The great author wrote six novels before her early death 200 years ago. But which, wonders Allison Pearson, is the best?

In the small hours of July 18 1817, one of the best writers who ever lived took her last breath. Exactly a year earlier, when Jane Austen was finishing The Elliots (later Persuasion), she experienced back pain, a harbinger of the disease that would kill her at the age of 41. She must have felt rotten. And yet, dissatisfied with the novel’s final chapters, Austen set about rewriting them, smoothing away anything lumpy or moralising. In her agony, she took infinite pains so the reader would know only pleasure.

Persuasion is not Jane Austen’s final book (she was working on Sanditon when she died), but it is the most emotional. At 20, Anne Elliot was persuaded to give up the socially unworthy Captain Wentworth. Seven years later, when Anne is practically an old maid, they meet again and our heroine is wild with regret. “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older – the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.” Years after she was gone, Austen’s beloved sister, Cassandra, wrote in the margin next to that sentence: “Dear, dear Jane! This deserves to be written in letters of gold.”