But the fact that Pride and Prejudice is more single-minded, that the love story of Elizabeth Bennet and D'Arcy is not only of the book but is the book (whereas the love story of Emma and Mr Knightley and Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram have parallel streams), has given Pride and Prejudice its popularity above the others among readers who are more interested by the course of romance than by the exposition of character. Entirely satisfactory as is Pride and Prejudice so far as it goes, it is, however, thin beside the niceness of analysis of motives in Emma and the wonderful management of two housefuls of young lovers that is exhibited in Mansfield Park. It has been generally agreed by the best critics that Miss Austen has never been approached in her own domain. No one indeed has attempted any close rivalry. No other novelist has so concerned herself or himself with the trivial daily comedy of small provincial family life, disdaining equally the assistance offered by passion, crime and religion.

Whatever Miss Austen may have thought privately of these favourite ingredients of fiction, she disregarded all alike when she took her pen in hand. Her interest was in life's little perplexities of emotion and con-duct; her gaze was steadily ironical. The most untoward event in any of her books is Louisa's fall from the Cobb at Lyme Regis, in Persuasion; the most abandoned, Maria's elopement with Crawford, in Mansfield Park. In pure ironical humour Miss Austen's only peer among novelists is George Meredith, and indeed Emma may be said to be her Egoist, or the Egoist his Emma.

But irony and fidelity to the fact alone would not have carried her down the ages. To these gifts she allied a perfect sense of dramatic progression and an admirably lucid and flowing prose style which makes her stories the easiest reading.

Recognition came to Miss Austen slowly. It was not until quite recent times that to read her became a necessity of culture. But she is now firmly established as an English classic, standing far above Miss Burney (Madame d'Arblay) and Miss Edgeworth, who in her day were the popular women novelists of real life, while Mrs Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis, whose supernatural fancies Northanger Abbey was written in part to ridicule, are no longer anything but names. Although, however, she has become only lately a household word, Miss Austen had always her panegyrists among the best intellects such as Coleridge, Tennyson, Macaulay, Scott, Sydney Smith, Disraeli and Archbishop Whately, the last of whom may be said to have been her discoverer. Macaulay, whose adoration of Miss Austen's genius was almost idolatrous, considered Mansfield Park her greatest feat; but many critics give the palm to Emma. Disraeli read Pride and Prejudice seventeen times.

Scott's testimony is often quoted: "That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with. The big bow-wow I can do myself like any one going; but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me."

Based on an article in the public-domain 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica