When a beloved author dies, we will often create an impromptu display at my library, a temporary shrine featuring books and biographical information at one end of the check-out desk. January, 2010, however, presented a spatial challenge. Erich Segal, Robert Parker, Louis Auchincloss, J.D. Salinger, and Howard Zinn all died in relatively quick succession.
Thanks to PBS and Masterpiece Theatre, I had already been thinking about my own favorite author who, unlike those named above, died in the very prime of her writing career at the age of 41. Emma, the film version of which will conclude tonight, was her fifth novel; Persuasion, published posthumously and perhaps not fully edited by the author, was the sixth and last. There would be no more Jane Austen.
I learned to read classics as an adult many years ago while living in Clute, Texas. Clute had little to offer in terms of entertainment; there was one rather poor bookstore and lurking in the back was a cupboard labeled “Literature.” Over the course of my four inexplicable years in Clute, I purchased most of the inventory offered in this cupboard. And it was there that I confronted the bleak reality: there would be no more Jane Austen.
Happily, I find Austen imminently re-readable. Since their initial appearance, her novels have been steady sellers but not best sellers. She seems to have been equally loved and loathed over the years. It was not even until the 1940s that the novels began to receive serious scholarly attention and achieved the dreaded status of Required Reading for English majors.
In recent times, Jane Austen has become, however improbably, a veritable industry within popular culture. There are Jane Austen cookbooks and Jane Austen guides to style, decorating, landscaping and dating. In my library alone there are 31 different fiction authors who have written sequels, adaptations, or something else entirely with Austen characters or the woman herself as heroine. These novels include all genres: romance, mystery, science fiction and horror. (Yes, Jane Austen and zombies!).
While some of these novels are more successful than others, none will ever be Required Reading. I sympathize though – I assume it is the same substitution impulse that drives me to check out books with titles like What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist: The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth Century England or the Bedside, Bathtub, & Armchair Companion to Jane Austen.
Much of what one learns is rather disturbing to modern sensibilities. Jane Austen, like most children of the gentry, was given to a wet nurse for the first year of her life. At age seven, she was sent with her older sister, Cassandra, to a boarding school. Conditions were such that both girls became seriously ill. Their parents brought them home but, upon their return to health, they were sent out again. Luckily, their formal education was considered complete when Jane was nine years old.
Austen’s emphasis on the economic aspect of marriage is well known. Though she lived much of her life in an intellectually stimulating and supportive family environment, she was penniless. Her failure to marry left her completely dependent on the goodwill of male family members. Maiden aunts were expected to serve others.
As Fay Weldon points out in her Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, marriage, so sought after, had its own burdens. Contraception was “wicked and illegal” but childbirth was dangerous -- a woman’s chance of dying increased with each pregnancy and fifteen pregnancies were not unusual. It is unlikely that Jane Austen, married, a mother and mistress of her own home, would have written the novels that she did.
Film adaptations of Austen’s work focus on the comedy and romance. Scholars are more interested in their complex structure, moral discrimination and irony. Modern women, such as Carol Shields who wrote a biography of Jane Austen for the superlative Penguin Lives series, see a darker side of the Austen family and find bitterness and even rage beneath the quiet surface of the novels.
Today we received our latest: A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen. I will, of course, check this book out. But I already know why I read Jane Austen. I can’t help it. I went to check a fact in the introduction to my own personal copy of Pride and Prejudice; 104 zombie-free pages later, I realized I had been seduced anew and my column’s late again.
(Photograph from Saucy Salad, Creative Commons, Flickr.com)
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