A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen

Do you enjoy reading Jane Austen? Then this book is for you whether you started reading her when you were eleven, as my wife did, or in your sixties, as I did. Whatever reason you enjoy JA, you will find someone here who shares your enthusiasm, someone who has a different reason for liking her, and three or four someones who have unique or at least unusual reasons for their enthusiasm. Each of the six novels has at least one essayist who proclaims it as the best, and each has at least one prepared to label it as the least successful. All of the writers have personal insights to offer. For example, have you noticed that there are no substantive scenes in JA with men only? She didn't know how men talk when they are by themselves, and she didn't try to invent it. Elsewhere her novels are criticized because they ignore the Napoleonic wars that were going on when she wrote, but they were not part of her life and experience even with brothers in the Royal Navy, so she left them out except for incidental references in "Persuasion." As Eudora Welty puts it in her essay, "never did it escape Jane Austen that the interesting situations of life can take place, and notably do, at home." (I would suggest amending that to read "the lastingly interesting situations of life.") Editor Carson's title is, of course, from one of JA's most quoted lines, and the writers she assembled are themselves a quotable lot. I cannot completely resist the temptation to sample them. E. M. Forster has an amusing description of himself as a JA reader: "I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. . . . She is my favorite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers. The Jane Austenite possesses little of the brightness he ascribes so freely to his idol. Like all regular churchgoers, he scarcely notices what is being said." Rebecca Read proposes six reasons for reading JA. One is "because it's possible to read everything she wrote," contrasting her output of "six completed novels, three unfinished ones, three volumes of juvenilia, and some poems and letters" with the forty-seven of Trollope "-- enough to take a busy reader several lifetimes to complete." Whereas, "one of the greatest rewards of reading Jane Austen . . . is that having done so, we get to reread Jane Austen on a later occasion." Harold Bloom wrote the book's Foreword and an essay that sends readers to "Persuasion" (my personal favorite after "Pride and Prejudice"). He it calls a "perfect novel" and praises "its extraordinary aesthetic distinction." He describes its heroine, Anne Elliot, as "a quietly elegant being, . . . a self-reliant character in no way forlorn" whose "sense of self never falters." I could go on, but I think my favorite is this from Welty: ". . . she had been born, or rewarded, with fairy gifts -- not one, but two entirely sep

This volume contains 33 essays on all things Jane Austen. Represented here are classic authors and modern, novelists, poets, academics, critics, a psychologist, historians and even a filmmaker or two. Eudora Welty. EM Forster, Lionel Trilling, Somerset Maugham, JB Priestley, CS Lewis, Virginia Woolf -- these elder authors remind us that Austen has been around for two hundred years and, while she has gone in and out of mainstream fashion, she has always been appreciated by a statistical (and discerning :-) few. Amy Heckerling, Benjamin Nugent, Anna Quindlen, Amy Bloom, Susanna Clarke, James Collins, Margot Livesey, Fay Weldon, David Lodge and Diane Johnson attest to Austen's relevance even today. As expected, the topics are wide-ranging, and the essayists are articulate and provocative. The works are dense; if you're looking for light and breezy chats about Austen, then this isn't the book you want to pick up. The topics range from the very personal to the detached and academic. If you've read the novels and want to go deeper, if you want to learn about Austen -- her intentions, her techniques, her admirers -- then you will find this volume a rewarding and worthwhile read.

Let me start by saying that Jane Austen is my favorite author and -- yes -- I've actually read her books and didn't just see the movies. This collection of essays gave me new ideas to ponder, as well as an opportunity to revisit why I love Jane. In fact, reading these essays made me want to reread all her novels as well as her letters. What I liked about this collection was the mix of the authors. They include amazing writers from the past such as C.S. Lewis, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and W. Somerset Maugham, as well as current authors like A.S. Byatt, Anna Quindlen and Amy Bloom. There are academics, critics, playwrights, a psychologist and even a screenwriter. (Amy Heckerling wrote the screenplay for "Clueless" based on Austen's book "Emma.") Each essay focuses on a different aspect of Austen's writing, e.g., "the Nerds of Pride and Prejudice," "The Radiance of Jane Austen," "Reading and Rereading Emma," "Some Thoughts on the Craft of Austen's Persuasion." Although many of them make the same or similar points, they each have something unique to bring to the discussion. My one suggestion for improvement would be to put the author's bio info at the beginning of each essay rather than at the end of the book. One of my favorite essays by Rebecca Mead gives Six Reasons to Read Jane Austen. The first is "because we can't invite her to dinner, even though we'd like to" and the second "because she probably wouldn't want to come." I'm not sure we could stand up under her sharp wit. What would she think of what society has become? I also enjoyed the essay by John Wiltshire (an academic) who wrote about all the things that Austen didn't say but left to our imaginations. If you think about it, Austen gave very limited physical descriptions of her characters and almost no descriptions of the scenery or the houses that the stories are set in. This allows us to focus on what Austen deems important -- what the characters think and say. While I loved reading these essays, I don't think we shouldn't get so caught up in analyzing them that we miss the point. Anna Quindlen says it best, "Serious literary discussions of Pride and Prejudice threaten to obscure the most important thing about it: It is a pure joy to read." I think pure joy is a fantastic way to describe Jane Austen.

This is about as good a book on Austen as I can recall. It has the minor and inevitable flaws of any work built on a set of independent short essays with no linkage or synthesis; there are a few pieces that don't add much and variations in quality. All in all, though, it is excellent in coverage and specific content. In reviewing it, I have forced myself not to display the syndrome that is the core of the book's analysis: my own personal, unique and totally assured understanding of the great Jane and relationship with her. There seems to be no other novelist in the language who so speaks to the reader in ways that build a sense of her being a presence for oneself. In poetry, Chaucer is perhaps the closest in this regard; both are ironists, brilliant in making the writer/reader link a conversation you are invited into and acutely accurate observers of their chosen world. This book does a pretty good job of deciphering just how she does it. One of its major strengths is the inclusion of work by heavy duty writers who know all the tricks of the trade. The essays offer some of the best analyses I have come across of how she builds her characterization that is more thematic and backed by a complex moral perspective that is easy to overlook in the vivid foreground of the story. The book includes too many sharp insights to even hint at. It also is well-balanced in including sensible (non gushing, non didactic) aspects of her work that are routinely discussed in many other critical reviews: her careful bounding of the space of her story's setting (my own favorite example is that there is not a single instance of two males speaking in a private conversation; Austen the observer had never observed this and Austen the novelist wouldn't even try to bring it to a false life), the social context of the Regency period, with some new insights on the bonds of social hierarchy that drive many elements of the story but are so easy to overlook, and her style, with its unique "voice" that lures the reader in as joint observer. There's so much more to the book. It's for serious readers who know the novels well. At times, I got a little lost in the subtlety of the analysis of Sense and Sensibility and the tonalities of the comments on Emma. It's not a "Janeite" book. It treats Austen respectfully as the writer who most reached a perfection within the bounds of her ambitions. It's also excellent to read as a whole and to dip into. My summary assessment is "indispensable." If you love Austen then you need this book.

While I groan at yet another overuse of "a truth universally acknowledged" and a subtitle that claims all 33 of its writers are great writers and the limitations implied by the "on why we read Jane Austen," I can assure you that, once you get past the cover, the contents of this book, with a few pontificating and dryly academic exceptions, comprise an absolute treasure trove for fans of Jane Austen. I especially liked this from J. B. Priestley on why he loves Elizabeth Bennet: "She is a real girl, a person in her own right, with a will of her own, instead of the beautiful dummy that so many romantic men writers bring into their fiction. Literature is crowded with mere dream figures we are asked to accept as heroines. But real women are much better, altogether more satisfying than dream figures; and Elizabeth Bennet is one of the first and best of them in fiction, not only English but all fiction." Also...David Lodge finds "Emma" the novel that most perfectly represents JA's genius, but Virginia Woolf thinks the unfinished and, in the main, inferior story "The Watsons" sheds more light upon its writer's genius....Martin Amis longs for a twenty-page sex scene at the end of "Pride and Prejudice," with Mr. Darcy "acquitting himself uncommonly well"....Fay Weldon posits that "Mansfield Park's" dutiful Fanny Price and rebellious Mary Crawford represent the two sides of the author that she never quite reconciled in herself....Benjamin Nugent nominates Mary Bennet as one of the earliest examples of a nerd in a famous work of fiction....John Wiltshire delves into why it's so difficult to get Austen right onscreen and screenwriter Amy Heckerling writes on the challenges of turning "Emma" into "Clueless"....Dr. Johnson keeps cropping up, stealing some of the credit for JA's greatness--for example, C.S. Lewis praises her "Johnsonian cadence" and W. Somerset Maugham discerns the influence of Dr. J. in the structure of her sentences....The question of whether Austen's failure to mention Napoleon in novels written during the Napoleonic wars is evidence of her limitations gets some required airings....Harold Bloom considers why he and others he's talked with always feel very sad after rereading "Persuasion," "this perfect novel." Diane Johnson tells us that Austen actually titled that last novel "The Elliots," but she died before it was published and her relatives changed the title.... Another interesting tidbit from Diane Johnson: Have you realized--I hadn't--that Austen never wrote a scene where women weren't present and chose never to go into the minds of servants or men? I also loved this essay-ender from Margot Livesey: "I read Austen first as a teenager, then in the company of a long romance, later still as a single woman, and now as a married woman. And in each of these incarnations I have understood that Austen is speaking to me, and about me, and about that deep need to have the world we live in--be it Bath, or Lyme Regis or the Lower E