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

In a piece called “Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen,” Lionel Trilling addresses the two kinds of admiration for Jane Austen. He quotes none other Henry James, who admired Miss Austen, and who indeed had a moral and artistic affinity with her. Mr. James proclaimed that her reputation had exceeded her intrinsic interest and was unwarranted. He blames: “the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of magazines, which have found their ‘dear,’ our dear, everybody’s dear show more Jane so infinitely to their material purpose.” In the more recent past, Dr. Leavis expresses his impatience with Miss Austen’s admirers while he honors her work. The same essential notion emerges in the work of Dr. Mudrick and D.W. Harding. Mudrick describes “a mere mass of cozy family adulation, self-glorif [ication] … and nostalgic latterday enshrinements of the gentle-hearted chronicler of Regency order.”
For some part of A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, an admirable collection edited by Susannah Carson, the issue of the “ownership” of Jane Austen – who has the right to admire her the most – rears its rather ridiculous head. The fact that there exist in parallel two main thrusts of Jane Austen love, the one where the charm of setting and sweetness of outcome rule, which I call the visceral, and the other dominated by academic research, and which deals with the more recondite, esoteric matters of exegesis and comparative aesthetics, which I will term the cerebral. For those of us who look for patterns, tricks, and subtle effects in our fiction, Jane Austen is a magnificent delight, over and over. And yet, how much less magnificent can Austen be to the devoted “lay” reader, who returns to her favorite novel, knowing that once again, the delights can be depended on? This is ridiculous, as I said. I can quote from a critic: “Long life, good health, and much prosperity to the reader who simply enjoys the narrative.” And I myself, have no qualms whatever to acknowledging a deep, visceral love for the Austen oeuvre, and it coexists quite nicely, thank you, with my delight in her subtler shadings, those lovely and beautifully-expressed barbs that skewer, and those ineffable expositions of psychology and human nature. I like “dear Jane” too.

So I guess, there you have it. True devotion to Jane Austen should be reserved (according to some) to those with the background, taste, credentials, and temperament to understand the literary merits, and shunned by the rest. Fat chance, and rightly so. I must admit to liking her work first and foremost for the ruthless candor of her observations of Regency hypocrisy and cant. At least they look and sound like hypocrisy and cant to us now. She strikes as far ahead of her times when portraying human motivation and real longing. The quality of her individuals never flags, never fails to ring exactly true, no matter the character’s state in life. Others enjoy Jane Austen – perhaps revere is a better word – for her portrayal of manners, her tight, quiet plots, her felicitous heroines, and her fulsome heroines. Why not? I like all those things, too, and admit to a good measure of reverence myself. Apparently I’m in decent company.

E.M. Forster famously opens an essay on Jane Austen, “I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen … She is my favorite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed … The Jane Austenite possesses little of the brightness he so freely ascribes to his idol. Like all regular churchgoers, he scarcely notices what is being said.”

E.M. Forster was no neophyte when it comes to judging a fiction’s quality, bit I read his words impressed by his visceral, rather than his cerebral, enjoyment. Isn’t this what Henry James, and professors Mudrick and Harding object to? These issues present perhaps the high water mark to the flood tide of her reputation. Implicit within the arguments is the acknowledged truth, a “truth universally acknowledged,” that Jane Austen, that peerless portraitist and storyteller, that purveyor of gentle manners cloaking a barbed, prickly sarcasm, ranks at the very top of artists writing English narrative. Yes, right there with Shakespeare. We find we can hardly blame critics and scholars for their apparent proprietary feelings toward her. We all feel that way.

I stared out wanting to review this collection. Ms. Carson, the editor, leads the festivities off with a fine, thought-provoking essay of her own. The work carries the subtitle “33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen.” The collection does not lack for star power. Besides Forster’s need-I-say-hardly “imbecile” views, we get perception, insight, circumspection, and appreciation from Eudora Welty, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Lionel Trilling (twice), W. Somerset Maugham, Anna Quindlen, Louis Auchincloss, Janet Todd, Amy Heckerling, Margot Livesey, Jay McInerney, and Virginia Woolf. Contributions from lesser-known scribes add light and weight, as well.

We do have a mix here, between the cerebral and the visceral, and perhaps nowhere is the visceral more in evidence than Martin Amis’s wish for a twenty-page extension to Pride and Prejudice to get a detailed description of the Darcys’ wedding night, “with Mr. Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well.” The cerebral, however, is everywhere. And I reserve the highest rank for Harold Bloom.

Mr. Bloom treasures "Persuasion" above all, as do I. He compares Anne Elliot to Rosalind of Shakespeare’s "As You Like It," saying they are the two heroines who carry almost omniscient understanding of their stories. He says of Anne and Rosalind, “Their poise cannot transcend perspectivizing completely, but Rosalind’s wit and Anne’s sensbiliy, both balanced and free of either excessive aggressivity or defensiveness, enable them to share more of their creators’ poise than we ever come to do.” Mr. Bloom goes on to cite others’ elegant points, and to make his own, about the deep understanding and unceasing and unspoken communication between Anne and Captain Wentworth. These points, and the truth that Anne outshines Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennet in understanding, sympathy, and virtue, helped clarify for me the lovely features of this masterwork, to which Mr. Bloom ascribes “extraordinary aesthetic distinction.” He avers to feeling sad after each rereading, but I must say I never felt so tinged. The joy is, I admit, more alloyed than that accompanying "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice," but not at all because we value the heroine less. Appropriately enough, Mr. Bloom describes the novel as having a “canonical persuasiveness.”

We all read Jane Austen for different reasons. Whether you value her satisfying plots, her persuasive characters, or her sparkling wit, you will find 33 new perspectives, all from artists themselves, for reading and appreciating her work all over again. show less

My long time fascination with Shakespeare started a long time ago when I was attending the British Council. I won’t dwell on it again.

In this “Living with Shakespeare” I didn’t get much on Hamlet, but I kept thinking about Hamlet's five soliloquies; the humour and poignancy of Kent's words in King Lear; the horror of what happens to Gloucester and the heart-rending ending of the same play. The mixed emotions of the finale to Macbeth. Mark Antony's speeches in Julius Caesar. Iago's show more words in Othello. Shakespeare gave the world a literary water-fountain around which to gather when engaging with the great issues of each passing generation. His heroes and villains, his comedies and his tragedies make up an unerringly eloquent compendium of human frailties/motives as the world changes - and yet nothing changes. And I've hardly scratched the surface of how Shakespeare's words have the power to move and shock and create laughter like no one else has been able to before or since. The naysayers should take the time to experience a play performed live or, at the very least, watch a film version. It will hopefully change their minds. And he is not just for 'middle class snobs'! Shakespeare's for everybody. After having finished this book, I'm reminded of Harold Bloom's comments about Marlowe in 'The Western Canon', when he says that Marlowe the man 'can be meditated upon endlessly, as the plays not'; sometimes the writer's life - especially with Marlowe - can be even more interesting than their work. If the story of Shakespeare's life was that good he would have written a play about himself... maybe that is what he did with "The Tempest". I remember watching a video of the play "Cheapside" at The British Council in the 80s, wherein David Allen's brilliant play about Richard Greene has Shakespeare darting on occasionally as a sharp-eyed (upstart?) magpie always on the lookout for gleaming lines and plots to lift. In the closing scene he lets himself into the dead Greene's room and rummages surreptitiously through the half-finished manuscripts. "'Story for a Snowy Night'" he muses to himself. "Mmm.... A Winter's Tale?'" It's such a cheeky cameo - lovely stuff.

Shakespeare remains relevant because his understanding of universals was profound, and his language remains piercingly fresh. He was a genius living at a time when the English language was still wonderfully malleable. It was an age in which the known world was expanding with the discovery of the Americas, when England was a centre of growing prosperity and technological advance - and the headiness of living in a country in such flux is palpable in the texts too. That Shakespeare was a brilliant literary innovator just isn't in doubt; you have only to read Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson to see it. They are all stupendous in different ways (I recently reread Jonson's “The Alchemist” and was astonished all over again), but the acuity of Shakespeare's phrases, the penetrating psychological insights in Macbeth, Lear and Hamlet, the sheer beauty and strangeness of the language and the thinking set him apart. To say Shakespeare remains an icon for English-speaking people all over the world contradicts the well-known idea that Shakespeare is a 'universal soul'. All of my friends whose first language is not English regard Shakespeare as a great. The poet transcends not only time but culture and language. I've always wondered how it can be possible to translate Shakespeare into modern foreign languages, especially languages which are linguistically remote from English like the Portuguese Language, yet people do it, amazingly. As Ian Dury once wrote - 'There ain't half been some clever bastards'.

Politicians have done much to undermine a common set of values among us human beings. Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society" comes to mind. In the Bard we find touchstones that are timeless and inform our basic values - simply as people. In many situations the words Macbeth, Brutus, Cordelia, Shylock or Malvolio are all that is needed to set the tone or the scene. Good point about politicians. People get suckered by them, child-like, time after time. I'm sure Shakespeare had something to say about gullibility. Must check it out when Benfica’s team is not on...

NB: We should not overlook Shakespeare's influence on the development of German drama via the translations of Gottfried Herder. But Herder to Goethe in a letter: "Shakespeare hat Euch ganz verdorben"! The same happened to some Portuguese people... show less

I would recommend this marvelous book to anyone who has an interest in Shakespeare. Not only are the many essays insightful, some are deeply personal. The contributors run the gamut from actors who have been knighted for their brilliant contributions to comic book writers to novelists to critics. Each in its own way sheds new light on one or more plays or characters.

Everyone will have their own favorite essays, but the following are what stick in my mind:

I felt privileged to read Ben show more Kingsley's reflections about how various theatrical spaces shaped one company's performances of "The Merchant of Venice," and James Earl Jones' thoughts on Othello as "The Sun King." Ralph Fiennes gives insight into his choices in making the film version of "Coriolanus" (a favorite of mine) as does Julie Taymor in her marvelous "Tempest" with Helen Mirren as Prospera.

I didn't care much for "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)" when I saw it performed, and I have no real interest in the questions of the differences in the different extant versions of Shakespeare's plays, but somehow I found myself completely engaged with Jess Winfield's discussion of Shakespare's texts, using "Complete Works (abridged)" -- which he was part of creating -- as a lense.

Whatever your interest, you will find something here to enjoy -- and probably more than you expected to. I will be keeping this volume close and revisiting the individual chapters as I study the different plays. show less