Jane lies in Winchester-- blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and for all she made!
And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain,
Glory, Love, and Honour unto England's Jane!
-Kipling, "The Janeites"
Today is Jane Austen's 231st birthday. For some time now one of my lj tags has been "jane austen pwns you." I am going to take this opportunity to show you a little bit of why this is so.
Jane pioneered the art of making the everyday extraordinary. She knew people very well, and she wrote them just as they were. That is why her works have lasted so long. You can
still recoginze people you know in the form of Lucy Steele, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Catherine Morland, and so on and so on. She created such
wonderful characters. There was a point when I was reading
Northanger Abbey that I got so angry and frustrated with John and Isabella Thorpe that I had to put the book down and fume. Because
I knew people like that, and they had done things like that to me, and I wanted to whack them upside the head. I have also, many times, laughed out loud reading Jane-- and that's not something that even I do very frequently with "the classics."
It's not very widely known these days, but Jane is actually
hilarious. In Rudyard Kipling's story "The Janeites," about a group of soldiers who had formed a secret Jane Austen society, one character says this: "...they'd begin, as often as not, on this Secret Society woman I was tellin' you of-- this Jane. She was the only woman I ever 'eard 'em say a good word for. 'Cordin' to them Jane was a none-such. I didn't know then she was a Society." That quote cracks me up, partly because it puts so plainly what is just perfectly
true. You may not believe me when I say Jane Austen is hilarious, because you don't go in for the romantic comedy of manners laced with affectionate satire and snark. So let me show you this.
This is an excerpt from a piece of Jane's
Juvenilia. It was written when she was about fifteen, and it's like something a really clever fifteen-year-old would write. It's from a... novella, I guess... called "Love and Freindship," a parody of the romantic novels of the day. It might be useful to point out that fainting and running mad were favorite pasttimes of heroines in these novels. When they disovered their husbands to be dead or unfaithful, the would a) faint instantly, recover only to faint again, repeat as necessary, or b) scream and fall into a hysterical fit, recover briefly, become hysterical again, repeat as necessary. Here a carriage has just been overturned on the road, and the two young ladies who act as heroines realize that the victims of the accident were their long-lost husbands.
"Sophia shreiked and fainted on the ground-- I screamed and instantly ran mad--. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses, some minutes, and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an Hour and a Quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation-- Sophia fainting every moment and I running mad as often. At length a groan from the hapless Edward (who alone retained any share of life) restored us to ourselves. Had we indeed before imagined that either of them lived, we should have been more sparing of our Greif-- but as we had aupposed when we first beheld them that they were no more, we knew that nothing could remain to be done but what we were about. ... I was overjoyed to find him yet sensible.
'Oh! tell me Edward (said I) tell me I beseech you before you die, what has befallen you since that unhappy Day in which Augustus was arrested and we were separated--'
'I will,' (said he) and instantly fetching a deep sigh, Expired--. Sophia immediately sunk again into a swoon--.
My greif was more audible. My Voice faltered, My Eyes assumed a vacant stare, my face became as pale as Death, and my senses were considerably impaired--.
'Talk not to me of Phaetons (said I, raving in a frantic, incoherent manner)-- Give me a violin--. I'll play to him and soothe him in his melancholy Hours-- Beware ye gentle Nymphs of Cupid's Thunderbolts, avoid the piercing shafts of Jupiter-- Look at that grove of Firs-- I see a Leg of Mutton-- They told me Edward was not Dead; but they deceived me-- they took him for a cucumber--' Thus I continued wildly exclaiming on my Edward's Death--. For two Hours did I rave thus madly and should not then have left off, as I was not in the least fatigued, had not Sophia who was just recovered from her swoon, intreated me to consider that Night was no approaching and that the Damps began to fall."
Is that not wonderfully goofy stuff? And it is awesome because I wrote things like that (maybe not that clever) when I was fifteen! I write things like that
now! If I do things like this, how very easy it is to imagine teenaged Jane trying to repress laughter while reading this out loud in a highly dramatic manner to her sister!
Here is another bit of Juvenilia from the brilliant "History of England, by a Partial, Prejudiced, and Ignorant Historian," which reminds me of a mix of Monty Python and Dave Barry Slept Here, A Sort-Of History of the United States. In this work, Jane's overall goal is to try to make Mary Queen of Scots out to be a martyr at the hands of her cruel and inhumane cousin Elizabeth. This is from the section on Henry VIII, "whose only merit was his not being
quite so bad as his daughter Elizabeth."
"The Crimes and Cruelties of this Prince, were too numerous to be mentioned, (as this history I trust has fully shown;) and nothing can be said in his vindication, but that his abolishing Religious Houses and leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in general, which probably was a principal motive for his doing it, since otherwise why should a Man who was of no Religion himself be at so much trouble to abolish one which had for ages been established in the Kingdom. His Majesty's 5th Wife was the Duke of Norfolk's Neice who, tho' universally acquitted of the crimes for which she was beheaded, has been by many people supposed to have led an abandoned life before her Marriage-- of this however I have many doubts, since she was a relation of that noble Duke of Norfolk who was so warm in the Queen of Scotland's cause, and who at last fell victim to it. The Kings last wife contrived to survive him, but with difficulty effected it."
When I first decided to do this post, I had just finished
Persuasion, Jane's last novel. I read it shortly after I read the Juvenilia, actually, and how much she had matured during her life, the sort of bittersweetness of
Persuasion-- especially if the story if the Great Unknown, the man who met Jane Austen (at Lyme, I believe) and would have married her but died before he could, is true-- is so stirring. Here are some excerpts of what I'm talking about.
"Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love."
"She left it all behind her; all but the recollection that such things had been."
"One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering-- which was by no means the case at Lyme."
"No, I believe you capable of everything great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as-- if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone."
Mixed with the humor of such lines as:
"One likes to hear what is going on, to be
au fait as to the newest modes of being trifling and silly."
And the romance of:
"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tel me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you."
Let me state the obvious for a moment: What a range.
She's such a fascinating woman. And because of the way she writes, on such a personal level, forming a relationship with the reader, we all think of her as our friend. Our friend Jane. This is why her fans are called Janeites, not Austenites, usually. We feel like we
know her-- which, of course, we don't. No one living today will ever completely know the whole truth of who Jane Austen was as a person. But we all know a little bit, the little bit that we connect to so intimately through her writing.
Let me quote Kipling once more: "There's no one to touch Jane when you're in a tight place. Gawd bless 'er, whoever she was."
Yes. God bless her, whoever she was.
Happy Birthday, Jane!
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storydice. The Clone Wars recaps have been sitting on my computer forever, and now I'm scrambling to post them all before the second season premiere, so the plan is to post one of those a day until I run out of recaps or run out of days.
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