Ray Moore's Blog, page 4

200 years

So 2013 is the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of “Pride and Prejudice,” and I first read the book almost fifty years ago. My grandmother could (hypothetically) have met someone who knew Austen personally. Wow! Time is weird.

Speaking of time, “Pride and Prejudice: A Critical Introduction” took six months of research and writing on a text that I already knew well. I am pleased to say that after finishing, I still like the book.

My aim was to answer the deceptively simple question : What is “Pride and Prejudice” about? My answer is that it is about marriage (an interesting topic for a spinster). Austen has one simple truth: marriage must be based on love, and love must be based upon a deep knowledge of the person who is the object of that love. Jane had no time for all that Romantic ‘love at first sight’ nonsense. The most important line in the novel is when Lizzie tells her father, “I do. I do like him … I love him.”  Also, although Jane accepted the inferior status of women in her society (she didn’t have much choice), she asserts that in marriage the two people should respect each other equally.  There is nothing soft about Jane Austen’s view of love – radical, yes, soft, no.

If you like “Pride and Prejudice,” you will want to read this book.

Jane Austen, teenage writer

I have been reading Jane Austen’s Juvenilia – the stories she wrote as a teenager for her own and her family’s entertainment. Everybody should read them because they are hilarious! The girls are always fainting, or running mad, or getting drunk – it’s pure Monty Python! She takes just about every value and turns it on its head. Her History of England, by an ignorant historian and with very few dates, is a delight. So is Love and Freindship – Jane never quite got that i before e thing. My own favorite is the story of the two sisters who go on a tour of Wales with their mother. The mother decides that they will ride, which means that she rides and the two girls run alongside. All goes well until the girls wear out their shoes, but their mother buys a single pair of shoes and the girls happily hop all the way home.

I also read the early novel Lady Susan, the only completed Austen novel which was never published. The critics get really snooty about this novel-in-letters (proper name epistolary novel), but in it Austen tries something completely revolutionary: her heroine is a nasty, manipulative, sexual predator who very nearly wins in the end. Of course, it is not a mature work of art, and though there is a conclusion, I think that Austen gave up on it. Nevertheless, it is a breath of fresh air and ends once and for all the stupid image of “sweet Aunt Jane.” Jane Austen was a radical comedian.