Jane Austen For Dummies (6 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
Austen is everywhere â even off-Broadway. Chapter 15 provides details about the many screen and stage adaptations of Austen's novels, but at the time of this writing, a musical, “I Love You Because,” very loosely based on
Pride and Prejudice,
is playing off-Broadway. The hero's name is Austin Bennet; his new girlfriend is Marcy Fitzwilliams (in the novel, the hero's full name is Fitzwilliam Darcy), and the girlfriend's best friend is Diana Bingley. The point of the show is advertised as “how to love someone because of his or her differences.”
Austen is now so popular that even non-novel readers recognize the name from seeing it in various, unexpected places like tea mugs and dating guides. Her immediate Regency siblings and her future Victorian collateral descendants would faint at seeing their sister and aunt depicted like this. For they presented her as a near saint. But Austen has also stepped off the pedestal into the trenches of World War I and classrooms ranging from high school to post-doctoral school seminars.
When Henry Austen wrote his biography of his sister for the posthumous publications of
Northanger Abbey
and
Persuasion,
he presented a woman ready for sainthood:
Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget. Where extenuation was impossible, she had a sure refuge in silence. She never uttered either a hasty, a silly, or a severe expression . . . She was thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God, and incapable of feeling it toward any fellow creature. . . .
Henry's notice, of course, is understandably influenced by his feelings of loss over his 41-year-old sister. Henry also had recently become a clergyman of the Anglican Evangelical persuasion, so this recent career move certainly affected his decision to write of his sister's religious devotion.
But imagine the shock when the edition of her letters came out in 1932. Here's another Austen one-liner from a letter that completely undercuts Henry's “incapable of feeling offence” line: “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal” (Letter, December 24, 1798). Yet 1932 was still a long way from 1818 when Henry wrote the biographical notice. And so the Austens had time to perpetuate “Saint Jane.”
Austen's next biographer was a beloved nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh. By the time he published
A Memoir of Jane Austen
in December of 1869 (though dated as 1870 on the title page), he was a mutton-chopped Victorian. And so it's not surprising that he presented this type of Aunt Jane to the world with the help of his two sisters; all three of them, the children of Jane Austen's eldest brother James, knew their aunt well and still remembered her.
The
Memoir
opens by saying that Austen's life was “singularly barren” of events. This portrayal doesn't look too promising! And because the Victorian mindset is one of silence and coverup, the
Memoir
proceeds accordingly. Not that Austen has anything to hide. But the
Memoir
presents Aunt Jane as a simple woman who had “genius” and lived a happy Christian life without complexity. The sarcasm, cynicism, and satire that you've seen in her letters and even seen in some of her fiction are all missing. Nevertheless, the
Memoir
satisfied the appetites of a new generation of Austen readers for information on the author's life. And it boosted Austen's popularity!
In 1894, the English critic George Saintsbury coined the word “Janeite” to mean an enthusiastic admirer of Austen's works. But Rudyard Kipling popularized the term in a short story called “The Janeites,” first published in 1924. Written in heavy cockney slang, the story isn't the easiest text in the world to read. But it's worth the effort. Here's the story in summary:
Soon after WWI, the story's narrator goes to a Masonic lodge on cleaning day. One of the cleaners is Humberstall who'd been wounded in the head but who still returned to the western front as assistant mess waiter for his old Heavy Artillery platoon. A simple and uneducated man, he tries to explain how his boss, the senior mess waiter, was able to talk with the university-educated officers on equal ground because of their shared love of Jane Austen's novels. Humberstall is coached on the novels and is led to think that the Austen readers, or Janeites, are all members of a Masonic-like secret society. They scratch the names of Austen characters on the guns. Then all but Humberstall are killed by a hail of gunfire. When he quotes
Emma
to a nurse, another secret Janeite, she saves his life by getting him on the hospital train back to England. Humberstall still reads Austen's novels as they remind him of his comrades back in the trenches. “There's no one to match Jane when you're in a tight place,” he says, noting the comfort her novels provide. Yet her comfort isn't all healing, for as the other Masonic Lodge cleaner notes, Humberstall's mother has to come and take him home from the Lodge because he gets “fits.”
WWI soldiers agreed that while they were overseas in the war, reading Austen was an effective mental escape from gas masks and bayonets. The Army Medical Corps advised shell-shocked soldiers to read Austen for the books' soothing effects. Supposedly, Mr. and Mrs. Rudyard Kipling found comfort in Austen's novels, which they read to each other after their son was killed in 1914 in WWI.
Austen's novels became continuously available since 1833, when England's Bentley Standard Novel Series produced affordable editions of her works. In 1923, R. W. Chapman's edition of Austen's novels was published by Oxford University Press. This scholarly edition is one of the earliest of the works of any English novelist. While Austen had readership popularity before, she now had academic distinction. Scholars began to pay serious attention to her novels, proceeding with literary analyses. Austen's use of irony was especially appealing to American academic critics writing just after WWII because analyzing her verbal irony made use of a popular new critical approach that treated the text as an object in itself and studied that text in terms of how the author used language.
A study in 1997â1998 by the National Association of Scholars showed that in the 1964â1965 academic year, 25 liberal arts colleges surveyed in the United States still had no courses that cited Jane Austen in their catalogs. When those same schools were surveyed in the 1997â1998 academic year, however, Austen had moved into third place, just behind those old standbys Shakespeare and Chaucer. Austen's appearance in college catalogs' course descriptions is likely the result of the Women's Movement and the expansion of the
canon
(literary texts that authorities consider as the best representatives of their times). For along with Austen on the 1997â1998 lists were Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, and Zora Neale Hurston. In the earlier list, no female writers were listed.
Austen's novels began to be translated as early as 1813, with
Pride and Prejudice
going into French during the same year the book appeared in England. Within 11 years, all of her novels were available in French. But France hasn't quite caught the Austen craze like the United States and England. And one reason may be that the French found some of her characters alien to their culture. For example, the French found Elizabeth's behavior impertinent and unladylike. So in the French translations of
Pride and Prejudice,
the French read about a different Elizabeth Bennet than their English-speaking counterparts. Her character was changed. Be that as it may, Austen's novels have since been translated into Swedish, German, Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Persian, Polish, and numerous other languages. But like the French suppression of Elizabeth's sassiness, the translations may also make the female characters more in tune with the local culture. If you're interested in tracing translations, check out David Gilson's
A Bibliography of Jane Austen
(Winchester, 1997).
In 1940, the Jane Austen society of the UK was formed; sister societies appeared as The Jane Austen Society of North America (1979) and The Jane Austen Society of Australia (1988), as well as societies in non-English-speaking countries. The study of the so-called “cult” of Jane has become fashionable among academics who sometimes criticize the societies. But most members are not cult-creatures. They simply enjoy getting together to discuss and learn about Jane Austen. Yes, some of our members dress in Regency attire, but that's not a requirement of membership. Dressing up (or not!) and sipping tea are little harmless delights and escapes from the pressures of everyday life.
The Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), a nonprofit organization, can be accessed via the Internet at
www.jasna.org
. Over 60 regional groups offer periodic meetings, book groups, and related activities around the United States and Canada. Membership fees are reasonable and cover the production and mailing of three 32-page newsletters annually and an annual journal of Austen-related articles. The Society is run by volunteers, with the exception of a professional data bank manager. Students are welcome and have a reduced membership fee.
Jane Austen is so popular today that there are many ways to enjoy her after you've read and re-read the books and seen the films and television series:
Take one of the many Jane Austen tours through Hampshire, England, which advertises itself as “Jane Austen Country.”
Visit the house in Chawton where Austen lived for the final eight years of her life. It's now a museum run by the Jane Austen Memorial Trust. Chapter 19 provides instructions on how to get there, plus its Web address.
Buy or borrow from a library
The Jane Austen Cookbook
and create with friends and family a complete Jane Austen meal. Chapter 18 tells you about
The Jane Austen Cookbook.
Start a book club devoted to Jane Austen, and after you've read all of Austen, read Karen Joy Fowler's novel,
The Jane Austen Book Club.
As you read other novels, keep a list of how many times Jane Austen or one of her novels is mentioned casually. I was reading a mystery book last week in which one of the detectives saw an Austen novel in a room. I mentioned it to a friend who said she had noticed Austen's name popping up in many other novels.
Encourage your school or local theater group to do a play based on an Austen novel. Chapter 15 gives you a start on finding such plays. Or have a class or another group write their own play. It can even be performed without costumes and settings in a reader's theater format.
In 2005, Chicago picked
Pride and Prejudice
for its “One City, One Book” event. As President of the Jane Austen Society of North America, I had the privilege of speaking at the Chicago Public Library about Austen and the novel. Debates, discussions, and other events occurred in venues all over the city. Libraries offered the novel in numerous translations. Encourage your local leaders to do “One City, One Book,” using an Austen novel.
Schools have Jane Austen Days, when classes study the novels and students prepare food from Austen's time and dress in period costume.
Indeed, you may seem to be in a Jane Austen
daze,
but that's not so bad, is it?