Principal Alex Hernandez on Why Jane Austen Still Matters

^{Principal Alex Hernandez, left, with a portrait of Jane Austen, circa 1810. (Photo by Neil Gaikwad)}

We asked Victoria College Principal Dr. Alex Hernandez, who taught the third-year English course Austen and Her Contemporaries, why Jane Austen appeals to such a broad audience, even today? 

AH: I think there’s a common misconception that Austen’s novels are these capsule love stories, self-contained, even petty little dramas. They are romances, of course, but her work touched on so many of the key issues of her time – and her time was so tumultuous. She was born right before the American Revolution erupted into violence and spent her formative teenage years as the French Revolution played out. Her adult life barely outlasted the Napoleonic Wars, a period which also saw flowering of Enlightenment and Romantic reaction to it, to say nothing of rapid industrialization, the rise of empire and debates over the slave trade. In various ways, her work is steeped in these ideas and cultural upheavals. She’s thinking through philosophy, politics, aesthetics, history, what it means to love and be human, and so much more, all in this utterly pleasurable forum, which is the novel. 

In Northanger Abbey, written at the end of the 1790s, but published posthumously, Austen’s narrator chastises those who denigrate the novel as a literary form. 

"I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding,” she notes, since ultimately novels are “work[s] in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” 

This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2025 issue of Vic Report