The Best Dinner Guest: Jane Austen

When I was a kid, I never went anywhere without a book.  I was actually that kid who took a book to the playground, on field trips out of town, to the movie theater (just in case), to the bathroom, you name it.  I repeatedly got in trouble in third grade for hiding a book under my desk and reading it when I should have been learning fractions.  (This is probably why I still have trouble with fractions, even using a calculator).  Luckily, I had the kind of parents who applauded my love of books.  They were happy to give me an allowance, knowing it would be spent on books, and bought books that they thought I would like or read books out loud to my sister and me.  As I got older, I obviously learned there was a time and a place for reading, but books were never far out of reach.  My sister and I even took to reading over some meals, which my parents still refer to as "dinner reading."

Since high school, however, my reading frenzies have gone in phases.  When I was suffering from my first heartbreak in college, I stopped reading for a period of close to eight months.  My grades weren't that great at this time, either, but my parents were most concerned by my sudden disinterest in reading.  My father even, on driving me back for the winter quarter, bought me three books at the Bakersfield Borders as a special treat, in hopes of helping me get back to normal.  When I studied abroad a few months later and didn't have internet, I finally went back to reading anything and everything.

I haven't gone through another eight month break like that, but there have definitely been times when I haven't found myself absorbed by a book.  (Coincidentally, these seem to be times when I am either feeling down or overwhelmed, like this past fall, as I struggle to adjust to a full-time job and trying to keep our home afloat while my husband worked and studied full-time).

Today, however, I experienced a few moments of reading pleasure that took me back to my childhood.  I reached the climactic moment in my book on the bus coming home, right before my stop.  I contemplated staying on the bus until I finished the book, but the prospect of possibly getting lost when it was -6 Celsius (about 20 Fahrenheit) didn't seem too appealing.  Agonizing over what to do, I finally got off the bus, put my gloves on, opened my book back up, and walked home reading.  Having to keep an eye out for ice slowed me down a little, but I made it home and got to the end just as I stepped into the elevator.

Even Bluegrass seems intrigued

The book that held me so enthralled was Jane Austen's Persuasion.  It was the only book of hers I hadn't read.  I'm not sure why.  I read Sense and Sensibility when I was 11, Emma one summer vacation spent in Poland, Pride and Prejudice for a class, and Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park the summer before I started college.  Persuasion was the only one I never read. And to be honest, I had little interest in reading it.  My sister and I had once watched the film version, and all I remembered was that the main character was "old" and not that pretty and the story was sad.  I was also put off by how short it was in comparison to her other novels.  I worried that maybe Austen just hadn't cared enough about her own heroine to write her a full-length novel.  The other day, though, while I was wondering what to read after my Prus, I thought, why not give it a try?

And it proved to be another book I could hardly put down.  Now that I am myself no longer in the bloom of youth (at least not by Austen's standards), Anne Elliot's mature age of 27 doesn't bother me.  Although Austen was supposedly unable to edit Persuasion to the extent she did her other novels, in many ways it's a more tightly constructed narrative.  While there are secondary plots, each of them is, directly or indirectly, connected to the story of Anne and Wentworth.  And while Austen's digressions are always charming and entertaining, I didn't feel I missed the multiple secondary narratives.  The social commentary is also sharper than usual.  There is no complicated syntax that allows for multiple interpretations.  Whereas the ending of Northanger Abbey can be read as chastising either the parents or the flighty children, in Persuasion, the shallow characters like Elizabeth and Sir Walter are soundly and definitely punished.  Often in Austen's other works, only the truly villainous characters are not redeemed, while the comically vapid ones are made to look foolish but then let off the hook.  Not so in this last novel.  And in many ways, this is more satisfying.

As I was reading this book, I found myself wondering what it is about Jane Austen that makes her so appealing.  She is beloved by all kinds of readers, from those who generally avoid classic works, to those who live and die by dense postmodernist poetry.  She's basically the closest thing Regency England has to a bestseller.  She has her detractors, like all popular artists, but she remains adored by millions of readers.  Why?

I can't offer any new opinions about her enduring popularity.  But I have some thoughts on why I've loved her for fourteen years--unreservedly, unashamedly.  To begin with, all of her heroines, from Elizabeth Bennet to Fanny Price, are intelligent.  I was (as has probably been made clear) a huge nerd all throughout school, and I still think of myself as a nerdy bookworm.  To find so many smart girls the object of affection for dashing men like Mr. Darcy and and Captain Wentworth and even Mr. Willoughby was kind of a consolation for someone like me.  The mean girls are always punished and the social climbers are ridiculed.  But aside from these fairly trivial, personal reactions, Austen has written some of the funniest books ever published.  Her wry wit practically sparkles from page to page.  It's almost impossible to find a sentence that doesn't contain a laugh.  About how many other books can that be said?  Her language is precise and her complex syntax often sounds as though she's speaking to you directly from the page.  It's hard not to feel, after you've read one of her books, like you've somehow befriended Jane Austen.  There are hundreds of other authors I admire and books I've loved.  But if I could choose one person from history to invite over for dinner, I am pretty sure it would be Jane Austen.