That, and I made a New Year's resolution to update the blog twice a month and I've only got a few hours left to think of ideas.
In all seriousness, this 200th anniversary lark is kind of a godsend for the thematically-frustrated blogger - I could talk about Pride and Prejudice for hours. (I won't. Maybe.) I first read it when I was thirteen, which I think is the perfect age at which be struck by the pure, unbridled pleasure of reading Austen. You will only read something for the first time once, after all, and coming to Austen with a head full of academic theory or wet-shirt-joke-pop-cultural-osmosis can get in the way of the fact that Austen is fizzingly, deliciously, deliriously enjoyable. It also marked the first time I committed an act of academic defiance upon being told something was too difficult for me (the second, and only other, was doing far better in my university final exams than someone who spent three years in a cycle of putting on plays, staying up until 3am watching Disney films, necking Red Bull and writing essays in an hour had any right to do). I remember very clearly the evening I decided I would embark upon what would surely be a formative moment in my development both as an intellectual, and as a woman. (I must have been a delight for my parents.) The BBC was broadcasting the final five books of its Big Read series, an attempt to whittle down the nation's hundred favourite books, and the top two spots came down to Pride and Prejudice and Lord of the Rings. Since then I have read both, and if I say that only one of them induced me to throw it against a wall in frustration because of the fucking Council of Elrond, you will be unsurprised at my retrospective rage when that book won. Anyway. Prompted by the vague notion that Pride and Prejudice was not only clearly very good but seemed to carry an intellectual weight that struck a chord with my self-important thirteen-year-old heart, I expressed an interest in reading it. "Maybe wait a couple of years," suggested my parents. "You might appreciate it more when you're older." I was, naturally, furious. Imagine my (unfounded and confusing to all others) triumph when the book box in my classroom next Monday morning yielded a copy of the very novel. "Look," I said, brandishing it, "I'm going to read it." "Oh, well done," said my mother vaguely, which was not, I admit, the reaction I had been hoping for.
I needn't have worried. From the minute I turned the first page and read that elegant, arch, oft-imitated, never-surpassed opening sentence, Jane Austen settled irretrievably into my heart. Every subsequent sentence rang clear as a bell - even when I wasn't sure what Jane was actually on about (for god's sake, what is a syllabub?). Incidentally, I still have that first copy, initially borrowed from school and later definitively nicked when I decided rather unfairly that no-one else would want to read it. And Pride and Prejudice is the gift that keeps on giving - in the nine years since (there's a terrifying thought), I have picked it up at least half a dozen times and found something new each time. It's not always a comfortable experience. Imagine my horror at the age of seventeen, having systematically devoured every other scrap of Austen I could get my hands on (pro tip: the juvenilia, so not worth the time) realising that Austen was the most unflinchingly callous writer I had ever encountered. Who else writes that fat people in mourning don't deserve sympathy because they're too ridiculous? But Austen's morality code is based on being smart, not nice, and I don't mean book smart, but street smart: Lydia Bennet isn't 'bad' because she likes flirting with boys or anything so prudish. (Austen basically defined flirting in print, after all, just look at Catherine getting flustered by Mr Tilney's views on landscape painting in Northanger Abbey. Woof.) Lydia doesn't get to be a heroine because she has no idea how to handle herself in the society she was born into; Austen's leading ladies all learn how to navigate the choppy waters of the social and sexual minefield that is the mixed metaphor they call life. It's a tough life with limited options, says Austen, and you have to be tough to survive it.
Not everyone likes Austen, of course, often because of this relentlessly controlled pragmatism that plagues the pages of what would otherwise be early-nineteenth-century rom-coms. Charlotte Bronte didn't like Jane Austen. She wrote a letter complaining that reading Austen was like finding "An accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with near borders and delicate flowers - but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy - no open country - no fresh air - no blue hill - no bonny beck." Well, no offence to Charlotte Bronte, but bollocks. (Maybe a bit of offence to Charlotte Bronte - I did cry upon finishing Jane Eyre, but with relief).** Bronte's criticisms amount to the idea that Austen is a series of miniatures, unrealistic and restrained, that all end in - pure fantasy! - marriage. We won't dwell on the fact that this comes from a writer who literally wrote the book on how you can change a brooding, gambling, womanising misanthrope through the love of a good woman (but only if he's blinded to make up for the social inequality between you). Austen is precise, economical. She does not waste words on those who need not have words wasted on them. Every sentence is beautifully constructed and furthers the story she is telling.
Yes, her books all end in marriage to solvent men - but crucially, they end in marriage on the heroine's own terms. No-one would call Austen a feminist, partly because it would be a pointless anachronism, but more partly (you know what I mean) because Austen's happy endings are deeply pragmatic affairs. Want to have a comfortable life in early nineteenth century England, free from smallpox and gum disease? Marry a well-off man. Want to have a happy life in early nineteenth century England? Marry a well-off man that you love. Austen doesn't stint on letting us know how unlikely this outcome is. Lizzie and Jane Bennet get lucky: they have the writer on their side. Their three younger siblings present the shadow of a much more likely fate - one shotgun married to an unfaithful rake, one prodded into spinsterhood without a second thought, one sentenced to reform through hanging about with her clever, well-married sisters.*** There's a moment in Pride and Prejudice that I've always found telling - after younger sister Lydia (possessed of "animal spirits", nudge nudge wink wink) elopes with proto-lad Wickham, apparently scuppering all chance of a respectable match for Lizzie, she reflects on the man she herself has lost in the process:
She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was a union that must have been to the advantage of both. By her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved, and from his judgment, information and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance. But no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was.
It's the "judgement, information and knowledge of the world" bit that gets me. To Charlotte Bronte, no doubt, it sounded passionless, even calculating. To me, it is a painful insight into the psyche of both a character and writer who found themselves trapped in circumstances in which they could never be their best selves. Lizzie hasn't just fallen for Darcy as a man, but the life he brings with him, his ability to bring her a world that she wishes to - and cannot - be a part of, looking on from rural Hertfordshire. In Austen, marriage exists to free its participants - male and female - from versions of themselves they have constructed to navigate the complex onslaught of the social, sexual and financial mores of everyday life. Marriage is a refuge for honesty, a place that people arrive at when they come to understand themselves most truly, either singly or with the help of a partner. In the former case it is treated, time after time, as a matter of revelation: Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park finds "exactly at the time when it was quite natural it should be so" that he's gotten over Regency vamp Mary Crawford and wants to marry Fanny Price, Emma Wodehouse has the sudden sparklingly blinding insight that Mr Knightley "must marry no-one but herself", Marianne Dashwood's trials with Willoughby allow her to emerge sharper and surer of herself, and ready to marry Colonel Brandon. In the other instance, of a couple growing together, Pride and Prejudice is only the most obvious example, trading off its protagonists' titular flaws against each other; Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth have a profound effect on each other during and after their eight-year separation, Mr Tilney leads Catherine Morland deftly towards maturity by subtly (and flirtatiously) cutting away the language of gothic romance she has surrounded herself with. All are instances of characters finding "knowledge of the world" through their partner and becoming, in the process, the fullest and richest version of themselves they could be. I don't find that passionless at all. I find that thrillingly, embarrassingly romantic.
And, in essence, that's what Pride and Prejudice does. It teaches. It is an unfailingly, uncomfortably honest book - lies and self-deceptions unravel at speed and Lizzie comes face to face with not only her own failings, but her sisters', her friend's, and her beloved father's. Reading it is a self-exmaining experience: at the age of thirteen, the tang of well-deserved romance was delicious, at seventeen, I desperately craved Austen's pithy detachment from the world she lived in, at twenty-two, the age I am now, I think I'm finally beginning to understand what she's on about with this companionship and knowing yourself business. I'm wrong, no doubt. I'll come to it again in five year's time and my sympathies will lie with Caroline Bingley or Charlotte Lucas or Mary Bennet. The day will come, I fear, when I find myself in agreement with Mrs Bennet. But I don't mind. In these moments of revelation about myself, I come the closest to being an actual Austen heroine that I'll ever get.****
*Sort of by accident, actually. I swear, at the time I just liked the name, and it wasn't until my mother innocently enquired as to the literary origins of the nomenclature that I understood I was now committing acts of breath-taking arrogance unconsciously.
**Really. I was in both an airport and my teens, and the heady combination of jet-lag, hormones and interminable religious imagery made me burst into tears on closing the book.
***Actually, Austen apocryphally told her uncle that Mary and Kitty do get married after the book ends, the former to one of her uncle's clerks and the latter to a clergyman near Pemberley, which sounds like Austen placating a tipsy, sentimental uncle to me.
****Apart from the time I got soaked in a downpour on my way to a restaurant where a group of friends were, walked in dripping, apologised for my appearance, and was answered by my best friend staring at me and shouting, "You look amazing! You look like Lizzie Bennet!" But I think she was drunk.
I hope you are still intending to do your two monthly reviews. Just rewatching the BBC Hollow Crown, prompted by your witty and insightful comments - though I am sure plenty to disagree about!
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