★★★★★ 5
Aunt Jane, Georgian Spinster Queen of English Prose
Format: Mass Market Paperback
I'm reading Emma again for the third time. It happened like this: I thought I'd try an audio book on CD for the first time, something to listen to in the car besides music. Scanning the shelves at the local bookstore, I saw loads of contemporary best sellers, self and financial help, new age and evangelical Christian spirituality, and Jane Austen's Emma in MP3 format, all on one disc. Austen! Water in the desert! I scooped her up.
For the last week I've been listening to her in my car. At the beginning it was without much concentration. Over the next few days my attention gradually increased. Now I'm hooked. Down the throat. Through the gut. Again. It happens to me every time I return to Jane. I just can't get enough. The last two nights I've gone to bed reading ahead of where I've listened. Even though the story is coming back to me, I'm still taken by it, hook line & sinker. Jane's reeling me in, and the line is utterly slack.
Now, I am a guy. I break out in hives if I happen to accidentally brush a romance novel. As far as I am concerned, bodice rippers where the tall olive skinned duke inevitably has his forceful yet gentle way with the heroine are good only as ammunition with which to tease the women in my life who enjoy such tripe. Having said this, I realize a lot of people also refer to Jane Austen as "Chick Lit," equating her with the likes of Nicolas Sparks. For the record, those people are on crack.
Austen is much more a comedic writer than a writer of what we call romances. She is simply a hoot. Subtle disjunctures and ironies build to exquisite crescendos. She has me laughing every other page. Her characters, even her unpleasant and ridiculous ones, tend to breed sympathy. Like most of my favorite books, she creates worlds, or a world, really (all of her books are set in the same historic and geographic milieu,) which comforts and gladdens. The feeling I get from her is much like the feeling I get when I read Tolkien describe the Shire or Last Homely House, or something like the children's book Frog & Toad to my niece.
It's an eating poached egg on toast snuggled up inside under a quilt on the couch with a cup of tea on a rainy day kind of feeling. (Don't you just love English prepositions and phrasal verbs? Try doing that in French! Austen and phrasal verbs: two of the many reasons English speakers ought to rejoice in their language, I say!)
Anyway, during all of her stories, including Emma, Europe was being blown apart by the Napoleonic Wars, and the only oblique references in any of her stories to that maelstrom is that Great Britain has a mobilized Army (Pride & Prejudice) and an active Navy (Persuasion.) The reason the military is important has nothing to do with Austerlitz, Waterloo, Trafalgar or any of that nonsense. Rather, it is that both services have officers which make very suitable suitors for women of her heroines' social positions (Lt. Wickham & Capt. Wentworth, for example.)
Some brand this awful: elitist, sexist, parochial. I, for one, find it beautiful. Small, intimate, ordered, secure, anchored. Very human and sane, that is.
What matters most is not what some silly diminutive one armed Corsican with maniacal delusions of world conquest is doing; no. What really matters is whether and how Mr. Woodhouse takes his gruel, or if Mr. Elton will propose to Harriet. Or if Mr. Knightly and Mrs. Weston have come to visit yet, today. Will Mr. Frank Churchill come, and what is he like? Has Emma truly foiled Mr. Martin's advances on her friend, he being an entirely unsuitable yeoman farmer? Harriet must marry a gentleman, you see.
Just so. Indeed, these are truly the things that mattered- and still matter- most. Don't let the history books and the reverse snobbery of some critics fool you.
Instead go read this book, and every other that Jane wrote, and prepare to be enchanted.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2006


