The Timeless Appeal of Jane Austen
The pandemic hasn’t much changed how I pass my free time. Austin and I just spend all our nights in, rather than most. We’ve been spending some quality time watching or rewatching rewatching various adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels. We started off our Jane Austen kick back when social distancing first started in March by streaming the 2020 film adaptation of Emma. While it is one of the few Austen protagonists I don’t see myself in, the story is a great favorite. I enjoy its depiction of village life — its dinner parties with parishioners, its shops filled with acquaintances and their village gossip — and how it eerily mirrors elements of my life.
I’ve always fancied that my life had a touch of a Jane Austen to it. I grew up in a rambling old house in a countryside town surrounded by an odd selection of village residents who comment on all aspects of our lives. My life is brimming with characters that often populate Austen’s novels: the anglican vicar, an attentive mother, and a protagonist who thought she knew rather a lot about how life should be, only to find she was wrong every time. My childhood was full of holiday dinner parties with parishioners and townsfolk, and long walks in the countryside. Christmastime meant singing carols with friends around pianos and harpsichords, and summer afternoons were a time to have a cup of tea with the ladies from the parish.
Were my life, in fact, a Jane Austen novel, I think it would begin rather like this:
When the Reverend Brown moved his elegant wife and two small children from the City to the countryside, following a call to a rural anglican parish, he promised it would only be for a few years; yet the family remained and while the following two decades presented them a few misfortunes, it afforded a great many more pleasures.
Like many women, I strongly identified with the heroines of Jane Austen’s novels, as Austen had a great ability to speak to the female experience. There was a time in my life when I saw myself in the highly imaginative, though naive, nature of Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey. Other times I resonated with Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet and the resolute way she stood up for herself and her loved ones. Still more often I associated with her older sister Jane, and her deep sensitivity and sincerity. Other days I’ve found inspiration and solidarity in the quiet strength of Elinor Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility.
It’s my own stumbling into love that reminds me most of Austen’s books. When I moved back from England in the fall of 2018, love and marriage couldn’t have been further from my mind. I had decided to move to New York City, work for the United Nations, and do some good in the world. Nothing would stop me. It was like Elizabeth Bennet tells her sister Jane:
“I am determined that only the deepest love will induce me into matrimony. So, I shall end an old maid, and teach your ten children to embroider cushions and play their instruments very ill.”
Like Elizabeth, I couldn’t imagine how falling in love would change my entire life. I didn’t get what the big deal about marriage was. I was so set in my ways, that I didn’t even realize I liked Austin that way until I was already half in love with him. Months later my entire world — and what I wanted from it — was different. Much like Jane Bennet, I remember the wild joy that rose up within me when Austin proposed; with the realization that I was so blessed as to spend my life with a man that puts all those in novels to shame. No matter the state of the world, the joy and love that Austin and I share grounds everything in my life.
Jane could have no reserves from Elizabeth, where confidence would give pleasure; and instantly embracing her, acknowledged, with the liveliest emotion, that she was the happiest creature in the world.
“‘Tis too much!” she added, “by far too much. I do not deserve it. Oh! Why is not everybody as happy!”
When I think back to who I was back when I’d moved back from England, I laugh. I was so sure I knew what the years ahead would look like, what I wanted out of life. Instead, my world turned upside down, and became far more beautiful than I could have imagined. This is the power of Jane Austen’s novels -- the way that she expresses the simple power of love and how it changes us.
I could go on sharing the parallels between my life and a Jane Austen novel. Admittedly, with a killer virus in the air, sometimes life feels more like the Austen parody novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The power of Jane Austen’s books lies in their timelessness. Now, more than ever, I am comforted knowing that life has changed very little, even as different as it is from the life of Regency Era English gentry. Our relationships with each other are as powerful as they ever were. No matter how much COVID-19 changes our world, this will always be true.
