Great collection of essays on Austen. ( )

The essays vary in quality, but most are highly entertaining and widely divergent views of Jane Austen's works (although all agree they LIKE the books, not all agree on which ones are the BEST).
You should probably (re-)read the books yourself before beginning, which I did not.
(Bedtime reading, one essay per night.) ( )

I enjoyed almost all of these essays, especially those by Susannah Carson herself. Kingsley Amis - what are you talking about? There were perhaps slightly too many included - I was flagging by the end. A couple of the writers who contributed referred to their own novels, which jarred. I wish the biographies of the contributors (which I belatedly discovered at the end) had been inserted before each essay, and I wish the date each essay was written had been given.

This book made me want to go and re-read all Austen's novels for the umpteenth time. ( )

A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Why We Read Jane Austen edited by Susannah Carson, contains 33 essays by well-known writers about their love of Jane's novels. Austen was the seventh of eight children, lived only to the age of 42, and wrote at a time when published novels by women were still unusual. She created a "tiny world in which a canceled dinner party or a shower of rain is an important event, so that we could attend to and enjoy her subtle comedy". (J. B. Priestly). Yet somehow she has managed to approach the stature of Shakespeare, with her works read and taught and performed and turned into movies and plays over and over and over again. How can this be?

This book is not a smooth production. The editor might have considered thematic entries to link the essays, for example, or short overview introductions before each. However, the disjointed feel is far outweighed by the gems she has gathered for us. Eudora Welty, E.M. Forster, Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt, Lionel Trilling, Virginia Woolf - it's an all-star line-up, with each giving his or her take on Why We Read Jane Austen. As I had hoped, it is filled with insights that had not occurred to me. For example, because she was a realist and wrote about what she knew, "she never attempted to reproduce a conversation of men when by themselves, which in the nature of things she could never have heard." (W. Somerset Maugham). We never hear Darcy talking to Bingley, or Wickham, or Captain Wentworth speaking to Captain Harville, unless a woman is there to witness it. As another example, C.S. Lewis quotes four key passages from Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, and observes that, "All four heroines painfully, though with varying degrees of pain, discover that they have been making mistakes both about themselves and about the world in which they live. All of their data have to be reinterpreted. Indeed, considering the differences of their situations and characters. the similarity of the process in all four is strongly marked. All realize that the cause of the deception lies within . . ."

It has always struck me that readers of the six novels will put them in such varying orders from favorite to least. Several essayists find Mansfield Park (my least favorite) the most accomplished and interesting of the novels; others give the award to Emma, although seemingly all consider the "most delightful" to be Pride and Prejudice. Austen in fact was apparently concerned that P & P was too bright and sparkling, and that it may have needed more shadow. Several essayists comment on the different, "autumnal" feel to Persuasion, her last novel, which some see as signalling the transition to a different style that would have developed had she lived longer. Many comment on her comedic talents. She can be quite sharp, e.g. "a large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction as the most graceful set of limbs in the world." If you want to enjoy her witticisms apart from the novels, I recommend The Wicked Wit of Jane Austen, collected by Dominque Enright. As Amy Bloom says in her essay, "Jane Austen is often unkind, occasionally contemptuous, but almost never wrong."

The differences in perspective among these well-known authors is striking. Diane Johnson observes that, "Austen's great serious subject was the precariousness of the lives of women in early-nineteenth century England and, lacking other options, the urgent need for them to establish themselves by marriage." But Amy Bloom sees Jane Austen as "the best writer for anyone who believes in love more than romance, and who cares more for the private than the public. She understands that men and women have to grow up in order to deserve and achieve great love, that some suffering is necessary (that mewling about it in your memoir or on a talk show will not help at all), and that people who mistake the desirable object for the one necessary and essential love will get what they deserve." Kingsley Amis is a contrarian to all the Austen appreciation, writing of her moral "corruption" displayed in Mansfield Park, and has one of the best lines. He points out that in that book the ostensibly villainous Henry and Mary Crawford actually are "good fun", and that Edmund and Fanny, whom we are intended to admire, are "morally detestable" bores: "to invite Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Bertram round for the evening would not be lightly undertaken." Eva Brann finds Austen's work perfect in every way, and "the most felicitous of her perfections is her knowledge of the human heart." For Jay McInerney, it is our affinity for the female leads which is critical: "unless we are cranky scholars or celibate critics, we love and rank the novels according to our regard for the female principals." He finds his own "admiration shifting" among them at different points in time.

Virginia Woolf has perhaps the most thought-provoking essay. She goes back to the juvenalia, particularly the "astonishing and unchildish story Love and Freindship", written when Austen was 15, and wonders about something in it which "never merges with the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world." That laughter, the acute sense of our ridiculousness, is an undercurrent that manifests itself in later novels as well. At the same time, "what she offers {in the novels} is . . . composed of something that expands in the reader's mind and endows with the most endearing form of life." "Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of of an unerring heart, an unfailing good taste, and almost stern morality, that she shows up these deviations from kindness, truth and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature." Woolf speculates on what Austen would have written had she lived longer, with her growing popularity. "She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, traveled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to feast upon at leisure." If only!

All of this inspired me to think about why, despite the dramatic differences in the breadth of their landscapes, Austen rises, for me, to the level of Shakespeare. What I say next could be applied to him, too: She is smarter than we are, and more insightful about human nature. She's wittier than we are, with a sharp, sometimes wicked, sense of humor. She writes with an almost unfathomable grace. We sense that so much lies within those crafted sentences that we find ourselves re-reading her books again and again. Just as the author-essayists in Why We Read Jane Austen obviously have. ( )

If you hate Jane Austen, this book will do little to change your mind. If you are indifferent to her, you may not be tempted further by these essays. If you love and admire her, this book will possibly bore you or irritate you after different writers either repeat what you already know or dislike what you like and like what you dislike.

However, if you are unsure about Austen or if you are curious to know what the fuss is all about, this book isn't a bad place to start.

This collection of essays that explain, praise, examine, accuse and otherwise give some kind of answer to the question implied in the title covers her 6 novels, her fragments, and her juvenilia do cover a range of opinion. Yes, most of it is positive and some of it feels a bit silly. Many of the essays were written long before the idea of the book came into being. Some are very scholarly and some are quite chatty. Some few are downright picky. Still, it does dig up quite a lot of thought about those 6 books as various authors talk about their favorite characters or novels, defend what they love most and excoriate what they despise. The novels are considered as single topics, as a group, and occasionally in comparison with more modern works.

My reaction to it was occasional surprise as someone pointed out an idea new to me, or bristly irritation as yet another author could not resist the lure to stick "It is a truth universally acknowledged" into the piece he or she wrote. On a few, I wondered why they bothered to write at all. Of course, I am an admirer of Jane Austen, so this book would do that.

But if you have read only a few of the novels, or perhaps only seen some movies based on the novels, this book could prove much more interesting and educational. It might well draw you deeper into the oddity. It might introduce you to the cult and offer you the Kool-aid. It will certainly open your eyes to, not only the novels and the woman we barely know who wrote them, but to the audience of Jane Austen and how she is regarded and has influenced our world. It could push you away or pull you in.

I already know I want to purchase a copy so I can go through with a highlighter and pen, to argue, to underline, and to explore, so that when I reread the books I can look for what these assorted authors claim is there.

I seriously doubt it will change my mind about Mansfield Park, however, but I'm going to give it a try. ( )