How Can a Modern Woman Possibly Be Fond of Jane Austen?

In one of my APAs, someone castigated Jane Austen's books like this: "All those daft twits rabbiting on about clothes and boyfriends and manners."

Others have, over the years, intimated that a modern woman ought not to be reading such trash.

Well, much as I laughed over the first caveat, that isn't Austen. It sounds more like Georgette Heyer, or even moreso those who use Heyer as a template for romances. Austen's characters don't talk about clothes at all, outside of air-headed Mrs Allen of Northanger, who doesn't think of anything else, and she sticks her quill into young ladies who think and talk about nothing but beaux, such as poor, luckless Anne Steele in S&S. Manners, though, are emphasized, as are mores and commentary (subtle and unsubtle) on social interaction. I think it's important to remind oneself that whereas Heyer et all are writing historical romances that have developed a specific formula, Austen was writing a novel about her own time, about problems facing women then. She criticized herself in a much- quoted letter to her sister Cassandra, saying in effect, 'the problem with Pride and Prejudice is it's too light and bright and sparkling.' Many have misinterpreted this remark. It seems to me, on close reading of her elsewhere, that she meant the novel to be taken more seriously than it is--that underneath the comedy she has some very specific observations to make about human interactions.

What is it about, really? It's about the wrong reasons for marrying, and how it affects a woman for the rest of her life. Of course a hard-line feminist can point out that novels about marriage are at worst pointless, and at best demeaning, for a modern woman--but during Austen's time, that was the only choice a woman had, unless she wanted to live on as a pensioner to some family member or other, which more often than not meant being used as an unpaid maid.

If one looks past the focus on the subject of marriage, the novel's focus is suddenly larger--and very real. It is about relationships between men and women. Betwene sisters. Between friends. As for marriage, she sends up relationships that were formed with security as the goal; relationships that were sparked by physical attraction and not much else; relationships made with an eye to rank, money, social status, or competition. And, with humor and style, she offers some truths about the differences between love and lust, and what relationships based on either mean to a marriage months--or decades--after the wedding.

The fact that Austen doesn't use modern terminology doesn't make it any less real than a contemporary novel that has a supposedly liberated woman romping from bed to bed for forty pages: the message is the same, that women who mistake falling in lust for falling in love are usually doomed to a very unhappy existence. And in Austen's time, you couldn't divorce, you were stuck for life.

I've had good feminist friends give me appalled reactions when I admit to liking Austen. But I don't consider reading Austen a guilty pleasure, as I do, say, reading Wodehouse. I consider Jane Austen a forerunner of feminism. She doesn't stand out and preach as Mary Wollstonecroft did. Her influence was nevertheless profound. Again and again in those novels she portrays women thinking for themselves, choosing for themselves--even if their choices are within the conventions of the time. The famed relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy makes it very clear that they were first attracted by one another's intellect--those two were clearly brain-snogging before they ever got to the fine sheets of Pemberley. It is also clear that the man--his higher social and economic status notwithstanding--had to earn the woman's respect, and rethink some of his assumptions, before she could see in him a possible partner. There is no dominant male making the decisions: those two are equal right down to the last page, and Austen makes it clear that it will continue to be so after the marriage.

She pillories history (written by men) and writes wittily yet eloquently in defense of woman writers (NORTHANGER). She skewers pomposity, hypocrisy, moral vacuum, whether in those of high degree or low. Of course she is a woman of her time, and she advocates such idiocies as good birth, etc., but I think it a mistake to dismiss all her writing because of these.

Austen's heroines are all quite different from one another. Their stories are not interchangeable; one cannot imagine Mr. Darcy and Fanny Price making a match--or Emma having any kind of influence, good or bad, on Henry Crawford. The heroines do struggle toward emotional maturity; some of them (Fanny Price, Anne Elliot, Elinor Dashwood) have moral right on their side from the start, and some (Emma Woodhouse, Marianne Dashwood) have to learn what this means.

Another pair of criticisms levelled at the books are that manners seem all-important, and that the characters are bloodless. Manners are indeed important, but you cannot say of Austen that the matter is unimportant so that the manner pleaseth; her pen pokes most viciously into phony characters, who mask selfish, or even ugly, motives under socially acceptable poses. And her audience recognized this, too, if one peruses the reactions--negative as well as positive--that she carefully recorded after the publication of a couple of her books. Her contemporaries (or most of them) knew right away what she was at; including, it would seem, those people who thought that this or that character was based solely on them And were not pleased about it, either.

Bloodlessness--as in passionlessness--is in the eye of the beholder. Certainly the novels will seem passionless to those readers who are used to a lot of sex in their novels.

Austen's stories don't ignore the purely passionate side of life. Au contraire! Out of all the novels, only one doesn't deal with either the act, or the effects of, extra-marital affairs, which is Northanger, and even then Belle (one of Austen's funniest female characters) sails pret-ty close to the wind with Captain Tilney. More important, though, is how skillfully Austen depicts attraction, and its results. One can feel the sexual charisma between Darcy and Elizabeth; and that Willoghby exudes. And I suspect one of the main reasons why modern audiences are upset by the ending of Mansfield Park ("That Fanny is such a wimp!" "Edmund is such a stick!") is that the attraction between the Crawfords and Fanny and Edmund was so skillfully--realistically-- developed.

The point I'm trying to make is that I find the people in Asuten's novels very real. I also find that most of the truly human problems depicted in those novels face us now--they are universal problems of human existence. The time, almost two centuries ago, and the settings, country villages in England, make the reading safe for the modern person who needs to escape from the sturm and drang of everyday life. But that doesn't mean that the novels aren't wise, or thought-provoking. Every time I reread one, I find something new to ponder, which is one of the reasons I get them down for yet another session every few months. The main reason, though, is that I enjoy them.

If one doesn't enjoy her work, of course, one ought not to feel obliged to read it. To tell the truth, I admire unstintingly the Bronte sisters, and love reading about them (comparing Mrs. Gaskell's biography, which is remarkable in many respects, to a modern one, was one of my fun projects a year or two back) but except for Jane Eyre and Anne's two novels, I find their fiction difficult to get through. I need light and laughter; overwrought emotions and unending tragedy might reflect the right causes, but that is not why I read fiction.

To wind this up, I hope that those actually reading this far who have hitherto condemned Austen on what they've heard ought to give the novels a go before forming an opinion. You might be in for as much pleasure as I've had since I first picked up Pride and Prejudice twenty-five years ago.

fall '96