Jane Austen

Katrina Murray Excerpts

Thursday 18th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Katrina Murray (Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) on securing this timely and welcome debate and, to be honest, on allowing us to reread and rewatch the great works of Jane Austen, all on the grounds of pure research.

I begin by quoting Jane herself from “Persuasion”:

“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures.”

Those words were spoken by Anne Elliot, a character who knows exactly what it is like to be overlooked, underestimated and quietly right all along, and they seem like an entirely appropriate place to begin discussing Jane Austen. As has already been said, we are meeting just after the 250th anniversary of her birth, and what strikes me is not simply that her novels are still read and in great demand, but they are still being argued over, still being adapted and still capable of illuminating modern debates about power, class and gender. To my mind, that is the clearest measure of her literary and cultural legacy.

Jane Austen was a woman who was often presented as a writer of romance and— sometimes dismissively—the original chick lit, but she was a woman who never wrote escapism. As we have been reminded during this debate, she was writing social commentary, delivered lightly but never casually. Her novels examine money, inheritance, reputation and power with real precision, particularly in how they shape women’s lives or, as she puts it clearly in “Sense and Sensibility”:

“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”

That line does feel a bit less romantic than totally economically literate.

The clearest example of Austen’s seriousness is “Mansfield Park”, which to my mind is a novel that is often overshadowed by “Pride and Prejudice” or “Emma”. Through Fanny Price, Austen explores dependence and what it means to be grateful, constrained and constantly reminded of one’s place. Fanny’s refusal to marry wealth at the cost of her conscience is not dramatic rebellion; it is moral resistance under pressure. Austen shows us that integrity, especially for women, is rarely rewarded quickly or loudly.

Austen is never heavy-handed. Her greatest strength is irony. She exposes hypocrisy, entitlement and self-importance by letting her characters speak for themselves, often while being entirely convinced of their own virtue. It is a technique that has aged extremely well and still feels uncomfortably familiar in public life, which is why her influence today is so extensive. She wrote about structures, not fashions, which is why her work travels so easily more than two centuries later. We have already talked at length about “Bridget Jones’s Diary”, but we also have Bollywood’s “Bride and Prejudice”, modern queer retellings such as “Fire Island”, and let us not forget “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, which suggests that if a writer’s work can survive both the literary canon and the undead, their cultural legacy is in a really good place.

Most recently, historians such as Lucy Worsley have reminded us that Austen’s radicalism lay in insisting that ordinary women were worthy of being heroines and that their inner lives mattered, which is why she continues to speak so powerfully to young women today. Her heroines think, judge, change their minds and, crucially, are allowed to say no. They are underestimated, patronised and sometimes dismissed as trivial, only to prove otherwise. That theme has not entirely lost its relevance.

By writing women’s lives seriously—their judgment, their intelligence and their everyday experience—Austen helped to shift what was considered worthy of literature. Writers such as the Brontë sisters, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell went on to write very different kinds of novels, but they did so in a literary world that Austen herself had helped to open up. She showed that stories centred on women could be complex, rigorous and enduring, and that women novelists themselves deserved to be taken seriously. Her influence runs through literature, films, television and popular culture, and it continues to invite us to question how power really operates, often behind politeness and convention.

I will end with Austen herself again, who wrote:

“One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it”.

Some 250 years on, Jane Austen remains beloved, not because she smoothed over difficulty, but because she understood it, and because she trusted her readers to do exactly the same.