As if marital forms and not marriage itself were the problem…
I haven’t yet begun to go stir crazy in a pandemic that forces (most of) us to stay indoors and away from all the friends we’d been so used to meeting on a regular basis. As winter slowly recedes, I’ve begun to find ways to cope with isolation, the sort I always thought I’d actually enjoy and, to a great extent, still do.
I’m fine, I keep telling myself, I’m fine. And maybe I am, and maybe I’m not. I mean, really, I live on my own now so who, really, is to know? A few years ago, a friend had to gently remind me that I was isolating myself from actual human beings and he was right. I began to seek not just the company of friends but groups of people and I even enjoyed myself.
And then, this. And, frankly, while I miss being able to hang out with friends over samosas and chai at my favourite restaurant Shan (yes, that’s a shameless plug and you should try them), or trying to figure out group dynamics when I meet new people and all the quirks of Other Peopledom, I’m also loving being on my own.
I meet with a few people regularly, and we take walks or drive to places with the windows open a crack, masked all the while (I feel compelled to point that out, given my many irked postings about people who aren’t) and I don’t enter restaurants or cafes except to pick up orders and leave, quickly. What I miss as much as meeting up with friends and speaking without masks is being able to take my work to any one of the nearby cafés to work. As the months grind on and as the virus gets both better and much, much worse, I’ve begun to find ways to occupy my time. Like many people, I’ve embarked on various projects involving crafts, mostly, and I’ve begun to tentatively think about artwork I’d like to make (who among us has not fallen for the charms of those discounted Domestika courses?).
And I’ve started to think about all the work I’d like to read or re-read, books I’ve meant to either begin reading or revisit, something I haven’t had the physical or mental space to do for a while. On a friend’s Facebook wall, I saw a conversation about reading an author’s work in the order in which they were published and I thought immediately of Jane Austen, long one of my favourite authors.
But would I read Austen in the order that her work was published, or the order in which it was written? I decided on the latter, since part of the point of the exercise is to see how a writer shifts over time. It’s not a foolproof strategy, because “lost” works by authors are always being “discovered.” Sometimes, that’s a matter of a writer’s estate deciding what should or should not see the light of day. Sometimes, that’s a writer herself keeping a work locked away for decades, only to unfurl it with a loud if rhetorical TA-DA!, all in order to create more buzz and, hem, sales (the once-famous-for-just-one-book Harper Lee and her “discovered” prequel Go Set a Watchman come to mind). But I liked the idea of at least working with what we know and recognise as Austen’s body of work (slim, yet profoundly influential).
I began with her Frederic and Elfrida, written when she was somewhere between 12 and 15 years old (1787-90). It’s, well, it’s not quite a novella or an essay or a play, but appears to be an exploratory text she wrote mainly for fun and to be shared amongst friends. Yet even here, we can see the wit and sarcasm she continues to be known for although too many ignore the latter, preferring to paint her as a writer of romantic novels (a historian friend, preparing to give a talk on Austen’s time period, said to me, “You can’t tell how sarcastic she really is until you read her out loud” and I think he’s right). Austen is in fact the opposite of a romantic: how could she be otherwise? Although she was never desperately poor, she spent most of her life dependent on the charity of wealthier friends and relatives (her formal education had to be cut short because the family lacked the funds to educate a daughter). She noted and recorded the ways in which women like herself had to comport themselves to prove alluring within a marital economy that overdetermined social life at the time (and which still does, even if we don’t recognise its tyranny these days, except to register shock and horror at tales of honour killings and arranged marriages, as if marital forms and not marriage itself were the problem).
I’ve read Frederic and Elfrida a few times, but it remains a jumble in my head, nonsensical and silly in the best way and completely uncaring about tact: there’s defenestration and sucide, and both occur in the most casual way. And it’s all about marriage and family alliances which produce marriages, and a world where people give and take affection as if they were exchanging cups of sugar. But it’s a concluding bit that I found most revealing of what would become her style. Elfrida has tried to wile Frederic into marrying her and he at first refuses; the result is this:
This answer distressed her too much for her delicate Constitution. She accordingly fainted & was in such a hurry to have a succession of fainting fits, that she had scarcely patience enough to recover from one before she fell into another.
“Scarcely patience enough to recover from one before she fell into another” is, to my mind, classic Austen. That entire sentence and the one before it are lovely, but it’s these last few words that combine wit and humour with a droll recounting of a physical action without descending into slapstick. “Scarcely patience enough” contains within it a world of marital blackmail, expectation, and a hurried rush towards a state of matrimony about which Austen was always coolly analytic.
I’ll have more on my pursuit of Austen and other writers (I’ve just come off a move that lasted about six months, more on that later, and I’m finally getting back to work). If you’re new to Austen, or think you hate her, do listen to this excellent episode of The Lit Pickers, hosted by the always amazing Supriya Nair and Deepanjana Pal, “Jane Austen: Genius or the Greatest Genius?”
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: Watercolour of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra Austen, 1804.