How To Read Jane Austen

Well, there's the right way (Yips! to Rachel):

What can be the relevance of Jane Austen to the young women of today? Why is the BBC about to screen new adaptations of Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion? Why does the spectre of Pride and Prejudice stalk the land, whether as Bridget Jones's Diary or Keira Knightley's other daytime job during the proliferating insanities of The Pirates of the Caribbean? Austen herself was, like most women of any age, no dazzling beauty. Her heroines too are middle class, ordinary, with no special advantages of looks or education or wealth, and yet they are heroines. The battles they fight are the battles of every day. They struggle for self-control in agonising circumstances. They turn aside so that other people can't see the hot tears that start into their eyes.

For hot tears do start into their eyes: Austen's heroines are all passionate, all proud, all sensitive. They must deal with the common trials of every young woman's life, bullying, disappointment, misunderstanding, and, most unbearable, helplessness to influence the course of events. Though 190 years have passed since Austen's death, women's emotional lives still present the same challenges.

What gives the Austen heroine her power is her self-discipline. In all Austen's novels, the heroines, no matter how scatty, deploy immense reserves of self-control. It is as if they all knew that it is fatally easy to be mad, to "give way" to excessive feeling, to sink into melancholia, or hysteria, or self-starvation. Fanny Price, who at Mansfield Park has to endure the daily humiliations that were the lot of any poor relative, develops her spiritual muscle by exercising almost superhuman patience. She never points out to her thoughtless relatives that she might be tired, that she could do with a fire in her room, that she would like to ride out occasionally, because refraining from doing so makes her stronger.

And then there's the somewhat-hysterical-chip-on-shoulder-way:

Along with the obligatory pig, most of Jane Austen’s world never made it through the drawing room door. You’d never know it from the novels, but she lived in interesting times. As the film notes, her sister-in-law lost her first husband to the guillotine during the French Revolution. While her oeuvre was gestating, Napoleon’s army ravaged Europe and froze to death in the retreat from Moscow. On the other side of the world Zheng Yi Sao, the pirate queen known as the Dragon Lady of the South China Sea, commanded a fleet of 1,800 junks and 70,000 men.

Had Jane ever looked out of the window, she would have seen her starving country neighbours herding into slums. Had she read of the molecular theory that preoccupied scientists, or joined the philosophical fight to the death between reason and romanticism? Reformers debated A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the feminist polemic by Mary Wollstonecraft, a weaver’s daughter who was politicised by all the horrors of unwed poverty that Austen’s heroines are so frantic to avoid.

A few years after Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813 came a novel by Wollstonecraft’s daughter. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a book that engages far more actively with its world and continues to express our anxieties about the advancement of science. Frankenstein became the keystone of the fantasy genre; it has been filmed almost as often as Pride and Prejudice but Shelley herself, intellectual scion and poet’s muse, has never achieved the same leverage on mass imagination as Jane Austen.