Why I love Jane Austen

I’ve heard so much unfounded hate for my favourite authoress and her genre lately that I felt compelled to write a rebuttal.

I won’t bore you with a spiel about her work’s literary merits: Jane Austen’s wit, her more than brilliant character portrayals, the charm of that era and its language, the mere fact that they’re not written by a Meyer or a James. I’ll leave that to your discretion and the scholars’.

The aspect of her writing that I admire most  – which incidentally is the one people unwarrantedly criticize the most – is that it revolves around almost ordinary people in pretty common situations pursuing the clichéd ending of every average story. Anybody else writing about this would make it as blasé as that implies, but Jane Austen’s talent is at its finest and most refined in these apparently commonplace events.

Blaise Pascal said ,“The strength of a man’s virtue is not measured by the efforts he makes under pressure but by his ordinary conduct.” Jane Austen understood that and I couldn’t agree more.  I am thoroughly against the idea that what happens in a living room while sipping tea is any less significant than some big cataclysmic event. Sure, those might be more forceful if you measure consequence in units of impact/hour. However, while one major event can change your life, it takes the of your life to show the change. It’s all the other minutes of the days when your guard is down and your real character shows itself. It’s the little pieces of conversation, carelessly thrown about, that can build or destroy our friendships, maybe without our even noticing it happening. It’s the little jealousies and annoyances that strain our relationships. It’s our idiosyncrasies that define us  Say what you will, these little minutiae are our lives. Treating them with any less respect than any blood-pumping confrontation is denying our own importance.

People are so infinitely fascinating, with all their different personalities and trivialities, their aspirations and inclinations, their habits, their prejudices. Some of these traits are so inherent to us that we don’t even realize they exist but conversation and human interaction make it all available for study.  But it’s no easy task to make observations of this sort about people without sounding petty or judgmental. Jane Austen manages to do this so well, that the infinitesimal remarks that would be snide gossip in another’s words, are with her treated with grace, value, and humour – because honestly, if we can’t make fun at what a silly species we are, we’re not going to survive very well with each other. It is so rare in life and in print to find someone who tells the truth about people without the accompanying dramatics of a sixth grade girl, someone who has high standards for conduct and civility but without condescension for those who don’t meet them. That Jane Austen has a talent to convey this in her writing makes her even more praise-worthy.

As to the inevitable love story, they do not by any means rival Disney’s impracticalities as some assume. The characters are imperfect, and their relationships are imperfect.  Their only crime is to aspire for relationships that combine sense and affection, but that’s a crime I’m not bitter enough to condemn.

Read on,

KRP