What does Jane Austen mean to you?
Toby Litt
For a couple of years, after university, I couldn’t see the point. I’d loved Persuasion, which was one of my ‘A’ level texts. But more recent attempts at Sense and Sensibility (which opens like a legal document) and Northanger Abbey (which is not her best book) had put me off. Then, straphanging on the Prague Metro, commuting to and from my job at the Economics Faculty of the Charles University, I read Emma – and I was back; a devotee once more.
Among the things I realised was that Emma, apart from being a delight, had been written not just for the first and second but for the third and fourth readings, too. In a sense, even first readings of Jane Austen are re-readings – we know the ending already; the difficulties overcome, the felicities anticipated. But there are pleasures deeply embedded in the ironies of each scene of Emma.
I’d also put in a word for Sanditon, her incomplete final novel: it is wonderful to read it and dream what might have taken place in this fashionable town built oh-so-unwisely on sand.
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Helen Dunmore
One thing I particularly love about Jane Austen's novels is the way they reveal dfferent facets of themselves at different stages of a reader's life. The novels themselves seem to ripen, but of course this is our own immaturity ripening.
The Persuasion I read last year is not the Persuasion I read when I was sixteen. Its focus on the fragility of life did not strike me then; in fact I thought Louisa Musgrove's accident somewhat contrived. Certain passages have grown more significant for me with each reading. An example is the discussion between Captain Harville and Anne Elliot about the nature of love in men and women. It's a wonderful passage, full of feeling and humanity, and the climax of the novel. As I read and re-read Jane Austen's novels, it seems to me that the characters who receive the richest emotional rewards are those who may have made terrible mistakes, but who redeem themselves by the strength of their feelings, and by their candour about their inner lives. It's a great risk for a reserved woman like Anne Elliot to speak so openly, but she does - and almost magically transforms her own situation.
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Esther Freud
Jane Austen makes writing look simple. She wrote with confidence, wit,
romance and a real sense of place. Her books are political, passionate and
packed with suspence - the best kind of suspence - where you care about the
people living between their pages as intensely as if they were real.
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Elizabeth Buchan
Sometimes favourite writers wear out and they drop away, but Jane Austen is
a writer who will be with you for a lifetime. Apart from her astonishing
dexterity, wit and observation, she is full of surprises. As you enter a
different stage in life, you discover - as with Shakespeare - that it is
reflected back at you in her work.
At eighteen, I identified with Elizabeth Bennett. Now, I am more
likely to see the world through Mrs Bennett's eyes - a world that was full
tough realities, not least the entail. It is perfectly true that Jane Austen
did not tackle the problems of the Napoleonic wars, but there is plenty to
be learnt from the position of Miss Bates: poor, disregarded, utterly
powerless. This encompassing of human experience into novels that delight,
provoke and make the case for laughter as an antidote to our many follies
and, yet, do not flinch from darker methods - there is malice and undercover
revenge if you look for them - distinguishes a body of work whose rewards
and truths are infinite.
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Stuart Kelly
For me, Jane Austen is most intriguing at her edges: the juvenilia and
Sanditon. Much though I adore the sly wit and immaculate plotting of
'those six perfect novels', as one critic said, I'm drawn to the
rambunctious humour and cobra-like poise of her first and last works. In a
way, I think she was getting back to her original rebelliousness with
'Sanditon', and it's a tragedy she didn't live to complete it.
Imagine a Jane Austen that got her three-score years and ten: 1845. She would have outlived Scott and read A Christmas Carol. Given her demolition of the "gothic" in Northanger Abbey, how would she have responded to "Count Robert of Paris" or even the death of Little Nell? Austen is an anagram of 'unseat', and that's my private version: the constantly unsettling, never uncomplicated, always surprising writer. Read them as if you'd never seen Bridget Jones!
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