The Jane Austen Project

My big reading project for 2004 is to tackle the six major novels of Jane Austen. Until now, I'm embarrassed to confess, I had only read Pride and Prejudice. C.S.Lewis would have thought me fortunate indeed, that I still have the pleasure before me, of reading them for the first time. But to most people it would just sound like an admission of illiteracy. Nevertheless, it seemed like there were good reasons for not having read them before. When I was a lad, they all seemed like Girls' Books. Then, when I tried to read them as a grown-up, I found it hard to cope with the society that was being described. All those upper-class wasters hanging around each others' houses, griping about money and fortunes, and doing b**** all to justify their miserable existences. It was grievously offensive to working class taste. The fact that Jane Austen herself may be more than a little critical of this lifestyle, never cut much ice.

Well, it was time to make my peace with the immortal Jane. First

Persuasion

It's short, and it's got one of the feistiest of heroines. Well, you've got to sympathise with a heroine who's a more mature woman - that's to say, at twenty-seven she is past the first bloom of youth. Exclamation mark! The Lyme Regis and Bath of Austen's novels seem as fantastic to us as Minas Tirith and Mordor, and the black magic of their denizens about as powerful.

Northanger Abbey

The plot of Northanger Abbey is just ridiculous; but then, it's supposed to be, because Jane Austen is poking fun at the kind of gothic tales of romance and terror that were popular at the time, like Mrs Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho. Catherine Morland has her head so full of this stuff, that her imagination gets her into trouble when she stays at the home of General Tilney, whose son Henry she has fallen in love with. The path of true love doesn't run smooth, what with Catherine's gothic suspicions and the General's discovery that she doesn't have the prospects he at first thought. (It's all down to money and class again!) But Henry comes through in the end, and the General is won over (not till he finds out her prospects are better than he thought secondly), and so it all ends happily.

Emma

This is many people's favourite Jane Austen, but I think Emma's a bit of a pain with her snobbery and meddling attempts at match-making. Still, she turns out not-too-bad in the end, thanks to the love of a good man.

Jane Austen considered '3 or 4 families in a Country Village, the very thing to work on'; and this is one of the things I admire about her. It seems to represent that Benedictine attention to close detail, which grows into love, that is the model for pastoral care.

Mansfield Park