A Jane Austen Education Read Online Free
was, I saw, with her characters. A thousand authors could write novels about ordinary people, but only one of those books would be Emma. Austen’s characters came to seem so vivid, so meaningful, because she put them down on the page exactly the way she placed her words: without condescension, without apology, but with a masterful talent for arrangement. Emma was balanced by Jane Fairfax, and Miss Bates by Harriet Smith, and Mr. Martin by Mr. Elton, and all of them by one another, setting the whole story in motion and creating scenes that felt as natural as real life. It didn’t matter how small the frame was, because it contained a whole world.
As it turned out, people had been reacting to Jane Austen exactly as I had for as long as they’d been reading her. The first reviews warned that readers might find her stories “trifling,” with “no great variety,” “extremely deficient” in imagination and “entirely devoid of invention,” with “so little narrative” that it was hard to even describe what they were about. Austen herself, who liked to collect her friends’ and family’s opinions of her books, recorded that a certain Mrs. Guiton found Emma “too natural to be interesting.” Madame de Staël, an illustrious French intellectual, thought her work “ vulgaire ”—which makes it just as well that Austen declined to meet her formidable contemporary at a London dinner party when she had the chance.
Austen knew that she wasn’t creating for just anybody. “I do not write for such dull Elves,” she said of Pride and Prejudice, adapting some lines of poetry, “As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.” And Emma, she knew, would be the hardest challenge of all. “I am going to take a heroine,” she said as she was about to start working on the novel, “whom no-one but myself will much like.”
But from the beginning, there were readers of discernment who recognized her genius behind the façade. No less a judge than Sir Walter Scott, the leading writer of her day, author of epic poems and sweeping historical novels like Ivanhoe and The Bride of Lammermoor, confessed her superiority:
That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of description and sentiment, is denied me.
Another critic poked fun at readers who thought that there could be but “little merit in making characters act and talk so exactly like the people whom they saw around them every day,” not recognizing that, as with Mozart or Rembrandt, the highest art lies in concealing art. Such readers, he joked, were like the man who couldn’t see why everyone was making a big fuss about a certain celebrated actor, “who merely behaved on the stage as anybody might be expected to in real life.”
Her reputation slowly grew, but by the late 1800s there were only two opinions about Jane Austen. Either you loved her or you hated her. Mark Twain, a famously exuberant hater, swore that reading Austen made him feel “like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven.” “It seems a great pity to me,” he taunted an Austen fan, “that they allowed her to die a natural death.” “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, ” he told another friend, “I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone.”
But if you loved her—if you “got” her—you felt like you’d joined a secret club, with its own code words and special signs and degrees of initiation. It was a creed, in the words of one writer, “as ardent as a religion,” and “a real appreciation of Emma ,” her subtlest book of all, was “the final test of citizenship in her kingdom.” Rudyard Kipling, very much a citizen himself, celebrated the phenomenon in
As it turned out, people had been reacting to Jane Austen exactly as I had for as long as they’d been reading her. The first reviews warned that readers might find her stories “trifling,” with “no great variety,” “extremely deficient” in imagination and “entirely devoid of invention,” with “so little narrative” that it was hard to even describe what they were about. Austen herself, who liked to collect her friends’ and family’s opinions of her books, recorded that a certain Mrs. Guiton found Emma “too natural to be interesting.” Madame de Staël, an illustrious French intellectual, thought her work “ vulgaire ”—which makes it just as well that Austen declined to meet her formidable contemporary at a London dinner party when she had the chance.
Austen knew that she wasn’t creating for just anybody. “I do not write for such dull Elves,” she said of Pride and Prejudice, adapting some lines of poetry, “As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.” And Emma, she knew, would be the hardest challenge of all. “I am going to take a heroine,” she said as she was about to start working on the novel, “whom no-one but myself will much like.”
But from the beginning, there were readers of discernment who recognized her genius behind the façade. No less a judge than Sir Walter Scott, the leading writer of her day, author of epic poems and sweeping historical novels like Ivanhoe and The Bride of Lammermoor, confessed her superiority:
That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of description and sentiment, is denied me.
Another critic poked fun at readers who thought that there could be but “little merit in making characters act and talk so exactly like the people whom they saw around them every day,” not recognizing that, as with Mozart or Rembrandt, the highest art lies in concealing art. Such readers, he joked, were like the man who couldn’t see why everyone was making a big fuss about a certain celebrated actor, “who merely behaved on the stage as anybody might be expected to in real life.”
Her reputation slowly grew, but by the late 1800s there were only two opinions about Jane Austen. Either you loved her or you hated her. Mark Twain, a famously exuberant hater, swore that reading Austen made him feel “like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven.” “It seems a great pity to me,” he taunted an Austen fan, “that they allowed her to die a natural death.” “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, ” he told another friend, “I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone.”
But if you loved her—if you “got” her—you felt like you’d joined a secret club, with its own code words and special signs and degrees of initiation. It was a creed, in the words of one writer, “as ardent as a religion,” and “a real appreciation of Emma ,” her subtlest book of all, was “the final test of citizenship in her kingdom.” Rudyard Kipling, very much a citizen himself, celebrated the phenomenon in
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