Reading Miss Austen

I've been reading Mansfield Park. Last week I read Sense and Sensibility.

There is something to be said for Miss Austen's story (she only wrote one, apparently.) She noticed everything about her characters, and brought it all to our attention. Her story has given rise to many excellent movies, and her detailed explanation of her character's feelings must be a great aid to the actors assigned to play them.

The movies are much to be preferred to her books, where characters of the utmost delicacy speak to each other in full paragraphs (sometimes several paragraphs at a go) made up of sentences whose brilliantly chosen words, are arranged in four or five clauses each--so that, on a Kindle, you are likely to lose track of whether you are still at Mansfield Park, or perhaps at Downton Abbey, or some country parsonage, where more or less identical characters are agonizing over the same dilemma ('three thousand a year' versus 'true affection'.)

It is no wonder that Americans consider the British upper classes (as depicted in British fiction) twits and poltroons, redeemed only by our envy of those high-waisted Empire gowns and the libraries and stables of their country estates.

It is hard to believe that Britannia ruled the waves for the satisfaction of Miss Austen's characters, that India had to be enslaved, the Welsh forced to mine coal, the Irish to dig canals, so that these mannered fellows, and their tiresome women, could fuss about their amateur theatricals, send starving poachers to Australia, misuse their poacher's daughters before ousting them into the streets, thereby condemning their bastard children to miserable (but, hey! at least they were short) lives as annoying street 'urchins' (albeit less annoying, because less frequently encountered, than their recognized children, confined to nurseries until exiled to school, there to be buggered by upperclassmen and whipped by sadistic Masters, with only the 'heir' (and possibly 'the spare') having any hope of enjoying life thereafter.)

All fiction, we are told, is about conflict, but never in the course of western literature have so many excellent words been devoted to such trivial agonies, or so dexterously avoided genuine human suffering. It makes us reflect upon how much of our cultural heritage is owed to 'markets'. Austen's stories exist because there were Austen characters, no doubt wearing high-waisted Empire gowns, to read them.

Their half-siblings (the 'street Arabs', pick-pockets and prostitutes) were illiterate and penniless. No use addressing their reality, and certainly not in sentences of twenty-seven carefully chosen multi-syllabic words, divided into several subordinate clauses.

Who knows how much Miss Austen knew, or even suspected, of those darker realities, but Mansfield Park, no matter how boring and lengthy, rings truer to our ears than Dickens. Maybe her keen sense of how much conflict would be plausible to her readers is the reason we prefer her.  Or perhaps it is the absence of special pleading--that pervasive, suffocating social consciousness, by which Dickens constantly abjures us to 'feel' for his characters--who nevertheless remain paper dolls. 

Miss Fanny Price's dilemmas, the trivial problems of a poor relation, what to wear to her first ball, how to politely reject an unpleasing suitor, how to deal with her hots for her first cousin (the boring and priggish Edmund, a second son and a C of E clergyman, the only fates worse than the guillotine) are amazingly 'real' by comparison to Mr. Carton's nobility.

I'm just beginning Chapter 37.

Still over twenty to go.

Not sure I'll make it.