My mother-in-law, a woman in her late eighties, finds watching movies adapted from Jane Austen’s novels boring. Her attitude mirrors, somewhat, the reaction of novelist Henry James who saw the characters in Austen’s novels as having “small and second-rate minds,” Philistines one and all. Emerson found Austen to be imprisoned in a wretched and smothering conventionality with an excessive concern for “marriageableness.”1 Not everyone has reacted this way to Austen, not now nor in the nearly two centuries since her death in 1817. Some saw her writing as “a prose Shakespeare,”2 a writer who exposed with her acid solution of words the empty foundations of social and personal morality in a violent and repressive age in English society.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Lee Siegel, “A Writer Who Is Good For You,” The Atlantic Online, January 1998; and 2William MacAuley in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 2, B.C. Southam, editor, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1987.
There is nothing to equal
your smallness in a small
town and the commonplace
has never found a finer master
than your divine chatter some
have said, Jane, yes they have.
Petty inconsistencies, parochial
vanities, familiar everydayisms,
vulgarity and pride, delineated
as entertainment and amusement,
tissues of character in speech,
gently undulating life-surface,
triviality but intense relations,
satire’s world without bitterness,
hermetically sealed with supreme
moments quite inarticulate giving
you: coolness, patience, poise and
leisure obtained so you could write
and me too, Jane!----and me too!
Your wholly secular and narrow
world with people you disliked,
tolerated but accepted in the only
society you knew where nothing
was too little for your little world
and happiness=simple pleasures.1
Balance, moderation, courtesy:
recipe for survival in two worlds—
yours and ours—inner landscapes—
the triumph of the ordinarily ordinary
and the inherited order over change:2
but we can’t triumph with that recipe
and order can we Jane? Can we Jane?
Nor could you---would you, Jane?3
1 Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, editor, Ian Watt, Prentice-Hall Inc., Inglewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963, p. 172.
2 Adena Rosmarin, “Misreading Emma: The Powers and Perfidies of Interpretive History, English Literary History, Vol. 51, pp. 315-42.
3 What would Austen have written if she had lived beyond the age of 41?
Ron Price
4 June 2008