Why We Need Jane Austen Now: A Plea for Humor and Sanity

Jane Austen's novels take place against a backdrop of war, although battlefields and battlegrounds are unmentionable. The War of 1812, fought by Great Britain against the United States, silently provides a context for the launch of Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813. The Napoleonic Wars were raging as Austen wrote. "Between 1797, when a young Jane Austen began work on what would become Pride and Prejudice, and 1813, when the novel was published, the French Revolution was fought, Marie Antoinette was guillotined, and Napoleon rose to power and conquered most of Western Europe" [https://www.chipublib.org/historical-context-of-pride-and-prejudice/ ]

Men in uniform appear in Austen's works, but we look at their faces, estimating their character based on their lips and eyes, not much noticing their rank and not asking much about their combat experience.

So why do men and women alike turn to literature when the world around us begins to shake?

Rudyard Kipling, writing about a hundred years after Austen's novels were published, wrote a powerful short story titled "The Janeites," about how desperate British soldiers engaged in trench warfare battles relied on Austen to help regulate their sanity as they faced the worst experiences humanity had ever contrived. "Beneath the comic, ordinary surface of the narrative lies the random brutality of the Great War, " writes Lilia Melani of Brooklyn College, explaining that in Kipling's story, "almost all the Janeites are killed in action, and the surviving Janeite who tells the story is damaged psychologically. Having learned about Austen while at the front, he asserts, 'There's no one to touch Jane when you're in a tight place.'"

(You can read the Kipling short story, published widely and discussed by Austen scholars internationally, here.)

I suggest that Jane Austen would offer a similar comfort to us now, not as an escape from our current state of international crisis but as an antidote to it. Austen's words remain current and the underpinnings of her novels are always daring. As D.W. Harding wrote in Regulated Hatred, Austen's "books are, as she meant them to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked; she is a literary classic of the society which attitudes like hers, held widely enough, would undermine."

Jane Austen is a troublemaker of the most engaging and diverting sort. We'd want to sit next to her at a dinner party. We'd want to be her best friend, and we'd want to know what she really thought about people we knew, even if (especially if?) she wasn't being terribly polite. In a letter to her sister, for example, when learning about what happened to one of their neighbors, Jane Austen wrote in all candor, "Only think of Mrs. Holder's being dead!  Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to make one cease to abuse her.” (Letters, 14 October 1813)

Jane Austen is a great writer, a creator of complex characters in potentially cataclysmic situations, and a woman of fierce wit. No wonder we need her today.

Most recently, Austen's fans can even listen to Pride and Prejudice on their own time, as narrated by the captivating Alison Larkin. An author who begs to be read aloud, Austen is one of the rare early novelists whose prose leaps off the page and dances in the mind of the listener. That I can listen to Austen while I fall asleep, knowing I can rewind and listen to the same part again, is as self-soothing in the way that hearing a favorite song can be—you know the ending, so you feel safe, but you want to hear the middle again, to feel reassured.

There have been more than 25 versions of Pride and Prejudice film and television adaptations, not including Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Christmas at Pemberley Manor, which takes Elizabeth and Darcy, updates them, and tosses them into the holidays. It’s no wonder Austen has managed to capture entirely new generations of appreciative audiences throughout the years.

Of the Austen adaptations, Bridget Jones's Diary might be the most adorable and clever, but my own favorite is the screen adaptation from 1940.

Adapted for film by playwright Jane Murfin and Aldous Huxley (author of dystopian social science fiction novels Brave New World and The Doors of Perception), 1940's Pride and Prejudice was released 16 days after the Battle of Britain began. Wartime audiences once again needed Austen.

Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, the stars of this version, received this review in The New York Times when the film first appeared: "Greer Garson is Elizabeth—'dear, beautiful Lizzie'—stepped right out of the book, or rather out of one's fondest imagination: poised, graceful, self-contained, witty, spasmodically stubborn and as lovely as a woman can be. Laurence Olivier is Darcy, that's all there is to it—the arrogant, sardonic Darcy whose pride went before a most felicitous fall."

The strength of Austen's heroines—and the rectifiable flaws of most of her heroes—emphasize that resilience is essential for a life well lived. Healthy anger, self-reliance, measured defiance, and a fundamental sense of integrity are the key ingredients to Austen's successful characters.

These are, of course, lessons we can all be taught from her works, if we have not yet perfected them. Returning to Austen to be reminded of what skills and traits we need either to acquire or reinforce is an excellent way to keep ourselves steady as threats of yet another war frighten, intimidate, and make us feel powerless.

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It is an understatement to see her as a writer of women's issues or dabbling in a universe of domestic trivialities. Instead, we should see her as profoundly "shocking," which is what W.H. Auden said in his 1937 poem, insisting that "Beside her [James] Joyce seems innocent as grass." Austen, says Auden, disturbs and disrupts us, even as she amuses us as she "Describe[s] the amorous effects of 'brass'" because she "reveal[s] so frankly and with such sobriety...the economic basis of society."

Finally, Austen is a profoundly influential writer for those of us who are engaged in self-examination. Perhaps that is one reason why Elizabeth Bennett, the protagonist of Pride and Prejudice, deserves her role as the leader of the Austen pack: "I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities!...[ I ] have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either are concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself."

Austen helps us know ourselves. During moments when we feel as if we know little about anything else, can trust very few people, and can control almost nothing about the circumstances of history, we turn to Austen to fortify us because, as Kipling might say, "we're in a tight place."