We still need Jane Austen’s icy wisdom

I managed to sit through most of Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius the other night. I endured luvvies and minor academics and even Cherie Blair, all wide-eyed at the brilliance of their heroine. She was inevitably presented as edgy and funny and brave and ground-breaking and mould-breaking and ball-breaking and oozing girl power.

Equally predictably, no one mentioned the key to her writing’s power, to her authorial authority: her moral intensity. It’s the truth about her that’s universally unacknowledged. It is hard to talk about – we don’t like moralists nowadays, do we? We don’t like the idea that the creation of literature might have a moral or even a religious dimension – yuk! But it must be talked about. For her comedy and acuity of observation is not random, scattergun, unfocused. It has a logic.