Normblog has republished a lecture given to the Jane Austen Society in 2006 by Richard Jenkyns, author of A Fine Brush on Ivory and a descendant of Jane Austen’s brother James. Professor Jenkyns’s lecture is titled “Boredom and Jane Austen” and it’s quite interesting. A few tidbits from the first part:

In my childhood my great-aunts sometimes seemed to speak about her as though she were a lately deceased member of the family whom they had known themselves; and as they seemed to me enormously ancient - and indeed they were fairly ancient - it took me a while to work out that the novelist had died a full 60 years before even the eldest of them was born. But there was a sense of her abiding presence. In the drawing-room of the house shared by two of those great-aunts sat Jane Austen’s writing desk. After their deaths it passed to my cousin Joan Austen-Leigh, who later very generously gave it to the British Library. Many of us saw it when it came to Chawton for our annual gathering two or three years ago. I also attended the occasion at the British Library when the desk was formally presented, and I remember the sense of faint discomfort at realizing that I was no longer permitted to touch what had once been a friendly and familiar object.

Yes, but now we ALL can see it at the British Library! Behind glass, but still.

Jane Austen could not herself have used the words ‘boring’ or ‘boredom’: they do not appear until near the middle of the 19th century. The verb ‘bore’ originates as aristocratic slang in the mid 18th century and it does appear in her books, but her usual word is the standard term of her time: ‘dullness’. It is worth lingering on that word for just a moment, as its scope is, I think, somewhat wider than that which we would naturally give to boredom today. The invention of the word ‘boredom’ may indeed be the effect of a change in which certain forms of human unhappiness are understood and interpreted; or perhaps the appearance of the word helped in part to cause that change.

The lecture is spread across four blog posts (there are links leading to each one). Check it out!