T i m e O u t

Letter to Jane Austen

Dear Miss Austen,

I take the liberty of writing to you on this, the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice.  What a phenomenon you became as the years rolled on! I wonder what you’d make of it all.

 To think that you had to publish your works as “A Lady” and that you couldn’t get a publisher to accept them and now they are translated into 35 languages and, because there are no longer copyright restrictions, people have given up counting the millions of copies printed!

 What a thrill you would get to know that your books are quoted and referred to as if they are the ultimate Truth, to know to know of your fan clubs, the use of your portrait as a brand name image and then we have the Internet, a kind of gigantic encyclopedia where all knowledge is stored and there’s so much about you, it’s mind boggling! People read about your daily routine, what you read, wrote, ate and drank. There are Jane Austen Heritage Centres, study groups, coffee mugs. Then there are these machines called computers where we write and store manuscripts, You’d have loved the computer. You’d never have left your desk!

 Then the films. Films are like watching book images move or like being able to see a theatre production on a screen! It’s complicated but you’d love films. Our best actors and actresses want to be Austen characters. Two in particular, Colin Firth as Mr Darcy and Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood, give marvelous interpretations of these roles.  You’d love Colin Firth’s Darcy. Modern-day ladies adore him! He literally goes back to your time. People and among them the afore-mentioned actress Emma Thompson, claim that reading “Jane Austen” helps them combat adversity, chronic depression, heartbreak, the death of a loved one. Smile if you like but the many Jane Austen book clubs do help people cope with the harsher aspects of the human condition.

 Miss Austen, I think you might find our morbid curiosity about your personal life in your close-knit middle class family a bit intrusive. There are so many questions about your day to day existence and so many theories about why you didn’t marry, some not worthy of recounting.  Then people love to theorize that if you lived in the 21^st century your illness would have been diagnosed and cured. 

 We cannot but admire your resilience in tackling, book after book, the many issues dealing with the world of women in the sedate, tranquil English countryside, a world you knew, understood and commented on with sharp irony. We love your biting social commentary . We love the universe of sentiment that is in your relatively small world, the tensions within the family circle, the choices involved in being a woman, your strong, witty women who live the conflict between accepted moral codes and personal needs, the desire of your women to be educated and well-versed in literature. You highlighted class barriers and the plight of women who couldn’t inherit wealth  on their husbands’ deaths. You were one of the first authors to suggest that women should marry for love and happiness, and not for social standing or economic security. You were about to broach the subject of women’s sexuality. What a loss to the world of romance and fiction that you didn’t live to do so. Your women, Elinor, Marianne, Elizabeth, Emma, Anne, Fanny, Catherine, all developed in your distinctive, elegant style language. It is as near to perfect as English prose can get with your irony, humour and precision. These women remain real to us long after we’ve finished the novel or seen the film. Each woman a piece of the puzzle that you didn’t get time to finish.

 You were not just a writer. You are a cultural icon. If the present is anything to go by, in a hundred years time somebody who will not be born for another sixty, seventy years may well decide that a nice way to mark the 300^th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice is to write an imaginary letter to the author. How interconnected we all are!

 Sincerely

 Frances Fahy 2013