Reading JANE EYRE in 2018 America

Wealth and family connections. Chronic mistreatment of vulnerable children. The despising of the poor by those comfortably well off. Institutional life in place of home life for the poor. Lessons in “humility” and “gratitude” to those warned to keep their “place.” -- But even in that place, flickers of kindness and opportunities to better herself. Leading to — independence, and then, in her new position, an unexpected sense of home and feelings of respect and love. -- But the veil is torn away and reality revealed, followed by the direst poverty, hunger, situational homelessness. Dangers to the homeless are real, while those with homes perceive threats from the homeless. Of course, the story does not end there....

The character of Jane Eyre herself as well as her story were something quite new to English literature. What a difference from the world of Pride and Prejudice we find in Jane Eyre! And I say this as someone who loves the novels of Jane Austen.

But in Jane Austen’s England and the class to which the Bennett daughters were born, a young woman’s only respectable end was marriage. “Independence” was a disgrace, if not a scandal, depending on how it was achieved — or, rather, “independence” was defined only by wealth, and so brought about by the right kind of marriage. Class distinctions were paramount. Servants were invisible. “Sensibility,” the name given to overwrought passion given free rein by the wrong kinds of reading in Sense and Sensibility, could lead to nothing good. 

Then along came the mystery author “Curran Bell” (Charlotte Bronte’s nom de plume), with her passionate little orphan, Jane, with her innate sense of justice. Revolutionary! I ask my women friends, whose life rings truer to yours in its essentials, that of Eliza Bennett or that of Jane Eyre?

Does the child deserve ill treatment? She is dependent on an aunt by marriage who detests her, as do the three children who are her blood first cousins. You would think that tie would mean more, but Jane’s mother was sister to the cousins’ father, so they are cousins by a female relative — and one who, moreover, married beneath her station. The brother could forgive, but his wife could not, and their children have no love for their cousin. The 14-year-old boy is particularly cruel and despicable, telling little Jane that she “ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mamma’s expense.” Jane’s mother’s sin had been to marry a poor curate, against her family’s wishes. Her punishment was to be disinherited by her grandfather. Jane’s parents dying of typhus (her father contracted the illness while visiting those poorer than himself, in pursuit of his calling), her uncle adopted her — and loved her — but then he also died. Family wealth is not to be shared except under the most careful legal arrangements, and the daughter of a disinherited relative by marriage has no claim on the cousins’ mother beyond the promise made to her dying husband — conveniently set aside in time, the better to suit her own feelings and purposes.

Jane’s background is given quickly in the novel’s beginning. Mr. Rochester’s character and the lively relationship he comes to value in Jane is the focus of most readers and has been mine in previous readings of the novel, but this week I come to it with a different heart, with different heavy thoughts. I see the fictional aunt’s and boy cousin’s heartlessness in the first two chapters against current stories — in 2018 — of girl children accorded lesser value than their male contemporaries. Issues of poverty and wealth add another dimension. Envy, hatred, retribution -- it's all there.

The Bennett family and the mother and daughters in Sense and Sensibility are close to adulthood and their “poverty” relative only to the wealth of antecedent generations. Little Jane Eyre, on the other hand, despised by her own relatives, is daily schooled in “humility,” first in the home of those relatives and afterward in the charity school to which she is sent. She succeeds academically, however, conquers her temper, and after six years as a student is promoted to teaching in the same school. It is independence of a sort, but the scope of the school world does not satisfy her. She wants to see more, to experience more — and, still determinedly independent, she seeks and finds a position as governess. 

When one of Jane Austen’s characters prepares to go out as governess, she is an object of pity to friends and to the author. For Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the position of governess is an achievement — not failure but success. In Pride and Prejudice, only the housekeeper, “Hill,” is given a name. In Mrs. Reed’s house, we know Bessie and and Abbott and Robert; in Mr. Rochester’s Thornfield, even the footman, Sam, is named. Is it a difference in the times or in the eye of an author who sees beyond social conventions? Perhaps something of both. 

Jane Eyre was feared by many in its time. The novel exposed a young woman’s capacity for passion and urged moral equality, not only among various social classes but also between men and women. If Jane is elevated late in the novel by an unexpected inheritance, so is Mr. Rochester brought low by injuries sustained in the fire that destroys Thornfield. Their respective changes in fortune do not make the man the woman’s inferior, however; what is brought about is an equality of fortune to align with the moral equality Jane had claimed from the start — and which Edward Rochester could not help acknowledging and respecting, even at his most desperate.

What if, what if??? we may ask, imagining other paths the story might have taken, but Bronte shaped her novel to the characters she conceived, and so their end is not contrived but, according to the individuals they were and the circumstances of their lives, inevitable. Society is left as it was, except that readers of Jane Eyre have been given a glimpse of different values and possibilities. 

Paul Krugman had an interesting opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times. Here’s part of what he wrote in refutation of the notion that only blue color workers feel “economic anxiety” and are responsible for the current political climate:

…It’s perfectly possible for a man to lead a comfortable, indeed enviable life by any objective standard, yet be consumed with bitterness driven by status anxiety. 

You might think this is impossible, that having a good job and a comfortable life would inoculate someone against envy and hatred. That is, you might think that if you knew nothing of human nature and the world. 

I’ve spent my whole adult life in rarefied academic circles, where everyone has a good income and excellent working conditions. Yet I know many people in that world who are seething with resentment because they aren’t at Harvard or Yale, or who actually are at Harvard or Yale but are seething all the same because they haven’t received a Nobel Prize. 

What is happening in our country today, he says (and I agree) is “not about populism." The power behind it, the money and influence behind it, come from the privileged who don’t want others to share their good fortune.

What has become of Bronte’s vision? Of respect for honest work, of truth spoken across classes, of moral equality between men and women, of the “American dream” for all Americans? What has become of the American dream vision it used to seem most of us shared for our country?

“Whenever I went out, I heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was welcomed with friendly smiles. … At this period of my life, my heart far oftener swelled with thankfulness than sank with dejection: and yet, reader, to tell you all, in the midst of this calm, this useful existence … I used to rush into strange dreams at night….  By nine o’clock the next morning I was punctually opening the school; tranquil, settled, prepared for the steady duties of the day.” - Charlotte Bronte, JANE EYRE

I'm not even separated from my true love, and still it takes that second cup of coffee every morning for me to shake the nightmares of these times.

Comfort Books

The sheep shuffled themselves into a tighter pack in the field beyond. Her feet skidded on ice, scuffed on stones; trees stood bare against the starry sky, the pale shape of an owl swept overhead. She climbed up as high as the drovers’ road; she stopped there, on the crossroads, on the edge of everything she had ever known. The hillside stood wide and empty, and it seemed that there was nothing but the stars and nightbirds.
 -      Jo Baker, Longbourn

As autumn slips from bright warmth to colder, chillier days, days growing ever shorter, bookmarked by dark mornings and darker evenings, instinct prompts me to turn to the joys of reading again books I have enjoyed in the past. Taking down a well-loved book to read it again is like settling in for a good long visit with a beloved old friend: in the comfort of familiarity, there is space and leisure to discover what one has never seen before and to rediscover forgotten delights.

An inveterate re-reader of Jane Austen all my adult life, when I discovered Jo Baker’s re-imagining of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of a maid in the household, I shelved Longbourn alongside the Austen original, anticipating re-readings of both.

Sarah took her orders, and went to gather up the needful equipment: her blacklead, vinegar, the jar of cold tea leaves, her rags and broom; at times like this, you just gritted your teeth and got on with it. She carried her basket upstairs, and, with Polly, got down on her knees to roll up the Turkey-carpet up. She swept out and blackleaded the grate, and then between them she and Polly dragged the carpet down the stairs.

Sarah is literate and borrows books from Mr. Bennett’s library, as well as from Elizabeth Bennett, but her life experiences have been narrowly circumscribed. She has not traveled far from home. Her little world has been bounded by the immediate countryside around Longbourn House and the village of Meryton. Also, her life is one of hard labor rather than moneyed leisure.

Jo Baker’s story lacks the sharp wit of Jane Austen’s. Well, of course! Clever, saucy Eliza Bennett is Austen’s central character, while Baker’s novel takes unworldly Sarah’s point of view – Sarah, who never so much as appeared by name in Pride and Prejudice. But while I will always love Elizabeth’s impetuosity and strong feelings, her prejudices and sharp tongue, as well as the loving heart she bears for family and friends, I am touched by hard-working Sarah’s ability to see beneath the social surfaces of those in all classes of life. Rather than take Mr. Collins as a complete fool, for example, as do Mr. Bennett and his daughters, Sarah sees the young man’s clueless awkwardness, and she pities him. Were Sarah to be cast as maid in the home of Emma Woodhouse, we feel sure she would understand the feelings motivating Mrs. Elton's behavior and pity her, also, rather than dismiss her from sympathetic consideration.

Pride and Prejudice at its inception began as a simple epistolary novel and grew from there, and even in its final published version the content of letters holds much of plot and character development. In Longbourn, not so. Entrusted with Elizabeth’s letters to mail, Sarah turns them over curiously in her hands on the way to the post office,

...lifting them to smell them, tracing the seals with a rough fingertip. They flitted wherever they liked, these letters. They darted back and forth across the countryside like birds.

Not like Sarah, who, when finally given the chance to travel to London, must ride outside on the carriage luggage rack.

She has dreamed of travel, though, this servant girl with rough, chapped and chilblained, work-hardened hands, and she is intrigued by James, the new addition to Longbourn’s servants, in part because she senses that he has seen faraway places. It’s true, James has been far from home, but there are places he has seen that he would like to see again, differently.

He sat on his bed, still in shirtsleeves, with a blanket over his shoulders, and a book of Scottish maps on his lap. This way of rendering the hard facts of landscape was new to him: the little upward flicks of the pen for mountainsides, the tiny clustered trees for woodland, the blue patches of lochs. He wanted maps of other places, he wanted maps of places he had been, he wanted to follow routes across terrain that his feet had trodden.

Will his life from now on be as narrowly bounded as Sarah’s always has been? As was the case with Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, Sarah and James begin their acquaintance with misunderstandings and irritability that we feel sure will turn in time to love. What we cannot anticipate in early chapters, however, is the number and depth of secrets that will be revealed in the novel’s rich course.

It is as much a matter of literary convention as of imagination, I’m sure, but Baker quite outdoes Austen when it comes to describing her characters’ world, whether indoors or out. In the kitchen we see the era's methods and materials of cooking and cleaning; outdoors there is livestock and fowl -- horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, domestic gallinies and hand-raised wild pheasant. Baker's descriptions provide details and nuances that transport a reader over two hundred years into the past and into a vanished English countryside.

She rubbed the mist from the window and looked out. Low sun now, after all the rain. The light was golden: it caught on the damp flagstones and made them brilliant.

Or this passage with Mrs. Hill, the housekeeper, outdoors for a change:

She climbed a stile, and sank down in the lee of a hedge. There was wood sorrel growing on the bank, and harebells, and there were cowslips nodding in the meadow grass at her feet, and a young cow ambled over, head swinging low, considering her with a bulging eye. It blinked its long lashes, and licked its nose with a rasping sticky tongue.

Among the comforts of re-reading is that even bad weather can be appreciated in the pages of a book. Our own northern Michigan skies of late have been filled with dark scudding clouds, the sky “heavy and low,” bringing a “strange dusk” to mornings and afternoons, but indoors we have cheery firesides and electric lamplight and books in which to lose ourselves, shutting out the chill fall dark with pages of lively, vivid fiction. Leelanau County is bracing and wild as October draws to a close. It's beautiful. But the fireside has its own attractions, and as I scrub out my own egg pan and wipe down the stove, I think of Sarah performing her chores at Longbourn, and I look forward happily to joining her again this evening.

I Turn For Relief: The Comforts of Baking and Re-Reading

Feeling overwhelmed by time’s fullness and breakneck speed may be brought on by a crowded calendar, concerns of business, or any number of activities, even by reading itself. The consumption of too many books and book reviews and political articles in succession, particularly with a felt obligation to have something intelligent to say about each one, culminates every now and then in a crash. The system, as it were, goes down.

Baking

And so, tired of thinking and have nothing to say, of days passing without inspiration, I turn to the most spotted, dog-eared pages in my oldest cookbook. Comfort! A pan of brownies in the oven smells delicious in the evening, and nothing brightens a grey, cold November morning like hot oatmeal muffins dripping with butter. And now, it being a cold, grey, wet, windy November morning as I draft this post and wait for my oven to preheat, I’m thinking I might as well include a couple of recipes I’ve adapted over the years from the Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer. (My mother used the 1950 edition of this cookbook, and I received my own copy of the 1964 edition in 1966 and used it until it fell to pieces, to be replaced by a 1967 copy.) Admonitions are my own additions, as should go without saying, but I’m saying.

OATMEAL MUFFINS

Sift together (or mix well together, as I do, with a wire whisk):

2 cups flour (I use Bob’s Red Mill)

1 T baking powder

2 T sugar

½ tsp. salt

1 egg

2/3 cold cooked oatmeal (see below)

1 cup milk

Beat the egg well, and add to it the cold cooked oatmeal and milk, mixing ONLY until dry ingredients are thoroughly moistened. DO NOT OVERMIX! Here you do not want an electric mixer or food processor or even a whisk but simply a spoon or fork. Also, DO NOT USE INSTANT OATMEAL OR “QUICK” OATS! You might as well eat a bowl of sugar! What you want is either whole or steel-cut oats (Bob’s Red Mill has both), and the thing to do is to cook twice the amount you want for breakfast the day before, and to save time that morning you will put the oats and water to soak in the top of a double boiler the night before, and to save even more morning time bring the oats to a boil the night before, leaving them covered for morning reheating.

Bake muffins in a HOT oven, 425 degrees, for about 25 minutes. The recipe makes a dozen muffins. OVEN TEMPERATURE IS CRUCIAL FOR MUFFINS! Few things from an oven are more disappointing than muffins with raw middles. You want them brown and crisp on top, fluffy inside, and baked clear through.

CHOCOLATE BROWNIES

4 oz. melted dark baking chocolate (NOT “baking squares”)

½ cup melted butter (use other shortening at your own peril)

1 cup flour

(Salt and baking powder are really not necessary.)

4 eggs

2 cups sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

Melt chocolate and butter in the top of a double boiler and stir until shiny and smooth. Mix dry ingredients together with a whisk as you did with the muffin batter in the other recipe. Add sugar gradually, beating until very light.

Add melted chocolate-butter to sugar-egg mixture and then stir in dry ingredients. Spread in a shallow baking pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes.

My modifications to the original cookbook brownie recipe include doubling the amounts of chocolate, shortening (and always using butter for “shortening”), eggs and sugar and eliminating salt and baking powder, resulting in a chewy rather than a light, cakelike brownie. The key here, again, is making sure that the brownies are baked all the way through. Test with a clean knife or toothpick. If it comes out gooey rather than clean, give the brownies another 5 minutes and test again. You should have a crunchy top and a rich, dense brownie.

I baked brownies from this recipe on Friday night and took them to the bookshop on Saturday morning. There were no complaints from browsers or customers.

Reading

I’ve been a re-reader all my life and cannot comprehend people who say they never re-read. To me, that would be like meeting a pleasant, interesting person, having a wonderful conversation, and never wanting to see that person again. In grade school, I read all the Walter Farley books over and over, along with The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, The Borrowers, Palmer Brown’s The Silver Nutmeg, and my mother’s old copy of Anne of Green Gables, to name only a select few. To be honest, I still enjoy revisiting these favorites, but in more recent decades I’ve added to this list all of Jane Austen’s novels, but especially Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Maggie-Now, my favorite Betty Smith books; the beginning and end (not the middle volumes, which bore me to tears) of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat, Thoreau’s Walden, of course; Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; and, the most recent addition, Ellen Airgood’s South of Superior, which I have read four times and expect to re-read for the rest of my life.

Re-reading for me has all the advantage of “escape,” with the added comfort of familiarity. The characters and their worlds are old friends, and I enter once again into their lives and adventures. Even knowing how things will come out in the end, I vicariously re-experience all the confusions and doubts, hopes, fears, and excitement of the people in these books. And yet, always, somehow, there are a few lines that strike me as if I’m reading them for the first time. The time never feels wasted or the experience repetitious.

Because I’m currently re-reading Proust on assignment for a group discussion coming up soon, it was Jane Austen I turned to at dark 3 a.m. one recent morning. Never feeling a need to justify a re-reading, I did however think this time that it would be worthwhile going through Pride and Prejudice again in preparation for a December discussion of Longbourn, which I’ll also re-read again with pleasure before our group meets.

Here is a passage often quoted:

Upon the whole, therefore, she found, what has been sometimes found before, that an event to which she had looked forward with impatient desire, did not in taking place, bring all the satisfaction she had promised herself. It was consequently necessary to name some other period for the commencement of actual felicity; to have some other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and by again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for the present, and prepare for another disappointment.

“Don’t wish your life away!” my mother always warned me, from my earliest childhood, when I “couldn’t wait” for time to bring around some longed-for event. How many modern self-help books counsel readers not to believe that happiness depends on some conditional “if” event, like falling in love or winning the lottery? The passage is perfectly familiar, as is its sense. But in my most recent reading I was suddenly struck by the last four words: “prepare for another disappointment.” How much dry irony Austen packs into those four simple words, as if anything wished for will disappoint! Is this Eliza Bennett’s skeptical wariness or the author’s own?

Much, much – I often think far too much! – is made of the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice. Finishing the novel this time, I read the afterword by Henry Hitchings with my own skeptical, wary eye. I nodded approvingly over everything he had to say about Jane Austen and David Hume’s philosophical writings on reason (once, back in graduate school, before the tsunami of writings on Austen, I had thoughts of writing something on that subject myself but could not bring myself to read her work with the analytic, academic rigor such a project would demand, because one does not want to analyze love, and I love Jane Austen), but as for what he says of the famous first sentence, I was less than satisfied, as usual.

The novel’s opening sentence is one of the most celebrated in English literature. It alerts us, quite subtly, to Austen’s powers of irony. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ she writes, ‘that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ This seems straightforward, but ought to prompt two questions: is this alleged ‘truth’ really acknowledged ‘universally’, and ‘must’ an affluent man always be ‘in want of a wife’? Austen is not endorsing the view that all affluent men should marry; instead she gently mocks the notion that there can be universal truths, and at the same time she mocks the shallowness of her contemporaries.

Close reading, literary criticism – call it what you will, it has never satisfied me and still does not. So this time I set about trying to figure out and articulate for myself what that sentence is doing, and it strikes me that there is both more and less going on there than the critics would have us believe. Make no mistake: this is one of the best, most successful first lines ever penned in a work of fiction. There is genius in it. And yet, has it ever seemed “straightforward” to any reader? How obtuse and thick-headed would such a reader have to be? Of course the tone is mocking, and the mockery is obvious! That’s why we laugh! But are we really meant to be led by this sentence into reflections on universal truths? Is this the direction Austen would have us go? 

My questions are rhetorical, as I’m sure is obvious, and no is the answer I would convince you is correct. My claim is that it is self-interest in general and the character of Mrs. Bennett in particular that Austen mocks in her opening sentence. Then, move along, move along! We’re entering the world of a story!

As Hitchings says elsewhere, Austen is always, first and foremost, in service to the story she is telling. Any “feminist and revolutionary notes,” and so surely any epistemological or metaphysical considerations, are a lesser priority. The opening sentence introduces the concerns of a particular social group, but most pointedly it introduces one member of that group. The mocking tone calls into question self-interest unwilling (or perhaps unable) to recognize itself. Just as Mrs. Bennett protests that she forces herself out into society only for the sake of her daughters, so she needs to present those daughters as potentially answering the “need” of eligible bachelors. Mrs. Bennett’s almost complete lack of self-awareness is paired with a very high level of self-interest, and it is Mrs. Bennett who is introduced on the first page of the novel, her entrance prepared by two information-rich sentences. Character and story, story and character. How much Austen compresses into a very few words, and how easy it is to overload those simple words with philosophical freight!

Agree or disagree? Why?

Commuting between Proust and Austen, as I did for several mornings and evenings, I was struck anew by the lack of description in Austen’s work (so rich in Swann’s Way!) but also the economy of expression throughout her work. Wherever not necessary for the explication of character or the forwarding of plot, details are omitted, as in this passing reference to the wedding between Mr. Collins and Charlotte Lucas:

The wedding took place; the bride and bridegroom set off for Kent from the church door, and everybody had as much to say or to hear on the subject as usual.

We already know what the bride and groom respectively looked for in marriage, and in future chapters we will see them at home, quite satisfied, so of the wedding itself nothing more need be said.

Re-reading is a comfort and an escape because the work and characters are familiar, but it’s important for me to re-read books rich enough to show me something new each time through.

I began writing this post while the oven was preheating for oatmeal muffins and finished it up with chicken broth simmering on the stove, redolent with plenty of garlic and celery. Homemade noodles, cut thick, were already dancing in my head as wind and rain whipped tree branches outside our old farmhouse.

Happy baking – and happy reading! 

Book Review: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, 
and Jane Austen,

by Charlie Lovett

NY: Viking, 2014

Hardcover, $27.95

On sale October 20, 2014

Like a wary horse led toward a new and unfamiliar horse trailer – i.e., suspiciously, nervously -- that’s how I approach modern fiction claiming inspiration from Jane Austen’s work. My mind is not closed but is definitely guarded. At the same time, I’m also prepared to be won over. That’s it, though: I’ll be passing judgment on every page with a standard set 200 years ago by Jane Austen herself. How could it be otherwise?

Charlie Lovett did not win me over on the first page or even in the first chapter of First Impressions. I found fault with his adjectives and even his verbs.

Her first impression was that he was the picture of gloom—dressed in shabby clerical garb, a dark look on his crinkled face, doubtless a volume of dusty sermons clutched in his ancient hand.

But Jane Austen herself is the main character in that and every other chapter, so Lovett has given himself quite a challenge. Attempting to imitate Jane Austen! It is all too easy for words to fail: he who attempts and she who critiques had best tread carefully here. And so I read on.

After only four pages of his fictional Jane and her fictional and purely invented friend and mentor, our modern author shifts to the present day, introducing us to young Sophie Collingwood, and you’d think Sophie would seem easier to accept than first-chapter Jane, but maybe I’d allowed my skepticism to deepen over the previous four pages, because I did not immediately cotton to Sophie, either. Reading ostentatiously as she walked along, looking down on the strange young man for being American and casually dressed but then speaking to him of her father in a manner seemingly designed to invite the development of a relationship -- that is Sophie as we first meet her. “Sophie rolled her eyes. ‘He likes to shoot things.’” Is she trying to give Eric the brush-off or encourage revelations? Maybe she’s not sure herself, and maybe our first impression of Sophie will not be a lasting impression.

Back to Hampshire, 1796, in the third chapter, the Reverend Mr. Richard Mansfield gives the fictional Jane the first suggestion of many to follow as to the development of a story she has in progress.

“I only felt that if Sir John Middleton were a more affable sort – the type to throw parties or host picnics – your younger characters might be thrown together with more frequency.” 

 “I confess I had not yet given much thought to the character of Sir John,” said Jane. “But I think you are right. And it should not take much rewriting to set him on a course to host picnics and balls aplenty.”

Now the horse is asked to walk up the ramp to the trailer, and this horse plants hooves squarely on solid earth and digs in! Stiff legs, ears laid back! Jane Austen needing literary guidance from an older man? One whose own writing is pedestrian in the extreme? What kind of liberties are being taken here with one of my favorite writers of all time?

The structure of First Impressions is two stories, however, one historical fiction and the other modern mystery. Eventually the two will intertwine. And fortunately my second impression of Sophie was more favorable than the first, the revised view beginning where Lovett starts cashing in the promise of “old books” in his subtitle. Sophie’s Uncle Bertram, I learn to my great delight, was a book collector. Soon Sophie finds a job in a secondhand bookshop! She gets to know a customer whose passion is early printing, and this intrigues her (though she’s never been interested in the printing aspect of books before), as her family is descended from an early English printer. She learns to question her own first impressions of everyone and everything.

There is a lot in this book for bibliophiles. My part-time bookstore helper, Bruce, will love the beginning of this chapter (page 79):

Almost without thinking ... Sophie had walked to Cecil Court, a short pedestrian lane between Charing Cross Road and St. Martin’s Lane that was lined on both sides with bookshops. Cecil Court, with its rows of tall glass windows framed by green painted woodwork and filled with displays of every type of book imaginable, was the heart of London’s secondhand book trade. The world seemed to move more slowly here....

And Sophie’s Uncle Bertram, expounding to her on the beauty of rare books:

“If you mail a rare stamp it becomes worthless. If you drink a bottle of rare wine, you’re left with some recycling. But if you read a rare book it’s still there, it’s still valuable, and it’s achieved the full measure of its being. A book is to be read, whether it’s worth five pounds or five thousands pounds.”

Because that’s the kind of collector Bertram was, a reader rather than a trophy hunter. It’s impossible not to love him, so I was grateful to have so many encounters with him in flashbacks, despite his death early in the novel.

Death? Uncle Bertram? Did he fall, or was he pushed? Is Sophie’s imagination running away with her, as did young Catherine Morland’s in Austen’s Northanger Abbey?

Whatever will be discovered later on, Sophie’s impression that Uncle Bertram’s death is suspicious constitutes a mystery for her. The second mystery has to do with a couple of very specific 18^th-century books and the relationship between the fictional Jane Austen (remember, this is a novel Lovett has written) and her aged mentor. Sophie is determined to solve both.

Jane’s mentor, Richard Mansfield, is mirrored in Sophie’s life by her Uncle Bertram and later, in lesser fashion, by the bookseller, Gusty Boxhill. Sophie’s loving relationship with her sister Victoria mirrors that of Jane and Cassandra. Eric and Winston, Sophie’s “suitors,” seem to have no parallel in the fictional Jane Austen’s story. Are we to believe and trust either one of them, or do the older men hold all the truth and devotion cards?

For me, the modern chapters of this book worked better than those with Jane Austen, although I enjoyed brief two-century-old glimpses of the fictional printer. As for the mysteries, they felt contrived, and I could have done without them, whereas the world of old books, bookshops, bookselling, printing history, and primary source research had me spellbound. But this is, as always, a subjective response: I am a bookseller, and I live in a world of books. It’s also no small matter to me when a writer undertakes to re-invent one of my favorite authors.

The bottom line, though, is that First Impressions is an entertaining book and makes enjoyable reading. It will be irresistible to Austen fans and bibliophiles, and mystery readers and book club members will enjoy it, as well. The discussion possibilities are endless.

Leave a comment and become eligible for a give-away copy of this book! Sorry, U.S. mailing addresses only.

A Novel I’ll Be Re-Reading For Years to Come

One of my favorite meadows near home

Months ago a friend recommended that I read Longbourn, by Jo Baker, but summer is a busy time, and books and weeks fly by at a dizzying pace, so I didn’t pick up the book that had been waiting patiently for me until a few days ago. That’s all it took—picking it up and reading the first page. I was hooked.

The main character, Sarah, is a maid in the Bennet household, that family of five daughters famous among English-language readers for 200 years from Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice. Mrs. Hill and her husband run the house with the help of maids Sarah and young Polly, and as Polly, only about 12 years old, has a hard time waking up early, it falls to the more responsible Sarah to rise in the dark on washday and go out into the cold morning to begin the hardest day of the week.

The air was sharp at four thirty in the morning, when she started work. The iron pump-handle was cold, and even with her mitts on, her chilbains flared as she heaved the water up from the underground dark and into her waiting pail. A long day to be got through, and this just the very start of it.  

All else was stillness. Sheep huddled in drifts on the hillside; birds in the hedgerows were fluffed like thistledown; in the woods, fallen leaves rustled with the passage of a hedgehog; the stream caught starlight and glistened over rocks, Below, in the barn, cows huffed clouds of sweet breath, and in the sty, the sow twitched, her piglets bundled at her belly. Mrs. Hill and her husband, up high in their tiny attic, slept the black blank sleep of deep fatigue; two floors below, in the principal bedchamber, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet were a pair of churchyard humps under the counterpane. The young ladies, all five of them sleeping in their beds, were dreaming of whatever it was that young ladies dream.

From Austen’s book we already know Longbourn (the house) and the Bennet family and their neighborhood and the nearby town of Meryton, the relatives and the officers and dozens of letters exchanged by the gentlefolk. We’ve made a visit of several weeks with Elizabeth when she goes to stay with Charlotte Lucas at the parsonage after Charlotte has married Mr. Collins, and we’ve accompanied Elizabeth again into Derbyshire with her aunt and uncle. Her parents’ foibles are as familiar to us as those of our own family. But without Baker’s book we hadn’t the barest acquaintance with the servants at Longbourn, Netherfield, Lucas Lodge, or Pemberley. As the author says in her note at the end of her book,

The main characters in Longbourn are ghostly presences in Pride and Prejudice; they exist to serve the family and the story. They deliver notes and drive carriages; they run errands when nobody else will step out of doors—they are the “proxy” by which the shoe-roses for Netherfield Ball are fetched in the pouring rain. But they are—at least in my head—people too.

So a great part of the pleasure in reading Longbourn is coming back to a familiar fictional place and adding a new dimension to our experience of it. Jo Baker goes places with her characters that Jane Austen never went. It is as if the servants and those whom they serve inhabit completely different worlds, as of course they do, from a social and economic perspective. Seeing Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their daughters through the eyes of their servants, therefore, gives a very different picture from the one painted in Austen’s original novel.

But another source is pleasure in reading Longbourn is simply Jo Baker’s beautiful writing. The housekeeper at Hunsford Parsonage peers into scoured pans with her “head cocked like a hen.” When Sarah goes out one night, she stumbles through “cow-churned fields.” We are in the country, in the English countryside, and see and hear and feel it all around us—the old drovers’ road near Longbourn and the stone steps of the boundary wall at Pemberley, “treads ... glossy with the years.”

Not everything is lovely and pastoral in this world, however, and Baker also brings in the muck and the blood of it, along with the far-off slavery that brings sugar to England and the plight of orphans and unwed mothers and country boys off to war in strange lands and widows and orphans in those strange lands. All this she manages with brilliant economy of language and without ever losing the focus on her characters. For instance, when collecting gossip from their aunt in Meryton, the girls learn, in passing, that “a private had been flogged,” and no more is said of the flogging by Austen. Baker has Sarah come unawares upon the scene in Meryton:

Her senses, briefly, could not accommodate the image.  

Then it was a pig. A carcass. A great slab of meat waiting to be skinned.  

Then her perceptions shifted again, true patterns formed: she saw the shape of human muscle, shoulder blade, a dark slick of hair, the cable-twist of neck.  

In the instant that she saw, she looked away, but by then it was too late. ...His skin was lurid in the dull light, his cheek hazed with greying stubble and flattened against the dark weathered wood. His eyes were wide and rolling, his jaw clenched. His body, held immobile by the bonds, was fiercely at work: his arm muscles shifted and twisted, his feet trod and braced against the cobbles like a horse’s.

It is a horrible scene, shocking to Sarah and to the reader, but the detail in it is not gratuitous, and the images are those of a masterful writer: “his feet ... braced against the cobbles like a horse’s.”

Somewhere I read a review of Longbourn that took issue with Baker’s mentions of chamber pots and night soil and women’s bloody napkins and babies’ stinking nappies. Well, this is the servants’ world: what the gentry would never mention and can pretend does not exist must be dealt with by the servants, and Baker does not dwell on it unduly. It’s just that in Pride and Prejudice, we share Jane and Elizabeth’s sheltered, privileged world; in Longbourn we are in Sarah and Polly’s world, the one that props the other up and makes it possible.

But there is another dimension, and if the “necessary house” takes us down a level from Austen’s world, the political and military realities Baker includes take us up to a bird’s eye view of England at that time—again, while always staying focused on her characters. History barely intrudes on the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice, but the Longbourn cast know its pinch and fear its chill winds.

Jo Baker loves Pride and Prejudice and has been re-reading it for most of her life, a love I share. When a good friend of mine said in our reading group that she “loved the language but didn’t like the characters at all,” my heart sank. Not like Eliza Bennet? No, my friend was impatient with Eliza and with all the rest because none of them knew what it meant to work; instead, they led what she considered superficial, pampered, frivolous lives. Now I can’t wait for my friend to read Longbourn. She will love both the language and the characters and will be drawn irresistibly into the drama of their lives.

I believe a reader coming to Longbourn without any knowledge of Jane Austen’s novel could still be bowled over by the story and the writing. Despite Baker’s inspiration, her work can stand on its own. I’m also sure readers like my friend who found Pride and Prejudice boring (!) will have a more positive reaction to Longbourn, finding it more “realistic.”

As for me, I will go on loving and re-reading Pride and Prejudice, only now I will also have Longbourn to love and re-read. My experience of the English countryside in the late 18^th century has been deepened and broadened and enriched, especially as it pertains to one small English neighborhood, my love for that faraway, fictional place a reflection of my love for my own home.

Wild grape and willow at water's edge

I Had a Jane Austen Moment

It wasn’t the first time, either. 

Many years ago a man came into my bookstore and somehow got onto the subject of concealed weapons and his right to carry same. Don’t ask me how that subject arose. It was very important to him, so my guess is that he was adept at bringing it into the conversation. But as he was giving his impassioned speech, all I could think was, Are you carrying a weapon? Because I’m not. So we are on very unequal footing. I don’t like unequal footing. And while I occasionally have people wander into my bookstore, hands in pockets or clasped nervously in front of them, exclaiming (much to my annoyance, because it’s not as if I’m running an opium den or a speak-easy), “This is such a dangerous place for me to be!” I can’t imagine any of them would feel the serious need to enter armed. And I thought then, and think now whenever I recall the encounter, of Emma’s protests when she learned from the concern of her friend Mrs. Weston that Frank Churchill, who had flirted with her outrageously, had all the time been secretly engaged to another young woman.

“I have escaped, and that I should escape, may be a matter of grateful wonder to you and myself. But this does not acquit him, Mrs. Weston; and I must say, that I think him greatly to blame. What right had he to come among us with affection and faith engaged, and with manners so very disengaged? What right had he to endeavour to please, as he certainly did – to distinguish any one young woman with persevering attention, as he certainly did – while he really belonged to another? How could he tell what mischief he might be doing? – How could he tell that he might not be making me in love with him? – very wrong, very wrong indeed.”

That Frank Churchill should come into that small country society and behave as a single man, without romantic or marital commitment, when his affection and promise had already been secretly given, meant to Emma that Frank had been treating society, as well as the marriage market of the time, as his personal plaything. “Impropriety!” Emma exclaims.

“Oh! Mrs. Weston – it is too calm a censure. Much, much beyond impropriety! It has sunk him, I cannot say how it has sunk him in my opinion. So unlike what a man should be! None of that upright integrity, that strict adherence to truth and principle, that disdain of trick and littleness, which a man should display in every transaction of his life.”

I am not saying that Jane Austen or the society of her time would have the same attitude toward concealed weapons as they had toward concealed engagements or marriages, only that in my mind there is a parallel. Do we meet openly, as equals, or with our secret selves carefully hidden away until -- ???

Well, that was a lengthy introduction, but get me on the subject of Jane Austen, and I am as likely to be carried away as my one-time visitor with his own pet hobby-horse. My more recent Jane Austen moment came when Mr. X said of Mr. Y that the latter was often considered “arrogant.” Mr. X continued, “When you find out about his life, you see he’s entitled to be arrogant.” Austen fans will not have a moment’s hesitation here but will know instantly that Mr. X’s account of Mr. Y brought Pride and Prejudice to my mind.

Mr. Bingley was good looking and gentlemanlike .... but his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien; and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. ,,,[H]e was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.

Mr. Darcy is quickly detested by almost the entire town of Meryton and all the family at Longbourne except Jane (who never thinks ill of anyone) for his insufferable pride, and it takes nearly the whole novel for Elizabeth to realize that she, too, has been guilty of the same deadly sin, prejudiced against Mr. Darcy because he wounded her own amour-propre. A couple of more moderate voices are heard, however, as early as Chapter 5.

“His pride,” said Miss Lucas, “does not offend me so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a right to be proud.”

Elizabeth’s friend, Miss Lucas is in general much less critical of others than Elizabeth, sometimes (as we later learn) carrying nonjudgmentalism to extremes Elizabeth regards with something like horror. Elizabeth’s sister Mary, the family moralist, “who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections,” was the first to make a distinction between pride and vanity.

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

What, though of Mr. X’s opinion of Mr. Y? Can one have a “right” to be arrogant? A man who takes pride in his accomplishments – or, of course, a woman who takes pride in hers – does not necessarily need to parade them before others to satisfy his or her vanity. But arrogance – where does that put us?

Without consulting a dictionary, and only going by my own sense of the word, I can’t help finding arrogance, as one of Austen’s characters would put it, “a grievous fault indeed.” I see the arrogant individual lording it over others, disdaining others, riding roughshod over anyone who gets in his or her way – and can there ever be a question of a “right” to such behavior?

Yes, I sound like Mary! Sigh! Mary the earnest bluestocking, not the lively, witty Elizabeth Bennett. And yet, I don’t think Elizabeth would put up with arrogance for one minute. She would puncture it verbally and/or turn and dance away gaily in another direction.

P.S. Next day: Here's an interesting site, not only defining but giving tips for spotting and dealing with arrogant people.

Always, For Me, Jane Austen

Our “intrepid Ulysses group,” having tackled James Joyce, Dante, Beckett, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Faulkner and so on, decided most recently to read Pride and Prejudice together, the first time for about half the group. As for me, I’ve read this delightful novel countless times – really, cannot begin to count my readings, since Austen was my tired-brain-bedtime reading through my first two years of graduate school. Lined up at the head of my futon on the floor were Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility; Emma; Northanger Abbey; and Persuasion, and every evening when my brain could not absorb one more word of philosophy, I would crawl under the blankets and pull out whichever Austen novel I had closed the night before, opening where my bookmark had been left. Night after night. Finishing one, I would move on to the next, and at the end of the row I would begin again at the beginning. So yes, I know these novels pretty well.

But being asked to lead a group discussion made my reading different this time around. For the first time, I noticed Austen’s incredible economy of language. How much information is packed into the first sentence! We know that we have begun reading a comedy, that the cast of characters comes from a certain class of society, that the story will end in marriage, and that the author looks at her world with eyebrows raised and an amused smile on her lips.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

There it is. This “truth universally acknowledged” is of course not “universal” at all but part of the fabric of a certain class of English society at the time of the novel. The “good fortune” tells us more about which class of English men and women we will meet in the novel’s pages. “Single man” and “wife” aims us toward the marriage market, and the author’s sly wording tells us that she finds much humor in this business of families looking to marry daughters into money. All this in twenty-three words!

I also noticed for the first time how short many of the chapters are and how most of them consist of a single scene. Onstage in the first chapter are Mr. and Mrs. Bennett. Basically, we are given two sentences of introduction, then a spirited dialogue between husband and wife, ending with a paragraph summing up their marriage in general. Austen’s ability to convey character through dialogue is well known, and it’s no wonder her novels have been so often adapted for dramatic presentation, but has anyone considered how the English theatre might have been changed had she been introduced into a literary/theatrical milieu in London? What a playwright she might have been!

Of the 61 chapters of Pride and Prejudice (the final chapter being a summary exposition of the future of its characters, without dialogue), three stand out from the rest -- for me, at least -- in their startling dramatic impact: Chapter 19, the extraordinarily ridiculous proposal of marriage from Mr. Collins and Elizabeth’s spirited refusal of same; Chapter 34, another proposal of marriage, this time issuing reluctantly and haughtily from Mr. Darcy, and Elizabeth’s even stronger refusal; and finally the marvelous, irresistible scene between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Chapter 56. Surely Lady Catherine could hold her own onstage beside Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell! Which one do you think would come out on top?

And oh, that Eliza Bennett! Who can help loving her? She is well read but no showoff bluestocking, musical without the heaviness of genius, not a ravishing beauty but slim and attractive, with bright, lively eyes, dark and beautifully expressive. Her sense of humor is irrepressible. She loves long country walks. She will not marry without love, even if it means remaining an old maid, and she is determined to be recognized as a “rational creature.” 

Not for Elizabeth the wit of the staircase, l’esprit de l’escalier, thinking too late of the retort she should have made. No, Eliza is never at a loss for words (except when spoken to by her sister, Mary, who has none of Elizabeth’s quickness or sense of the ridiculous). Our heroine’s regrets are of a very different order, regret for what she said rather than what she did not say, regret that she let herself be prejudiced against Mr. Darcy and in favor of Mr. Wickham for no other reason than the former’s initial coldness and the latter’s easy charm, the one offending and the other fueling her own pride. The conclusions of all reasoning rest on the soundness of first premises, and this charming "rational creature" had some hard lessons to learn before reaching her happy ending.

I put forward to the group the following hypothesis: Mrs. Hurst, Bingley’s married sister, is crucial to the story by giving Miss Bingley an audience for her cruelest observations on the Bennett family. Without Mrs. Hurst, Miss Bingley’s character would not be so readily revealed. Mr. Hurst, who does nothing but eat and sleep, is useful in taking his wife out of the marriage market so that Bingley does not have two sisters competing for Mr. Darcy.

One question our group has not yet resolved is Mary, the pedantic Bennett sister. What is her function in the story (or drama, as I now think of it)? Does she have one? Any thoughts?

Not generally a great reader of secondary sources, I did venture into a couple other writers’ researches and views of Austen. I picked up some interesting facts but also found a couple of opinions that had me spluttering. How in the world can Francine Prose, in Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them, say that Mr. and Mrs. Bennett had a happy marriage?! Did she read the last paragraph of the first chapter or the first paragraph of the forty-second chapter? “Close reading,” the method Prose recommends to writers, certainly fell down on the job here! And Nigel Nicolson, in his book, The World of Jane Austen – how can he say that Austen looked at houses only as evidence of characters’ wealth, not of their taste? Here is a description of Pemberley and Elizabeth’s response to it:

It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills – and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.

Does that sound as if only wealth had been on display or noted by the heroine or author? Nicolson advances “evidence” for his claim that Austen did not care for a certain contemporary architect by quoting lines of dialogue from another of her novels – but the character who advises throwing out the architect’s plans is a shallow fop! Who on earth would take Robert Ferrars as a mouthpiece for the author?

But there were nuggets of information in the little secondary reading I did. For example, I learned that the four novels published during the author’s lifetime were published anonymously ... that her brother acted as her agent ... that her posthumous reputation was very great when her brother revealed her identity ... and, most heart-piercing nugget of all to my mind, that Jane Austen never in her life met another writer. It is one thing to live in a small village or in the countryside and to have a limited circle of acquaintance but never in her life to have met another writer? How I wish I could invite her to my bookstore to meet my writer friends! Imagine the exchange of views, the “spirited critique” of society and literary fashion!