How Jane Austen revealed the economic basis of society

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The gemstone is a cool turquoise, not a ruby or emerald. The band in which it is set is only nine carats, the lowest concentration that can advertise itself as gold.

The small ring nonetheless fetched £152,450 at auction in 2012. A fine result. But not everyone was happy.

The ring once belonged to Jane Austen, author of “Pride and Prejudice" and other literary classics, born 250 years ago this month. The auction was won by Kelly Clarkson, singer of “My Life Would Suck Without You" and other pop hits, who triumphed in an American talent show 23 years ago. Rather than let the ring leave the country, Britain declared it a national treasure and delayed its export until Jane Austen’s House, a museum in Chawton, Hampshire, could raise the money to buy it.

When told this story, one museum-goer remarked: “Isn’t it lovely that money doesn’t always talk." Money does not have the last word in Austen’s novels. When Mr Darcy, with his country mansion, makes a peremptory marriage proposal to Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice", she first turns him down. Fanny Price does the same to rich but libidinous Henry Crawford in “Mansfield Park".

Austen herself refused an offer of marriage in 1802 from Harris Bigg-Wither, young heir to Manydown, a large Hampshire estate. In Austen’s novels and her life, a good fortune is not sufficient for happiness. But it is necessary.

Austen insists on that necessity with a consistency and quantitative precision that sets her novels apart from most literary works. She reveals “so frankly and with such sobriety / The economic basis of society", notes W.H. Auden in shocked admiration.