Jane Austen

Wendy Chamberlain Excerpts

Thursday 18th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) on securing this debate. I am the Liberal Democrats’ Chief Whip, so I am not given to making speeches as a Liberal Democrat spokesperson, but I have chosen to speak in this debate because my degree is in English language and literature and—as other Members have already said—I am a Jane Austen fan.

As the MP for North East Fife, I cannot claim that my constituency has any relationship to Jane Austen. If she had come to North East Fife, she might have wanted to bathe in the sea off the East Neuk, but she would have found it rather chilly. As the hon. Member for East Thanet (Ms Billington), whose constituency includes Ramsgate, just pointed out, going to the seaside was not necessarily a safe thing for Austen’s characters to do. Many of them came to harm by the sea.

Clearly, the streets and the quirks of neighbours captured in Austen’s writing are one of the reasons why we have had such a varied debate today. Walter Scott, the 250th anniversary of whose birth we celebrated in 2021, was a Jane Austen fan and described her as having

“the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment”.

I want to put Jane Austen into her historical context. Many Members have already done that in this debate, but the Napoleonic wars have not been mentioned so far. I recommend Jenny Uglow’s “In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815”, which is available in the House of Commons Library. If we map Austen’s life on to that period of time, we see that the Napoleonic wars started as she turned 18 and concluded only two years before her untimely death.

There has been some criticism of the letters that Austen wrote and of her attitudes towards death. There is a particular letter in which she comments on the stillbirth of a woman known to her by basically suggesting that the stillbirth was caused by the woman being “frighted” at seeing the face of her husband. Consequently, some people have suggested that there is a cruelness to Austen, but I would argue that that was the reality of her times: women died in childbirth; these things happened.

We see Austen’s perspective on war in many ways in her books. We see the Redcoats that Lydia Bennet encounters in Meryton, and naval officers such as Captain Wentworth and his colleagues in “Persuasion”. There were troops everywhere in Britain during that time. War was a fact of life, but it was also a fact of life that, because the war continued for so long, it became part of people’s day-to-day lives so it did not intrude on their consciousness in a way that an event of shorter duration might have done. War is part of Austen’s novels, but it is not at the centre of them. As has been said already, Jane had brothers in the Navy. She was heavily invested in their careers and understood the peril that families felt about a loved one serving overseas.

What is interesting about Austen’s writing is that it not only resonated with her contemporaries but has continued to resonate with many different generations across the ensuing 250 years. In 1918, as part of efforts to boost morale in the trenches, two of her works, “Persuasion” and “Northanger Abbey”, were selected by the War Office for the Forces book club and printed in a size that could fit in a soldier’s pocket. That does not suggest that Austen produced “chick-lit”. Indeed, a hospital worker in 1915 wrote an article in The Times about their efforts to find appropriate reading to calm the nerves of those suffering from shellshock:

“It happened that a tired soldier found her”—

that is, Austen—

“just what he wanted…We found ourselves…wishing that the dear lady had written at greater length…as the last page of ‘sense and sensibility’ came.”

The other thing I will say about war is also about empire. One of the things that we do not necessarily recognise in “Mansfield Park”, for example, is that it is quite clear that the Bertram family are profiting from the slave trade in the Caribbean.

In relation to Bath and my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), I was at the Topping & Company bookshop in St Andrews in my constituency last week and people there were talking about how popular the celebrations in Bath for Austen’s birthday had been. It is truly remarkable that a woman who in her lifetime earned only £631 from writing—the equivalent of £45,000 today—has gone on to create a multimillion-pound industry.

I want to talk a bit about the literature—how did Austen capture so many hearts and minds? I will suggest a second book to Members: John Mullan’s “What Matters in Jane Austen?” is a set of 20 essays that really track her literary genius. It is a book that I come back to on a regular basis, though not quite as regularly as I come back to the books themselves. John Mullan argues that Austen was a trailblazer in literary ingenuity:

“She did things with fiction…with characterisation, with dialogue…that had never been done before.”

We take free indirect style in English fiction for granted, so we underestimate how revolutionary Austen’s style was. Because she filtered her plots through the consciousness of her characters, we really saw real people. That is one reason that her art has endured.

It was the little things that mattered—the smallest of details. One chapter of Mullan’s book talks about blushing. That seems such a small, inconsequential thing in some ways but Emma Woodhouse—the one Austen character who is very secure in her opinions, her confidence and her sense of self—blushes when she is reprimanded by Mr Knightley for her treatment of Miss Bates on Box Hill. That is the first sign that that woman, Emma, who has been so confident in her opinions until now, has got things wrong and does not truly know herself.

Austen’s plotting of who keeps silent in “Emma” turns the book into a detective novel. That is one reason why so many people can return to her books: you find something new every time. All of that shows how crafted Austen’s work was, and that craft has allowed her work to be remade again and again. I am a woman of a certain age, so 1995 was quite important for me, whether it was “Clueless”, “Persuasion”—I entirely agree with the hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) about that production—or the very well known “Pride and Prejudice” adaptation. I have unfortunately been unable to get to the “Austenmania!” exhibition, but that would have been very popular with me. As the hon. Member for Basingstoke mentioned, the careers of some of our greatest stars, and maybe even our Prime Minister, may have been launched through such things.

What inspires so deep a devotion to Austen’s work, even in the inattentive reader? I would argue it is the way she captures human follies and scruples with genuine affection and humour. My hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Dr Chambers) referenced what Mr Bennet said about how we make

“sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn”.

On Mr Bennet, I have to say that the 1995 production fooled us all. Mr Bennet is a pretty neglectful dad, isn’t he? How did he end up with five daughters and be unable to provide for them on £2,000 a year? I think he has a bit to answer for.

Towards the end of that story, Elizabeth reflects that Darcy

“had yet to learn to be laughed at”.

We, the readers, understand that under her tutelage he will learn that. We also learn to laugh at Darcy a little ourselves. Austen’s ironies attract us still, but her balance and poise often elude imitators. But while laughing at foolishness is a good way to get by, it is not ultimately the salve that brought comfort to the soldier in the trenches or to an admiral’s family. To quote Beatrice Scudeler,

“if her novels prove that moral corruption is ubiquitous, they also make the case that, despite our corrupted nature, we’re not unsalvageable: forgiveness and redemption are always within reach of humankind.”

From Emma to Anne Elliot to Mr Darcy, confronting their mistakes is a powerful factor in how Austen’s characters grow. Fanny Price is one of the least popular of Austen’s characters because she is always good and always right, and although that is a very nice way for someone to live, it sometimes makes them slightly insufferable to live with. I agree with the hon. Member for Carlisle—Anne Elliot is my favourite character and her failing is that she has not been headstrong enough, which is not often a problem for the other heroines of Austen.

Austen’s most powerful innovation was to realise that a lack of self-knowledge is the very voice of narration. Her dialogue is king of her works. The comic characters are monologists whereas our heroes—such as Emma and Mr Knightley—are supreme in their dialogue. We should also look out for the significant characters who we never hear from—they do not actually speak—because they are interesting too.

To conclude, in an age where it is less and less common to call on our neighbours and know their follies and scruples, and where the ridiculousness of Miss Bates would have potentially meant that Emma’s hot takes went viral on social media, it does us good as politicians to be reminded that community requires compassion.