Frederick Wentworth, at first rejected by Anne in Persuasion, “went, but he was worth something. The heroine of Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, is so called because “her family needs ‘more land’ ”. She treats Austen’s names as if they have inherent properties. She does not just analyse the ways in which names announce pretension, as with Augusta Elton (née Hawkins) and her sister Selina, now married to Mr Suckling of Maple Grove. She has mined into every name of person or place to create a huge compendium of the etymologies and associations on which she believes the novelist was drawing. “The question of naming brings out a poetic complexity in Austen,” Doody says. “Impossible! – I never can call you any thing but ‘Mr Knightley’.” Her reply playfully parodies the proprieties of the day. In Emma, Mr Knightley asks the heroine whether, since they are now engaged, she might call him “George”. In Pride and Prejudice Mr Darcy celebrates Elizabeth’s acceptance of his second proposal by finally using her first name: “dearest, loveliest Elizabeth”. Margaret Doody is surely right to argue in her new study of the topic that Austen was minutely attentive to the naming of her characters, for names matter very much to her characters.

Their wrangling familiarity is enacted in their use of each other’s names, for these are powerful properties in Austen’s novels. He calls her “Mary” – and invariably to tell her she is wrong about something. Only think if anything should happen?” She calls him “Charles” throughout the novel – and always to contradict him. “Oh! No, indeed, Charles, I cannot bear to have you go away. The first time is when he proposes to leave her behind with their injured child to go out to dinner. Of course! She is the only married woman in all Austen’s novels to call her husband by his first name. I remember the eureka moment when I realised, on my nth reading of Persuasion, that there was something truly unusual about Mary Musgrove, the wonderfully moany and insensitive sister of the heroine, Anne Elliot.

John mullan what matters in jane austen