Believing in Austen

Why is everyone so obsessed with Jane Austen? She only wrote six books, after all, so what’s the big deal? Because beneath the wit and romance is a radical, tender belief: that connection matters, that people can change, and that love – hard-won, awkward, real – might just save us, says Kyla Ion from Topping & Co. Booksellers, who are running a week of events around Jane Austen this month.

I think it’s easy to see the roaring popularity Jane Austen has and judge it as undeserved. Maybe we’ve culturally, globally, fallen under a shared delusion – we’ve somehow been tricked into loving a woman born in 1775. As a bookseller in Bath, I have been asked countless times where to find the Jane Austen books, or what my favourite edition of her works is, or just to give my recommendation on where to start with Jane Austen. All this could breed cynicism in someone about Jane, but it hasn’t for me, and I don’t think I ever could be dismissive about her books for one simple reason: I’ve read them – and I love them too.

The fact is that Jane Austen has written fantastic works of literature, has made inspired contributions to the stylistic practices of novel writing, and wrote optimistically about the world while experiencing, in contrast to that, a lot of pain.

For any readers who never got a degree in English Literature, here’s a two-penny term to throw around at your next dinner party when the conversation inevitably turns towards the history of literature: free indirect discourse.

This is what, in practical terms, Jane Austen gave to the evolution of literature. It’s a mode of narration that her work is famous for, that seems so effortless it’s difficult to even acknowledge as a choice. Essentially, in Austen’s novels, the centre of narration moves freely between different characters in a scene. We’ll be with our heroine, and then we’ll move in the next sentence to her father, and then three sentences after that we’re seeing things through the perspective of polite society at large – it has the same effect as a roving camera, moving from subject to subject, giving the reader a really subtle and un-intrusive sense of all-knowing power. It feeds a very specific fantasy – that you could stand in the centre of a room and really understand what everyone around you is thinking.

At the core of this fantasy is a truth universally acknowledged: we crave connection.

Free indirect discourse allows a reader to feel immersed within the social sphere of the book – in the middle of the gossip, comedy and heartbreak. I believe Persuasion is the most successful of all of Jane Austen’s novels in showcasing why we love Jane Austen, because the entire book is just about wanting to be able to read people, understand them, and have them understand you.

If you haven’t read Persuasion, here is my quick, relatively spoiler-free, synopsis: Anne Elliot is 28, and, as such, is considered unmarriable. This is made worse because her family is terrible to her and has also become quite poor. Because of their risk of poverty, they’ve had to rent out their estate. Coincidentally, one of their tenants is the sister of a man called Captain Frederick Wentworth, who had proposed to Anne eight years prior. She had rejected him, despite loving him, because her family had deemed him unsuitable – at the time he had not been a Captain, and they had not been poor. Now, after eight years, Captain Frederick Wentworth has reappeared, and Anne’s family don’t even remember him, and Anne suspects Wentworth doesn’t remember her either.

He does.

Anne is not the most beautiful girl in the world, Anne is just getting by, and this man she was supposed to marry eight years ago – back when her life still held potential – is suddenly back. Now he is respectable, wealthy and still handsome, and there is a very severe unfairness to that which transcends 200 years of history.

Everything in the world that Jane Austen crafts feels incredibly real, particularly her players – they are as desperate as you are, as moved to feeling as you, as awkward, as scared, as full of pride, as full of fear, as self-conscious as you…

There is a gendered aspect which makes it doubly unfair. At 30, Wentworth is of marrying age, and Anne’s life is over. I think Persuasion very easily could have made it onto our shelves in the Horror section if Austen had decided that it was a story only about isolation, loneliness and this savage unfairness – except, Anne is not the only one in love. When Anne is sitting alone in a piano room thinking about this terrible unfairness she looks up and sees Wentworth is there, looking back at her.

Just like that it’s not Horror, it’s Romance, because the novel’s promise is not that we will be alone. It is that sometimes, if you’re lucky, you will be thinking of someone and they will be thinking of you too. It’s easy to believe that promise, because everything in the world that Jane Austen crafts feels incredibly real, particularly her players – they are as desperate as you are, as moved to feeling as you, as awkward, as scared, as full of pride, as full of fear, as self-conscious as you are – at least as self-conscious as I am.

And Jane Austen’s books are happy books – which is its own minor miracle.

Austen writes optimistically about relationships in a time period when there wasn’t much to be optimistic about when it came to marriage, to being a woman, to being a woman who wanted good things for herself. Jane Austen never married. Her father died suddenly, and then she died young, fresh off from barely escaping total poverty.

My point is not that she lived a miserable life that was only suffering. She was incredibly close to her sister, she was proposed to once and rejected that proposal – she lived a life. My point is only that she could have written from a place of cynicism, of belief that life is fundamentally unkind, but she didn’t. Jane Austen chose with every word that she wrote to believe in love – to believe that there is constancy and trueness in romance and relationships. At its core, being a romantic can be a protective force – you believe in the best parts of people, and so they become a bit more real. It is also the sort of perspective you have to fight to protect, because life can be notoriously unkind, unforgiving and unromantic. Jane Austen helps protect that part of yourself that believes in good things.

You will be disappointed in your life. You will be proposed to by strange men who you do not like. You will be courted by very charming men and it will be a mistake and you will be embarrassed but also, hopefully, saved from total destitution. You will argue with your parents, you will lose people that you love, you will lose yourself, you will find yourself, you will look at your life and worry that you have wasted it to some measure – that you have not become the person you were meant to be – but also, maybe, if you’re lucky you will get to dance with someone that you love. You will come back to yourself, and you will be changed, but maybe in some ways improved by change.

Why do we love Jane Austen? Because she invites us to be participants in her novels which are clever and funny and full of earnest, eccentric people trying to pay attention to each other and care for each other the best they can – which is usually pretty well. And because no one has bested her yet at convincing us of the validity and importance of big feelings.

Topping & Co. Books toppingbooks.co.uk/events/bath