The young have little sense of other places and times. They live in a perpetual now unless they are taught otherwise. This argues for the importance of history and literature as the center of a humane curriculum. They don’t just show us alternatives to the present, but remind us that we are all in this human enterprise together. Times may change, humankind not so much.

A Stephen Spender poem says,” I think continually of those who were truly great.” That’s one good reason to mark anniversaries and remember our illustrious forebears, and 2017 is notable for being the 200th of the death of a woman who lives on in millions of hearts and minds. Almost a hundred years ago, Kipling offered up a prayer to her – one maker to another.

Jane lies in Winchester, blessed be her shade!/Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made.

This is from “The Janeites,” the Kipling story that tells of a shell-shocked veteran of World War I, an uneducated hairdresser, who heard several men alongside him in the artillery talking in a kind of code. To him it seemed that they were members of a secret society. When he asked, they introduced him to Austen novels, which he took to be initiation into a sort of Masonic order beyond rank or hierarchy.

He dutifully studied for admission and ranked the works as follows: “’Persuasion,’ first; an’ the rest in a bunch, except for another about some Abbey or other – last by three lengths.” That’s not only funny, but true. Even better as literary criticism are a few other conclusions from this sole surviving acolyte, all of whose fellow Janeites were killed in a barrage that left him with what we would call PTSD.

First, he decided “ ’er characters were no use! They was only just like people you run across every day.” Familiar with more pot boiling fiction, this seemed dull, realistic stuff to him. But, of course, that is one thing we value in Austen and that makes her stand out from earlier writers. We all do know a Miss Bates, an Emma or a Reverend Collins.

Yet, she didn’t just show us an old maid or country parson or young rake, but made us draw conclusions about them. “Some’ow Jane put it down all so naked if made you ashamed,” says the unlettered Janeite. “They’re all on the make, in a quiet way, in Jane.”

That is, she was a not just a realist but a satirist, and that almost always implies being a conservative moralist. If she was acute and tart about human foibles, it was because she was measuring bad behavior against a mark that was being missed.

Finally, Kipling’s Janeite concludes that “there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place.” Focusing on these works centered on a domestic, English society helped preserve the sanity of men in a brutal, blasted, inhumane world of mass murder. This is doubly touching when we learn that Kipling read Austen aloud to his family in the evening months after his son was killed in the trenches.

Thornton Wilder once said of Madame de Sevigne, whose letters are one of the summits of French literature, that she “was not devastatingly witty or wise” but “what attentive ears.” She heard and saw everything and recorded it in a style of uncommon purity.

The same might be said of Austen, except she was both witty and wise as well. She has spawned innumerable imitators, acres of romance novels, but none of her followers are her equal, and many of her emotional readers miss part of the point. Her books aren’t about the plot or who winds up with whom. They are about the character of the characters, and the majority are human, all too human.

Kipling himself said “When she looks straight at a man or woman, she is greater than those who were alive with her…with a more delicate hand and a keener scalpel.” That is, under her ladylike façade, she was a very tough-minded but quietly amused judge of her fellow creatures.

Some good, and many not so good, film and TV adaptations of her work have been made, but none can match the books themselves. That’s because so much of them resides in the supple, sly, subtle prose that makes her a master. Only perhaps Sterne and Fielding before her can even compete, and many after owe her a large debt, including George Eliot, Henry James and Edith Wharton.

From her they learned the novel could be a deeper study than previously thought of society, psychology, morality and personality, and none of them could match her effervescent humor. Austen died in 1817 at the age of 41, leaving behind an uncompleted seventh novel. Janeites honor her memory, but mourn bitterly the novels that might have flowed if she had matched her father’s 74 years or her mother’s ninety.

I could not conclude this remembrance without a nod to the greatest Janeite I ever knew. George Holbert Tucker was a Norfolk, Virginia newspaperman, genealogist and local historian. I knew him in his eighties when he would join us at the Virginian-Pilot cafeteria for lunch and regale us with dirty limericks, tales of local scandal and tidbits of history. He was also a Jane Austen aficionado who late in life published two books based on meticulous research that helped debunk the myth of the prim, pious, reclusive Austen her family had promulgated.

“Jane Austen: The Woman” brought George respect and praise from no less a figure that the great British historian Paul Johnson who said he thought he knew all about Austen but found a new fact on every page. It also brought George a pen pal in Patrick O’Brian, the author of the Jack Aubrey nautical novels, who was another devoted Janeite.

As proud of his tidewater Virginia lineage as any English aristocrat, Tucker was once asked at lunch who he identified with in the Austen novels. With a characteristic twinkle in his eye and a flounce, he said, “Lady Catherine De Bourg, of course.” With any luck, George and Jane are trading gossip in heaven.