My mother was a voracious reader. We lived in Nelson and she took me with her to the Nelson Institute Library before I started school, often going twice a week to change her books.
My mother read whodunnits and much else. It was a habit she ingrained in me. She read each of Jane Austen’s six novels every year.
Austen was born in 1775. December 16 this year will be the 250th anniversary of her birth.
As a student at Nelson College, I won some prizes. The best one was Austen’s six novels published in an attractive edition by Thomas Nelson of London.
My mother told me when I was seven I had the “gift of the gab” and should become a lawyer, so I took law at Victoria University of Wellington, but also did a BA. In English, I was lectured by Professor Joan Stevens; she was a superb lecturer. One of the set texts was Austen’s Emma.
I found this study a pleasant relief from the rigours of law.
Evergreen
It seems to me a great pity that the humanities are no longer in educational fashion. I found my arts degree as important to my future as my law degree. Indeed, in terms of my personal development, it was more enriching. I have maintained an interest in Austen’s work over the years and have re-read the novels many times.
Looking at my bookshelf, I find I have more than 25 volumes about her – biographies, editions of her letters and literary analyses. Her image was placed on the £10 note in Britain in 2017, the 200th anniversary of her death on July 18, 1817. In the bookshops in Wellington new printings of her novels are still being sold. That cannot be true for many writers who have been dead for more than 200 years.
In 2001, Jane Austen: Antipodean Views was published in Australia. Many Australians and New Zealanders contributed to the book; I was one of them. The judgment I gave then was, “Jane Austen is simply the greatest novelist who ever wrote in English.” I believe that still.
I find her reference to Shakespeare interesting. She says in Mansfield Park: “But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution.” Much the same can be said of Austen.
It is not easy to define where her genius lay. The facts of her life were simple. She never married although she had opportunities. I suspect she was somewhat in love with her own creation, Mr Darcy.
She was a creature of the 18th century and more particularly of the Regency period, which loosely applied from 1795 until the reign of Queen Victoria began in 1837.
Austen’s parents were well educated with cultivated minds. Her father was a clergyman and an Oxford graduate who taught his daughter. She also had some formal schooling and was encouraged to read a great deal. The family was well off while he remained alive and had connections with the gentry. Two of her brothers were naval officers during the Napoleonic Wars.
Austen’s genius lies in her wit and humour. Some of her writing is hilarious and makes me laugh out loud.
It was certainly not a democratic age. Having been frightened by the bloodshed of the French Revolution, the English were cautious. A feature of Austen’s novels is the precise treatments of differences in social class: the aristocrats, the gentry, the middle classes and the yeomen are all represented. People who earn their livings by trade were looked down upon by those higher up the hierarchy. And many of the families depicted have servants, whose characters are also important in the narratives.
The landscapes of southern England are depicted favourably. It is country life with sojourns to London. Travel is by carriage or horse, and often difficult.
Yet it is the interaction of human beings that are the Austen mainstay. She has a habit of sharing the inner workings of some of the characters as they interact with one another or reflect upon one another. The formality of the social forms of introduction feature frequently.
Most of the characters are not flat, they develop and change. Some have few redeeming characteristics, for example, Mrs Bennet and the Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Harriet, in Emma, seems rather sad when Emma’s efforts to marry her above her class fail but she was then happy with her first preference – a farmer – whom she married.
The unbearable snobbishness of the baronet Sir Walter Elliot and two of his daughters, but not Anne, is a big theme in Persuasion. The contrasting natures of sisters Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility contain lessons for living.
There is satire too. See, for example, Northanger Abbey’s treatment of the Gothic novel. But it is notable there is little discussion of politics in any Austen novel. English 19th-century novelist Anthony Trollope, in contrast, wrote many novels that primarily involved politics.
There is a lot about people falling in love, but it really does not appear that these are romantic novels in the true sense; they seem too steeped in the values of the Regency for that.
Listening in
Austen’s genius lies in her wit and humour. Some of her writing is hilarious and makes me laugh out loud. Her superb English prose is as pure and precise today as when it was written. Then there come the subtle and complex ironical observations: “Kitty has no discretion with her coughs, she times them ill.”
Over the past 10 years, I have often listened to her novels as audiobooks in bed. Various versions are available and different readers bring new emphases and understandings of the novels that I find fascinating. I am not sure Austen’s work was designed to be read aloud to the family as much as the work of the social realist Charles Dickens was.
Listening to Austen rather than reading by eye works wonderfully well. It is superior in enhancing my understanding by experiencing a wider range of emotional reactions.
I seldom bother with any other author on audiobooks these days, just Jane.
My two favourite Austen novels are Persuasion, the last one she wrote, and Pride and Prejudice, which was a heavily reworked version of “First Impressions” that was written in 1797 but never published.
Entering another world has a strangely soothing effect. The worries of our world are removed. Anxieties ebb away. For me, Austen is therapy. Her work adds to my sense of civilisation and what it means to be human.
Sir Geoffrey Palmer was the 33rd prime minister of New Zealand.
