Samizdata

Considering the fashionable wail that Britons are a dumbed-down lot, there is a lot of interest in the fiction of Jane Austen at the moment. BBC and other channels are vying, so it appears, to see which one can carry the most screenings of Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility or Emma. More productions are expected. Last night, yours truly and Mrs Pearce went along to see ‘Becoming Jane’, a film which tries to capture the moment in Austen’s life when she fell for a dashing if roguish young London lawyer, tried to elope with him, but failed to carry off her plans when she realised that a whole brood of relations depended on her young beau’s uncertain income for support. The lawyer’s rich uncle, played with menacing brio by Ian Richardson, blocks the marriage (Richardson is brilliant in the film). Austen ended her days unmarried, channelling her experiences of forbidden love into fiction. Her life sounds quite sad in certain ways although we have some of the finest fiction in the English language as a result.

Some people wax lyrical or get very cross about Jane Austen. I take a fairly sympathetic line. Toby Young, writing in this week’s Sunday Telegraph magazine (no web link), argues that she is one of the greatest English novelists, a stylist and master of irony, able to catch the foibles and weaknesses of people and also able to spot the virtues and goodness in the most unlikely people. On the other hand, Frances Wilson, writing in the same magazine, says Austen was a money-grabbing snob, a reactionary (horrors!) whose characters all too often forsook the path of true love and chose money and position instead. That verdict seems unfair. Take Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennett initially recoils from Mr Darcy (this is an age when a man is Mr X rather than Dave or Steve) precisely because she fears he will be a snob and a materialists because of his substantial fortune and large country estate. Wilson, who I suspects projects her own liberal sentiments onto a much more conservative age, cannot imagine why Bennett does not go for the more supposedly hunky Mr Wickham instead. But it is Austen’s brilliance as a writer to draw out how an initial lack of attraction can, after a time, turn into something very different.

Irony, and the ability to see through the surface of things, is what makes Austen’s fiction so compelling. It is not ‘realistic’ in the dreary, PC sense that she packs it with large lectures about the Napoleonic War, or the Industrial Revolution, or the tumults in Ireland and the New World. She chose a very particular time and place – rural, Southern England – and the preoccupations of minor landed gentry. It does not try to make grand socio-economic ‘points’, although clearly, in its reticent way, it is a very conservative form of fiction, like the crime fiction of PD James. We do not, to take a different author, damn Joseph Conrad for being ‘limited’ because his works are often set at sea.

To go back to my first point, it is remarkable that, at least among what is left of the novel-reading classes, Austen remains so popular, and not just with women, although she is seen perhaps unfairly as a writer on women for women. There is a timeless quality about her stories and her themes. In 200 years’ time, I am not sure if anyone will be reading Norman Mailer. They might though, still be reading the woman who wrote this:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.