A painting of Jane Austen with her six novels (covers) around her.

All of Jane Austen’s novels, ranked. Image: Claire Mabey and Tina Tiller.

BooksApril 11, 2025

All of Jane Austen’s novels ranked from worst to best

Guest writer

All of Jane Austen’s novels, ranked. Image: Claire Mabey and Tina Tiller.

On the occasion of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, Hannah August ranks her novels. Happy birthday, Jane!

It was 250 years ago this year that a family in a small village in Hampshire welcomed the arrival of a baby daughter. This daughter would go on to write six of the most beloved novels in the English language, attract the type of fandom more commonly associated with modern-day pop stars, inspire a proliferation of increasingly loose film and television adaptations of her work, and end up with her portrait on the English 10-pound note.

The occasion of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday is a perfect time to revisit her work. But before you cue up the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice, consider the joys that can be had from actually reading the original novels. And if you’ve never read one and are wondering where to start, The Spinoff has kindly prepared the following entirely non-definitive ranking.

6. Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility was Austen’s first novel, and it shows. It’s pretty schematic – its central characters, the sisters Elinor and Marianne, respectively embody the qualities in the novel’s title, but unlike in Pride and Prejudice, these qualities of characterisation don’t really drive the narrative events. Instead, Elinor and Marianne are at the mercy of the two men they fall for, the charming yet insincere John Willoughby (Austen’s first experiment with the fuckboy character type, who will show up again and again in subsequent novels), and the nice but dull Edward Ferrars.

Greg Wise as Willoughby and Kate Winslet as Marianne from the 1995 film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.

The best thing about this book is the recognisability of certain characters – most straight women have known (and perhaps dated) a Willoughby; many of us have held tight to the same romantic ideals as the youthful Marianne. But this doesn’t really make up for the multiple missteps of its final movement. Elinor’s beloved Edward is suddenly released back onto the marriage market through a plot twist that feels awkwardly contrived; Willoughby’s sympathetic response from Elinor when he finally apologises for his behaviour ignores his truly awful treatment of a previous lover. And there’s a bit of unavoidable ick for contemporary readers about having the 17-year-old Marianne end up with a man 18 years her senior.

Eligibility verdict: Sense and Sensibility will always be invited to the ball, but lacks sufficient attractions to guarantee a partner for every dance.

5. Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey is a pretty silly novel. But it’s also the novel in which Austen most overtly flexes her satirical muscles, and as a consequence it’s also pretty funny. Its heroine is 17-year-old Catherine Morland: naïve, unaccomplished, “often inattentive, and occasionally stupid”, but also nice, enthusiastic about life, and very well-read in a certain type of novel.

The novels Catherine prefers are those stuffed with Gothic clichés – ruined castles or (ahem) abbeys with hidden passageways, secret messages stashed inside innocuous-looking containers, apparent benefactors who’ve imprisoned young women. When Catherine is invited to stay with the Tilney family, who happen to actually live in an abbey, much of the humour and narrative tension that ensues results from her over-active imagination and her determination to map her reading onto real life, with embarrassing results.

Yet Austen’s message isn’t (naturally) about the dangers of reading novels – one of the most romantic moments of the book comes when Catherine discovers that her beau, Henry Tilney, is equally passionate about her favourite novels, and the takeaway is instead that reading for pleasure can be a key part of a life conducted with good sense and sound moral judgement.

Eligibility verdict: Northanger Abbey isn’t a key contributor to the drawing room conversation, but it’s having such a nice time chuckling over the book in its lap that it doesn’t care.

A black and white etching of Catherine Morland from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. — Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland scaring herself with gothic novels. An illustration from the 1833 edition of the book.

4. Mansfield Park

This is the Austen novel that most people haven’t read. Which is a shame, because it’s absorbing, tightly plotted, and feels like it’s prefiguring the later 19th century novels of George Eliot or Thomas Hardy. Fanny Price is the eldest daughter of a mother who made an ill-advised marriage and is struggling with a bothersome number of offspring. Fortunately Fanny’s aunts, who made better matrimonial and procreational choices, decide that they can take Fanny under their wing, and she moves to live with her four cousins at the country estate of Mansfield Park.

Fanny is quiet, timid, and well-behaved, and develops a crush on her cousin Edmund, who himself only has eyes for the more vivacious Miss Crawford. Edmund’s two sisters, meanwhile, are engaged in a rivalry for the affections of Miss Crawford’s brother, a charming cad in the Willoughby mode. How Fanny will escape the clutches of Mr Crawford when he ultimately turns his charm on her, and how she and Edmund will finally end up together, are matters of genuine suspense right up until the novel’s closing chapters.

Fanny’s a somewhat insipid central character, but the novel’s structurally highly satisfying in the way she becomes the fixed point on the moral compass of the supporting cast, the key members of whom undergo genuine self-development, or get their comeuppance in ways that feel fully deserved and narratively consistent.

Eligibility verdict: Like the shy, silent girl in the corner of the room, Mansfield Park turns out to be surprisingly engaging when you take the time to get to know her.

3. Persuasion

Diehard Austen fans are already pulling out their inkpots and pens to tell me this novel deserves a higher ranking, and I get why. Persuasion is the Platonic ideal of the romance novel, the urtext of enduring love and second chances. For anyone who’s ever hoped that the one that got away might show up on their doorstep years down the line – rewarding them for all the time they spent making the best of it as a single person – Persuasion is here for you.

At 27, Anne Elliot has, we are told, lost her “bloom”. (The satire in this novel is targeted towards characters – like Anne’s father and elder sister – who are obsessed with physical beauty and youthfulness.) At 19, she was in love with Captain Wentworth, a charming young naval officer whom she was persuaded not to marry by an older female friend because of his apparent lack of prospects. Eight years later, he re-enters her life, a much more eligible bachelor than he once was…

A young woman (Dakota Johnson) holding a rabbit in a poster for Persuasion — Apologies but here is Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot in Persuasion

This novel is Austen’s most romantic because it vindicates individual conviction – Anne sees Wentworth’s true quality before society does, rather than conveniently falling in love with someone who’s already highly esteemed. But it’s not perfect – the cad character just gets shuffled off stage at the end, which is narratively unsatisfying, and Anne ultimately lacks the spirit of the heroines of the next two novels.

Eligibility verdict: Persuasion is absolutely marriage material. But its attractions are such as will appeal predominantly to more mature, refined tastes.

2. Emma

Emma is a perfect satire of small-town life. It takes to its greatest extreme Austen’s perennial theme of the limited prospects for young women living in rural villages – both in terms of matrimony and entertainment more generally. Twenty-year-old Emma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever, and rich”, is starved for things to do, channelling her energy and talents into misguided matchmaking endeavours amongst those who enter her small rural orbit. Her misplaced conviction that she’s right about everything is what makes her both infuriating and sympathetic. That she manages to endear herself to us despite the fact that the narrator is gently mocking pretty much everyone and everything throughout (her heroine included) is part of the novel’s charm.

The only reason this novel hasn’t ended up in first place is that, on the romance front, it’s a bit of a dud. Another 18-year age gap between Emma and her eventual husband is exacerbated by the fact that his treatment of her is occasionally uncomfortably paternalistic: telling her off for her bad behaviour (even if she’s deserved it) makes it feel as though she’s being shamed into loving him.

Eligibility verdict: Emma has masterminded your evening’s entertainment and has ensured that the victuals are excellent, the conversation sparkling, and an equal number of attractive young gentlemen are available to partner the ladies. Time spent with this novel cannot possibly be regretted.

A black and white illustration of Emma and Mr Knightely ina 1898 edition of Emma by Jane Austen. — Emma Woodhouse and Mr Knightley. An illustration by Chris Hammond in an 1898 edition of Emma. Image: Houghton Typ 805.98.1770, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

1. Pride and Prejudice

So predictable, I hear you murmur around the card table. That Austen’s best-known, best-loved, most adapted novel should take out first place – did she even bother to read the others?

Here’s the reason Pride and Prejudice is a better novel than Emma or Persuasion: it has it all. It’s funny – see the depictions of Mr Collins, of Lady Catherine de Bourgh; also Austen’s presentation of the younger Bennet sisters and their parents. It offers a nuanced examination of the pressures of patriarchal society – see the different decisions Elizabeth Bennet and Charlotte Lucas make about matrimony. But it’s also the novel where it’s easiest to get behind the central romantic partnership.

two portraits of couples, both Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice — Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle (left) and Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen as Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet

Elizabeth Bennet is smart, kind, witty and independently minded. Mr Darcy is (though it takes a while for it to be revealed) loyal, generous and open to self-improvement. They’re both young and hot. It remains perennially easy to find them attractive as characters, whereas the qualities that distinguish a Fanny Price or an Anne Elliot are less seductive for contemporary readers. You do not want to get stuck at a party talking to Fanny Price; you’d be pretty happy to get stuck talking to Elizabeth Bennet. Pride and Prejudice encourages us to form an attachment to its romantic leads as individuals, not just to the idea of their eventual union – it is this that sets it apart from Austen’s other novels.

Eligibility verdict: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a ranking of items must be in want of a first-place-getter. Despite the excellent company, Pride and Prejudice is the most eligible contender for that title.

All of Jane Austen’s novels are available to purchase from Unity Books.

Keep going!

The cover of Truth Needs No Colour by Heather McQuillan, with an image of the Christchurch Cathedral after the earthquake behind it.

It took years for Heather McQuillan to write and publish her now, very timely, novel.

BooksApril 10, 2025

The dystopian nonfiction I didn’t intend to write

Heather McQuillan

Guest writer

It took years for Heather McQuillan to write and publish her now, very timely, novel.

Heather McQuillan on the long road to publishing her latest young adult novel, Truth Needs No Colour.

Soon after the February earthquakes of 2011, those of us involved in education in Ōtautahi Christchurch faced another shakeup in the reorganisation of our schools. Some closed, some merged. We were told that this was done in the interests of certainty. But it wasn’t certainty we needed (as if that is even possible!). It was compassion and community. As a result, communities were torn apart. At the time, I had been reading about the privatisation of public education in the USA, where, following Hurricane Katrina, most New Orleans schools were transferred into privately run, publicly funded charter schools. I feared the same would happen here. It didn’t. Not then.

I met my brave, conflicted, artistic Mariana one day in 2012 when I stared at a blank page and wrote a scene about a girl waking on her 15th birthday to three gifts: a red dress, a briefcase of repurposed art supplies and a cheap bead bracelet. She found it hard to be grateful. Life wasn’t fair. The voice of a dead mother intruded. I had no idea what was going on, but Mariana and her whānau — Grandpa Jack, Nana Isla, Scruff and Katya — arrived fully formed.

I set out to write the next scene, but what turned up was the same girl waking on her 16th birthday, only now, she was in a prison camp, covered in bruises and grateful for the beetle she caught and ate. I still had no idea what was going on. This book is the result of my filling in the gaps with all of the thinking I’d been doing about lies and injustice, and with my experiences of wonderful resilience and friendship.

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Anna Rawhiti-Connell
— Senior writer

As Mariana’s character developed, the rules of the patriarchal and authoritarian charter schools I’d been reading about became part of her story. Clothing choices are highly regulated, and the children follow painted lines in the corridors with their hands by their sides. I didn’t make this up. A “no excuses” philosophy, the misapplication of positive psychology language, and an overbearing testing regime are common threads in many of these schools where poverty and social-emotional challenges are downplayed, and the children are labelled as the problem if they lack so-called “grit”.

With education becoming the next corporate frontier, it wasn’t a huge leap for me to arrive at the concept of a deliberate charter school-to-private prison pipeline run by the same corporation.

By 2014, I’d finished the first draft of my book, won a New Zealand Society of Authors manuscript assessment, and worked with the incredible Mandy Hager. She said, “This is a seriously good book … you will find a publisher.” But publishers didn’t agree. Most never replied. One called it well-written but “not for them”. Another suggested the romance needed to be “sexed up”. A small publisher showed real interest, but after great reader feedback and much discussion, they passed – not because of the book, but because homegrown YA (young adult fiction) is a hard sell. Let’s hope that is changing because our rangatahi need and deserve to read stories relevant to their worlds. Reading books about their own communities is key to young people’s comprehension and engagement with literature.

Heather McQuillan launching Truth Needs No Colour. Photo: Marie Fox: Those Lost Stories.

Soon I ran out of local publishers to submit to, so I rewrote the setting to Tasmania so I could submit the book in Australia: some interest, a Zoom call, then a “no”. When Cloud Ink Press sought YA submissions at the end of 2023, I reworked the setting again. It is now firmly set in the South Island, reimagined after a disaster, after the government has deemed it financially unviable to rebuild again, and some years after the faceless corporation Carapace has taken hold.

Over the intervening 13 years, the title changed four times, a key character was annihilated, and the romance was not sexed up. I questioned why I kept going, but people I trusted told me it was good. Thank goodness for those people – the ones who cheer us along, encourage, support, read, and champion books for young New Zealand readers.

Though it took so long, sadly, the time is ripe for this story. We live in an age where we don’t have to imagine a government seeking to outsource infrastructure to a faceless corporation. Technocratic, formulaic approaches to education and corporate control through testing regimes and charter schools are once again on the agenda in New Zealand. And our prime minister held a meeting a few weeks back to lure potential private investors to our resources, roads, hospitals and prisons. I definitely never set out to write what has to be the worst possible genre – dystopian nonfiction.

And we also don’t have to imagine a young person daring to question it all and speak out. It is our young people that are leading climate action, challenging corrupt systems and being allies for the silenced. But that’s not Mariana – not at first. It’s too scary, too dangerous. She stays quiet. Things get worse. Then she speaks. Things get even worse.

Of course, I’d love you to buy and read this book and to press it into the hands of young people. But more than that, young or old, even if your voice shakes, take action – through your art, writing, organising, amplifying others, and supporting movements – because activism isn’t just speaking out, it’s showing up in whatever way you can. One voice can spark change. But as in Truth Needs No Colour, it takes many voices – shouting, creating, resisting – to topple those who create and profit from injustice.

Truth Needs No Colour by Heather McQuillan ($30, Cloud Ink Press) is available to purchase from Unity Books.