“Ah! There is nothing like staying home for real comfort.”
Jane Austen
I had just finished
Emma when
this post mentioning Pride and Prejudice caught my eye.
What stayed with me (from that post) was the concept of knowing one is happy without feeling outright happy at key points in our lives. It is a short but interesting post on happiness.
Yes,
Emma was a reread for me.
My husband and I had both read this book for college, the same instructor in fact. This was a flamboyant professor who professed his love for
Emma at every opportunity. If
Helen ever had him, she will remember immediately. We all graduated in 1983, so it was at least 30 years ago we read this book. As I read, bits and pieces of the plot came back to me. My husband had no memory of the details of the book and even needed a character list to keep everyone straight as he first listened. I think there were about 23 on that list.
Husband did not care for
Emma 30 years ago. And honestly he did not care for it now either. 30 years ago he thought he did not like it because the professor was so over the moon about it that no book could have lived up to expectations.
Now he did not care for it because he felt all the characters talked too much. He was actually surprised I liked it.
I went into
Emma just after finishing
Catch 22, so
Emma was very welcomed at that point.
In Cold Blood might have been very welcomed at that point.
I remembered liking
Emma 30 years ago.
I thought I would
not like it the second time around.
I thought knowing the general outcome of the book (in advance) was going to ruin it for me.
It did not.
Laura mentioned (long ago in a comment) that as a literature major in college, there was a design of study that revealed the plot of books in advance so the writing style/composition could be analysed as one read. So, the professor told them the general plot of the book before they read it for class. And then as they read, they analyzed the author's process/style.
I had this experience with
Emma. I think I noticed a lot more because I knew what was coming. I enjoyed the process. I think I might have liked it better the second time around, I enjoyed/caught the nuances more.
I have read all of Jane Austen's books. I have read
Pride and Prejudice and now
Emma twice as I had read them long ago and then reread when they came up on recent book review group lists.
If I had not already read all of them, I would be suggesting the other titles for book group reading lists. I would want to have read them all.
I love her books, our girls love her books. Oldest has read at least
Pride and Prejudice (for a class) and loved it too.
There is a woman in one of my book review groups who always talks about the subtle humor in books. She will mark certain passages in books, read them aloud to the group, and talk about the subtle humor. She is really helping me in my reading as I am catching the subtle inferences of authors more readily. I think -
there is a Chris moment - each time I hit one. It has really helped me grow in my reading. I had that experience (a lot) while reading
Emma this second time. And I kept thinking - wonder if Chris will mention that one - before I remembered I was reading it for my other reading group - Chris will not be there.
I think Jane Austen is a good example of subtle. These are not merely 'girl books', these are social context books (in my opinion).
Context Section from SparkNotes:
Jane Austen, whom some critics consider England’s best novelist, was born in 1775 in Steventon, England. The seventh of eight children, Austen lived with her parents for her entire life, first in Steventon and later in Bath, Southampton, and Chawton. Her father was the parish rector in Steventon, and, though not wealthy, her family was well connected and well educated. Austen briefly attended boarding school in Reading but received the majority of her education at home. According to rumor, she had a brief love affair when she was twenty-five, but it did not lead to a marriage proposal. Two years later she accepted and then quickly rejected a proposal. She remained unmarried for the rest of her life. Austen died in 1817, at age forty-one, of Addison’s disease.
Austen began writing stories at a very young age and completed her first novel in her early twenties. However, she did not publish until 1811, when Sense and Sensibility appeared anonymously, -followed by Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814). Emma, which appeared in 1816, was the last novel published -during Austen’s lifetime. (Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared posthumously.)
Austen’s novels received little critical or popular recognition during her lifetime, and her identity as a novelist was not revealed until after her death. As admired as Austen’s novels later became, critics have had a difficult time placing them within literary history. She is known for her gently satirical portraits of village life and of the rituals of courtship and marriage, but she wrote during the Romantic period, when most major writers were concerned with a very different set of interests and values. Romantic poets confronted the hopes and failures of the French Revolution and formulated new literary values centered on individual freedom, passion, and intensity. In comparison, Austen’s detailed examination of the rules of decorum that govern social relationships, and her insistence that reason and moderation are necessary checks on feeling, make her seem out of step with the literary times. One way to understand Austen’s place in literary history is to think of her as part of the earlier eighteenth century, the Age of Reason, when literature was associated with wit, poise, and propriety. Her novels certainly belong to an eighteenth-century genre, the comedy of manners, which examines the behavior of men and women of a single social class.
Rather than dismiss Austen as a writer who shuns the artistic and political movements of her time, it is perhaps more useful to think of her as an early feminist. Critics have pointed out that the Romantics, who were almost exclusively male, offered a poor model of literary fulfillment for the ambitious woman of the time. While male writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron possessed the freedom to promote their own individuality through wide travel and sexual and military adventurism, women were largely denied these freedoms. For women, the penalty for sexual freedom was social ostracism, poverty, and worse. In Sense and Sensibility, Austen describes explicitly the danger that cultivating emotion posed for women of her time.
In this social context, Austen’s commitment to reason and moderation can be seen as feminist and progressive rather than conservative. The intelligence and resourcefulness of her heroines stand in constant contrast to the limits of the constricted world of courtship and marriage defining their sphere of action. While reading Emma it is interesting to consider to what extent Austen accepts or questions the idea that marriage represents a woman’s maturity and fulfillment.
Some consider Emma Austen’s best and most representative novel. It is also her longest novel, and by many accounts, her most difficult. Long praised for its rich domestic realism, Emma also presents puzzling questions: how can a character as intelligent as Emma be wrong so often? When does Austen expect us to sympathize with Emma, and when does she expect us to criticize her? Is the ending as genuinely happy as it is presented to be, or does Austen subtly inject a note of subversive irony into it? That these questions are on some level unanswerable ensures that Emma will be read again and again.
If you are wondering about my husband - he kept with the book, and liked it well enough by the end (he said the second half was better), but it certainly will never be a favorite. And he is not itching to read another Austen.
He watched
Emma with Gwyneth Paltow. He loved the movie. He thought it was very funny and well done.
A couple people in the group watched the BBC version of
Emma (there are at least two and the more recent one is better in my opinion).
After the meeting the facilitator and I were talking -
The facilitator of the group is male, heterosexual, youngish, and very well read. He had never read any of Austen's work before
Emma. And he loved it. He said he had to read it at a much slower pace and really think to catch the humor.
I told him I think that is one advantage I have in listening to the books. The pace for reading out loud/listening is MUCH slower than the pace for reading text. Much slower (I read very quickly). By listening, I am forced to a yoga like state of reading. My iPod has a feature where I can adjust the pace (slow, normal, fast, very fast).
I usually listen on normal.
I have a book I am just starting (
Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton) where there is something off about the reader. It is a volunteer reader through USF Lit2Go. Normally their readers are very good. I am going to try a slower pace to see if that helps. If not, no harm in buying from Audible sometime (I watch the sales), as it was a free download from USF Lit2Go.
I also have
Siddhartha (1922) by Herman Hesse with a dreadful reader. This was a very
inexpensive (maybe $2) download from Audible. I bought it before I understood the importance of listening to a sample of the reader's style before downloading. There was a reason it was on sale! If I end up rebuying a different version, no harm. But I am going to try a slower pace to see if that helps the very speedy reader sound.
