As If I Needed More Persuading...

Jane Austen is definitely near the top of the list of my favorite writers. There are only a few writers whose work I read over and over, and she's quickly become one of them. I say "quickly" because until about six years ago, I had not read much Austen at all. (How I got through an English Literature major without reading a single one of her novels I'll never guess.)

Oddly enough, it was a film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that compelled me to really dive in and read Austen. I'm one of those literary purists who usually gripes about movies not being nearly as good as beloved books, but this was one case when a movie actually inspired me to read the source material again. I had read Pride and Prejudice once, maybe a year before I saw the A&E/BBC five-hour version. I liked it, but for some reason it didn't fully capture me -- at least not enough for me to go reading other books by Austen. Then I spent a week in Connecticut in January 2000, helping to care for my sister when she was recuperating from surgery, and she and I spent five wonderful hours together watching that faithfully adapted P&P movie starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. I was amazed by how funny it was, and how romantic. I went back to the book, and suddenly it was as though I knew how to read Austen. The dialogue seemed to jump off the page.

From then on, I was hooked. I went on to read everything I could find -- all six of the finished novels (I haven't read Sanditon, in part because I know it's incomplete, and in part because I like knowing there's still some Austen fiction in the world I've yet to read). And since that winter, I've gone back numerous times to the novels, re-reading most of them in full, some of them more than once.

For some reason, winter tends to be the time I go back to Jane Austen. I'm still trying to figure out why her novels seem so perfectly suited to my reading tastes during the cold, bleak, grey months of winter here in the Ohio River Valley. Perhaps because they lend color and beauty and romance to prosaic, grey days. Perhaps because, living as I do in a very small town, where my sphere of experience is also quite small, these tiny "bits of ivory" (as Austen liked to call them) just make satisfying sense.

This January is no exception. I found myself going back to the shelf to read Austen's last completed novel, Persuasion. I just finished it a few days ago; I think it's only my second complete read-through of the book. I had forgotten how much I loved it. As if I needed any more "persuading" regarding how wonderful a writer this woman was!

Anne Elliot is a very different kind of heroine than Lizzie Bennett or Emma (probably my two favorite heroines, though I think Anne might be creeping her way up the list...I like Elinor Dashwood too). She lacks the "witty sparkle" of Lizzie or Emma, but what she lacks in sparkle, she makes up for in solidity and maturity. She is, of course, the oldest of all of them -- and has learned many of life and love's most difficult lessons before the novel starts. There's a warmth and elegance to this book, and a deeper dignity to the romance.

After I finished reading it, I popped in a library copy of the 1995 film -- mostly because I wanted to see Sophie Thompson play Anne's hypochondriac sister Mary Musgrove. She didn't have tons of screen time, but what she had she made the most of! Great performance, and a nice film all the way around, though it felt a bit rushed toward the end.