Because she's a classic, you might say, dismissing completely the question I've proposed. Because she's been revived by pop culture and Hollywood and BBC productions, you could further claim, coming perhaps a little closer to the truth.
This is a relevant question because I did not understand (and hence did not enjoy) Austen's writing at first. I was young, I was naive, I knew little of the ways of the world.
So let me take you back to my first interaction with Austen.
I picked up Sense and Sensibility in 7th grade at a book fair. I loved the book fairs; my middle school hosted one annually. It was my heaven on earth: surrounded in every direction by new, fresh smelling books, their covers untattered and perfect, 90% of them fictional-- several hundred universes awaiting my keen eye, legions of words waiting to march across the blank slate of my pre-adolescent mind-- I found the copy of Sense and Sensibility on a table designated as "Classic," a period portrait of two fresh-faced, bejeweled young women on the cover.
"Ooh," I said, and I bought it.
(Just like that. That would be how I've always bought books, and how I still buy them. I look at the cover, and I go "Ooh," and my hand is drawn of its own accord to my credit card.)
When I tried to read it, however, I understood none of it. I was too lazy, as a youngling, to actually look up the definition of "Sensibility." After many hours of thought (as is often the case, in being lazy, I created more work for myself), I puzzled its meaning out incorrectly, and applied it with an audible slap to Marianne Dashwood-- "Obviously these words share a root!" I growled at the two young women gracefully situated on the cover, who had tricked me with their rosy cheeks, satin dresses and demure expressions. "They share a root, and thus must mean the same thing, and so why are you opposites? I don't get it! Your character traits MEAN THE SAME THING!"
That misunderstanding was frustrating enough to make the book inaccessible to me. I don't like not understanding something; it nags at me.
But that wasn't my only problem. The novel's opening, with its analysis of the Dashwood inheritance problems, also danced over my head.
And the relationship between Eleanor and the Ferrars lad. It made me groan, even as a 12 year old-- especially as a 12 year old. Where was the passion? And where were the longwinded descriptions of their physical beauty? WERE THERE NO SOULMATES IN THIS BOOK?
I flung the book into a corner of the gameroom's bookcase and forgot about it.
In 9th grade, a trifle older, not much more mature in matters of taste, I tried my luck with Persuasion. In the same year I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and my preconceptions of a green, rectangle-headed Munster ruined it for me. Objectivity was yet an undeveloped tool for me, you see, and Persuasion fared little better-- have you read Persuasion? It was the last novel Austen completed. Again, at 15, I was still searching for the modern trappings of romance. The glitz. The empty glamour. The Fabio cover.
After those two forays into the mind of Austen, I gave up. I packed it in. I wrote her off my list of favorite authors-- for good, as I thought. Throughout high school, if you had asked me about Jane Austen, I would have told you that her writing is boring. Unfunny. Unwitty. Worse than-- worse than-- if a book could be transmuted into a food: worse than BRUSSEL SPROUTS.
And I am NOT one of those gourmands who has been able to acquire an appreciation of the sprout since gaining adulthood; no, brussel sprouts, I will shout it from the roof tops, trigger my gag reflex.
I held determinedly to that opinion of Austen, Austen as a round, green, foul-tasting sprout, because I knew no better. I had been taught no better.
It took an intensive college course on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, untranslated from their original Olde English, to convince me that eighteenth century texts in general are actually quite modern, quite easy to understand and quite delightful to read.
So was an immature mind opened to a clearer understanding of that which came before the year 1986.
The course I'm taking in Oxford is geared around Jane Austen. I will have (re)read four of her novels and written five research papers about them by the time all is said and done. I will have toured her birth home, jumped from the same Lyme-Regis rock as Louisa Musgrove in Persuasion, toured the same palatial houses as Elizabeth Bennet, and walked some of the same paths as the Hollywood and BBC portrayals of Austen novels.
And, as if all of that weren't enough of a total Jane immersion, when I come home to Austin, I will be spending my senior year writing an honors thesis about gender roles and feminism and conservative politics in her novels.
(But don't quote me on that. My thesis advisor has directed me to find "some little problem" that I can realistically answer in one semester of research and 40-70 pages of doublespaced type, and the huge issues of feminism and politics definitely don't follow those instructions. Give me time to think. I'll whittle them down in the end.)
As for how I came to light upon Austen specifically, from the body of eighteenth century texts I found so attractive post-Chaucer experience, that would be because-- well, yes. I have seen the movies. And yes, I've seen the biographical ones, too.-- Austen is accessible in a way most eighteenth century writers are not, thank you BBC screenwriters.
And her writing IS witty, contrary to my adolescent opinion-- extremely so. I would imagine, when read by someone with good voice control, these books have the potential to come totally to life, every carefully crafted sentence of them. The ironies are there in subtle spades; those less obvious can be teased out in nuance. Park Honan, one of her biographers, writes that her books are actually quite good to read aloud because "one of the greatest qualities of Jane Austen's prose is its 'ear'" (245).
In the end, of course, I didn't have that much control over the Oxford course: my options were Austen, Shakespeare, or Romantic Legends-- hands down I was registering for the eighteenth century female author. No questions asked.
This is a relevant question because I did not understand (and hence did not enjoy) Austen's writing at first. I was young, I was naive, I knew little of the ways of the world.
So let me take you back to my first interaction with Austen.
I picked up Sense and Sensibility in 7th grade at a book fair. I loved the book fairs; my middle school hosted one annually. It was my heaven on earth: surrounded in every direction by new, fresh smelling books, their covers untattered and perfect, 90% of them fictional-- several hundred universes awaiting my keen eye, legions of words waiting to march across the blank slate of my pre-adolescent mind-- I found the copy of Sense and Sensibility on a table designated as "Classic," a period portrait of two fresh-faced, bejeweled young women on the cover.
"Ooh," I said, and I bought it.
(Just like that. That would be how I've always bought books, and how I still buy them. I look at the cover, and I go "Ooh," and my hand is drawn of its own accord to my credit card.)
When I tried to read it, however, I understood none of it. I was too lazy, as a youngling, to actually look up the definition of "Sensibility." After many hours of thought (as is often the case, in being lazy, I created more work for myself), I puzzled its meaning out incorrectly, and applied it with an audible slap to Marianne Dashwood-- "Obviously these words share a root!" I growled at the two young women gracefully situated on the cover, who had tricked me with their rosy cheeks, satin dresses and demure expressions. "They share a root, and thus must mean the same thing, and so why are you opposites? I don't get it! Your character traits MEAN THE SAME THING!"
That misunderstanding was frustrating enough to make the book inaccessible to me. I don't like not understanding something; it nags at me.
But that wasn't my only problem. The novel's opening, with its analysis of the Dashwood inheritance problems, also danced over my head.
And the relationship between Eleanor and the Ferrars lad. It made me groan, even as a 12 year old-- especially as a 12 year old. Where was the passion? And where were the longwinded descriptions of their physical beauty? WERE THERE NO SOULMATES IN THIS BOOK?
I flung the book into a corner of the gameroom's bookcase and forgot about it.
In 9th grade, a trifle older, not much more mature in matters of taste, I tried my luck with Persuasion. In the same year I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and my preconceptions of a green, rectangle-headed Munster ruined it for me. Objectivity was yet an undeveloped tool for me, you see, and Persuasion fared little better-- have you read Persuasion? It was the last novel Austen completed. Again, at 15, I was still searching for the modern trappings of romance. The glitz. The empty glamour. The Fabio cover.
After those two forays into the mind of Austen, I gave up. I packed it in. I wrote her off my list of favorite authors-- for good, as I thought. Throughout high school, if you had asked me about Jane Austen, I would have told you that her writing is boring. Unfunny. Unwitty. Worse than-- worse than-- if a book could be transmuted into a food: worse than BRUSSEL SPROUTS.
And I am NOT one of those gourmands who has been able to acquire an appreciation of the sprout since gaining adulthood; no, brussel sprouts, I will shout it from the roof tops, trigger my gag reflex.
I held determinedly to that opinion of Austen, Austen as a round, green, foul-tasting sprout, because I knew no better. I had been taught no better.
It took an intensive college course on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, untranslated from their original Olde English, to convince me that eighteenth century texts in general are actually quite modern, quite easy to understand and quite delightful to read.
So was an immature mind opened to a clearer understanding of that which came before the year 1986.
The course I'm taking in Oxford is geared around Jane Austen. I will have (re)read four of her novels and written five research papers about them by the time all is said and done. I will have toured her birth home, jumped from the same Lyme-Regis rock as Louisa Musgrove in Persuasion, toured the same palatial houses as Elizabeth Bennet, and walked some of the same paths as the Hollywood and BBC portrayals of Austen novels.
And, as if all of that weren't enough of a total Jane immersion, when I come home to Austin, I will be spending my senior year writing an honors thesis about gender roles and feminism and conservative politics in her novels.
(But don't quote me on that. My thesis advisor has directed me to find "some little problem" that I can realistically answer in one semester of research and 40-70 pages of doublespaced type, and the huge issues of feminism and politics definitely don't follow those instructions. Give me time to think. I'll whittle them down in the end.)
As for how I came to light upon Austen specifically, from the body of eighteenth century texts I found so attractive post-Chaucer experience, that would be because-- well, yes. I have seen the movies. And yes, I've seen the biographical ones, too.-- Austen is accessible in a way most eighteenth century writers are not, thank you BBC screenwriters.
And her writing IS witty, contrary to my adolescent opinion-- extremely so. I would imagine, when read by someone with good voice control, these books have the potential to come totally to life, every carefully crafted sentence of them. The ironies are there in subtle spades; those less obvious can be teased out in nuance. Park Honan, one of her biographers, writes that her books are actually quite good to read aloud because "one of the greatest qualities of Jane Austen's prose is its 'ear'" (245).
In the end, of course, I didn't have that much control over the Oxford course: my options were Austen, Shakespeare, or Romantic Legends-- hands down I was registering for the eighteenth century female author. No questions asked.
