Susannah Carson

A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Why We Read Jane Austen edited by Susannah Carson, contains 33 essays by well-known writers about their love of Jane's novels. Austen was the seventh of eight children, lived only to the age of 42, and wrote at a time when published novels by women were still unusual. She created a "tiny world in which a canceled dinner party or a shower of rain is an important event, so that we could attend to and enjoy her subtle comedy". (J. B. Priestly). Yet somehow she show more has managed to approach the stature of Shakespeare, with her works read and taught and performed and turned into movies and plays over and over and over again. How can this be?

This book is not a smooth production. The editor might have considered thematic entries to link the essays, for example, or short overview introductions before each. However, the disjointed feel is far outweighed by the gems she has gathered for us. Eudora Welty, E.M. Forster, Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt, Lionel Trilling, Virginia Woolf - it's an all-star line-up, with each giving his or her take on Why We Read Jane Austen. As I had hoped, it is filled with insights that had not occurred to me. For example, because she was a realist and wrote about what she knew, "she never attempted to reproduce a conversation of men when by themselves, which in the nature of things she could never have heard." (W. Somerset Maugham). We never hear Darcy talking to Bingley, or Wickham, or Captain Wentworth speaking to Captain Harville, unless a woman is there to witness it. As another example, C.S. Lewis quotes four key passages from Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, and observes that, "All four heroines painfully, though with varying degrees of pain, discover that they have been making mistakes both about themselves and about the world in which they live. All of their data have to be reinterpreted. Indeed, considering the differences of their situations and characters. the similarity of the process in all four is strongly marked. All realize that the cause of the deception lies within . . ."

It has always struck me that readers of the six novels will put them in such varying orders from favorite to least. Several essayists find Mansfield Park (my least favorite) the most accomplished and interesting of the novels; others give the award to Emma, although seemingly all consider the "most delightful" to be Pride and Prejudice. Austen in fact was apparently concerned that P & P was too bright and sparkling, and that it may have needed more shadow. Several essayists comment on the different, "autumnal" feel to Persuasion, her last novel, which some see as signalling the transition to a different style that would have developed had she lived longer. Many comment on her comedic talents. She can be quite sharp, e.g. "a large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction as the most graceful set of limbs in the world." If you want to enjoy her witticisms apart from the novels, I recommend The Wicked Wit of Jane Austen, collected by Dominque Enright. As Amy Bloom says in her essay, "Jane Austen is often unkind, occasionally contemptuous, but almost never wrong."

The differences in perspective among these well-known authors is striking. Diane Johnson observes that, "Austen's great serious subject was the precariousness of the lives of women in early-nineteenth century England and, lacking other options, the urgent need for them to establish themselves by marriage." But Amy Bloom sees Jane Austen as "the best writer for anyone who believes in love more than romance, and who cares more for the private than the public. She understands that men and women have to grow up in order to deserve and achieve great love, that some suffering is necessary (that mewling about it in your memoir or on a talk show will not help at all), and that people who mistake the desirable object for the one necessary and essential love will get what they deserve." Kingsley Amis is a contrarian to all the Austen appreciation, writing of her moral "corruption" displayed in Mansfield Park, and has one of the best lines. He points out that in that book the ostensibly villainous Henry and Mary Crawford actually are "good fun", and that Edmund and Fanny, whom we are intended to admire, are "morally detestable" bores: "to invite Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Bertram round for the evening would not be lightly undertaken." Eva Brann finds Austen's work perfect in every way, and "the most felicitous of her perfections is her knowledge of the human heart." For Jay McInerney, it is our affinity for the female leads which is critical: "unless we are cranky scholars or celibate critics, we love and rank the novels according to our regard for the female principals." He finds his own "admiration shifting" among them at different points in time.

Virginia Woolf has perhaps the most thought-provoking essay. She goes back to the juvenalia, particularly the "astonishing and unchildish story Love and Freindship", written when Austen was 15, and wonders about something in it which "never merges with the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world." That laughter, the acute sense of our ridiculousness, is an undercurrent that manifests itself in later novels as well. At the same time, "what she offers {in the novels} is . . . composed of something that expands in the reader's mind and endows with the most endearing form of life." "Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of of an unerring heart, an unfailing good taste, and almost stern morality, that she shows up these deviations from kindness, truth and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature." Woolf speculates on what Austen would have written had she lived longer, with her growing popularity. "She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, traveled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to feast upon at leisure." If only!

All of this inspired me to think about why, despite the dramatic differences in the breadth of their landscapes, Austen rises, for me, to the level of Shakespeare. What I say next could be applied to him, too: She is smarter than we are, and more insightful about human nature. She's wittier than we are, with a sharp, sometimes wicked, sense of humor. She writes with an almost unfathomable grace. We sense that so much lies within those crafted sentences that we find ourselves re-reading her books again and again. Just as the author-essayists in Why We Read Jane Austen obviously have. show less

This book collects 33 essays by writers, readers, movie producers and Austen scholars- all dedicated to celebrating Jane Austen. It's a perfect book to publish at this time since Jane has never been cooler. She is an action figure, she is a detective, her characters have been made into vampires and zombies, there are countless movies and books surrounding her and her stories. This collection of essays, though, is about READING Austen's novels. Not reading the sequels. Not watching beautiful show more adaptations. No, it's about reading the witty, ironic and fabulous Jane's words herself.

On that level, this collection succeeds. Everyone in it reads and enjoys Austen, and they're all willing to share with readers why they do so. However, 33 essays is a lot. There are (in my opinion) far too many essays on Mansfield Park. This would be fine if they varied a bit, but they basically all say the same sort of thing: Fanny Price is boring, but she is a moral and kind person. Yes, I get it. I don't need to read that five times.

And that, in my opinion, is the shortcoming of this collection. When you have 33 people talking about one author who wrote six books, you get a lot of repetition. I can't tell you how many times the same quotes were used- from "It is a truth universally acknowledged" all the way down to Austen's "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory." It got aggravating.

I think I would have preferred fewer essays in this book- perhaps one on each book Austen wrote, one on her earlier writings, one on her unfinished ones, and then a few on the experience of reading her as a whole. It was great to read so many opinions on Austen, but as everyone in the book loved her writing, it got a bit repetitive in general (though the specific points made were interesting on their own).

However, that said, this is a book most Janeites will want to own and enjoy. It is fun to read, though I recommend reading the essays over a longer period of time than I did. And it will make you want to read Austen again. As soon as possible. show less

Why do I - why do we - read Jane Austen over and over and over? In this collection, edited by Susannah Carson, thirty-three writers try to figure it out. And some of them hit in on the head, and others really...really do not.

I approached this book, post-its and pen in-hand, like I would a text book or maybe a thesis paper. I wanted to learn from it, to have a conversation with it, with the writers. I wanted the validation of thought and passion that literary critics can sometimes give.

The show more problem I encountered, though, is that it lacks organization. What attempts to be an organic flow of information, opinions, criticism and thoughts jumps back and forth (as you move from one writer to the next) between focuses. They don't seem grouped in any particular way - and maybe this is supposed to be a comment on just how universal Austen is, but it doesn't work. On top of that, we are given author biographies in the back, but there's no context for the essays with the essays. With some, you can guess - we know when C.S. Lewis and Virginia Woolf lived/wrote, but some of the (for me) more obscure authors seem to float in time with no reference to the period in which they were written, and that can be very problematic. Especially when an author is writing about film adaptations with no reference past the 1980s. Or when another author makes reference to the way a class is taught that seems right out of the sixties.

Like Austen, each author comes with temporal and emotional baggage that can affect their vision. For instance, an author writing about Austen and modernism in 1920 is going to have a very different vision than the one writing about turning Emma into "Clueless."

That aside, I did enjoy the way some of these authors seemed to manage to put my feelings about Austen's works into words and theories that actually make more sense, almost as much as I enjoyed arguing with my pen in the margins. Did it make me want to hop up and immediately re-read Mansfield Park and Emma? Not really. But it definitely made me look forward to reading them again, new information and theories in-hand.

Lauren Cartelli
www.theliterarygothamite.com show less

Shakespeare and Me is a collection of essays by a variety of (mainly) writers, actors and directors, on what Shakespeare means to them and how he is still such a big part of modern culture. Throughout the essays, most of Shakespeare’s plays are mentioned, with many of the writers concentrating on just one.

As with all books featuring contributions by different people, some appealed more than others. My personal favourites were the three essays on Othello, and especially James Earl Jones’s show more ‘The Sun God’ (I was amused by the fact that he mentions actor Hugh Quarshie, and writes that he thinks Quarshie should play Othello – this essay was written prior to Quarshie’s performance as Othello at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre last year, which I was lucky enough to see). Eammon Walker – who himself played a fantastic Othello at the Globe Theatre – writes ‘Othello in Love’; and Barry John writes ‘Othello: A Play in Black and White’ which studied how the staging of a production of Othello started to draw parallels to the play itself.

I also enjoyed Re-revising Shakespeare by Jess Winfield of the Reduced Shakespeare Company; Shakespeare and Four-Colour Magic by Conor McCreery (where he discusses turning Shakespeare and his characters into comic book stars), and Ralph Fiennes’s ‘The Question of Coriolanus’.

If you have any interest in Shakespeare, I recommend this book. show less