capri0mni | Thoughts on Jane Austen, and her last novel, Persuasion (Reply)

I've read Jane Austen before -- I read Pride and Prejudice in high school, and Northanger Abbey in college. And I enjoyed the experience both times.

But it wasn't until I saw the televised production of Persuasion, last Sunday, that I was tempted, again, to read Austen outside of an academic context, mostly because I found the television production utterly confusing, and that the ending came on too quickly, in an "OMG My Romantic Ending is Pasted on, Yay!" sort of way, and I knew enough of Austen to know she was a much more careful writer than that, and I wanted to see what she'd put in that the tv-show makers left out.

So this is the first time I've read Austen as a mature adult (I certainly wasn't emotionally mature in high school, and I was just on the cusp maturity in my mid-twenties). This is also the first time I've read her work in an open-ended way, without teacher-led discussions on What it All Means, or any time limits or essays to be expected and graded at the end.

So, maybe, this is the first time I've read any Jane Austen, full stop.

Some thoughts:

This is the last of Jane Austen's novels, completed when she was 41 (my age, sorta). She was starting to get ill halfway through writing it, and she died before it could be published. I can't help but wonder what she would have changed or polished up a bit, if she'd gotten the chance.

As I'm reading, I'm finding myself fascinated with studying how she contrasts a character's internal thoughts and the external events that trigger them (something that I have particular trouble balancing, in my own work), and how she can a) make it perfectly clear and reasonable why her protagonist thinks something, and b) makes it clear that maybe, possibly, probably, the protagonist has it All Wrong -- at the same time! She's a master at this. I must study, more closely, how she does it.

There's something very poignant, isn't there, about a woman at the end of her life writing a story about confronting the deepest regrets of our lives, and being forgiven for our mistakes (even if she wasn't consciously aware of the end, when she began)?

The dialogue! Did people really talk like that, 200-something years ago, or is that literary convention? I suspect the latter. But really, like the number of licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center, the world may never know...

I know I've gone on at length, here, about how literature is over-rated as the be-all and end-all of culture. But there is something very good about reading, too -- especially when you know that's the original form it was created in (instead of a tv adaptation, or movie or play). Watching an adaptation is like listening to two people talking at the same time: the original author, and the adaptor. Even with a very good adaptation, the two people are not saying the same thing, and sometimes (often?) you can't quite make out what the author actually says. Reading something that was created to be read is a bit like sitting down to a personal conversation with someone, and now that I'm reading without a teacher looking over my shoulder, I'm getting a very strong sense of this from Austen's "voice".

I recently read, somewhere, that Jane Austen thought her protagonist was "too good." I thought I'd read that in the Wikipedia article on Persuasion, but it's not there. ... In any case, if Miss Austen had been around and asked me to beta-read, to ask how to fix the "too-goodness," I'd suggest that she leave her protagonist as she is, and just give her father and older sister at least some redeeming qualities. I know that's hubristic of me, to be offering advice to my ancestors, but still, I'm just saying...

I saw this point raised on a review blog on the PBS website, about the TV adaptation, but it's a good one, and I'll raise it here, myself: How come a character like Darcy (from Pride and Prejudice), who's vain, rude, and can't dance, gets all the fangirls swooning, but Captain Wentworth, who would (probably) be a feminist, if he lived today, is virtually ignored?

Also, I love Mrs. Croft, the Admiral's wife (and Captain Wentworth's sister). I'd invite her to dinner, most definitely. She probably knows all the best bawdy jokes.