Will the real Jane Austen please stand up

Despite being a bookworm with a penchant for 18th and 19th-century literature, I’ve only ever read two Jane Austen novels. Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. At school. I didn’t enjoy them that much. I remember skimming the romantic passages – never being one for chick-lit – and being bored by the soul-searching and self-reflection of the middle classes. First-world problems, Darlings. Get a life. I much preferred 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, On the Road, and bodice rippers my BFF found in her big sister’s secret hiding place.

This year, as you know, is Austen’s 250th birthday. (Imagine all those candles!) So, it’s Jane Austen this and Jane Austen that wherever you look, which I’ve mostly ignored. However, while reading a book about different ways to think of rural England (long story) I came across a chapter devoted to the portrayal of English landscapes in film adaptations of Austen’s novels1. These are, on a simplistic one-dimensional level, pretty, scenic backdrops that tug at English heartstrings and wow Americans. But interrogate the motives and outcomes more critically, and the rural scenes are, in truth, unreal or, more accurately, hyperreal2, where reactions are organised around ‘codes’ of recognition, behaviour and judgement that are detached from the ‘real’ referents of 18th/19th-century rural landscapes. This is unavoidable because the actual landscapes no longer exist as they did over 200 years ago, and Austen’s readers/viewers do not have any lived experiences of the landscapes in the original temporal context. The films are judged not on historical realism but on their ability to mould a history that is reminiscent of the present. Put another way, these simulations produce a permanent ‘liminal’³ state of the now. Permanent, because the films realign our geographic sense of self by relocating us in liminal space, where we are stranded and cannot return to a landscape that no longer exists but that is now ‘familiar’.

Psychobabble to the fore, I dug out my complete works of Jane Austen that I’d inherited from Mum and Dad (along with the complete works of Shakespeare, Bronte sisters, Dickens, Maugham, Kipling, et al.) and vowed to read at least one of them and watch a film adaptation in the not-too-distant future. Cunning plan filed under ‘good intentions’, I got on with my life.

My life is not what it was this time last year when I was PhuDding, stressing about PhuDding, and wondering what I might do if I stopped PhuDding. Now I know. Family and friends once again come first. I’ve renewed my long-standing pre-PhuD cerebral commitments that have always been dear to my heart, and ditched those that were a pain in the rear. Resultant gaps are filled with debates, presentations and gatherings hosted in safe spaces for free-speechers, critical thinkers and devil’s advocates. Every person and all views are welcome. No one is cancelled. This last weekend was one such event: where climate change scientists rubbed shoulders with climate change deniers; Reform UK candidates shared a platform with Guardian journalists; the pros and cons of Tommy Robinson’s contempt of court were intelligently debated; the Star of David was worn openly and proudly, and there wasn’t a keffiyeh in sight.

Spoilt for choice, I attended discussions on: What do our farmers need? (lower taxes and less regulation); Why are our prisons in crisis? (onerous regulation and lack of leadership); Why are Britain’s energy prices so high (taxes, onerous regulation and Ed Miliband); How do we get Britain building again (restructure taxes, slash regulation and sack Miliband); How do we reduce the benefits bill (slash taxes and regulation and disqualify spurious claims); What are the solutions to the Middle East crisis (anything but Tony Blair). Obviously the ‘answers’ in brackets are my personal takeaways, as brief as I can make them. The panels and audiences didn’t reach a consensus, but it was fun for me to juggle different perspectives, which helped me nuance some of my hitherto ‘straightforward’ standpoints, and join the dots between ‘separate’ issues. Spoiler alert – they’re not separate after all: just slash taxes and regulation then we can all go down the pub.

To ring the changes, I sat in on a discussion of Plato’s Republic and, I had to really, a session entitled “Jane Austen: spinster, feminist or just a good writer.” Many in the room had read copiously, studied and/or written about Austen, so the discussion was very enlightening for me. Speakers were divided as to whether Austen was writing as a social commentator or, more specifically, as a feminist. I was taken with a different idea, that Austen was a satirist. I love satire and miss the likes of Spitting Image, and Have I Got News For You before being a right-of-centre panellist spawned a level of vitriol and venom from the viperous left that would have taxed Austen’s tolerance and wit.

The wine reception after close of business was equally as stimulating. I chatted to a political economist who was an expert on colonialism. His father was Nigerian and his mother Polish, and he didn’t disagree with my assertion that the EU was the biggest colonial project of any. Then I hooked up with a future candidate for Mayor of London. I didn’t catch which party she was representing, but she was anti-Khan and that was good enough for me. Pleasantries with a Shakespearean actor, a retired librarian and a reunion with a philosopher-cum-mathematician took me to the end of the evening and a walk in the rain to St James’s Park underground station.

This evening, I’m off to the Royal Geographical Society and “Environmental justice and climate action: victims of the ‘war on woke’?” where a supposed leading light will explore “how the 'war on woke' promoted by dominant figures in the US Republican Party is harming climate action and environmental justice in the US and far beyond.” Nothing like coming to a conclusion before hearing what others have to say, and boy will I say something.

I should be home before my bedtime and might, just might, have time for a cup of chamomile tea and one chapter of a Jane Austen novel. As Caroline Bingley says in Pride and Prejudice, “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading”, but unlike Miss Bingley, I actually mean it. Also from Pride and Prejudice, Mr Darcy (aka Colin Firth) declares, “I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little yielding – certainly too little for the convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of other so soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever”.

As I said earlier, first-world problems.

¹ Lawrence, M. (2003) 'The view from Cobb Gate: falling into liminal geography', in P. Cloke (ed.) Country visions. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, pp. 93-115.

2 Hyperreality: a concept in post-structuralism. Refers to the process of the evolution of notions of reality, leading to a cultural state of confusion between signs and symbols invented to stand in for reality, and direct perceptions of consensus reality.

³Liminality: the condition of simultaneously existing or belonging to to two different places or states.