We missed this article somehow, but saw it on the JA Centre at Bath newsletter today. Laura Thompson discusses the popularity of Jane Austen’s work in a modern world, related to the release of the new Headline editions of the novels.

As a young girl in love with buying books, I recall spending £1 on a bargain edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. The cover showed Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth silhouetted, in a clinch, with the moon behind them glowing in the shape of a heart. The blurb read something like: “Will Anne ever again be held in the arms of the man she loved and lost?”

HA! Could it be as truly, awfully delicious as….this cover?

Somehow, we doubt it; but we confess that we are biased.

Now we are coming to the nub of it. This novel, which should have the freedom of the literary city, has been appropriated by would-be Elizabeths. It has become that dread thing: a woman’s book. Obviously men still read it, but it is hard to imagine them doing so without getting that silly look they would adopt when forced to watch Sex and the City with their wives. This is no longer their territory; and therein lies both the lifting up and the downfall of Pride and Prejudice. So powerfully does it now command the female vote that an entire dimension of the novel has been excised from our collective understanding.

*sigh* Back there again, are we?

There is, in fact, a kind of epic wrongness about the recasting - reselling - of Jane Austen as a romantic novelist. It might have made her as popular as Helen Fielding, but it has led to a desperately etiolated perception of her books. Instead of reading Austen, we are reading our own reading of her; and, in true modern style, what we see in her is ourselves.

Okay, that’s not so bad.

Hence the popularity of Elizabeth Bennet, who resonates particularly because she embodies the contemporary virtue of “being yourself”.

Funny, we have always wished we could be more like Elizabeth Bennet, except for the judging-without-all-the-facts thing, of course! But we wish we could have her self-possession and combination of sweetness and archness. (We manage the arch just fine, but the sweetness tends to escape us, unfortunately.)

Actually, there is rather more to Elizabeth than the perfection we behold in her (and ourselves). What, for example, is one to make of her ambiguous joke that she began to love Darcy on “first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley”? Sir Walter Scott, for one, thought she meant exactly what she said; and I think he had a point.

So do we, but we doubt they are the same.

Elizabeth saw Pemberley as a representation of Darcy: not just wealthy and handsome but excellent throughout. So yes, she possibly did start to fall in love with Darcy after seeing his well-managed estate and meeting the “intelligent servant” who spoke so well of him. She understood then, as she could not have when he was being snotty in a ballroom, that there was much more to him than one perceives at…first impression.

Charlotte’s subsequent life is a kind of decorous hell, made bearable by the fact that the alternative would have been worse. She is the stony reality at the heart of Pride and Prejudice. She tells a woman’s story, but in a way that is utterly remote from feminine convention: with scant emotion, appealing to nothing other than rationality. And, like her creator, she has remarkably little to do with cosy readings of The Jane Austen Book Club and communal swoons over Mr Darcy.

Well, yes, but we admire the heck out of Charlotte Lucas. She chose her situation in life freely. And it seems clear that she knows how to handle her husband. From the novel:

The room in which the ladies sat was backwards. Elizabeth at first had rather wondered that Charlotte should not prefer the dining parlour for common use; it was a better sized room, and had a pleasanter aspect; but she soon saw that her friend had an excellent reason for what she did, for Mr. Collins would undoubtedly have been much less in his own apartment, had they sat in one equally lively; and she gave Charlotte credit for the arrangement.

We know more than one woman who stays in a bad marriage “for the sake of the children” or a house or financial security or whatever reason that seems important. This is not a phenomenon sacred to Jane Austen’s time.

As Jane Austen flourishes, the literary sense that she possessed in its most refined form is slowly dying: the irony would have amused her.

Never fear: here at AustenBlog we shall keep fighting the good fight.