Last week saw the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Here John Mullan looks at the “faultless” female characters in her novels

‘Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked,’ Austen wrote in a letter to her niece Fanny Knight just a few months before her death. Fanny had set a suitor, James Wildman, to read her aunt’s novels (without telling him the identity of their author) and he had evidently objected that her female characters were not exemplary. ‘I particularly respect him for wishing to think well of all young Ladies; it shews an amiable & a delicate Mind.’

So ‘faultless’ is a word for heavy irony. In Austen’s novels it is first used of a woman in Mansfield Park, and incredibly it is applied to Maria Bertram. ‘Maria was indeed the pride and delight of them all—perfectly faultless—an angel’. As a fragment of narration it seems extraordinary, but in context we see that it reflects Mrs Norris’s opinion, and probably her words: not just ‘faultless’, but ‘perfectly faultless’. The phrase dooms her.

In Emma, it is Mr Knightley’s word for Emma, immediately after she has accepted his proposal. ‘He had ridden home through the rain; and had walked up directly after dinner, to see how this sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults, bore the discovery’. Even at his most enamoured, Mr Knightley knows that it is a lover’s paradox. Has he not qualified to be her husband by being ‘one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them’?

Austen’s interest in her heroines’ faults and errors was in itself something extraordinary in fiction. Yet the novelty went beyond this. She also developed techniques for showing the contradictoriness or even obscurity of her protagonist’s motivation. The managing of the attraction between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, for instance, is a triumph of technique as much as of psychological subtlety. Elizabeth Bennet is an unprecedented creation not just because of her wit and ‘archness’, but because Austen is able to give us a sense of her self-ignorance. At the ball at Netherfield she is disappointed by Wickham’s absence and dances first with Mr Collins and then with one of the officers.

When those dances were over, she returned to Charlotte Lucas, and was in conversation with her, when she found herself suddenly addressed by Mr. Darcy who took her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without knowing what she did, she accepted him. He walked away again immediately, and she was left to fret over her own want of presence of mind.

‘Without knowing what she did’. It is the most innocent of phrases, but read one way directs us to perhaps the most important fact about Pride and Prejudice for most readers: the strong current of attraction between two characters who are superficially at odds. Elizabeth does something despite herself and by accepting the character’s own version of what has happened – fretting over ‘her own want of presence of mind’ – the narrator encourages the reader to imagine another explanation.

This is an extract from What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Essential Questions Answered (250th Birthday Edition) (Bloomsbury, £14.99) by John Mullan. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

John Mullan was our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” earlier this year. Members can watch it here.

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