Today, I’d like to talk about tolerance. Specifically, about tolerance in Jane Austen’s works.
Now, I belong to a number of Facebook Austen groups, which can be both funny and fun. (This was where I first encountered this great New Year meme: “I take no leave of you, 2025. I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.”)
Brilliant!
However, there is a tendency, in Jane Austen fandom, to judge Austen’s characters, and this is a tendency I deplore. Because, though I hope, and indeed trust, that we’re all better-natured than the bullying Mrs Norris of Mansfield Park, I also have to doubt that many of us – if any – can boast Fanny Price’s warmth of heart, patience, politeness, grace, and delicacy, either.
Poor Fanny and Mrs Norris are about equally judged and blasted on these Facebook sites, I regret to say.
What I’m suggesting here, as a New Year’s resolution, is for us to admire, and attempt to imitate, not only Austen’s wit, but her tolerance for people unlike herself.
What made me think of writing this was a recent – anonymous, and small wonder – member of Austen’s fan club seeking books where “Darcy beats up Wickham or kills him”. Instead of deploring this idea, any number of JAFF readers – whom I ardently hope never read my own novels – piled in to recommend books where this happens.
I was absolutely shocked, and I am not easily shocked, having lived in seven countries and visited 44 and, seriously, knocked about the world a bit. Can you imagine Austen writing such a scene? Even I had no violence when imagining Darcy’s confronting Wickham, in my Darcy. I would lose all respect for a Darcy who descended to Wickham’s level … but here were readers, apparently desperate to read about it, and even about murder.
(Now, we don’t know their own backstories. Perhaps they’d been treated badly by some “Wickham” of their own, and wished that someone had visited revenge upon this person. This might even be likely. I’ve never studied psychology; how would I know?)
What I do know is this: that this is not what Austen would have wanted.
And how do I know? Because she doesn’t judge, herself. Take Mr Collins (asap, and as far away as poss. – and hey, here I am, already failing the good nature test I’m setting!) Austen ridicules him and pokes fun at him, but in such a way that there’s no judgement in it. She might have instinctively assessed that he’s “on the spectrum” and can’t help being so. She even allows him to make our heroine’s best friend pretty happy – ok, not ecstatically happy, but there are only so many Darcys to be had – and Mr Collins not a bad catch, for Charlotte especially.
I can imagine Austen enjoying Clueless, and only sighing a little at all the Darcy-and-Lizzy-snowed-up-in-Maine-going-from-enemies-to heavy-petting-in-a-few-paragraphs JAFFs. What I can’t imagine is Austen endorsing violence – no, not even towards Mrs Norris, probably her meanest character of all.
The lasting brilliance of Austen – aside from her style – is her non-judgmental attitude towards human nature. She knew that people are not black-and-white but grey, and that they can change, and grow, and reform. (The last is what I attempt in my latest, Marianne, myself.)
Probably nobody here would actively seek out a book where Darcy has Wickham’s death on his hands. But some people do, and that idea would have disturbed Austen profoundly.
And with that let me wish everyone a VERY happy 2026, from London to wherever you are! Who knows, perhaps, together, we could make 2026 the kind of a year after which we would “send compliments to its mother”.
Alice
Alice’s latest novel, Marianne, published in late October 2025, has won gold medals in the Literary Global Book Awards (romance), the American Writing Awards (romance), the Historical Fiction Company Book awards (the ‘Austen’), and the Coffee Pot Book Awards. It’s a Sense and Sensibility sequel.
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