A Prose Shakespeare
The bicentenary celebrations of Pride and Prejudice
has kept the popular English author Jane Austen very much in the media and
hearts of Janeites whose fanatic support prompted The Royal Mail to release a
series of stamps featuring all six of Jane Austen's novels, and the Bank of
England to issue 10 pound notes with Jane Austen replacing Charles Darwin. Dear
Aunt Jane, the most pragmatic of English writers, could never have imagined the
kind of fame and cultism her work would generate.
Her books are a study in characters from Elizabeth Bennett, whom she thought
‘as delightful a character as ever appeared in print’, to Emma whom she did not
reckon as a general favourite; for, when
commencing that work, she said, ‘I am going to take a heroine whom no one but
myself will much like.' To the contrary,
her heroine has won innumerable friends. Emma at one point claims teasingly
that `I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any
other', and so it proves, very much like Mr Knightley in the novel, 'one of the
few people who could see faults in Emma', but for whom she remains 'faultless
in spite of her faults .' Emma won millions, who like Lionel Trilling, argue
that we feel concerned and protective towards her, as towards 'our ordinary
fallible self'. It is indeed bewildering that her books are repositories of
such longing and emotional attachments. Narratives on carriages, swinging
balls, estates and fashion fads of the times have hooked readers with passing
years to phenomenal proportions. Her
books are a commentary on the then Regency England transiting between the 18th century age of reason to the
Victorian - Romantic period of the 19th
century. Austen's works are noted for their biting social commentary, an
individual’s relation to society, love and marriage, gender discrimination,
education of women , class hierarchies, and the playful satirization of the
foibles of human nature. Austen's plots, though comic, highlight the way women
of the gentry depended on marriage to secure social standing and economic
security. The conundrum cannot but be left unpicked that though her conversational ease amassed masses, the literary intelligentia kept her alive through their outpourings of delight and misgivings alike. Her brother Henry, a writer himself and a great champion of her works could be credited as her first admirer. He was proud to see her works shelved in bookstores along with Fanny Burney and Maria Hedgeworth, the then famous writers with a following. But who has heard of the latter now and Jane graces stamps and bank notes in today’s age. E.M. Forster admitted to reading her with an open mouth and George Henry Lewes, an accomplished philosopher and scholarly journalist with a great interest in literature, hailed Jane Austen's novels.
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"What we most hardily enjoy and applaud, is truth in the
delineation of life and character: incidents however wonderful, adventures
however perilous, are almost as naught when compared with the deep and
lasting interest excited by anything like a correct representation of life.
That indeed seems to us to be Art, and the only Art we care to applaud. To
make our meaning precise, we should say that Fielding and Miss Austen are the
greatest novelists in our language. ... Now Miss Austen has been called a Prose
Shakespeare; and, among others by Macaulay. ... we confess the greatness of
Miss Austen, her marvelous dramatic power, seems more than anything in Scott
akin to the greatest quality in Shakespeare. ..." |
Anything
like warmth or enthusiasm, anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly
out of place in commending these works: all such demonstrations the authoress
would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré
or extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives
of genteel English people curiously well. There is a Chinese fidelity, a
miniature delicacy, in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing
vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are perfectly
unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy
sisterhood ... What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to
study: but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes
through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death--this
Miss Austen ignores....Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a
very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless woman), if this is
heresy--I cannot help it.
Although Charlotte and Jane were both Englishwomen
and belong to the elite of great female writers of all time, they wrote
differently. Charlotte Bronte was born a year after Jane died. Jane lived in
the civilized southern England of Hampshire, a place of great social life and
parties, and drew her observations there from, whereas Charlotte grew up in the
stark surroundings of the windswept northern England of Yorkshire. They
belonged to close-knit families and their literary inclinations were promoted
by their respective fathers and brothers. They read innumerable books and wrote
juvenilia and performed theatrical works within their family homes. They were
both around when women did not have many rights in society and it was thought
unfeminine for a woman to have a public life as a writer. Jane was a master of burlesque and irony. I find Jane’s novels, in general, to be more
“light, bright and sparkling.” Jane’s passion was more like a trickling musical
brook while Charlotte’s passionate feelings were stormy and wild, the
uncontained swelling waterfall. I love reading them both. .
Readers have a fabulous task of revisiting Jane Austen and
her famous six novels namely, Sense
and Sensibility,
Pride
and Prejudice,
Mansfield
Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
Sparkling Reading Times!
”I declare after
all there is no pleasure like reading”!
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