I just started reading A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, edited by Susannah Carson, and found an interesting idea in the second essay, the one by Eudora Welty entitled "The Radiance of Jane Austen." While the bulk of the essay itself was interesting and well-written, it didn't really say much I hadn't already heard, or read, or thought about except her opening paragraph:
Jane Austen will soon be closer in calendar time to Shakespeare than to us. Within the reading life of the next generation, that constellation of six bright stars will have swung that many years deeper into the one sky, vast and crowded, of English literature. Will these future readers be in danger of letting the novels elude them because of distance, so that their pleasure will not be anything like ours? The future of fiction is a mystery; it is like the future of ourselves.
I confess I did the math, and Welty is right. Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616. Austen was born in 1775 and died in 1817. Austen died 201 years after Shakespeare died. In 2018, it will be 201 years since Austen died. I'm not sure what this really means, though. On the surface, it seems to suggest the Austen's world is more similar to Shakespeare's than to ours, which isn't really a new idea. Her work is definitely more understandable to the modern reader than Shakespeare's plays and poetry are. I think Welty is saying that the further we get from Austen, the more inaccessible it will become. That may be, but the raw emotion of Shakespeare's greatest characters transcend the trappings into which the stories themselves are housed. Likewise with Austen's characters.
A few years ago I was rereading Mansfield Park and Henry Crawford's reading of Henry VIII struck me as worth noting. Why that play? It is hardly ever produced anymore, and yet there was something in it that caused Austen to choose it as the play Crawford read aloud from to Fanny when he was wooing her.
"Shakespeare," observes Henry Crawford, "is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct."
Edmund Bertram agrees: "No doubt, one is familiar with Shakespeare ...from one's earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by every body; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare,..."
These days, I would venture to say that Austen is a part of more people's constitutions that ever before. Certainly in my little corner of the blogosphere "everyone is familiar with Austen ...Her celebrated passages are quoted by every body; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Austen."
I think what I like about the opening passage of the Welty essay is that it's an interesting factoid and one that could have a deeper meaning, or not. It's just been fun to wrestle with a bit.
Thought-provokiing post. As a fan both of Austen and of Shakespeare, I can't see them suddenly going out of fashion, because the truths within them are still relevant. I've just finished re-reading Macbeth, which is a masterful study of betrayal, greed, self-delusion and guilt, 'Macbeth does murder sleep'.
ReplyDeleteAusten's characters still ring true today - from Mrs Elton and Mrs Norris to Henry Crawford, Mary Crawford, Mr Knightly and even Mr Darcy (if you're lucky enough to find one). (Of course, we all like to think we're most similar to Elizabeth Bennett or Ann Elliott :))
Austen, especially, is more fmiliar to people now than when I was at school because of all those BBC and movie adaptations! Now we've had the wonderful David Tennant playing Hamlet, he'll have generated renewed interest in the Bard amongst children and teens too.
Plus they are authors that are still taught in schools (though whether that encourages children or puts them off for life isn't easy to say)
A few years ago I was rereading Mansfield Park and Henry Crawford's reading of Henry VIII struck me as worth noting. Why that play? It is hardly ever produced anymore, and yet there was something in it that caused Austen to choose it as the play Crawford read aloud from to Fanny when he was wooing her.
Apart from the obvious link - that Henry VIII is most famous for having six wives - never satisfied, he was always divorcing them or in some cases, having them beheaded. Maria Rushworth is divorced by her husband because of Henry, but effectively she is 'beheaded' - the head of the family, Sir Thomas, will no longer acknowledge her existence.
I don't think we find out which particular passage Henry reads out loud, do we?
I'm so glad you are reading this book, Jane! I have been reading bits and pieces of it for awhile now. Please continue to share your thoughts! I don't have anyone to discuss this book with. It would definitely be a very sad day in my life when Austen's world becomes inacessible and uncomprehendable! I don't think that would ever happen though.
ReplyDeleteIf you look just at the 201 years between each author and the 201 between us and Jane Austen, isn't there so much more of drastic change in the world socially, economically, morally, etc. in the latter 201 years that it sort of makes the latter 201 years a greater span of time. Yes our world is growing more and more unlike the world of Austen and Shakespeare, but both authors wrote about universal and timeless themes and their characters are accessible and timeless people.
Great post,Jane!
Unfortunately, it may happen. I mean, from my personal real life observatory I can assure you it may happen. Teaching literature (Shakespeare and Jane Austen included) to teenagers discussing their works with them, I feel how distant their language and, frighteningly , their values are from most of these young people. Few of them appreciate but many, so many, are not interested (at all) or just do not like reading (at all). Do you know most of my students admit they have NEVER read a book apart from reading for school? I haven't got much time and I must stop here, Jane, but thanks for this interesting reflection. I'll go on working and reading for the minority of my good students. They deserve my efforts. Minorities count. And I'm so glad I discovered such an interesting world of readers in the blogosphere!Have a nice day! Off to school!
ReplyDeleteDo you know most of my students admit they have NEVER read a book apart from reading for school?
ReplyDeleteThat is depressing, Maria Grazia, but it's probably not permanent. My daughter rarely reads - she's off out with her friends, or on Facebook, or off to swimming club or whatever. But just occasionally (a couple of times a year :)) she will be found with a book in her hands. She's also a big Austen fan in that she's watched all of those BBC adaptations, I took her to the cinema to watch the Keira Knightly P&P movie, she even picked up the original book a few years ago and read the first page (but she found the language too difficult - she was only 9 at the time - so she wasn't tempted to read more).
I'm confident that when she is older, she will read for fun, even if it's only occasionally. Don't give up hope.
"Her work is definitely more understandable to the modern reader than Shakespeare's plays and poetry are. I think Welty is saying that the further we get from Austen, the more inaccessible it will become."
ReplyDeleteActually, I wonder how accessible some of it is now. That is, I think that there is a tendency, exarcabated by all the tv adaptations, for us to think this is a very recognisable world when in fact there was such a major social transformation in England just after Austen's time (and starting while she was writing) that things are more different than we realise.
Obviously, she stays modern in that her characters are vivid and recognisable whereas Shakespeare's are really vehicles for ideas. But the social relations of that world have really gone and were already starting to unravel. And those social relations were largely the same (despite the Civil War etc) as they had been in Shakespearian England.
That is pretty much the thesis of The Word We Have Lost, my favorite history book. Prior to the early 19th Century society was divided into two. The gentitility and the commonality. By the end of the 19th Century that distinction had gone. The daughters of rich middle class Americans who had made their money in industry were merrily marrying into the high aristocracy. Methodist manufacturers had built their own new establishment in places like Manchester rendering the old gentility pretty much obsolete. The commonality was now working class, poor, lower middle class, middle class etc and the working class had their own parties and political represenatives.
It was a world completely transformed. Far more so than the changed between Elizabethan and Regency England.
So I think we have a tendency to think we understand the world as JA describes it more than we really do, largely because her language and her literary methods are so modern by comparison to Shakespeare.
Spencer--
ReplyDelete>So I think we have a tendency to think we understand the world as JA describes it more than we really do, largely because her language and her literary methods are so modern by comparison to Shakespeare.
I agree, and I like your comments. I'm going to have to read The Word We Have Lost--sounds like a really good book.
>The daughters of rich middle class Americans who had made their money in industry were merrily marrying into the high aristocracy.
That's the story Edith Wharton tells in The Buccaneers, but while the girls and their American parents are merrily marrying British aristocrats, the union is not smooth and neither respects the other much and I'm not sure the daughters ever feel comfortable in their new old world. I never actually read the book, which is on my TBR list, but I did watch the mini-series when it first aired years ago.