These assessments push Austen beyond her stereotype as patron saint of marriage plots. As Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey, an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues in Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness (JHU Press, 2024), the author's rushed and unsatisfying wedding scenes reveal her ambivalence about the convention of marriage. "If marriage is so central to Austen as a novelist, why does she speed through the resolution?" Brodey asks.

Here, she pokes fun at the fickle customs of upper-crust British society, which tended to base a woman's worth on external appearances, instead of internal qualities like intelligence and compassion.

Austen never married and remained financially dependent on her family, despite earning a meager but noteworthy wage of £684 for the four novels she published during her lifetime. (Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously.) "She was proud of the money she earned, but it wasn't enough to subsist on," Looser says.

Among them: the smash-hit 1940 Pride and Prejudice film with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier; Ang Lee's Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility from 1995; the cult-classic Clueless (1996), based on Emma; and the 2016 mash-up of genres—romance meets sci-fi meets horror—in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, where heroine Elizabeth Bennet takes on a new role: slayer of the walking dead.

The book's title also suggests abolitionist sentiments, given its connection to William Murray, the 1st Earl of Mansfield who served as Lord Chief Justice of England from 1756 to 1788—and was known as Lord Mansfield. In 1772, Mansfield ruled on a court case involving James Somerset, enslaved in colonial Virginia and brought to England by his master. After escaping and being recaptured, Somerset faced sale to a Jamaican plantation. A London abolitionist network intervened, and Mansfield ruled that Somerset—chained on a boat in the Thames—be freed.

Midway through Jane Austen's 1814 novel Mansfield Park, a few lines of prose rouse readers into a debate that still rages. The heroine, Fanny Price, known for both her timidity and strong moral backbone, broaches a controversial topic among relatives: the presence of slaves on her uncle's sugar plantations in Antigua, then a British colony. Fanny's inquiry goes unanswered—or as she describes it, a "dead silence!" cuts through the air, as her cousins sit idly by "without speaking a word or seeming at all interested in the subject."