Month: May 2009

Jane Austen has long been one of my favourite authors, ever since I read my mother’s copy of Pride and Prejudice   – it’s the brown book shown in the photo.

I’ve read this now so many times, watched TV and film adaptations that I’m not sure what to write about it. Usually I write about the plot and the characters to help me remember a book, but I don’t need to in this case.

What struck me this time in reading Pride and Prejudice is the language. Jane Austen is never sentimental or preachy, but treats serious subjects with humour and irony. Pride and Prejudice is full of wit and humour and timeless characters – foolish people, flirts, bores, snobs, self-centred and dishonest people as well as “good” people like Jane Bennet, who is determined to see good in everyone.

I was also aware of the many times she used the word “civilities”, and its variations. This was a society where manners were most important, behaving civilly towards each other and observing the correct etiquette. It’s a novel about manners as much as about pride and prejudice, about how people behave and how they see each other and the world. I like the original  title Jane Austen gave her book – First Impressions – because the first impression Elizabeth and Mr Darcy had of each other wasn’t love at first sight (or was it?), not a promising start. I used to try to work out which one was proud and which prejudiced, but decided that each of them is both. Fortunately, both weren’t too proud to admit they were wrong.

I enjoy reading about Jane Austen and her world and there are many books available. I have Maggie Lane’s Jane Austen’s World which looks at daily life in Jane’s England and includes accounts of the numerous dramatisations of her books. When I won a giveaway book from Dorothy at Of Books and Bicycles I was delighted that one of the books she had on offer was Jane Austen: a Life by Claire Tomalin. I’ve started to read it and now I’ve finished Pride and Prejudice I’ll be able to concentrate more on it. I love the cover, which shows the painting The Great House and Park at Chawton, owned by Jane’s brother Edward.

Several years ago I read Carol Shields’ biography, which lead me to James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of Jane Austen, published in 1869. He was her nephew and of course, knew her personally. I found a copy in my local library. In it he described her as a

clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair, forming natural curls close round her face.

She was

fond of music and had a sweet voice, both in singing and speaking.

And he thought she was a calm and even person distinguished from other people by

that peculiar genius which shines out clearly enough in her works.

And I think that says it all – she was a genius.

I love the cover of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson and the book itself is weirdly wonderful.

It’s only a short book, but there is so much packed inside its 146 pages and it’s definitely a book I’m going to re-read. The book’s narrator is Mary Katherine Blackwood, but I prefer her nickname of Merricat. She is anything but merry and as the book opens she is eighteen, living with her sister Constance and everyone else in her family is dead.

How they died is explored in the rest of the book. Merricat is an obsessive-compulsive, both she and Constance have rituals that they have to perform in an attempt to control their fears. They have set routines for cleaning the house, always putting things back in exactly the same places, never a fraction of an inch out of place. Merricat thinks she could have been born a werewolf, as the two middle fingers on both her hands are the same length and as she says in the opening paragraph she dislikes:

… washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantegenet, and Amantia phalloides, the death-cap mushroom.

The Blackwood family is feared and hated by the villagers and one of the major themes of the novel is persecution. They live in a grand house, away from the village, behind locked gates. Constance is hypersensitive and afraid, unable to leave the house, bringing in another major theme – agoraphobia. Then there is frail and feeble Uncle Julian, now wheelchair-bound engrossed in their family history, trying to make sense of what happened to them.

Just what did happen is only gradually revealed and Merricat is a most unreliable narrator. She is a disturbing and disturbed character. She makes trips into the village for shopping and library books, plagued by her fears of the children, that they might come near her, afraid they might touch her, that their:

mothers would come at me like a flock of taloned hawks; that was always the picture I had in my mind – birds descending, striking, gashing with razor claws.

She makes magical tours of the woods surrounding their house, checking where she has buried her treasures, a doll, a box of silver dollars and blue marbles which she imagines turn to jewels that are held together in a “powerful taut web” to protect them. These, together with a book nailed to a tree in the woods, are safeguards and as long as they are still intact Merricat believes that nothing can harm her and her family.

When Cousin Charles arrives, apparently looking for the Blackwood family fortune, Merricat’s world begins to disintegrate and terror takes hold. This terror is palpable as the outside world threatens to break into their lives.

I enjoyed this macabre tale, for its portrayal of fear, resentment, hostility and persecution of its disturbed and damaged characters.