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A lot, actually. For years I strenuously resisting reading any of the Jane Austen novels, fearing that their girlishness and silliness would rub off on me and I would suddenly become a useless mid 17th century member of the English gentry.
Oddly enough, I got to Jane's Austen's books by reading and watching books and movies about Jane Austen. I loved Clueless, back in the day, and picked up Emma perhaps six years ago meaning to read it. It sat unread for six years. I was flipping through channels one day and came across "Becoming Jane Austin", watched it briefly, then recorded it and watched it in its entirety. On a library spree, I picked up Sense and Sensibility, and The Jane Austen Book Club, both of which I wolfed down in my usual bibliophile way. I then watched the movie The Jane Austen Book Club, picked up my old dusty copy of Emma, read it, and am now 3/4 of the way through Pride and Prejudice (which I'm reading electronically on my G1 Google Android phone, yay technology). I'll read through the rest on my handy dandy G1 as well.
What has surprised me most about the Austen books is how intelligent they are. I guess I took it as a given that they were silly, being about girl stuff and all that, written by a barely-gentrified spinster who died at age 41. They aren't. They are tightly written, intricate dances of social convention and more importantly, analysis of those social conventions from the perspective of those who were bound by them. Jane's characters understand the need for compassion, and for making practical matches that look as much to the wallet as to the heart. She examines these from many sides, both critically and sympathetically, and the drama in her stories (and there is a ton) is the meditative drama of trying to navigate small town society within extremely tight social rules that in some ways really are life and death.
They are tightly focused books, too. They do not talk about the war going on outside the small towns, but only about a Militia being boarded nearby supplying officers for potential mates. They don't discuss the servants except with regard to the social rules under which they all live (and interestingly, it was clear that governesses can move into and out of the gentry fairly easily), and how the treatment of one's servants reflects on one's character.
There is no poverty in Jane Austen's novels, no famine, no horrible exterior events at all. The events that happen to the characters are family accidents, especially including accidents of birth, that impact everyone in the novel. In a society where women are brought up to be essentially useless ornaments, the prospect of suddenly having to worry about where you will live when your father dies is a very big deal. These are stories about the life of a family, a small town, and espeically about the rich inner life of intelligent young women in a society where youngness is valued in a woman, but intelligence is not.
When you break a society down to its immediate effects on members who don't create the society, but are conditionally privileged by it, you learn a lot about that society. For the young women of Austin's novels, being seen to "lose one's virtue" is the worst thing they can conceive of, not because they are anti-sex (it is clear from all of her novels that Jane Austen understood sexual attraction intimately) but because if they are seen as damaged goods, they fall out of society entirely, below even their servants.
The novels take place largely in areas that would in modern days be considered suburbs of London. Jane Austen almost certainly had a sensibility of the fate that awaited a "fallen woman" in London, and the horrors of that state. She almost certainly had seen crushing poverty with her own eyes, and within her own community worked to alleviate it. But that wasn't her world. Her world was the tightly constrained drawing rooms of the middle class struggling simultaneously not to fall out of the middle class and to move up into the upper class. In fact, her novels could easily be written about any "bedroom community" suburb today, even about young women today. In reading her novels, it became very clear to me in a rather painful way that women's careers today are still very much window dressing for their primary task -- which is to make a good match and then a good home. As much as we'd like to think we've grown beyond this stilted little society, the reason it resonates so strongly with middle class 21st century women is because it's still with us.
Oddly enough, I got to Jane's Austen's books by reading and watching books and movies about Jane Austen. I loved Clueless, back in the day, and picked up Emma perhaps six years ago meaning to read it. It sat unread for six years. I was flipping through channels one day and came across "Becoming Jane Austin", watched it briefly, then recorded it and watched it in its entirety. On a library spree, I picked up Sense and Sensibility, and The Jane Austen Book Club, both of which I wolfed down in my usual bibliophile way. I then watched the movie The Jane Austen Book Club, picked up my old dusty copy of Emma, read it, and am now 3/4 of the way through Pride and Prejudice (which I'm reading electronically on my G1 Google Android phone, yay technology). I'll read through the rest on my handy dandy G1 as well.
What has surprised me most about the Austen books is how intelligent they are. I guess I took it as a given that they were silly, being about girl stuff and all that, written by a barely-gentrified spinster who died at age 41. They aren't. They are tightly written, intricate dances of social convention and more importantly, analysis of those social conventions from the perspective of those who were bound by them. Jane's characters understand the need for compassion, and for making practical matches that look as much to the wallet as to the heart. She examines these from many sides, both critically and sympathetically, and the drama in her stories (and there is a ton) is the meditative drama of trying to navigate small town society within extremely tight social rules that in some ways really are life and death.
They are tightly focused books, too. They do not talk about the war going on outside the small towns, but only about a Militia being boarded nearby supplying officers for potential mates. They don't discuss the servants except with regard to the social rules under which they all live (and interestingly, it was clear that governesses can move into and out of the gentry fairly easily), and how the treatment of one's servants reflects on one's character.
There is no poverty in Jane Austen's novels, no famine, no horrible exterior events at all. The events that happen to the characters are family accidents, especially including accidents of birth, that impact everyone in the novel. In a society where women are brought up to be essentially useless ornaments, the prospect of suddenly having to worry about where you will live when your father dies is a very big deal. These are stories about the life of a family, a small town, and espeically about the rich inner life of intelligent young women in a society where youngness is valued in a woman, but intelligence is not.
When you break a society down to its immediate effects on members who don't create the society, but are conditionally privileged by it, you learn a lot about that society. For the young women of Austin's novels, being seen to "lose one's virtue" is the worst thing they can conceive of, not because they are anti-sex (it is clear from all of her novels that Jane Austen understood sexual attraction intimately) but because if they are seen as damaged goods, they fall out of society entirely, below even their servants.
The novels take place largely in areas that would in modern days be considered suburbs of London. Jane Austen almost certainly had a sensibility of the fate that awaited a "fallen woman" in London, and the horrors of that state. She almost certainly had seen crushing poverty with her own eyes, and within her own community worked to alleviate it. But that wasn't her world. Her world was the tightly constrained drawing rooms of the middle class struggling simultaneously not to fall out of the middle class and to move up into the upper class. In fact, her novels could easily be written about any "bedroom community" suburb today, even about young women today. In reading her novels, it became very clear to me in a rather painful way that women's careers today are still very much window dressing for their primary task -- which is to make a good match and then a good home. As much as we'd like to think we've grown beyond this stilted little society, the reason it resonates so strongly with middle class 21st century women is because it's still with us.
