What Would Jane Do?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is always right. She just is. Analysing people’s behaviour in society, she becomes an astute observer of individual desires, beliefs, kinks. Once you start reading Austen, you’ll never be able to shake her off. You won’t want to shake her off. Only give her time.

When I started reading my first Jane Austen novel, I was frustrated. So frustrated that I couldn’t even imagine finishing the book in this life or the next. Perhaps I should add that I was fourteen then, and had got it into my head to read Sense and Sensibility in as short a time as feasibly possible. “As short a time as feasibly possible” turned out to be about ten months. And why was that? Because I understood just about every tenth word she used, because the only English books I had read before were abridged versions of Penguin books, and because my vocabulary acquisition had experienced a kind of stagnation ever since an L3 and an L4 had started to encroach on my brain. I persevered, though. I’d seen the Ang Lee adaptation of the novel, and I liked it. So I just spent hours and hours looking up words.

Reading my next Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice, was much easier.  Of course I hadn’t suddenly turned a native speaker of English, but I started to notice patterns and repetitions in her diction. Once you know the basic Austen words, such as indisposed, drawing-room, tète-a-tète, delighted, enraptured, composure, nuptials, proposal, engagement, courtship, vexing, pleasantries, you’ve mastered the first important step. From then on, it was easy. Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon soon followed. Of course, at first I read her novels mainly for the plot, and I did not get the irony more often than I did, but this was fine. If you’ve read her once, you’ll read her again; and this is when you become acquainted with the subtleties of her writing. And that’s what I did.

Because in fact it’s really not just about the stories. Of course we love dashing British gentlemen courting deserving young women, but we wouldn’t love Jane Austen as we do were it not for her talent for social observation and her implied criticism by sending up her characters. She is no Maria Edgeworth, who writes pretty stories but fails to distance herself from her characters enough to really judge them. Austen’s achievement is that she manages to ridicule the characters other authors would strive to make perfect, while at the same time exposing their worth. She’s not into black-and-white painting. Her talent lies in depicting realistic people that have both vices and virtues.

Jane Austen can teach you a lesson about life. Obviously, she embraces the notion that for her heroines the only sensible thing to do is to marry. But, like Fanny Burney, only if there is true affection. And she also shows us the flipside of the coin: people marrying for money, or status, or connections and their resulting drama. Who doesn’t pity Charlotte Lucas when they learn that she is to marry boring, dim-witted, impudent Mr Collins, probably with the view of visiting Lady Catherine de Bourgh every week and listening to Foredyce’s Sermons every evening? Who can not simply shake their head in disgust upon hearing Willoughby abandon Marianne for the sake of Miss Grey “and her 50,000 pounds”?

But Jane Austen does not recommend circumspection only in the choice of partners. She depicts the pitfalls of unequal friendships, where one party is as presumptuous as to impose their will on the other as we see in Emma; in Persuasion, she tells us of the importance of the family and friends, but at the same time reminds us that there are decisions only we ourselves can make.

The beautiful thing about her writing is that she is no moralizer. She’s not like Charlotte Brontё who keeps quoting passages from the Bible and rambling on about a person’s moral obligations. (Don’t get me wrong, I love Charlotte as well.) Jane Austen manages to get her message across by the best means possible: humour. She satirises objectionable behaviour, and she can be very cruel in her criticism of shallow upper-class society. By way of ridiculing what she considers wrong she makes a far greater impression on her readers than she could have done had she preached modesty and integrity using a more serious tone. Indeed, I believe she actually characterised herself when she attributed to Lizzy Bennet in saying that “she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in any thing ridiculous”.

Jane Austen seems to have an answer for every “gulph, pit and precipice” in life. She exposes greed, inconstancy, vanity, stupidity, and conceit. And suggests the remedy for it, as with Mr Darcy’s pride and Lizzy Bennet’s prejudice. She brilliantly characterises hypocrites and hypochondriacs, with their sour-grapes philosophy. She is ruthlessly entertaining in her depiction of the undeserving, and lovingly satirical in that of the morally upright. Like Evelina, Jane Austen “steals the heart imperceptibly”. It is her novels that gave me the impetus to not take every trifle so seriously, to try to be generous towards those I like even if they bother me, to try to check those I don’t like by means of irony, and to preserve a certain critical distance to myself. Jane Austen has made such big impression on my life that whenever I’m at my wit’s end, I ask myself invariably, “What would Jane do?”