Wednesday, April 1, 2020

          Tea and a quarantine with Jane

"Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience - or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope."            Sense and Sensibility (1811) Jane Austen



In the 21st century, we have so many distractions during a time of self-quarantine: disheveled closets, overgrown cold-weary gardens, Netflix, social media in abundance, 24-hour news cycles, planning three meals a day and subsequent safe-distancing grocery shopping. But there is still the question of how to escape for a bit from 2020. And, thanks to Twitter, we know that Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale, recommends a quarantine spent reading Jane Austen. Consider getting acquainted or reacquainted with the Dashwood sisters and young Catherine Morland. Has your opinion of Mr. Darcy changed? Is Emma truly the best novel of the six, as argued by some critics? How did Anne Elliot survive in that viperous family? Consider the social and economic issues of Austen's era: women having no right to property or divorce; women like Austen herself often surviving on the goodwill of other family members; marriages arranged not because of love or respect but size of estates. Or, as Anna Quindlen invites us, read Austen for "pure joy." Dust off a copy of any Austen novel, brew a cup of tea, and escape into brilliantly written 1800s England. 

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Time and distance separate us from Jane Austen and her tales of Georgian England.

However, is it possible for a modern reader to not imagine herself as Elizabeth Bennet? Or to not remember feeling giddy like the young Catherine Morland?

Jane Austen's long enduring literary fan base may be a bit of a surprise to the 21st century reader. Editor Susannah Carson's 33 writers, including W. Somerset Maugham, Amy Bloom, Lionel Trilling and C.S. Lewis share their own views of Austen, her writing and legacy in A Truth Universally Acknowledged - 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen (Random House, New York)

The writers examine different novels and aspects of Austen's writing. Both the reader new to Austen and the decades-long enthusiast will find plenty of views to support or further debate, perhaps over a cup of tea.


In her own eloquent voice, Eudora Welty writes of Austen's novels as a critic may write of a ballet using descriptors such as sheer velocity, exuberance, vitality, happiness, and commotion. Welty insists that "surely this cannot fade away, letting the future wonder, two hundred years from now, what our devotion to Jane Austen was all about."

Pride and Prejudice gets a closer look by Anna Quindlen who sums her devotion to the book, writing that "serious literary discussion of P & P threatens to obscure the most important thing about it: it is a pure joy to read."

Rebecca Mead lists six reasons to read Jane Austen including that "the great recognized her greatness" citing examples of Sir Walter Scott and George Elliot as avid Austen fans.

Austen's appeal did not end when Margot Livesay grew from a teenager to a married woman. "...in each of these incarnations I have understood Austen is speaking to me, and about me, and about that deep need to have the world we live in...make sense."

If Austen had lived two additional decades, what novels would she have written? Would Austen ever imagined herself as an industry? And would she have approved?

In the essay that may arguably be the most provocative, Virginia Woolf predicts the literary world would've known a very different Jane Austen at 60-years-old: "She would not have been rushed by the importunity of publishers or the flattery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity. But she would've known more. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters." 

Why would a reader in 2020 choose an Austen novel over a more contemporary author? Editor Susannah Carson maintains that "for two centuries Austen has enthralled her readers. (Readers) all turn to Austen time and again to find some nourishment for their literary souls they can find nowhere else."

This compilation of perspectives offers a deeper understanding of Austen's novels. Not only will readers continue to turn to Austen for "some nourishment for their literary souls," they will also return to this collection of essays for a visit to the gifted literary mind of Jane Austen.

                                           (Essay assignment #1 - University of Oxford online class - Jane Austen, 2020)



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