'Persuasion' reloaded
I read Persuasion every single year. It’s the closest thing I have to a Bible. Whenever the world seems particularly mad (2017, anyone?), or midlife melancholia is lapping at my shins, Austen consoles me. Her imperishable wisdom is an antidote to any idiocy on the evening news.
Her wit has the medicinal sting of the G&T you crave at the end of a weary day. Of her six astounding novels, only four had been published, anonymously, by the time she died. For crying out loud, her black marble gravestone doesn’t even mention she was a writer! As long as readers love her, though, and millions of us hang on her every word, she is safe among the immortals.
Pride and Prejudice 1940s style.
A deepening relationship
Our relationship with Austen’s work changes and deepens over time. I’m glad I did Mansfield Park for Higher-level. It’s the most difficult and unyielding of her books, and I wouldn’t pick it up willingly.
Arguably, Sense and Sensibility never escapes its beginnings as an epistolary novel, although Austen wrote nothing more devastating than that scene in which Mr and Mrs John Dashwood persuade themselves of the virtue of giving a widowed mother and her daughters almost nothing to live on. Northanger Abbey bursts with first-novel high spirits, but for many it never goes beyond parody.
Emma resembles its interfering heroine, “perfect despite her faults”. As for Pride and Prejudice, the template for every romcom, it is much imitated but never bettered.
Everyone who loves literature will have their Favourite Jane. Everyone who loves gin has their favourite gin too.
