If Cassandra Austen, Jane’s beloved older sister, had not burnt almost every letter Jane wrote to her, our portrait of the writer would be more complete. As it stands, Jane Austen remains an enigmatic figure (or as Virginia Woolf described her, "inscrutable and mysterious"), even for modern readers.

Her short life unfolded through a series of journeys within a limited geographical area: she studied in Oxford and Reading with her sister and visited her relatives in Gloucestershire, Kent and Bath. In addition, she repeatedly tried, although in vain, to improve her health by travelling to Cornwall, Wales, and finally Winchester. Jane suffered from a then-unknown illness, likely a form of Addison’s disease, which caused her much suffering and led to her premature death.

Jane grew up in a bourgeois family in provincial England, surrounded by her seven siblings and a clergyman father. She experienced a quiet – but not tedious – life, devoted to maintaining relationships with family and friends, in touch with the cadences of nature as she observed it from the sitting room window overlooking the well-tended gardens. The occasional trips to London, reading, music, conversations, charades, plays performed in the sitting room or in the family barn, balls and picnics. Perhaps two unfulfilled loves we know little to nothing about. That’s all. Or so it appears.

What was Jane like? Her brother Henry described her as tall and graceful, a cheerful and sociable woman with a love for beautiful things: gardens, flowers, books and houses. However, in the portrait painted by her sister Cassandra, she appears quite plain, her curls escaping from her bonnet atop a round face, featuring a small, thin mouth. Perhaps this discrepancy is due to Cassandra's limited artistic skills. Jane was probably charming, despite being "not handsome enough" (as Darcy said of Elizabeth before falling in love): she had big lively eyes, a quick wit, a sharp intellect, and a gift for conversation we can still admire in Elizabeth Bennet when reading Pride and Prejudice.

Virginia Woolf placed Jane Austen among the top three most important and famous English novelists. In the history of the novel ("the voice of the bourgeoisie" as Mario Praz defines it), Austen represents "the ultimate boundary of the anti-romantic character" and embodies, in her time, the persistence of the rationalist ideals of the Enlightenment. Pride and Prejudice has been described by Attilio Bertolucci as "a novel in miraculous balance between two centuries", and – one might add – between the garden and the insidious and sublime open space, where her characters are often caught in a thunderstorm.

These definitions help us understand the time and, to some extent, the style of Austen’s writing. However, they do not fully capture the nuances of her six novels, especially her greatest ones (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma) in which the focus is, apparently at least, on love, the desire for marriage, and the complex ploys needed to achieve it. Austen’s keen eye for the subtleties of suppressed emotions, the sudden flush in her characters’ complexions, her gentle irony revealing the (mostly) male tendency to become too rigid in their properness, her admiration, on the other hand, for quiet courage, an awareness of the enfolding of events, an attention to small gestures; her open admiration for the "active" patience of characters like the Bennet or Dashwood girls when faced with sorrows and misadventures — these traits are all to be seen as a reflection of the author’s remarkable intelligence, rather than deliberate stylistic choices.

The rooms of a modest yet elegant country house provide the setting for a cast of characters: the protagonists, hesitant to reveal their true selves to one another, are contrasted with the more exaggerated and comical supporting characters (those mothers who talk too much, impulsively and without logic). The novel almost becomes theatre: Jane is the skilled director of her small world, which, centuries later, still feels inexplicably true — perhaps because it is always described from a perspective close to the characters. This truth is both captivating and deceptively “complete”: the reader might even think they can fully understand it and hope to inhabit it. However, it only exists within the genius of the writer.

Austen’s novels create a microcosm, carefully (and perhaps cruelly) carved out of the larger world. Outside the homes and gardens where Elizabeth, Elinor, and Emma dwell, far from the serene countryside and, most of all, from the characters’ thoughts and conversations, rage the Napoleonic Wars. In London, the unavoidable signs of widespread poverty coexist with the exhilarating effects and social struggle brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

Virginia Woolf has been particularly critical of the moral qualities of Austen’s female and male characters, suggesting that the author shows "too little of the rebel in her composition, too little discontent” and that there has never been a time when men and women were less at ease with each other. I believe one can partly disagree with the great Virginia. Austen's choice to depict a "lack of rebellion" in her seemingly harmonious world is not, in my opinion, a sign of intellectual laziness or moral mediocrity. Instead, it reflects a unique and bold choice by the author, allowing her to present an 'objective' view of the only society she knew. And she does so with such miraculous effectiveness that it might be mistaken for approval.

However, we can’t overlook the bitterness in Austen's words when she writes:

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is a very strong argument in favour of matrimony.