Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, but since I was on my great adventure, I let her birthday pass by this year without any fanfare. She deserves more. So, in honor of her 234th birthday, I wanted to share what her novels have meant to me in different periods of my life.
I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was about 8. My dad had bought my mom a really gorgeous hard backed version for a present years earlier, and the elegance of the cover made the book seem even more special. As it turns out, you can judge a book by its cover because what I found inside it could have been decorated like the Lindisfarne gospels and it would not have been too much honor for an Austen novel. You can probably imagine how much I got out of reading it; I liked the love story, and I liked the writing. But that liking stuck with me when others faded away, and I probably read Pride and Prejudice 20 more times in my childhood.
In high school, I branched out and tried the other Jane Austen novels. I still liked Pride and Prejudice best, but I also loved Sense and Sensibility. I hated Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Emma and Mansfield Park got on my nerves a bit. My preferences then were mostly due to ignorance and immaturity. Pride and Prejudice has the simplest, most straightforward kind of plot, and I understood it fairly well. (I would later understand it better, though.) Darcy and Elizabeth get a bad impression of each other, and they both stubbornly stick to it. When they finally learn that they were wrong, they fall in love. Typical love story, I thought then, but written amazingly well. I loved Sense and Sensibility for the same kinds of reasons. Marianne falls in love with a bad man, learns he's bad, and finds a better one. Elinor is kept away from her lover, but the stars finally align, and she gets to marry him in the end. Anyone who has read Sense and Sensibility can see that high school Kelly was much farther from capturing the essence of S&S than she was from P&P. I only like Emma and Mansfield Park a little bit because the heroines got on my nerves. Why, I would ask, was Emma so arrogant? Why was Fanny so retiring? I had little idea back then that people were so very different from each other and that I could enjoy watching different kinds of characters go about their lives. It's one of the biggest blind spots of youth, or at least was of my youth, to imagine that all people are like me. As for the novels I hated, I didn't really understand Persuasion at all. What does an 18 year old know about regret and second chances? I didn't like Northanger Abbey because I was too ignorant to know that it was a parody of a Gothic novel. I had never heard of a Gothic novel, and so I thought that Jane Austen had just written a crappy novel with dark abbeys and imagined murders. How out of character, I said. But it was only her juvenilia, I defended. Funny that I would try to defend a Jane Austen novel as juvenile, when it was me who was too juvenile to understand what she was doing with Northanger Abbey.
Since then, I have reread the novels many, many times. Really, most of you would be shocked how many times. I listen to them as audiobooks, watch the movies, spend time on The Republic of Pemberley (the very best and most learned Jane Austen fan site I know of), and keep the novels in the back of my mind during my classes. Here are the way my ideas about each book have changed:
Mr. Darcy and ElizabethPride and Prejudice: I still reread it often for fun, but it is no longer my favorite of Austen's novels. I find that as I age, I still admire the love story, but I crave the depth and the complexity of some of the other novels. I do think that Elizabeth Bennet is one of the most independent, vibrant characters I have ever read, and I love that Austen was able to show that even the characters I love can grow and change for the better. If I end up as an Austen scholar, P&P will probably not be the work I choose to focus on. However, it is the Austen book I recommend most, though I have some slightly different recommendations for Objectivists.
Elinor and MarianneSense and Sensibility: This novel is the one that I have returned to most often lately. Marianne is the character I am most like in all of the literature I have read, and the path her life takes is very similar to mine. I find a kindred spirit in her, and I love to read about her before she got any sense and remember my youth. I rediscovered S&S and grew to love it better than Pride and Prejudice when I was a new Objectivist. Austen explores the relationship between reason and emotion in S&S, and I really connected with that theme when I was learning to be reasonable but keep my fiery personality. It is that theme that makes me recommend it to Objectivists, but there is a danger there. S&S requires some knowledge about Regency England for Willoughby (the villain) to seem really bad and for Edward (one of the good men) not to seem spineless. An understanding of the engagement process and of the financial implications of marriage are really helpful. When I read S&S out loud to Aaron, I had to stop fairly often and explain some historical background, and he said this really improved his enjoyment of the novel. Once I grew out of the intense connection to the reason/emotion theme, I shifted my focus to others of her novels. It was only this past semester, when taking a class on British literature in the late 18th century (the period directly preceding Austen's novels), that I became aware of how rich Sense and Sensibility is in its exploration of some of the big literary issues of the day: the role of the novel (a fairly new genre), especially among women, the shift between the eighteenth century's style of literature to romanticism, the literary battle between sentimental plays and humor/satirical plays, and the exploitative nature of the marriage and inheritance laws. My class wasn't on any Austen novels (and they were only mentioned when the professor thought of some connection that she thought would be interesting to me), but having the deep literary background that Jane Austen took for granted made me admire S&S even more.
Emma and KnightleyEmma: This one is simple. I like Emma more now because I don't think I am perfect. I can see much of myself in a bossy, domineering, but benevolent character like Emma. I have grown up a bit since high school, and that has allowed me to appreciate a character with flaws that she must learn to overcome. It's amazing how finding out what your flaws are and working on them with mixed success makes you more compassionate about flawed people. :)
Mary Crawford, Edmund Bertram, and Fanny PriceMansfield Park: This novel is my least favorite because I still think the heroine is incredibly weak. She lets things happen around her without trying to influence them very much. She waits patiently for love, and in the end, she is rewarded. I can admire how ardently she sticks to her moral principles, but I cannot admire the principles themselves. So Fanny leaves me kind of cold. I know that Mary Crawford is an immoral woman, but I cannot help but prefer her, and I don't blame Edmund for preferring her for much of the book. I think that I might enjoy learning more about this book and its ties to abolitionism (there is a character who made his fortune using slaves in the East Indes).
The Spooky Northanger AbbeyNorthanger Abbey: I have learned to love this book for its satire. Once I understood that there is a genre of novels, primarily read by young women like Catherine Morland, where gruesome things happened to innocent maidens in Gothic castles and abbeys, I thought Northanger Abbey was hilarious. A girl reads too many novels, visits a Gothic abbey, falls in love, and lets her overactive and unreasonable imagination nearly rob her of a happy ending. She learns that the world outside of her happy family is full of bad people, but they are the garden variety kind and rarely arrive twirling their mustaches. This novel is interesting to me, like Sense and Sensibility, because of its close ties to the literature preceding it (the Gothic novel) and its exploration of the role of the novel.
Anne and Captain WentworthPersuasion: I left this one until last because my opinion of it has changed the most drastically. At 18, I could not understand how anyone could be persuaded by an authority figure to do something she didn't want to do, come to regret the decision, and face a life without hope of love. At 18, I was sure that I knew absolutely what was best for me. I saw the life before me like a pirate movie; I would bravely swash-buckle through any difficulties, and it didn't matter if I made any mistakes because I could swash-buckle right through those too. I had no concept of a mistake that could not be remedied. I had no appreciation for a person who could face the permanent loss of something she had wanted, face that it was her fault she lost it, and go on living life as best she could. I admired decisive action; I did not admire perseverance and patience. That changed after Livy's birth. For the first time in my life, I had done something I couldn't take back, and because of the postpartum depression, I often wanted to. It was then, doing the best I could for Livy because I chosen it and I had to, that I learned to love and admire Anne Elliot. I'm glad that I got a second chance (the postpartum depression went away after 14 months, and I was glad to have chosen Livy) like Anne Elliot did. Perseverance is best when it is rewarded by joy.
As far as the movies go, I have loved A&E's Pride and Prejudice, Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow, the Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds Persuasion, and the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility. I have seen every Jane Austen movie I could get my hands on, and there are others I liked as well. But these are the gems. I highly recommend them.
Besides reading Austen's novels, I have read quite a few books on her time period, and I read her letters. Some of the letters were destroyed, but the ones we have are delightful. Lots of daily life, lots of family news, and mentions of her characters. She saw them as living people, and she would write to her sister when she saw a dress that would have been perfect for Lizzy or a hat for Lady Catherine. I think only true lovers of Austen would like the letters, though. They are not the literary letters of people like Johnson or Keats. They are personal, by and large.
Austen's works have carried me through childhood, through my teenage years, and into my 30s, and the books have never grown stale. They have offered me something I needed from age 8 to age 30. I can't wait to read the blog post that I make in another 30 years telling you all how I have changed, how my appraisal and my love of the novels has changed, and how I knew next to nothing in my 30s. :)
