Two Hundred Years Dead Yet Fresh as a Daisy: How Jane Austen Survives

mithra ballesteros
Jul 21, 2017 · 7 min read
My set of Penguin Classics with foil-stamped covers designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith

Many years ago, we moved into a new neighborhood in suburban Chicago. As we unloaded the moving truck, a couple from down the street stopped in to welcome us.

After extending a plate of freshly baked cookies, they got down to brass tacks. “Might I inquire which school the children will attend in the fall?” the gentleman asked. When I replied that we moved specifically for the great public school, he cringed. “You know,” he whispered, “they teach trades in the public high school here. Perhaps a look at North Shore Country Day is in order.”

Oh, what Jane Austen would have done with this pair! But she is dead, so we took it upon ourselves to carry on her legacy. For as long as we lived on that street, my husband and I referred to our neighbors as The Odious Eltons, a nod to the snobby couple in Emma. “I don’t suppose the Eltons would object to seeing our naked offspring on the front lawn this evening, would they,” my husband would say through clenched jaw as he hooked up the sprinkler.

Therein lies the secret of Jane Austen’s enduring popularity. She created characters we recognize from our day-to-day lives. She wrote about regular people. Her heroines were underdogs. Her heroes were flawed. Ancillary characters were fully drawn and often, comically portrayed. And no one escaped the knife of neighborhood gossip.

This style was unheard of at the time, revolutionary even, and we modern readers forget that Austen invented it.

Sidenote: the above paragraph is your hint. If you are not a fan of Austen — if you nod in agreement with Mark Twain who said he despised Austen so deeply, he wished he could dig her up so he could “hit her over the skull with her own shinbone” — then you better run along. Because this week marks the 200th anniversary of the death of the greatest novelist who ever lived and the following post shall be a bulleted list of fawning opinions, beloved book recommendations, and gossipy remarks on Austen money.

  • Favorite Jane Austen Book in the Summer: Pride and Prejudice because it sparkles. When published anonymously in 1813, one critic called it “too clever to be by a woman.” The novel contains a pleasing ratio of heroes to buffoons. The plot twists are salacious. You can imagine the steamy sex being had behind closed doors. And the ending should be a lesson to all writers, most particularly J.K. Rowling: with a deft plot and few words, Austen steers the narrative to an ending that is close to what we desire but not so much to be predictable.
  • Favorite Jane Austen Book to read in bad weather: I love Persuasion. Its setting, the seafront village of Lyme Regis, is perfectly moody and beautifully conjured. Anne Elliot is a 27-year-old heroine stuck in the most awful family imaginable. Her father is obsessed with women’s complexions and I think of him every time I pluck my eyebrows. Anne is gentle and kind to the point that we wonder if she isn’t a marshmallow. But no, we learn she’s made of iron. We are forever thrilled when she ends up inspiring the most beautiful love letter ever written:

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell 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. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F.W.

  • Favorite Book Influenced by Austen: Atonement by Ian McKewan in which a young girl spies on her older sister and misconstrues what she sees, to disastrous effect. McKewan read Northanger Abbey when he was seventeen, and it made a lasting impression. He said the idea that everyone is watching, that “no one can hide from public scrutiny when a network of communications and media can lay everything open” greatly influenced his book.
  • Favorite Retelling of an Austen Novel: I have read many retellings and The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine is the only one that stands on its own two feet. A modern take on Sense and Sensibility, it tells the story of Betty and her daughters Miranda and Annie. Betty’s husband of forty-eight years has taken a mistress and Betty is jettisoned from her Upper West Side apartment. Betty’s grown daughters want to help their mother but they’ve got a bushel of their own problems. If you like Elinor Lipman or Nora Ephron, you’ll love this book.
  • Favorite Fake Retelling of an Austen Novel: Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding borrows very very little from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but I’m pretty confident Austen would have dragged sis Cassandra to the film and they would have snorted Pepsi through their noses at Bridget’s accounting of cigarettes smoked, bottles of wine drank, loves and pounds lost and gained.
  • Favorite Books With No Connection to Austen Except They Remind Me of Her: Plainsong by Kent Haruf for its spare language, sly humor, and small-town setting. Also, Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple for its biting send-up of post-modern America and its satisfying ending. Also, the entire Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brien really quenched my desire for Austen-like characterizations and prose.
  • Best Film Adaptation: Pride and Prejudice, (1995 BBC). First, Colin Firth’s wet shirt. Second, the heat between Firth and co-star Jennifer Ehle is legit. Off screen, they were sneaking into each other’s bedrooms. Third, Jane Austen’s great great great grand niece, Anna Chancellor, played the delicious role of Caroline Bingley. Fourth, this BBC production inspired Helen Fielding to write the brilliant Bridget Jones’s Diary.
  • Silliest Academic Study of Austen: The Word Choices that Explain Why Jane Austen Endures. One commenter wrote, “Studies like this are interesting, but they will drive good women to the likes of Wickham if brought into conversation.”
  • Most Interesting Academic Study of Austen: The Many Ways in Which We Are Wrong About Jane Austen: Lies, Damn Lies, and Literary Scholarship.
  • Most Interesting Honor Bestowed Upon Jane Austen: Austen is the only woman besides the Queen to be featured on a British pound. Her face decorates a new ten-pound note issued last week by the Bank of England in honor of the bicentenary of her death. This gesture would have delighted Austen. She wrote about money the way other authors write about scenery — very specifically. How many pounds a year, who would inherit which estate, who needed to protect an inheritance: these were questions that polite society didn’t discuss, but Austen did. For more on Austen and the subject of money, this post offers more on the subject, including a table with currency conversions.
  • How to Convince Naysayers Who Don’t Understand Austen: Sadly, they exist, those who, despite working brains and a taste for literature, do not find enjoyment in Austen’s books. I think it boils down to this: the plots seem silly. Unless one understands the horrors of primogeniture, one cannot relate to the extreme anxiety attached to finding a husband (or a rich wife if you were not a first-born son) in Regency England. The primal laws of inheritance that punished those born with vaginas is the backstory that modern readers often miss. (Believe it or not, that kind of b.s. still goes on in Jolly Olde England. Read about the Duke of Westminster’s entailed estate here.)
  • Favorite Line from an Austen Book: “Charles Adams was an amiable, accomplished and bewitching young man, of so dazzling a beauty that none but eagles could look him in the face.” This is from Jack and Alice, part of Austen’s Juvenilia, which she wrote as a kid. If she lived today, I imagine she would earn college money freelancing for The Onion or interning at ad agencies and writing spots like these:

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mithra ballesteros

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tenderfoot farm owner, storyteller, sufferer of foot-in-mouth disease

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