Belated birthday wishes, Jane

Observances of Jane Austen’s  250th birthday, including festivals, Regency-themed balls, concerts, talks, exhibits, and parades, were reported around the world. That I did not note the semiquincentennial until December 16 had come and gone tells how much I’m neglecting the news to avoid hearing the name Trump. 

Jane Austen’s popularity has only grown with time. Numerous surveys of contemporary readers rank her the number 1 novelist. Her works spawn book spinoffs, movies, conferences, tours, merchandise, and more. How do you account for such enduring renown?

Though set in a society very different from ours, Austen’s novels never grow old because her main concerns are internal. Her themes are timeless — self-awareness, morality, duty, misunderstanding, pride, social climbing, snobbishness, and the proper balance of reason and emotion. Personal character is paramount. Her protagonists have to overcome problems of their own making. Austen addresses these serious themes with wit and irony. Her observations are humorous, her characters vivid and often laughable. She employs a lot of dialogue rather than dense description.

I’ve known people who think Austen is lightweight because of her happy endings, her avoidance of politics and world affairs, and her cult following. In their minds great popularity and high literature cannot coexist. Ah, but her heroines have to struggle on the way to happy endings. They are young women humbled into self-discovery. As for the marriage plots, it’s not as though women had many choices in Regency England. If marriage was their best future, it was well to marry happily.

Over the years I’ve reread Austen’s six novels many times. I love the sparkle of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and the sensitivity of Anne Elliot in Persuasion. Emma Woodhouse’s meddling in Emma, Henry Tilney’s banter in Northanger Abbey, and Marianne Dashwood’s emotionalism in Sense and Sensibility never fail to entertain me. It’s only Mansfield Park that I’m still learning to appreciate.

How sad that Austen died at 41 when six of her seven siblings lived past 70. How many more novels she might have given us. Longing for readalikes, I check out other writers called “Austen’s literary heirs” for their wit, perception, or focus on domestic life. 

Barbara Pym, a British novelist of the mid-20th-century, was a happy discovery at first. Like Austen, Pym preferred to work on a small canvas, limiting her scope to the people and the world she knew. I loved her early novel Excellent Women, focusing on an unmarried young woman whose life revolves around her parish. “Jane Austen recreated only funnier,” the late New York Times literary critic Anatole Broyard called Pym. But as I read Pym’s later novels, I felt sad rather than amused. Her female protagonists are socially marginal, lonely women who fuss over undeserving men, often clergy. 

I’ve read serious novels by so-called Austen heirs: Elizabeth Bowen (The House in Paris), Penelope Fitzgerald (The Gate of Angels), Elizabeth Taylor (Palladin), Anita Brookner (Hotel du Lac), Anthony Trollope (Barchester Towers), Elizabeth Gaskell (Cranford), E. M. Forster (A Room with a View), Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence), Marjorie Oliphant (Miss Marjoribanks), Rose Macauley (The Towers of Trebizond), Henry James (Washington Square), and Nancy Mitford (The Pursuit of Love). I’ve read lighter novelists: Angela Thirkell (High Rising), E. F. Benson (Queen Lucia), Georgette Heyer (Arabella), and Miss Read (A Peaceful Retirement). I’ve read spinoffs featuring Austen’s characters. 

Most of these books were enjoyable, but I don’t wish to reread any. None made me feel exhilarated, as I do when I finish an Austen novel. There is only one Jane Austen. I’ll belatedly observe the semiquincentennial by rereading Austen’s own words.