Considering the fashionable wail that Britons are a dumbed-down lot, there is a lot of interest in the fiction of Jane Austen at the moment. BBC and other channels are vying, so it appears, to see which one can carry the most screenings of Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility or Emma. More productions are expected. Last night, yours truly and Mrs Pearce went along to see ‘Becoming Jane’, a film which tries to capture the moment in Austen’s life when she fell for a dashing if roguish young London lawyer, tried to elope with him, but failed to carry off her plans when she realised that a whole brood of relations depended on her young beau’s uncertain income for support. The lawyer’s rich uncle, played with menacing brio by Ian Richardson, blocks the marriage (Richardson is brilliant in the film). Austen ended her days unmarried, channelling her experiences of forbidden love into fiction. Her life sounds quite sad in certain ways although we have some of the finest fiction in the English language as a result.
Some people wax lyrical or get very cross about Jane Austen. I take a fairly sympathetic line. Toby Young, writing in this week’s Sunday Telegraph magazine (no web link), argues that she is one of the greatest English novelists, a stylist and master of irony, able to catch the foibles and weaknesses of people and also able to spot the virtues and goodness in the most unlikely people. On the other hand, Frances Wilson, writing in the same magazine, says Austen was a money-grabbing snob, a reactionary (horrors!) whose characters all too often forsook the path of true love and chose money and position instead. That verdict seems unfair. Take Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennett initially recoils from Mr Darcy (this is an age when a man is Mr X rather than Dave or Steve) precisely because she fears he will be a snob and a materialists because of his substantial fortune and large country estate. Wilson, who I suspects projects her own liberal sentiments onto a much more conservative age, cannot imagine why Bennett does not go for the more supposedly hunky Mr Wickham instead. But it is Austen’s brilliance as a writer to draw out how an initial lack of attraction can, after a time, turn into something very different.
Irony, and the ability to see through the surface of things, is what makes Austen’s fiction so compelling. It is not ‘realistic’ in the dreary, PC sense that she packs it with large lectures about the Napoleonic War, or the Industrial Revolution, or the tumults in Ireland and the New World. She chose a very particular time and place – rural, Southern England – and the preoccupations of minor landed gentry. It does not try to make grand socio-economic ‘points’, although clearly, in its reticent way, it is a very conservative form of fiction, like the crime fiction of PD James. We do not, to take a different author, damn Joseph Conrad for being ‘limited’ because his works are often set at sea.
To go back to my first point, it is remarkable that, at least among what is left of the novel-reading classes, Austen remains so popular, and not just with women, although she is seen perhaps unfairly as a writer on women for women. There is a timeless quality about her stories and her themes. In 200 years’ time, I am not sure if anyone will be reading Norman Mailer. They might though, still be reading the woman who wrote this:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Three cheers from this woman, Jonathan:-)
A minor quibble: Wickham was not necessarily more hunky (if by that you meant good looking, as Darcy was, allegedly, at least as good looking as Wickham), he was more charming – a big and important difference.
Also, I think that Lizzy was actually attracted to Darcy from the beginning (although she probably was not willing to admit it at first, maybe not even to herself), otherwise she would not have taken so much trouble of being “recoiled” from him.
Well, I guess it is a novel about women for women after all:-P
Why were all the best novels written by Russian men or English women? The only exceptions I can think of are some children’s stories, some comic novels, and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
Wherever you look, Jane Austen is around
I’ve got a neighbor with an Austen Healy in his garage. Does that count?
There were, of course, great novels written by English men as well.
Personally speaking, I only ever used to read Jane Austen novels because it made the classier chicks I was after, think that I was classier. Little did they realise, until far too late, that my bookshelves were actually full of Tolkien, Asimov, and other such low-brow pot boilers, rather than the Bronte and George Eliot books they were expecting (evil cackle, rubbing of hands, etc). Oh the devious shallowness of callow youth! 😉
The Billie Piper version of Mansfield Park was dissappointing. She being, as one MSM critic put it, “To contemporary” for the part.
However the thing that struck me, watching it out of computer reach with my mum on Mother’s Day, was-
How weird it must have been to have lived in a society that the ideas of socialism and communism had barely been thought of, let alone implimented.
To advance in the world of Jane Austen and the Bronte’s , one had to marry well or become a governess. Or Indeed marry badly but for money. Love didn’t much come into it, and “Trade” came nowhere at all, except for the last resort expedient.
Yet Love alway’s conquers in Austin! Was she a socialist visionary?
How would our Libertarian ideals have progressed under such a rigid class based society I wonder?
Well, I think, because that time also rewarded entrepreneurship and innovation.
So
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Who will willingly help in doubling it for him!
Big fan of Jane Austen. Though I prefer the 80s BBC adaption of Pride and Prejudice to the 90s as Colin Firth is way too short to play Mr Darcy.
Why were all the best novels written by Russian men or English women?
Tommy rot, you blighter. The absolute best novels are written by English men eg PG Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton, and French Men eg Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo.
Life without Chesterton’s The Napolean of Notting Hill, or Dumas’ The Count of Monte Christo or Hugo’s The Ninety-Three? Unmitigated hell.
Not it does not. What always conquers are common sense, decency, loyalty, and other such old-fashioned values. Love simply follows those. It’s not that love is not important, it’s just it’s like a carriage that is never put before the horses.
Three years ago we gave our two marrigable daughters two Austen novels each for Christmas, explaining that they were not merely literature, they were “how-to” books. The younger one celebrated her first wedding anniversary last October.
The blogger formerly known as Bran