NOTHING LIKE JANE

This column is from the ongoing series "MY READING LIFE" by Elinore Standard in The Record Review, December, 2004.

NOTHING LIKE JANE WHEN YOU ARE IN A TIGHT SPOT

I don’t know how many times I’ve read Jane Austen’s novels, nor do I remember when I read the first one. I go to them when I am tired of reading thrillers in which people get sliced and shot and blown up. I go to Jane Austen when I can’t stand another saga of family dysfunction and abuse. I turn to Jane Austen when the nightly news says the world around me is collapsing beneath the weight of fear, violence, lying and rage. I read Jane Austen to recover.

My favorite stories, fiction and non, are about how women manage and how people change their lives. I enjoy humor when it is witty and dialogue when it is stimulating. I mind being preached to. I appreciate a loyal and self-reliant character. I like happy endings.

Lately I’ve tried other so-called “comfort” novels, while attempting to avoid the bodice-ripper Regency romances and the mystery “cozies”that are so often included in this genre. Right after the ugliness of the recent presidential election, I even went so far as to try Agnes Sligh Turnbull, an American writer of bestsellers in the 1950s through the 70s. Like Jane Austen, she often writes about clergy and pastoral politics and the genteel life. Turnbull’s settings, often in upper class, pre-World War II urban America evoke what has been called a “kinder, gentler, age.” However, this kinder age as portrayed by Turnbull -- in addition to being completely humorless -- discriminated against all minorities, was Stone Age in its treatment of women, and it assumed an ethno-centric, white male-dominated, ruling class society. People were polite, though, and they all wore hats.

After reading this appalling opening line (page 1) from Turnbull’s “The Two Bishops” (Houghton, 1980), I fled back to Jane Austen:
“The warm effulgence of the late June day fell upon
the Bishop’s garden here and there.”

Karen Joy Fowler has written the delightful “The Jane Austen Book Club” (Putnam’s, 2004), in which she says, “Each of us has a private Jane Austen.” Fowler’s novel is more about the book club characters and why they read what they read than it is about Austen, but at the back of the book there is a generous bibliography and a chronological listing of what others through the years have had to say about the great Jane Austen. Fowler quotes Rudyard Kipling as saying, “Nothing like Jane when you’re in a tight spot.” (from “A Choice of Kipling’s Prose” ed: Craig Raine.) (Faber, 1987).

A chapter in a much darker recent novel, “Our Kind” by Kate Walbert,
(Scribner, 2004) has a reading group struggling to discuss Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” about which one character says, “I frankly, was confused, I couldn’t make heads or tails.” In comparing Woolf to Jane Austen, she adds, “Austen knew how to tell a story, and her books mean something. How many years later? You can read them again and again. In fact, I think we should read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ next…”

In “The Lesson of Balzac” (1905) Henry James said, “The key to Jane Austen’s fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility…” Such ease and simplicity may be the secret to the amazing survival and popularity of her work throughout two centuries. In her short lifetime she produced six novels which, given the fact she was a female (and an “Old Maid” as D.H.Lawrence called her) and getting published was hard enough without that. I wonder if there had been more Austen books written, would they seem as precious in the way they gently remind us today of the enduring foibles and follies of human nature.

Just to remind you, the six Austen novels, in order of publication: “Sense and Sensibility” (1811), “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), “Mansfield Park” (1814), “Emma” (1815), “Persuasion” (1817 Posth.) and “Northanger Abbey” (1817 Posth.). Although the books were not published in exactly the order they were written, they all deal with common themes such as the control of passion, miscommunication, the humbling of the vain and self-satisfied, and virtue rewarded. In addition, they all seem to be to be about money and the want of it.

“Northanger Abbey” of the six, is quite strange and it is the only one I have not persistently re-read. Perhaps this is because it seems like a juvenile exercise, which it pretty much is. Austen wrote it perhaps ten years earlier than any of the others but it wasn’t published until after her death. Unlike the other five novels, I find little comfort in “Northanger Abbey”. The three brother-sister pairs of characters seem farcical at times and, as I do with other novels old and new, I find myself becoming impatient.

Mark Twain didn’t exactly love Jane Austen’s work. He said, “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Among other non-appreciators are Joseph Conrad, “What is it all about?”; Rebecca West, “...you will see women haggard with desire or triumphant with love…”; H. G. Wells, “A certain ineluctable faded charm. Like some of the loveliest butterflies – with no guts at all.” And so on… Of course, there have always been detractors but the appreciators far outnumber them.

In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf said of Jane Austen: “Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching…”

For me, as a reader in the 21st Century, these brave qualities are what make Jane Austen so reassuring, over and over again.