Fairweather was kind enough to point me to the linked article, called “Pride, Prejudice, Perfection,” by Jonathan Yardley, one of The Washington Post’s book critics, as part of his series of columns called “Second Reading.”
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/29/AR2009072903529.htmlBriefly, the article describes Yardley’s lifelong connection to Jane Austen through his mother, herself a “passionate reader from childhood ….” Mrs. Yardley always kept a clothbound set of Jane Austen’s works by her bedside, no matter where they lived, and “returned to them over and over again.” Now that she is gone, the books belong to Yardley and have an honored place in his living room where he looks at them every day. Yardley chooses to write about PRIDE AND PREJUDICE in order to pay tribute to his mother’s influence on his reading tastes.
There are many parallels for me in this article, and some not. My mother was also an avid reader her whole life long; but although she read many romance novels, I have no specific recollection that she ever read Jane Austen. However, ever since I first read PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, and then scraped together quarters whenever possible out of my limited college funds to purchase cheap paperback editions of the other five novels, I have also kept a set of Austen’s works near to hand. Other than my first-edition Edith Whartons, my prized book possessions are a full clothbound set of the Oxford editions of Austen's works, received as a gift, a full set of the Norton Critical Editions, collected over the years, and various and sundry related works of criticism, also collected randomly over the years by purchasing new and by prowling old bookstores on a regular basis. My love of Jane Austen has already passed through to Moonbeam, and I have no doubt whatsoever where my set of Austen’s works will eventually end up.
My mother influenced me to read, but she had relatively little influence on WHAT I read. Nor did she always know, as in the time when I purloined a few Ian Fleming novels from a box of books we received from relatives. To tell you the truth, I doubt she ever knew I had those books. While my mother read mostly romance novels – her motives for doing so not being relevant to this piece – I read mostly everything else AND romance novels. I stumbled across PRIDE AND PREJUDICE as a college freshman; before that life-changing encounter, I had walked right past it in the library many times, always assuming it was a stilted, puritanical treatise on conduct. Just goes to show, you can never tell a book by its cover.
Anyway, I have never claimed status as an Austen scholar; but I have read each of the novels many times, seen all the videos many times, read the continuations of the fragments, read biographies and other works about life during Austen’s time, and consumed mass quantities of the available criticism. So, although I no longer consider myself a Janeite, I do have a few comments to accompany Yardley’s article. To be clear, my comments presume that before you proceed any further here, you have actually read the article, which is well-done and worth the few minutes it will take.
First, Yardley is exactly right about the literary criticism, especially the more “modern” writings of “feminist” authors. I own one or two of the books he mentions, as well as a couple of others, and they are, for the most part, DREADFULLY dull academic tomes. On the other hand, Tony Tanner's book, called simply JANE AUSTEN, is THE most illuminating work of literary criticism I've ever read. I devoured it. Simply written with amazing clarity of thought. If you love Austen and care about criticism, you must read Tanner’s book.
Next, I confess to having read a few of the "cracks" that Yardley speaks of ... i.e., prequels and sequels and re-tellings. There are literally hundreds of examples. It's Lizzily dizzying, not to mention that it gets old after a while. In addition to the more traditional sequels where authors attempt to mimic Jane Austen’s language and writing style, there are at least two series of mysteries that employ Jane Austen (Stephanie Barron’s series) or Elizabeth Bennet (Carrie Bebris’s series) as the sleuths. The novel has been told and retold from Darcy’s perspective (e.g., Pamela Aidan’s series). There is even a pair of moderately pornographic sequels (by Linda Berdoll) that describe the Darcys' sex life in GRAPHIC detail. You're so worn out after one of the sex scenes that you can't follow the plot. So you go back to re-read ... (oh, never mind). I keep asking myself why I don't sell those books.
Nowadays, you have Darcy traveling in time and JANE AUSTEN IN BOCA and THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB and many other perspectives. You even have Jane Austen as the heroine of her own romantic story in BECOMING JANE, which is an EXCELLENT movie, historically accurate as far as it can be, and not to be missed by Janeites. However, having some time ago exhausted most of my curiosity along these lines, I confess to still having a few unread examples of this genre on my shelf. But I did find the zombies that Fair refers to in several earlier posts on other threads (PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES) hilariously entertaining ... because that's really a fresh take. Sort of like Jane Austen meets Janet Evanovich with zombies. Just wow.
Speaking of screen adaptions of P&P, the Olivier and Garson version is, to me, a travesty. Greer Garson flutters around as if she is playing Elizabeth Bennet as a geisha. Lawrence Olivier isn't right as Darcy, either; he isn’t haughty enough, and part of Darcy's commanding presence in the novel is derived from his being described more than once as being very tall. Olivier is not tall and does not have the right aura. The later adaptations have been better, although each has its own issues. The original BBC version has the right Darcy (David Rintoul), but the whole thing is too stiff-upper-lip. The Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth A&E version injects a little more passion, but Firth more-or-less phoned it in. The latest version with Donald Sutherland as Mr. Bennet and Judy Dench as Lady Catherine is a jumbled cultural cross between Austen, Bronte, and Hardy, although Judy Dench – and only Judy Dench – appears to still be living in the pre-French-revolution 18th Century. To be perfectly fair, however, if you temporarily suspend your inner Gene Siskel, and just consider the movie you saw, rather than the movie you wished you had seen, it stands up pretty well.
As for the characters, I won't dwell on the fact that, or the reasons why, I identify strongly with Elizabeth Bennet, and especially when I was her age. But it's always seemed to me that Austen stretches too much bit to make Darcy appear too proud at the beginning, which in turn makes his dramatic reformation – or self-recognition, if you apply that interpretation -- less believable. The speech in which he claims he can't be bothered to dance with women who are not "handsome" enough seems forced. A man who had that sort of austere personality and was so concerned about public appearances would have taken greater care, even in company so far beneath him, not to say something that would obviously cast him in a negative light. (Not to mention why would such a man hang out with Charles Bingley, who was the exact opposite in almost every respect except intelligence.) You could opine that a man as arrogant as Darcy wouldn't have cared what people thought, but then again, protecting his character, and that of his family, in the eyes of the world seems to have been exactly what he DID care about. And then again, he turns out in the end not to have been so arrogant, after all.
Yardley’s discussion about the plot is largely dead-on. P&P was first written as an epistolary novel, which Austen called, "First Impressions." The fact that first impressions are often wrong, and that people have things to learn, both about themselves and others, nicely sums up the plot. Elizabeth Bennet is one of the most endearing characters in all of literature … combining moderate beauty, strong intelligence, and “easy playfulness” into a character that the highly proud, but secretly highly human, Fitzwilliam Darcy simply cannot resist, no matter how hard he tries. And he does try, only to be thwarted by his own self-realization. Yardley touches only briefly on the minor characters and the subplots; in my opinion, the minor characters, not just in P&P, but in all of Austen, are some of the finest character sketches in all of English literature, on par with Dickens’ best works. Satire was Austen’s game, just as much as it was Dickens’. Another great drawer of character, Mark Twain, hated Jane Austen. Ironically, having read about Jane Austen at some length, I highly doubt that Jane Austen would have hated Mark Twain. I’ve made a whole adult avocation out of hating him on her behalf. It’s the least I can do.
Yardley closes with the observation that Jane Austen liked happy endings. And so she did. Thus, although I like Shakespeare on a level nearly even with Austen, in the end, if I have to choose between them to settle in with on a snowy afternoon in January, it will always be Jane Austen.
