Jane Austen wrote six novels, which feels like a small number considering how often her work pops up in a contemporary setting. Her books have been adapted into prestige films, miniseries, loose Hollywood reimaginings, and at least one zombie mashup. They’ve shaped how novelists from the Brontës to Sally Rooney think about interiority and dialogue, and the way two people in a room can say one thing and mean another. Even unfinished fragments like Sanditon and The Watsons have made their way mainstream.
Readers don’t just like these books, they feel ownership over them, which is why ranking them almost always sparks a fight in the comments section. We’re issuing that warning now because, yes, we did assign numbers. And yes, you will have feelings about what ends up where on the list below.
6
‘Northanger Abbey’ (1817)
Catherine Morland is seventeen, sheltered, and an absolute fiend for Gothic novels. When a family friend brings her to Bath for the social season, she falls in with two very different crowds: the Thorpes, who are loud and scheming, and the Tilneys, who are warm, witty, and very much Catherine’s speed. She develops feelings for Henry Tilney, the clergyman son, and he seems to return them. But, when his father invites her to their estate, Northanger Abbey, Catherine arrives expecting something out of The Mysteries of Udolpho. Basically, she lets her imagination run completely off the rails and almost ruins everything.
The novel was written in the late 1790s, sold to a publisher in 1803, and didn’t see print until 1817, after Austen’s death, which means it’s simultaneously her youngest book and her most delayed. You can feel it. The satire of Gothic fiction is sharp and very funny, and Catherine’s naivety makes her one of Austen’s most endearing heroines, but the novel lacks the layered psychology Austen brought to her later work. Henry Tilney is charming enough, though he has a tendency to lecture, and the plot wraps itself up with a speed that suggests Austen had other ideas she wanted to get to. It lands at the bottom because it’s Austen still figuring out what she could do with a story.
5
‘Sense and Sensibility’ (1811)
Austen’s first published novel gets treated like a warm-up act for the rest of her work, and within the first hundred pages or so, you can see why. The premise is deceptively simple: two sisters who process the same disaster in completely different ways. Elinor Dashwood is steady and private. Marianne Dashwood feels everything at full volume. After their father’s death strips the family of their home and income, they relocate to a small cottage in Devon, and Marianne throws herself into a romance with John Willoughby, a charming man she meets after tumbling down a hill in a rainstorm. Elinor is also in love with Edward Ferrars, but she’d rather die than make a scene about it.
Then Sense and Sensibility gets mean. Willoughby’s exit is brutal. Lucy Steele’s secret engagement to Edward is a gut punch. The tidy set-up cracks open and what’s underneath is a novel about what it costs women to have feelings in a world that will punish them for it. By the time Marianne falls dangerously ill, you’re fully in it. And even though Austen wraps the love interests up almost suspiciously fast at the end, you don’t care because you’ve spent the whole book worrying about these two women, and you’re just glad they’re okay.
4
‘Mansfield Park’ (1814)
Nobody agrees about this one, and they haven’t since it was published in 1814. Mansfield Park is the Austen novel that splits readers down the middle, and where you end up on the fault line is almost always because of your feelings about Fanny Price. She’s a shy, morally serious girl who gets shipped from her parents’ chaotic house in Portsmouth to live with her wealthy uncle’s family at age ten. The Bertrams take her in, but only Edmund, the younger son, treats her like she belongs. Fanny grows up grateful and overlooked, quietly in love with Edmund and increasingly invisible to everyone else. When the glamorous Crawford siblings show up and start charming the household into chaos, Fanny is the only person who can see through them.
She watches Henry Crawford toy with the Bertram sisters. She watches Mary Crawford’s wit pull Edmund in. Fanny says almost nothing about either, which is admirable or frustrating depending on your preference. That’s the gamble of this novel. It doesn’t give you the pleasure of rooting for someone bold, but it does get you to notice how someone’s principles can cost them almost everything.
3
‘Emma’ (1815)
Emma Woodhouse is twenty, rich, and has decided she has a gift for matchmaking based on a sample size of one successful setup. She takes Harriet Smith, a sweet girl of unknown parentage, under her wing and promptly starts steering her away from a perfectly decent farmer and toward Mr. Elton, the pompous local vicar. When that blows up, Emma tries again. And again.
Austen famously said she was creating “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” It’s been two centuries now, but we’re pretty sure she was joking. Emma is bossy, snobbish, and wrong about almost everyone and everything. She’s also one of the most vivid characters in English fiction. She spends the whole novel misreading the people around her, including Mr. Knightley, the one person who calls her on it. It takes her an embarrassingly long time to realize she’s in love with him, but before that, multiple failed marriage proposals and a secret engagement stir chaos in Emma’s small circle. Austen manages to have fun while taking her time with a character that deserves it. And we get to watch a young woman grow into herself in the process.
2
‘Pride and Prejudice’ (1813)
You already know the broad strokes even if you’ve never read it. Pride & Prejudice was published in 1813 and adapted roughly once a decade ever since. The Bennets have five daughters, no sons, and an estate that will pass to a male cousin when Mr. Bennet dies. Mrs. Bennet has turned getting those daughters married into a full-time occupation. When Charles Bingley moves into the neighborhood, he brings his friend Fitzwilliam Darcy, who is rich, proud, and determined to find the whole scene beneath him. Elizabeth Bennet, the second eldest and with the sharpest tongue in any room she enters, takes an instant dislike to Darcy. He, despite himself, can’t stop noticing her.
The Elizabeth-Darcy dynamic is one of the great romance engines of English literature: two haughty, intelligent people who have each other wrong in complementary ways. The supporting cast is Austen at her most generous. So why is it ranked second? Because it might be the happiest ending Austen ever wrote, and the more times you read it, the more you notice how convenient that happiness is. Darcy swoops in to fix everything. Every sister lands where she should. The older you get, the more it starts to feel a little like a fairy tale. That’s not a knock. But it is the thing that puts it at number two instead of number one.
1
‘Persuasion’ (1817)
Anne Elliot is 27-years-old, which in Austen’s world is practically a spinster. Eight years ago she was engaged to Captain Frederick Wentworth, a poor naval officer who had nothing but ambition. Lady Russell, her late mother’s best friend, talked her into breaking off the betrothal, and Wentworth went to sea to make his fortune during the Napoleonic Wars. Anne stayed home and turned into the person in her family who handled everything: running the finances for her vain father, Sir Walter, and watching her own life get smaller. Then Wentworth comes back.
He’s rich now, still hurt and angry, and he won’t look at her. (If you have ever been in a room with someone you used to love and had to pretend you were fine, this novel will take years off your life.) Austen wrote this while she was sick. She’d be dead within a year of finishing it, and you can feel that in the writing. There’s still comedy, but there’s also this constant awareness of time running out. The climax is Wentworth writing Anne a letter from across the room because he can’t say the words out loud, and it is the most romantic thing Austen ever put on a page. The ending is happy, but you feel what it costs to get there, and that’s why it’s her best.
Persuasion
- Release Date
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July 15, 2022
- Runtime
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109minutes
- Director
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Carrie Cracknell
- Writers
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Ron Bass, Alice Victoria Winslow
