Fanny's Heart

Mansfield Park 

by Jane Austen

“This would be the way to Fanny's heart. She was not to be won by all that gallantry and wit and good-nature together could do; or, at least, she would not be won by them nearly so soon, without the assistance of sentiment and feeling, and seriousness on serious subjects.”

― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Out of all Jane Austen's novels, Mansfield Park has the dubious distinction of being disliked by more of her fans. Sense and Sensibility is about striking a balance between feelings and thoughts, Pride and Prejudice is about passing judgment on people too quickly, Emma is about maturing into adulthood, and Persuasion is about second chances. These themes are very different from those of her other books, which can usually be summed up in one sentence or even one phrase. In contrast, it is difficult to characterize Mansfield Park's theme. Does it have to do with ordination? Is it a parable about Regency England? Does it have to do with slavery? Is it related to children's education? Is it about how appearances and reality differ from one another? Is it about the consequences of defying social norms? Mansfield Park can be applied to any or all of those themes.
The main character, Fanny Price, presents the biggest challenge because she is timid, shy, insecure, physically frail, and, to some, irritatingly, always correct. She is definitely not like Pride and Prejudice's vivacious and clever Elizabeth Bennett. However, Mansfield Park also has a large following, whose respect and allegiance can be ascribed to the novel's rich and nuanced themes as well as to the protagonist, a young lady who stands out from most literary heroines. In the end, most readers only care that it is a well-written book that is enjoyable to read.

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The (almost) Complete Truth

Emma 

by Jane Austen

“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”   ― Jane Austen, Emma

I most recently read Emma as the April book for my local Great Books reading group. I had previously read it as the introductory novel in a class at the Newberry Library. The class was entitled "Jane Austen's Heirs" and included novels by such "heirs" of hers as Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, and Anita Brookner. Rereading this delightful novel is something I will undoubtedly do again.

Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." In the very first sentence she introduces the title character as "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich." Emma, however, is also rather spoiled; she greatly overestimates her own matchmaking abilities; and she is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives and is often mistaken about the meanings of others' actions.

While Emma differs strikingly from Austen's other heroines in some respects, she resembles Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot, among others, in another way: she is an intelligent young woman with too little to do and no ability to change her location or everyday routine. Though her family is loving and her economic status secure, the quotidian details of Emma's everyday life seem a bit dul; she has few companions her own age when the novel begins. Her determined though inept matchmaking may represent a muted protest against the narrow scope of a wealthy woman's life, especially that of a woman who is single and childless.
And of course there is the classical balance of the novel's structure that, combined with the beauty of Austen's writing style, makes this novel a favorite of readers and writers, particularly those mentioned above, ever since it was published.

Two Sisters

Sense and Sensibility

A New Musical

book, music and lyrics by Paul Gordon

directed by Barbara Gaines

“Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience- or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.”   ― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

On last Wednesday I had the good fortune to attend a production of a new musical with some friends.  The production was by the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the musical, based on a two hundred year-old novel, was Sense and Sensibility based on the novel by Jane Austen.
  
Austen wrote romantic novels and this is one of her best and the first with several to follow.  The musical followed the plot closely thus capturing the essence of the novel.  The story concerns two sisters:  Marianne Dashwood, the young, beautiful, passionate, and unreserved romantic;  and her older sister Elinor, prudent, pretty, and proper, with all the restraint of feelings of which Marianne had none. Their father dead, the sisters and their mother were about to be displaced from their childhood home of Norland by their half brother John, and his wife, Fanny.   He might have allowed the Dashwood sisters to remain at Norland, if only grudgingly, but his wife was determined to send them packing, especially once Elinor had begun a friendship with her brother Edward.  These characters are well-portrayed with music and songs by Paul Gordon (who has also written a musical based on Austen's novel Emma), somewhat reminiscent in tone to the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber (a bit derivative to my mind, but no matter).  

The story continues with their removal to a cottage in Devonshire where Marianne falls in love with a young man named Willoughby.  On the other hand she is also pursued by a dashing young officer, Colonel Brandon.  The remainder of the story concerns the relationships of the two sisters and how the complexities of love that develop are resolved (if you haven't already, read the novel).
The singers were superb, the staging was delightfully minimalist (a rare treat for a Chicago Shakespeare production), and the direction was brisk and straightforward.  In other words, you could not ask for a more entertaining afternoon of musical theater.  

The Importance of Understanding for Love

Sense and Sensibility 
by Jane Austen

“She tried to explain the real state of the case to her sister.
"I do not attempt to deny," said she, "that I think very highly of him--that I greatly esteem, that I like him."
Marianne here burst with forth with indignation:
"Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor. Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment."
Elinor could not help laughing. "Excuse me," said she, "and be assured that I meant no offence to you, by speaking, in so quiet a way, of my own feelings.” 

― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility


On this day in 1811 Jane Austen's first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published.  Austen wrote romantic novels and this is one of her best and the first with several to follow. But one may ask, what is the source of Austen's genius on the subject of love? It seems that she was able to develop a comprehensive view of the philosophies of her own time, including the rise of sensibility (Earl of Shaftesbury, Hume and Smith) and develop stories about real people who lived and loved, learned and grew through their experiences. Consider the two Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility. One may contrast Marianne Dashwood, the young, beautiful, passionate, and unreserved romantic. with her older sister Elinor, prudent, pretty, and proper, with all the restraint of feelings of which Marianne had none. Their father dead, the sisters and their mother were about to be displaced from their childhood home of Norland by their half brother John, and his wife, Fanny. John "was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed," and Fanny was even worse. He might have allowed the Dashwood sisters to remain at Norland, if only grudgingly, but she was determined to send them packing, especially once Elinor had begun a friendship with her brother Edward.

Edward had a bland personality and was practically paralyzed by shyness. While he was not particularly handsome Elinor struck up a somewhat dispassionate friendship with him. Again this was a contrast with her sister who, as the result of a chance meeting, had fallen for the dashing young, handsome and elegant Willoughby. The contrast of the sisters could not be better defined than in their choice of partners. Austen's genius extends to persuade the reader that Elinor's sense of love is truer than than the passionate sensibility of her younger sister. The romantic love of Marianne turns out to be as capable of tearing her heart apart as the Eros described in classical Greek dramas and philosophy. That this is the stuff of myth, one thinks of love at first sight, is felt by the reader, but for Austen it is not true love. It lacks a foundation and is thus unsuccessful. Grace and spirit and manners---the kinds of qualities that attracted Marianne to Willoughby---are wonderful to have, but they are no substitute for the Edward-like attributes of worth and heart and understanding.  The love that has these is more likely to hold sway in the long run.

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Reading Begins at Home

Books from my Parents' Library

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”   ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice


Before I was born and continuing after I arrived along with my sister (two years later) my parents had a small library in the home where we were raised.  This library consisted of  bookshelves that spread along one wall of our living room;  shelves that were filled with books from my earliest memory.  These books formed a not insignificant part of my reading from my earliest days - they were the source of such early reads as the Tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and more.  As I grew older and read more I remember my first encounters with Treasure Island and Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.  I became a life-long fan of Stevenson's writing, but above all I still keep and cherish an age-worn copy of  A Child's Garden of Verses because  it was one of my mother's books from when she was a very young girl.   It was from those shelves that I experienced my first taste of horror and speculative fiction with Edgar Allan Poe and dipped my toe into the world of Dante whom I do not claim to have understood on my first encounter.   What I could understand a bit better was the development of Jane Eyre from her terrible days in boarding school to her romantic encounters with Mr. Rochester, or Carol Kennicott and the events on Main Street depicted by Sinclair Lewis.  Along the reading way I acquired my own bookshelves in my bedroom.  It was here I began my own collection of classics like Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Twain,  The Jungle Books of Kipling,  and a collection of biographies of scientists and inventors like Michael Faraday, George Washington Carver, and Thomas Edison.
   
Later in my teen years I opened a tome that changed my life, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand whose heroic architect, Howard Roark, was among the heroes that I admired in my reading.  Heroes like Roark included Edmond Dantes from The Count of Monte Cristo.   Dumas' novel was a book I read as part of my school reading which augmented that program of reading that already had a sturdy foundation built at home.  There were other books for school including Willa Cather's My Antonia, Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days,  and the wonderful tale of immigrants, Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rolvaag.  These and many more as my reading for school expanded in high school and University.

My sister and I both spent many hours at the local library, The Matheson Memorial Library, in our home town.  It was there that we encountered many other authors and books that we enjoyed reading.  I first met Philip Carey on those shelves as Somerset Maugham's tale Of Human Bondage mesmerized me much as Jane Eyre had some years earlier.  The library books were a luxury that we could afford because they were free for us to read and make our own.  This was all part of a reading life that began in the home and did not stop, but continued during our school years as an independent and important part of our lives.  With all of our reading, in school, in the library, in the park and around town, and the reading that continues to this day, both my Sister and I continue to live in homes that are filled with books.  Because our love of reading had its start in the home of our parents with their library of books that they read and cherished as well.

Autumnal Expectations

Persuasion 
by Jane Austen

Thanks to Jenna of The Lost Generation Reader for hosting Austen in August reading event. 

"How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been--how eloquent, at least, were her wishes on the side of early warm attachment, and a cheerful confidence in futurity, against that over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence!  She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older--the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning." (p 33)

In Jane Austen's last novel, Persuasion, which was not published until after her death, Austen created a strong, mature, and independent heroine, Anne Elliot. One might consider this an autumnal work which emphasizes the flow of human sympathy and charity. Austen's attention to the sensibilities of her characters has been honed over the course of her preceding work, notably in Emma which she completed not long before beginning Persuasion.

Anne Elliot is characterized as having "lost her bloom". She is depicted as having a resigned melancholy due to her relations with her family who regard her as a "nobody" and her lack of having someone close to turn to. Her mother was no longer present, having died when Anne was fourteen. Having foolishly broken off an engagement eight years earlier to Frederick Wentworth, a penniless naval officer, Anne at the age of 27 has remained unmarried--and secretly devoted to Wentworth. The novel captures the poignant and seemingly hopeless situation of Anne by sharing the depth and subtleties of her emotional life. This is the essence of the book and its strength. Austen adopts a more metaphorical approach in her story than in preceding novels and, through Anne's feelings and the counterpart of nature, we see Anne coping and perhaps for the optimistic among us there is a possibility of hope in her future.

Major changes in Anne's life result from the move of her father to Bath while she remains behind in Uppercross with her younger sister's family. Thus begins a series of events that bring Wentworth, now a Captain, back into Anne's life. An unfortunate accident leads to Wentworth to begin re-examining his feelings about Anne. The changes that occur over the remainder of the story yield the expected classical ending; however the changes also suggest that the world of Kellynch Hall that Anne was raised in has been left behind for a new life that is not quite as expected.

This novel rivals Emma as my favorite of Jane Austen's novels; along with Pride and Prejudice it forms a trio of novels that I read again and again with growing joy and understanding.

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Comedy for Spring

Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”  ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

This is among my favorite novels. After having stumbled through it as a teenager I have read it several times as an adult and find it a delightful and very humorous read. My most recent reading was with a group where we were able to explore our varied viewpoints on the travails of the life and love of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. D'Arcy.
I was impressed with the clarity and classical balance of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. From the balanced structure with three sections of almost equal length to the deliberate, yet pleasing, way that the story advances the novel seems designed to display both an intimate and timeless story with a reasonableness that does not deny the underlying emotions on display. Mr. Bennet's apparent sedate approach to life provides counterpoint to the dizzying distress displayed by Mrs. Bennet. She is concerned with life's little problems (yes they are little, in retrospect), while they seem large and insoluble at the time, and whether they will work themselves out. However her overriding and immediate concern is over whether and when her daughters will marry. Will the young Bennet women be able to demonstrate their marriageability, much less choose among the landowners, the clergyman, the overly-proud (?) and the gamester to find fitting matches? Interweaving the misunderstanding of misplaced perspective and the imprecision of unwarranted judgements Austen has created a classic comedy of manners and marriage with a sensible narrative. Within a limited time and space she illumines both the rational and irrational in the humanity on display in this seemingly sheltered world (the turmoil of the outside world is indirectly displayed in the presence of the militia). Austen would go on to more mature demonstrations in Emma and Persuasion, but this book continues to delight the discerning reader.

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An Inspirational Memoir

Reading Lolita in Tehran:

A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

“I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American Dream, to justify this distinction. We in ancient countries have our past--we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.”  ― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

I read this memoir almost nine years ago with our Lincoln Park book group and it was one of our favorites the year it was published. While we normally wait until books are available in paperback we made an exception for Nafisi's memoir.
Nafisi does an excellent job of interweaving her memoir with the Western fiction she is discussing with her students, first at the university and then in secret, at home, with her select students. The book is divided into four sections, Lolita, Gatsby, Henry James, and Jane Austen. She touches on many other authors and novels as well and in such a way that made me want to read the works I hadn't already and reread some of the ones I had. Her analysis of Jane Austen's writing and other works is fascinating. The "party-line" Iranian objection to The Great Gatsby as a typical Western book of decadence that promotes adultery prompted me to think what I usually do when dubious objections are raised to writers' works. Did they read/see the same thing I read/saw (indeed, did they read/see it at all?), and if they did, did they get it?
As interesting as the literary aspect of the book is, the real story is what life was like in Iran during her time there. There was some humor, even though the story was mainly serious and included some things that amazed me: that there were snowstorms in Tehran, that Perry Mason, of all characters, seemed to be known by everyone, that the official movie censor was nearly blind!
The narrative relates a very personal story of Nafisi's life and students and the literature that they read during years of tumultuous change in Tehran. The story is moving for a reader who has always had the freedom to read and discuss any book that he chose. In a country where intolerant rulers limit freedom the liberating effect of literature on the students of Ms. Nafisi was inspirational.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi.  Random House, 2003.

An Intelligent Young Woman

Emma 

by Jane Austen

"Doing just what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor's judgments, but directed chiefly by her own. The real evils, indeed, of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself...." (Chap 1)

Jane Austen's Emma was first published on this day in 1815.  I most recently read Emma as the introductory novel in a class at the Newberry Library.  The class was entitled "Jane Austen's Heirs" and following the introductory refreshing reading of Emma the course included novels by such "heirs" of hers as Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, and Anita Brookner. The theme of course was Austen and Emma is one of the best of her novels to read and use as a model for the typical Austen novel.
Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like."  In the very first sentence she introduces the title character as "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich."  Emma, however, is also rather spoiled; she greatly overestimates her own matchmaking abilities; and she is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives and is often mistaken about the meanings of others' actions.
While Emma differs strikingly from Austen's other heroines in some respects, she resembles Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot, among others, in another way: she is an intelligent young woman with too little to do and no ability to change her location or everyday routine. Though her family is loving and her economic status secure, the quotidian details of Emma's everyday life seem a bit dul; she has few companions her own age when the novel begins. Her determined though inept matchmaking may represent a muted protest against the narrow scope of a wealthy woman's life, especially that of a woman who is single and childless.
And of course there is the classical balance of the novel's structure that, combined with the beauty of Austen's writing style, makes this novel a favorite of readers and writers, particularly those mentioned above, ever since it was published.

Emma by Jane Austen. Penguin Classics, New York. 2003 (1815)

The Literati

The Information 

by Martin Amis

“Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.”   ― Martin Amis, The Information

By the time I read The Information, the novel was notable not so much for its critical success, but for the scandals surrounding its publication, I had already enjoyed London Fields. The Information, while also set in London had a more contemporaneous plot and with its focus on the literati held my attention in spite of Amis's sometimes anarchic prose style. The enormous advance (an alleged £500,000) demanded and subsequently obtained by Amis for the novel attracted what the author described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he abandoned his long-serving agent, the late Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie. The split was by no means amicable; it created a rift between Amis and his long-time friend, Julian Barnes, who was married to Kavanagh. According to Amis's autobiography Experience (2000), he and Barnes had not resolved their differences.
The Information itself deals with the relationship between a pair of British writers of fiction. One, a spectacularly successful purveyor of "airport novels," is envied by his friend, an equally unsuccessful writer of philosophical and generally abstruse prose. The novel is written in the author's classic style: characters appearing as stereotyped caricatures, grotesque elaborations on the wickedness of middle age, and a general air of post-apocalyptic malaise.
Amis's novels are somewhat an acquired taste and his claim to be influenced by Jane Austen seems to have dissipated by the appearance of this and later novels. On the other hand perhaps not, with a fascination for words and contemporary relationships Amis's style may mirror our current world in a way not that different from Austen in her world.


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Jane Austen in the Information Age

Technology and Jane Austen

“It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language” 

― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

A lecture with the title, "Sense and Sensibility in the Age of Technology: Will Jane Austen survive?", suggests to me that I will be treated to a discussion of the latest ways that Jane Austen's novels have been morphed into electronic tidbits for our information age.  I remembered that in Jane Austen's day information was sent by letters, but this lecture informed us about the technology of our day - the internet and what changes that technology has spawned. 
The topic was presented yesterday by the lucid lecturer on Austen and the humanities, Elisabeth Lenckos - Instructor in the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago,  and I was not disappointed in the result of her presentation.  In the introduction to the topic she surveyed the changes wrought by technological progress in recent years including the growth of the internet and its impact on the creative urges of human beings as they have progressed beyond the age of homo ludens.  The body of the lecture featured a brilliant answer to the questions of the title with variations on the theme of technology and its impact on our reading of Jane Austen. The lecture quickly provided the answer that most attendees were no doubt expecting to the titular question.  It was a resounding yes.  But the answer only led to further questions about how and why this must be true.  Rather than relying simply on the the beautiful and economic prose style of Miss Austen, which is without doubt part of the answer, Ms. Lenckos turned to the philosophical foundations of Austen's novels.  She identified empiricism as evidenced by the importance of experience and observation in Austen's work along side rationalism as evidenced by the intuitive nature of the important characters.  The ability of "good" people in the novels (Elizabeth Bennet or Elinor Dashwood) to identify and understand the "frauds" (George Wickham or John Willoughby) was possible because they would observe and learn from their experience.  
I especially appreciated the lecturer's take on what readers may learn from Austen's novels;  that is the strength that comes from personal observation, independence of thought demonstrated by the characters, and the importance of reliance on informed intuition. The potential of these and the many examples from the novels on future human relationships is reason enough for the continued popularity of Austen's novels.  Finally the lecturer suggested that Jane Austen would likely embrace modern technology and engage in self-publication.  No matter how much our world is changed by the information age and the pervasive impact of modern technology classic texts which display universal truths such as we find in the novels of Jane Austen will continue to delight and inform readers everywhere.

Wild Imaginations

A Lecture on Jane Austen

"What wild imaginations one forms where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!"

-  Jane Austen

A lecture with the awesome title, "Monsters and Monstrosity": Desire and Corporeality in Jane Austen's Novels, gives one pause as to what to expect, even when the lecture is proffered by a proven sage (on Austen and her literature) such as Elisabeth Lenckos, Instructor in the Basic Program of the University of Chicago.  When that lecture begins with a discourse on the genre of "mash-up" novels based, loosely, on Jane Austen's original texts the wonder grew until Ms. Lenckos turned her analysis toward Austen's original texts and began to explicate the role of villainy and seduction as it was truly portrayed by the pen of Jane Austen.  The result was a delightfully instructive hour of learning about the influences and interests of Jane Austen and how she portrayed both lovers and other strangers without the need of some of the monsters that have been attached to her work in the twenty-first century.


The lecture made clear the familiarity that Austen had with the Gothic novel based, in part, on her novel Northanger Abbey which manages to maintain a basis in reality while referencing the Gothic and suggesting mysteriousness.  I enjoyed the recommendation of Anne Radcliffe (among several Gothic novelists referenced by Austen) as a worthwhile and entertaining representative of the Gothic genre in the lecture.  And also the discussion of Austen's ability to portray moral 'monsters' such as Willoughby and Wickham while maintaining a classically-balanced presentation of personal and social affairs in her novels.  Ultimately Austen's novels were shown to be " dramas of the mind and heart" where one can see the benefits of self-improvement and introspection in Austen's heroines.  It was an expansive lecture that limned the breathtaking scope of Austen's consideration of the role of the sensible and human reason in the realms of love.

Traditional Novels from Pym

Barbara Pym

"She had always been an unashamed reader of novels ..."
— Barbara Pym (Quartet in Autumn)

The British novelist Barbara Pym was born on this day in 1913. Pym's writing career spans the second half of the twentieth century but her early success with a handful of novels in the 1950s was followed by a fifteen-year period during which no one would publish her. Only three years before her death by cancer at age sixty-six she was rediscovered and achieved international fame. The loci of the rediscovery was a survey of famous British writers in the January 21, 1977 edition of the Times Literary Supplement, in which two of the famous writers asked to nominate the most underrated book of the previous seventy-five years picked novels by Pym. Philip Larkin, one of the surveyed writers, put Pym in Jane Austen’s league for her ability to keep her reader “always on the verge of smiling.” Recently Alexander McCall Smith echoed this comparison when he singled out Pym’s Excellent Women as “one of the most endearingly amusing English novels of the twentieth century.” My recent reading of Jane Gardam's Old Filth reminded me of the Pym style which She seems to share at least in part.

Pym's novel Jane and Prudence, first published in 1953, is set in a very British village, a world of jumble sales, charity fetes and tea with the new vicar. Jane, the vicar’s wife, is not quite comfortable with her role, though she tries to be dutiful. She first meets many of the prominent parishioners at the decorating of the church for the Harvest Festival, to which Adrian Driver, the village's very eligible tweed-and-brogues widower, arrives bearing his handsome contribution to the altar display:

“What a fine marrow, Mr. Driver,” said Miss Doggett in a bright tone. “It is the biggest one we have so far, isn’t it, Miss Morrow?”
Miss Morrow, who was scrabbling on the floor among the vegetables, mumbled something inaudible.
“It is magnificent,” said Mrs. Mayhew reverently.
Mr. Driver moved forward and presented the marrow to Miss Doggett with something of a flourish.
Jane felt as if she were assisting at some primitive kind of ritual whose significance she hardly dared to guess.

Miss Doggett is chief decorator and an elderly spinster; a few chapters on, we find her again trying to sort her men from her marrows: “Miss Doggett again looked puzzled; it was as if she had heard that men only wanted one thing but had forgotten for the moment what it was.” According to the novelist Jilly Cooper this was her finest work “ full of wit, plotting, characterization and miraculous observation". My favorite of Pym's novels is The Sweet Dove Died, published in 1978, with its fascinating heroine Leonora Eyre. As with all her novels the literary references abound.

An Afternoon Enlightenment

Jane Austen on Love

When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other's ultimate comfort. This may be bad morality to conclude with, but I believe it to be truth;

- Persuasion, chapter 24, Jane Austen

I am far from being an expert on love, but today I got a lesson in the philosophy of love from one of the masters of that field, Jane Austen, via a lecture by Elisabeth Lenckos who, inter alia, is program chair of the Jane Austen Society of North America, Greater Chicago Region and an instructor in the Basic Program and Humanities, Arts, and Sciences, the University of Chicago. Titles aside, Ms. Lenckos is a scintillating lecturer who was able to maintain the entertaining side of Jane Austen all the while she was expanding the horizons of the attendees, or at least my horizon regarding Austen's philosophy of love and some of its philosophical sources. It was an afternoon in which we were entertained with the history of an idea - the idea of love.

While I cannot begin to relate all the myriad details shared in Ms. Lenckos' talk I can share some of the highlights and ideas that I found particularly interesting. The talk began with a division of Austen's novels into two groups: the "lighter" novels - Pride & Prejudice, Emma, and Northanger Abbey; and the more "serious" novels - Sense & Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. She distinguished between three types of Love in three of Austen's novels suggesting that the protagonists of each demonstrated 1) Moral, platonic love in Fanny Price of Mansfield Park, 2) a More empirical ethical love in Emma, and 3) a union of the two types in Anne Elliot of Persuasion. Ms. Lenckos went on to discuss philosophical approaches to love from Aristotle and Plato to the Idealist approach concluding that Austen understood all of these and as an "artist" of love was able to develop and " appreciation of an ideal of love". Austen did not preach about love, but observed it and shared her observations through the invention of the modern love story.

What is the source of Austen's genius on the subject of love? It seems that she was able to develop a comprehensive view of the philosophies of her own time, including the rise of sensibility (Earl of Shaftesbury, Hume and Smith) and develop stories about real people who lived and loved, learned and grew through their experiences. Perhaps the best and greatest example was Anne Elliot in Persuasion who through eight years of effort, studying literature rhetoric and poetry was able to mature and through her reason win the love of Captain Wentworth. Through this talk I learned about female philosophers with whom I was unfamiliar including Mary Astel (1666-1731) who influenced Austen. The result of this talk was the expansion of my understanding of Jane Austen's genius and an enlightening afternoon. A fine way to spend Valentine's Day.

Rereading

Some Thoughts on the Pleasures of Being a Re-Reader
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: May 29, 2009


I’ve always admired my friends who are wide readers. A few even pride themselves on never reading a book a second time. I’ve been a wide reader at times. When I was much younger, I spent nearly a year in the old Reading Room of the British Museum, discovering in the book I was currently reading the title of the next I would read.

But at heart, I’m a re-reader. The point of reading outward, widely, has always been to find the books I want to re-read and then to re-read them. In part, that’s an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that no matter how long and how widely I read, I will only ever make my way through a tiny portion of the world’s literature. (The British Museum was a great place to learn that lesson.) And in part, it’s a concession to the limits of my memory. I forget a lot, which makes the pleasure of re-reading all the greater.

The love of repetition seems to be ingrained in children. And it is certainly ingrained in the way children learn to read — witness the joyous and maddening love of hearing that same bedtime book read aloud all over again, word for word, inflection for inflection. Childhood is an oasis of repetitive acts, so much so that there is something shocking about the first time a young reader reads a book only once and moves on to the next. There’s a hunger in that act but also a kind of forsaking, a glimpse of adulthood to come.

The work I chose in adulthood — to study literature — required the childish pleasure of re-reading. When I was in graduate school, once through Pope’s “Dunciad” or Berryman’s “The Dream Songs” was not going to cut it. A grasp of the poem was presumed to lie on the far side of many re-readings, none of which were really repetitions. The same is true of being a writer, which requires obsessive re-reading. But the real re-reading I mean is the savory re-reading, the books I have to be careful not to re-read too often so I can read them again with pleasure.

It’s a miscellaneous library, always shifting. It has included a book of the north woods: John J. Rowlands’s “Cache Lake Country,” which I have re-read annually for many years. It may still include Raymond Chandler, though I won’t know for sure till the next time I re-read him. It includes Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” and lots of A.J. Liebling and a surprising amount of George Eliot. It once included nearly all of Dickens, but that has been boiled down to “The Pickwick Papers” and “Great Expectations.” There are many more titles, of course. This is not a canon. This is a refuge.

Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Re-reading “Middlemarch,” for instance, or even “The Great Gatsby,” I’m able to pay attention to what’s really happening in the language itself — a pleasure surely as great as discovering who marries whom, and who dies and who does not.

The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard — always a stranger.

I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn’t learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God’s injunction and Adam’s loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. “Hurry,” they say, “he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/opinion/30sat4.html