Shawna Lemay’s tribute to Jane Austen: on learning to “view the world at a comedic distance”
“The most important thing I go on learning from Jane Austen is to view the world at a comedic distance,” writer and photographer Shawna Lemay says in the tribute she composed for “Unexpectedly Austen,” the series I’m co-editing with Liz Philosophos Cooper for the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth. “I read Jane Austen,” Shawna says, “because she’s funny and she’s sharp and she’s tender. I read her for her layers of understanding and for the way she sees.”
Today marks the 208th anniversary of Austen’s death on July 18, 1817. This is perhaps a moment to pause in the midst of this year’s 250th birthday celebrations and reflect on the sad anniversary of her death at age forty-one. We will of course never know what she might have written if she had lived longer. But we have her six famous novels, along with her letters and shorter works that weren’t published during her lifetime. What a gift she gave to generations of readers, who continue to find new layers in her work, new perspectives that may help us understand both the lives of her characters and the world we live in now.
“Where shall I begin? Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?”
– Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, June 17, 1808
Later in this letter to her sister, Jane Austen writes, “You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me.” Inspired by Austen’s words, Shawna Lemay wrote about “The Sponge-Cake Model of Friendship” for All Lit Up, back in 2018. In this essay, she talks about how the Austen sisters shared details about “important nothings,” and she suggests that “it’s the writing of sponge-cakes to each other that comforts, that makes each feel less alone.” (I recommended this essay here a couple of years ago and talked about the “sponge-cake” letters my sister and I have exchanged over the years.)
Photo by Shawna Lemay
In the tribute she wrote for “Unexpectedly Austen,” Shawna says she learns “from Jane Austen to delight in details, in sponge-cake, if you will. I learn about the juiciness of one’s important nothings, about living a life deeply interested in others.”
Read Shawna’s tribute in full on the JASNA website.
You might also like to read her recent post “Where Shall I Begin? Living with Jane Austen,” in which she highlights Adjoa Andoh’s contribution to “Unexpectedly Austen.” Andoh, well known as Lady Danbury from Bridgerton, says, “I have yet to see a stage or film version of one of Austen’s novels that successfully communicates the wit, humour and acerbic voice of the narrator who is Austen. Without that voice, all the stories are reduced to something much less interesting.”
Shawna writes, “as much as I have enjoyed the film adaptations, each time I watch one, I’m always drawn back to the texts. That is where the genius resides, at the level of the sentence, the paragraph. If you’ve only watched the movies, you only know a small sliver of Jane Austen’s staggering accomplishments. Every re-reading will reward you with a new and deeper understanding of humanity, of her genius. If you truly wish to understand the meaning of ‘wit,’ it is there in Austen’s works.”
Our July installment of “Unexpectedly Austen” also includes quotations from writer and comedian Andrew Hunter Murray and novelist and academic Julie Schumacher.
Murray says Pride and Prejudice gets better with each rereading: “Just when you think you’ve got everything out of it, you find more jokes, more wisdom, more understanding. It’s stunning. Plus, everyone fancies Lizzie.”
After being described as the “Funniest Woman in America,” Schumacher wrote an essay called “What if You Win a Comedy Award But Don’t Think You’re Funny?: “My idea of funny is Jane Austen,” she writes, “especially Pride and Prejudice. ‘Read a lot of Jane Austen,’ I want to say, when someone asks, ‘and maybe then you’ll be funny.’”
If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
A Bookmark Plaque in Halifax, NS for Budge Wilson’s Story “The Leaving” (details about the Budge Wilson Bookmark and the fundraiser our Nova Scotia Reading Circle for Project Bookmark launched recently)
“Jane Austen had pinned me to the wall” (A “scrapbook” post with a quotation from Robert Gottlieb’s memoir Avid Reader, links to recent articles, and photos of flowers and Halifax harbour)
(P.S. If you’re interested in the celebration of “Jane Austen in the Public Gardens” in Halifax on August 17th, rsvp on our Facebook event page. All are welcome!)
Read more about my books, including St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, and Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, here.
Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.
