RonPrice

My mother-in-law, a woman in her late eighties, finds watching movies adapted from Jane Austen’s novels boring. The students in my English classes always preferred to study other authors when given the choice. Their attitude, my students and my mother-in-law’s, 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 mildly acidic, satirical solution of words the brittle, indeed, empty foundations of social and personal morality in a violent and repressive age in English society. It was this world that sought violent release in the next century and found that release when it was blown apart in WW1. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Lee Siegel, “A Writer Who Is Good For You,” The Atlantic Online, January 1998; and 2William B. 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---the commonplace
has never found a master
finer than your divine chit-
chat some have said, Jane.

Petty inconsistencies, parochial
vanities, familiar everydayisms,
vulgarity and pride, delineated
as entertainment and amusement,
tissues of character in speech,
gently undulating life-surface,
triviality laid on 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