes and character she creates, you’re always aware that she’s there, in the corner, watching. Most of all, I love those moments where she makes you feel that you’re there in the Jane corner with her and she’s quietly digging you in the ribs, or whispering some smart, superior snark to you. She’s letting you know that she’s too cool for the world she’s created, and that makes you feel that you’re too cool too.
Frank Cottrell Boyce is a novelist and screenwriter
Philippa Perry
Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice
Picking a favourite Jane Austen character is difficult. I admire Elizabeth Bennet for her directness with the imperious Lady Catherine de Bourgh, but she’s too discreet for my taste. I know Lydia Bennet is supposed to be insufferable, a 15-year-old flirt who disgraces her family by eloping with a cad, but with her high spirits and imprudence, wouldn’t she be far more entertaining company than her elder sisters? And let’s not forget the bounder himself, George Wickham, who is another one of my favourites. Austen, it seems, is nearly as fond of sexy bad boys as I am. Look at Wickham, Willoughby, Henry Crawford – all totally phwoar.
So where does that leave my shortlist? Lydia, Wickham, Willoughby and Henry Crawford. To this, I’ll add the immoral Mary Crawford, who, if pitted against Fanny Price as a dinner companion, wins hands down. Fanny might be good, but as clever Elizabeth Bennet says of goodness: who thinks of that when they fall in love? I must decide: in fifth place, Wickham; fourth, Henry Crawford; third, Willoughby; second, Mary Crawford; and first place goes to Miss Lydia Bennet. To be in so much disgrace while so young is nothing short of magnificent. Put those five in a novel together and I’ll read it.
Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist, the Observer’s advice columnist and the author of The Book You Want Everyone You Love to Read
Adam Kay
Philip Elton in Emma
Philip Elton, Emma’s young, handsome and deeply delusional vicar, is Jane Austen’s most fascinating antihero. Possessing looks and charisma but little else, he’s earmarked by Emma for a match with her pal Harriet. The Rev, with one eye on Emma’s neckline and the other on her dowry, interprets this matchmaking as a passionate overture, leading to a mortifying lunge in a carriage. Elton’s charm suddenly gives way to embittered outrage and he becomes a Regency version of every radicalised internet bad guy. You can imagine him trolling Emma’s X account and flooding his Instagram grid with pouting selfies in floaty cassocks. Mr Elton: patron saint of every spurned creep who thinks petrol station flowers are a suitable apology.
Adam Kay is the author of This Is Going to Hurt. His first novel, A Particularly Nasty Case, is out this summer
Bolu Babalola
Elizabeth Bennet
I first picked up Pride and Prejudice when I was 12 years old. Well, when I say “picked up”, I mean it was foisted upon me by a harried librarian after our tiny school library had been depleted by me, an overeager bookworm. “Here. You’ll like this. Trust me.” It was chunky and I think she just wanted me busy. I eyed the hefty book with scepticism. And then I met Lizzy. Wry, sharp-tongued, earnest, intelligent, and managing a deft derision of men and a clear yearning for romance – a yearning that she would not compromise herself for. Surrounded by restrictive social norms her personality jutted against, protective of those she loved and a keen observer. I saw myself – or who I felt myself to be – and felt understood, despite being a Black girl from east London, a few centuries removed from our heroine. She was a romcom heroine who did not swoon, but stood up. Modern then, and perhaps modern now. Always an inspiration to me, a hopeful, rational romantic.
Bolu Babalola is the author of Love in Colour. Her new novel, Sweet Heat, is out in July
Olivia Williams
Miss Bates in Emma
It was my brilliant English teacher at school, Mrs Cullen, who flagged up to me the underestimated Miss Bates in Emma. I love Miss Bates because she’s a middle-aged woman without money who is discounted by society, and who holds and reveals the entire secret of the plot through what some people might think is her inane chatter, but in fact she observes acutely what’s going on between her niece Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill and calls it out before anybody else. It’s possible I’m projecting, but Jane Austen was a single woman who also was discounted by society and who also observed very closely what everyone else was doing. You could never accuse Jane Austen of inane chatter, but I’m sure she felt discounted and I think Miss Bates is there to show that you do so at your peril. She is a brilliant creation.
Olivia Williams is an actor who played Jane Fairfax in the 1996 television adaptation of Emma
Rebecca Watson
Mrs Gardiner in Pride and Prejudice
It is hard to reread Pride and Prejudice without falling for the idea of being Lizzy Bennet, with her slow-build romance story. Who doesn’t dream of possessing dark eyes that are expressive enough for a man to fall head over heels? But spare a thought for her aunt Mrs Gardiner, who enables that love, teases Lizzy for the feelings she doesn’t yet recognise and – vitally – is the antidote for the painfully overbearing Mrs Bennet. It is no coincidence that the novel ends with “warmest gratitude” to Mrs G. “What are men to rocks and mountains?” Lizzy giddily exclaims to her aunt after she is offered an escape to the lakes. Mr Darcy will soon loom larger than a mountain and Mrs Gardiner is the harbinger of that joy.
Rebecca Watson is the author of Little Scratch and I Will Crash
Nicola Sturgeon
Anne Elliot in Persuasion
My favourite Jane Austen character by far is Anne Elliot from Persuasion, the final novel Austen completed. Anne is compelling in a way that many of Austen’s other central characters are not. Whereas they often display the worst attributes of the upper classes of the time – backbiting and petty jealousies, an obsession with status and standing, and an overenjoyment of the fripperies of life – Anne stands apart. She is certainly of her time and class – her initial rejection of Captain Wentworth demonstrates as much – but she is also clever, funny, considerate and independent of spirit. She more than deserves her happy ending.
Nicola Sturgeon is former first minister of Scotland
Tom Crewe
Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice
Mr Bennet “was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three and 20 years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character”. It is one of the reader’s pleasures to be superior to Mrs Bennet, and we feel that we have understood her husband by the end of chapter one. Yet it is Jane Austen’s art to carefully undermine our sureties, even when they have been offered as her own, and at the conclusion of Pride and Prejudice it is Mr Bennet who makes me cry. Have you any objection to my marrying Darcy, besides thinking I’m indifferent to him, Elizabeth asks. “None at all,” he replies. “We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man; but this would be nothing if you really liked him.” So far, so Mr Bennet; but he is anxious underneath. Then she tells her story – the story we have read. “If this be the case,” her father says, “he deserves you. I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy.” He is soon joking again, but we have taken the true measure of his character.
Tom Crewe is the author of The New Life
Sara Collins
Elizabeth Bennet
Lizzy, as I affectionately refer to her, was one of the very first literary heroines I fell in love with. She is the pinnacle of wit and intelligence but also introspection, which appealed to me because, like many bookish teenagers, I also lived entirely in my head. She gave me that wonderful feeling you get when in your formative years you latch on to someone in the pages of a book who seems a lot like you. She’s marvellously forthright but she isn’t perfect – she can be quite condescending and often gets in her own way – and that only made me love her more, a love that morphed during my 20s into joyous affection for Bridget Jones, a modern descendant.
Sara Collins is the author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton
Greta Scacchi
Mrs Elton in Emma
When I first read Emma, Mrs Elton really leapt out at me. I couldn’t believe that this author from 200 years ago had made observations that were still so resonant in our society today of the nouveau riche woman aspiring through marriage to better herself. For the 1996 film, I was livid because I had to play the goody two-shoes, Mrs Weston, instead of my favourite, Mrs Elton, who was like a character out of Ab Fab. I could have throttled Juliet Stevenson, who ended up playing her. But the director said: “No, Greta is definitely a Mrs Weston.” They saw me as the nice, kind, perfect mother, but they don’t know what I’m like in real life. My friends will tell you: I’m much more like Mrs Elton.
Greta Scacchi is an actor who appeared in Douglas McGrath’s 1996 film adaptation of Emma
Joseph O’Connor
Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey
It would diminish her a bit to call Catherine Morland a very ordinary person but, in a sense, the heroine of Northanger Abbey is indeed literature’s first kid next door: likable, unassuming, sometimes getting things wrong, fond of books, especially gothic novels, once they are “all story and no reflection”. I’ve sometimes wondered if she’s a portrait of the artist as a young woman. To me, she seems an ancestor of Salinger’s immortal teenager, Holden Caulfield, who doesn’t understand the world yet stumbles into insights about it. Writing fiction about someone heroic, beautiful or brave is relatively straightforward, which of course is the reason why so many 19th-century authors did so. Austen does something far more difficult and nuanced. She succeeds wonderfully in making Catherine Morland real.
Joseph O’Connor is the author of My Father’s House and The Ghosts of Rome
Jo Baker
Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion
I’m going to go with Frederick Wentworth because I feel like, as with so many of Austen’s characters, there’s this sense reading Persuasion that a whole other novel could have been written about him, but she sketches it in with just a few lines, like a Picasso drawing. She gives you his whole world compacted and hidden away inside the novel – how he lives, his hopes, his disappointments, his carelessness and his flaws, but alongside that, his constancy and his love for Anne Elliot. And the adventure: he goes off to war and becomes a self-made man. And he’s just utterly decent alongside all of that – towards Anne, anyway; I don’t know what he gets up to when he’s onboard ship. But, you see, you find yourself asking these questions: what is he like when he’s not there? All of that potential is unmined. Extraordinary.
Jo Baker is the author of Longbourn, a reimagining of Pride and Prejudice, and The Midnight News
David Baddiel
Emma Woodhouse
Jane Austen was not, as the quaint teashop image would sometimes suggest, some kind of Grand Maiden Aunt of English letters, but the creator of the modern realist novel, the greatest innovator in the form. The technique she single-handedly honed like no one else was unreliability, telling a story not by a main character, but through a main character, her irony dancing along a line between narrator and character to offer the reader the delight of understanding what’s happening in a way that the character does not. And the book which expresses this skill more than any of her others is the last to be published in her lifetime, which means my favourite Austen character, even though she is frustratingly un-self-aware, overconfident, and complacently convinced of her own rightness – indeed, because she is all these things – is Emma.
David Baddiel is a comedian and the author of My Family: The Memoir
Whit Stillman
Lady Susan Vernon in Lady Susan
While another of Jane Austen’s novels carries the title Persuasion, the great persuader and dissuader of her fiction is the beautiful and brilliant Lady Susan Vernon, her funniest creation, a charming porcupine of epigrams, astonishingly frank in her interested designs, yet capable of convincing the men in her world of everything and anything. When disastrously found out, she doesn’t bore us with sophistries but goes to the heart of the matter: “Facts are such horrid things.” Finally, while Austen’s other protagonists are a sea of commoners, Lady Susan is the daughter of an earl.
Whit Stillman is the writer-director of Love & Friendship (2016)
Andrew Davies
Mr Bennet
Some of Austen’s heroines are absolutely delightful, but I am going for Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice because he’s so delightfully cynical. He’s so witty that readers tend to think he’s much nicer than he actually is. I think what he did was he got Mrs Bennet pregnant and then reluctantly did the decent thing and married her, and has spent the next few decades trying to stay as far away from her as possible, lurking in his study and making really rather cruel remarks about about his family and not making any effort at all to help his wife find husbands for them. In a lot of ways, Mrs Bennet is awful, and she gets on all of our nerves, but she is at least trying to do her best for her daughters. However, Mr Bennet doesn’t really give a toss about them. He’s a brilliant picture of a not very good parent.
Andrew Davies is a screenwriter who adapted Pride and Prejudice for television in 1995
Meg Mason
Mrs Bennet
I wish I could claim some obscure character from Sanditon as my favourite of all time, but I’m going with Mrs Bennet from Pride and Prejudice and more specifically Alison Steadman playing her in the 1995 BBC adaptation. My daughters were three and five when I first introduced them to it – not old enough to understand the plot but the dresses enchanted them and Steadman hooked them so profoundly that the programme is now deep in their DNA. Within a year, I was having a seamstress friend make up tiny Regency outfits for them, which they’d muddy to make them look more authentic. Now, aged 18 and 21, they still watch it probably once a month. Steadman inhabited Mrs Bennet so perfectly and made her even more alive. I’m sure my daughters wouldn’t have read the books as young as they did if it wasn’t for having that gentle, warm and loving introduction, so that by the time they actually got to the books, they already felt like old friends.
Meg Mason is the author of Sorrow and Bliss
Abi Morgan
Elizabeth Bennet
I’m choosing the most obvious Austen character, Elizabeth Bennet, but I’d be lying if I chose anyone else. I loved Pride and Prejudice from such a young age, and I think that’s because Elizabeth is a rebel and a feminist and a kind of rock star. She’s so brilliantly sparky, witty and headstrong but also incredibly vulnerable and deeply romantic. The book is a brilliant study of class, and as someone who’s always felt a bit like a poor cousin, it really chimes with me; that feeling that you’re always living in other people’s houses and there’s always the threat of someone coming in and taking the gammon from the table. So I’m very drawn to her on an emotional level. She seems like a scrapper. I love that she stands up for herself, and ultimately, when she does concede and marry Darcy, you totally feel like it’s a moment of love.
Abi Morgan is a playwright and screenwriter
Jeffrey Boakye
Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park
When I studied Jane Austen at uni, I was amazed at how she could get into the psychology of young people. The way she writes men is eerily accurate too. But my favourite character is probably Mary Crawford from Mansfield Park. She’s kind of a foil to the main character, Fanny Price, who is pious and well meaning and a bit wet. Mary, on the other hand, is badly behaved, slightly rough around the edges in terms of upbringing, really attractive, seen as shallow but also incredibly entrepreneurial – you could imagine her being an influencer in today’s world. But she’s got this part of her that wants to be with good people. She wants to be nice, and when you read the book, you don’t hate her, even though she’s kind of set up as a villain. She’s got a lot of grey area to her character and I like that.
Jeffrey Boakye is the author of I Heard What You Said and co-host of BBC Radio 4’s Add to Playlist
Rachel Parris
Elizabeth Bennet
I’m writing a book from Charlotte Lucas’s point of view, so I’m absolutely absorbed. She is Lizzy Bennet’s best friend and she is very practical and honest about life. She claims that she’s not romantic, although I, like a lot of Austen fans, think perhaps she is – she just makes very practical choices for herself because she’s a realist. I really like that, unlike a lot of Austen characters, she isn’t shiny and beautiful. In a world where femininity, charm and flightiness were valued, I value her for being clever. It’s said that she’s plain, but she’s also funny, insightful and smart – and I’d like to be friends with her. Lizzy Bennet is pretty awful to her when Charlotte makes her famous choice to marry Mr Collins, the absurd little vicar. But I think she knows what she’s doing. She wants a home, family, security. She wants to stop living with her mum and dad. So she’s really in control of her choices. She knows what she wants and she goes for it. I think that’s quite feminist.
Rachel Parris is a comedian, member of the Austentatious improv group and author of What Charlotte Did Next, out later this year
Gill Hornby
Mrs Smith in Persuasion
There are so many characters to love and admire, yet my mind is often drawn to that of Mrs Smith in Persuasion. Anne Elliot’s schoolfriend, now widowed, bankrupt, disabled and living in Bath, has detractors a-plenty, both in the novel – “a mere Mrs Smith, an everyday Mrs Smith, of all people and all names in the world… Mrs Smith! Such a name!” – and among critics. And she is far from faultless. Still, she is there for a purpose beyond merely the narrative. Through her, Austen reminds us of the precarious nature of the female existence, then chooses to reward her with her own happy ending. Though readers may find her problematic, it’s clear the author did not.
Gill Hornby is the author of Miss Austen, now being screened on BBC One, starring Keeley Hawes
Rachel Joyce
Catherine Morland
Catherine Morland is young and buoyant, without any of the sophistication that Austen’s later heroines acquire, but what I love is that she’s a gothic novel superfan and she really wants to be the heroine of a gothic novel, but her good sense gets in the way. Unlike gothic novel heroines, she doesn’t faint at the drop of a hat. She was raised in a parsonage with nine brothers and sisters, so she can’t help but be very pragmatic. And then, when she leaves Bath for Northanger Abbey, she gradually realises that life actually isn’t as terrible as the books she’s read, but it has other elements of danger and cruelty. Northanger Abbey was the first Austen I read as a young teenager in south-east London and it tapped into all my fantasies about myself as the heroine of the life I hadn’t yet lived.
Rachel Joyce is the author of several novels, including The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Her new novel, The Homemade God, is published in April
