I think, if one's considering what order to read Austen's
works in, especially someone is, in the, in the lucky position
about not having read any of them, yeah, what a wonderful
position to be in to be embarking Austen's fiction, it
makes sense to read them chronologically. She published
these six novels over the course of just seven years, two of
them, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, were published only the
year after her death. So one could read them in the order in
which they were published, starting with Sense and
Sensibility. And that would make sense because Jane Austen, I
think, as she was composing these novels in this
extraordinary concentrated period, was responding with each
new novel to the last one she written. How however, I think
there's another way to do it. I think, I would always advise
somebody who hadn't yet started reading Austen, to start with
Pride and Prejudice, her second completed novel, but also in
many ways her most accessible, her funniest, the one that has a
really sort of electric heroine, Elizabeth Bennett, who's
irreverence makes her unlike any heroine of English fiction
before her and maybe after, as well. And I think anybody who
doesn't like Pride and Prejudice almost immediately probably is
never gonna like Jane Austen. And then one could read Emma for
it's, rather, I think, more complex and subtle humor. It's
the longest, and I think the most complicated, of Jane
Austen's novels. Then perhaps Mansfield Park, which actually
came between Pride and Prejudice and Emma, and which is, I think,
the most challenging Austen novel because she reacted
against what she herself had done in Pride and Prejudice,
with this extraordinary and witty heroine, Elizabeth
Bennett, by creating Fanny Price, the most reserved of all
her heroines, and the least irreverent. Then perhaps
Persuasion, her last completed novel, which I think many people
have as their favorites. It's the most melancholy and the most
romantic of Austen's novels, the novel, in which the heroine
turns down the man she loves, but then gets a second chance.
Then perhaps Northanger Abbey, which although was published
after Austen's death, was probably the earliest of her
novels, at least in draft form, and is a playful jeu d'esprit
best enjoyed when you've already read some other Austen novels.
And then perhaps, last of all, the one she completed first,
Sense and Sensibility, which is a novel where she's still
finding her way, finding her technique, still writing much
influenced by the 18th century prose writers to whom she was
devoted, like Dr. Johnson, and perhaps a novel which is only
rarely relishable once you've understood the extraordinary
originality of the novel she went on to next.