As you may well be aware, today marks the 200th anniversary of the first publication of
Pride & Prejudice. Much is being said on the matter, especially by frenzied fans of the films. I enjoy the films very much myself; however, I am frustrated when people (fans and indifferents alike) reduce to her work to be called "romances," or label it as interesting/ relevant for women only. Then there seems to be the sort of confused group of people who scratch their heads and wonder why on earth she is praised both by intellectual circles and pop-Hollywood productions--how her work can be treated both so seriously and flippantly (a word I learned from Jane herself).
Literarily speaking, what she ought to be most praised for is the invention of the English-language novel as we know it. It's a huge claim to lay on her shoulders, but it is in fact accurate. Have you read any novels written before about 1810? There's probably good reason for that. The novel was still a new and somewhat unaccepted art form when Jane Austen came on the scene. The novels written prior to
Sense & Sensibility's first publication in 1811 (
Oroonoko,
Gulliver's Travels,
Robinson Crusoe) are meandering, poorly focused, contradicting tales. This doesn't mean that the stories are necessarily bad or that the writers were bad writers--rather, that no one had been able to take the concept of the novel and say, "Here is this art form. This is what works, this is what's important. This is how to provoke your reader." She knew which elements to expand (character development, action) and which to contract (physical descriptions of what people look like, where they live, etc.). She was able to harness the concept of a long fictional story and make it complete--not a word wasted or superfluous or boring.
Consider her contemporaries, like Mary Shelley or Sir Walter Scott (who was a great Austen fan). Her work is enormously different from theirs. Where Shelley and Scott are often repetitive, unfocused, or convoluted, Austen is direct, concise, and funny. She knows it's more important to describe character rather than person, allows her characters' actions to speak for themselves rather than belaboring a point.
Just a generation later, when the Bronte sisters wrote, the novel had become a much more sophisticated beast. Charlotte Bronte in particular turned her nose up at Austen as being a bit too prim and pressed, probably not considering that her own highly skilled work depended on the foundation of literary techniques that Austen was first to define.
On top of all this, she wrote characters who were multi-dimensional. Read
Robinson Crusoe, for example--it's a marvelous concept for a story, and often I couldn't bring myself to put it down. But what one really longs for and does not get is a character that seems like a real human being. It would be wonderful if we were all born fully-composed people, knowing who we are, what we want, and how to get along with each other. But we aren't this way at all; we're lucky if we have a sense of self and an average ability to get along with each other. Even with these things, of course, we all know ourselves to be not only fundamentally flawed but curiously contradicting--how often we want two things at once that are simply mutually exclusive (like my deep desire to return to pre-pregnancy weight, and my just-as-equal-sometimes-greater desire for chocolate chip cookies...). Austen was able to write characters who were both flawed and attractive, whose motives ought to be other than what they were. Yet, we still like them, still root for them.
Another (and perhaps the most important) reason Austen matters is that she was skilled at observing and relating human behavior and emotion. No matter how well-written her work, if her subject matter did not continue to strike a chord with people, her skill would perhaps not mean much of anything. No matter who you are and where you come from, one thing that all human beings can relate to is the concept of home and family--even if you are without both, your relationship to them has informed who you are. Austen writes about these things that everyone has in common. She writes about a world that is bound by structure and rules, and characters are defined by which rules they choose to keep and which they choose to break.
Last night, Chris and I watched a program about her on PBS, where we learned that she has a substantial male following from a group of intellectual elites called the Janeites, of which Rudyard Kipling and F.R. Leavis were both members. Kipling even wrote a short story about the Janeites. We also learned that her work was enormously popular with soldiers during the world wars--who wanted something to read in the trenches, wanted to read about home, and found their solace in Austen's clean, structured, sunny world.
It's the propensity of fans and filmmakers alike to mistake her clean and direct writing, her happy stories as "simple." They do whatever they want with her work; sometimes, of course, it's brilliant (
Clueless is still one of my favorite adaptations of her work); other times, like the Keira Knightley
P&P, it's a mixed bag. (Oh, I could write an entire essay just about that...) The greatest sin of all, in my book, is to polarize her characters--Elizabeth Bennet is no angel, and she's certainly not Darcy's moral superior, as is often seen in adaptations. Mr. Bennet is far from a charming, perfect father. Mrs. Bennet, however aggravating, works tirelessly for the welfare of her daughters who otherwise would literally be homeless without marriage upon their father's death. It's not as though Mr. Collins has the generosity of heart to care for them. Actually, I think that in any adaptation, the only character consistently well-portrayed is Mr. Hurst. How sad is that, when her characters are so delightfully relatable just the way they are? And when, in fact, the story's power is derived from the friction of these characters' desires and shortcomings?
In any case. Still more than all of this is that her language itself is delightful. It's impossible to come away from
Pride & Prejudice without feeling uplifted, and this is perhaps her greatest gift of all: to make people feel better. Even Winston Churchill once credited reading her work for curing an illness he was suffering from. She's delightful and funny. She has given me hope when I was lonely, entertainment when I've been bored. I love her. And I don't care who knows it.
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