Before even looking at Jane Austen's work, a number of type-related questions come to mind. Are we trying to type the novelist, her work, or perhaps one can only type her characters? All of these may be quite different. Then we have to take her social context into account. We are all to some extent coloured by the dominant type style of our era and our geographical location. In this essay, I cannot hope to "answer" these questions, but I intend to address some of these factors while examining type and Jane Austen.

Jane Austen lived from 1755 to 1817, in what is known as the Regency period in England. In order of publication, her completed novels are Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansefield Park, and Emma; two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously. Many readers will be familiar with some of these from the various movies, but it is important to keep in mind that a film is an attempt to translate a piece of writing into a different medium with quite different demands and aims. Moreover, aspects of these films have been altered and re-interpreted to render tham more comprehensible or palatable to a modern audience, so it would be a mistake to reach conclusions from the movies alone.

At first glance, Jane Austen appears to be the quintessential SJ writer; she might be an ISTJ, and a One, Five or Six on the enneagram. However, even if these guesses are correct, a closer inspection of Austen and her novels can reveal some of the complexities and subtleties of personality typing. When it comes to literature, and movies for that matter, it is tempting to reduce complexitites to simplistic conclusions.

Austen's novels are set in the homes and ballrooms of Regency England, concentrating on the gentry - the class just below the aristocracy - and mainly concern the struggles of young women to secure happy and financially secure marriages, involving also the family and community life around them. On one level her novels are romance stories - in all of them, a young woman ends up marrying the man she loves. They are set exclusively in the mundane social world; there is no fantasy or whimsy in her novels. Although this pragmatism reflects the dominant world-view of her time, this era interestingly saw the rise of the gothic novel, such as The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), both by Ann Radcliffe. The gothic novel was essentially an early kind of thriller or horror story, usually full of dramatic - one might say melodramatic - emotions. Its motifs included dark castles, hidden mysteries, murder, secret passages, stormy nights, gloom, and terror; its atmosphere of supernatural horror uses a vocabulary of violent emotions. Radcliffe's novels were followed by a plethora of imitations, which were hugely popular during this era.

Unlike the gothic genre, Austen's style is "realistic" rather than imaginative; she deals with actual social situations and the real lives of realistically portrayed personalities rather than gothic heroines. Austen is the champion of prudence, of moderation and common sense. In fact, her novel Northanger Abbey (published posthumously in 1818, although written in the 1790s) satirizes the gothic thriller, despite her acknowledgment of its entertainment value. Her heroine, Catherine Morland, allows her infatuation with Radcliffe's novels to interfere with her common sense; she learns that real evil wears a more human, mundane face.

It is important to keep in mind these two extremes of Austen's era: on the one hand, it was a time of great pragmatism and conservatism, when it was crucial for young women of the gentry class to marry well, as they had almost no way of maintaining financial independence. But, although "marrying well" is still a big concern, in Austen's novels her heroines marry for love, and sometimes somewhat out of their class. On the other hand, there was the enormous popularity of the gothic thriller. It could be argued that the lurid melodrama of the gothic genre served as an over-compensation for the dominant pragmatic realism of the era. Thus, in eschewing the gothic genre but having her heroines marry for love, Austen is in fact quite radical in the context of her society.

It is not surprising that in reflecting the dominant pragmatic approach of her time, Austen comes over as SJ - possibly ISTJ - and One-ish or Sixish on the enneagram, but in actual fact what she is really doing in her writing is not necessarily apparent on the surface.

In her fascinating article, "Story Genres and Enneagram Types" Judith Searle argues that, even though great writers transcend genres, particular literary genres correlate with particular enneagram types. So, for example, the basic Six genre is the thriller; the Nine genre is the fantasy. Space does not allow me to discuss this article in detail, but according to Searle's schema, Austen would seem to fit the Two genre and the One genre. Strangely and interestingly, Searle's description of the Five genre - the horror story - does not apply to Austen, but instead, to the gothic genre that was so popular when Austen was writing. However, if we move outside Searle's definitions, Austen's writing would appear to have strong Sixish elements in its emphasis on class, order, and rationality, and also Fivish, with her detached observation and objective style.

There are definite problems in classing Austen's writings as part of the Twoish love story genre. While Austen's novels are undoubtedly love stories with happy endings, they are very far from being only that. The recent movie version of Emma starring Gwyneth Paltrow, for instance, while a wonderfully delightful movie, does something of a disservice to Austen's novel by portraying it as only a sweet, funny, light comedy. Emma the novel is indeed a comedy, but it has a deeper, darker side that was not portrayed in the movie. As in all her novels as well, Austen is a superb satirist of human nature. She observes the customs and foibles of her era with an objective irony and razor-edged wit, and her observations are often bitingly satirical to the point of being almost cruel. For example, in Persuasion, there is a scene that has become the object of much heated argument among Austen scholars. In it, she mocks the grief of a mother for her dead son who was always a nuisance while alive. It can be argued that while some cynicism for the sudden sentimentality of the mother is justified, Austen was too severe in her judgement, given that this woman had actually lost her son.

These traits seem to me to indicate that Austen was a Thinking type rather than a Feeling type, who would be more likely to look at situations with a more soft-hearted and empathetic approach. Enneagramatically, this aspect of Austen feels Fiveish in its objective qualities, or perhaps Sixish in its cynicism. Austen is always looking through familiar social deceptions to the truths beneath. Although of course any type can have this trait, it does feel more Fiveish or Sixish than Twoish, which one might assume Austen is if one sees her novels as simple love stories.

Emma also illustrates another level of depth in Austen's works. In the movie, we are shown Emma's shock at finally realizing with whom she has really been in love all along. We do certainly see her mortification as, one by one, her schemes are shown to be the foolish fantasies they are. But the movie fails to portray how deeply Emma changes. In the novel, Emma fully realizes her blindness and her childish self-centredness. In other words, Emma experiences a profound and genuine insight into her own personality, into what her real motivations have been - a true enlightenment.

In nearly all of Austen's novels (an exception may be Mansefield Park, but that is a different story) her heroines, and sometimes other characters as well, must undergo this journey of self-knowledge. It may not always be as powerful as Emma's, but it does involve the attainment of inner wisdom. Even in Pride and Prejudice, which is perhaps Austen's lightest work (she herself later considered it too light and sparkling!) the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, comes to a deep-rooted realization of how unjust and blind she has been.

Typologically, Emma Woodhouse is probably an immature ENFJ, an unhealthy Two or Seven, and Elizabeth Bennet an ENFP and Seven, both of whom grow up and become more self-aware; but examination of the types of Austen's characters, while fascinating, is beyond the scope of this article. The importance of self-knowledge in Austen's novels, however, is an important factor that sets her apart from the stereotype of a writer of happy romance stories or simple novels of manners, as many seem to see her. She certainly appears to transcend Searle's genre schema; or perhaps the novel of self-awareness constitutes an as-yet unnamed genre of its own. Does this emphasis on self-knowledge and insight have an affinity with a particular type (Four or Five, perhaps, or healthy Nine?) or is it the province of any type, once it becomes enlightened? This is another question which, while perhaps unanswerable, begs to be asked by anyone serious about trying to investigate type and literature.

Another aspect of an author's use of character is that often, as Searle points out, the protagonist embodies the genre type - the way, for instance, the protaganist in a Six story about secret conspiracies is usually a paranoid Six him or herself. However, even though Austen's characters, like her novels, tend to be too complex to generalise in this way, Anne Elliot, for example, would appear to be a Four character in Persuasion, a novel that is one of Austen's most Four-like novels, although there are strong One and Two elements as well. Elinor Dashwood, in Sense and Sensibility, a novel which seems to have a One viewpoint, appears to be a clear One, with her sister Marianne, representing the opposing Four approach.

However, reading Austen's sober, coolly ironic, "realistic" novels, it would not be difficult to judge them as limited, superficial and lacking in passion, as did Charlotte Bronte, writing some half a century later. Bronte (1816-1855) described Pride and Prejudice thus: "An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air…I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses."

Later, after reading Emma, which she violently disliked, Bronte wrote: "She [Austen] does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her…even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition…Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet…"

Charlotte Bronte's reaction is not surprising when one considers her own life and her own writings. The subject is too enormous to cover here, but many readers will be familiar with some facts about her: that she lived a mostly isolated life with her two sisters, Ann and Emily (themselves also writers) with whom she shared an intimate and richly imaginative inner life. Charlotte's most renowned and beloved book is, of course, Jane Eyre (published 1847), a stormy, passionate tale containing some fairly dramatic, even melodramatic events (Jane's mistreatment as a child, the secretly locked up mad wife, the wedding stopped at the last minute, the house fire which blinds Mr Rochester) and which centres on the inner emotional life of its heroine. Compared to Jane Eyre, or her sister Emily's best known novel, Wuthering Heights, Austens' novels may well appear simply to evince elegance rather than depth, and common sense rather than passion.

In her biography of Charlotte Bronte, Unquiet Soul, Margot Peters writes: "Jane Austen was as great in her rational, comic objectivity as Charlotte in her her passional, poetic subjectivity. They were poles apart in the way they viewed experience, although often the experience did not differ." Bronte was quite unable to appreciate Austen's work, and there is little doubt that Austen would have regarded Bronte's style as too passionate and melodramatic, much the same way she regarded Marianne Dashwood's temperament in Sense and Sensibility.

What we have here, of course, is a classic clash of temperament - a classic F/T clash; in particular, an NF/NT conflict. Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen are both concerned with the inner life, but they approach it in very different ways. Bronte, an NF - either INFP or INFJ - is mainly concerned with the emotional expression of the passionate inner life; Austen's stance is more detached and cool, eschewing direct dramatic expresssions of subjective emotion in favour of ironic reflection upon it. My guess is that she was either an ISTJ or an INTJ. To me, though, her ability to see beyond many of the values of her era, and the importance of self-knowledge in her work do make her seem more like an NT than an SJ to me. Interestingly, it is in Austen's novels in which there is dramatic transformation of personality. In Jane Eyre, Jane feels and suffers and experiences life and love, but she undergoes nothing like the self-insight of Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennet or Catherine Morland.

In enneagram terms, Bronte is almost certainly a Four, with her emphasis on expressive emotion, and her judgements of Austen's novels sound the way a Four might describe a more cool temperament. Her writing would seem to fit into the Two genre (the love story), One (the "moral hero" drama) and especially Four (the melodrama, and also the love story, with darker elements than Two).

As for Austen, she is much harder to place on the enneagram. Contrary to what has been said so far, Austen's novels do contain deep feeling; her heroines' struggles are often strongly emotional. Read, for instance, this account of Anne Elliot's thoughts and feelings after meeting Captain Wentworth for the first time in seven years. She was once engaged to him, but broke it off after being persuaded by a dear older friend, deeply regretting it ever since.

    "It is over! It is over!" she repeated to herself again, and again, in nervous gratitude. "The worst is over!"
    Mary [Anne's sister] talked, but she could not attend.
    She had seen him. They had met. They had been once more in the same room!
    Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up.
    Alas! With all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing. (Penguin Classics, p85)