Reading about reading Jane Austen

Like just about every female English major on the planet, I am a Jane-ite. I read the books. I watched the movies. I watched the various miniseries. It was a screen version -- the 1980 BBC adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice," shown on Masterpiece Theater -- that first sent me to read Austen as a youngster. As an adult in the 1990s, when the BBC began a new round of Austen adaptations, I bought the new P&P miniseries on VHS. I bought it again on DVD. I go to the movies for new adaptations and then I buy THEM on DVD. I own a gigantic Modern Library Jane Austen compendium and a couple of the novels as individual volumes.  They're free on Kindle so I have them there, too. I have never, however, been a big consumer of the rest of Janeworld -- the zombie mash-ups, the novels where Jane solves crimes, etc. I read The Jane Austen Book Club and thought it was OK. But generally, I prefer the original.

Only I realized recently that it has been quite some time since I've actually read the original. For the last decade and a half -- yes, OK, since the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice" -- my Austen consumption has been almost entirely onscreen.

And that's too bad, as William Deresiewicz reminded me in his appealing new memoir, "A Jane Austen Education." He doesn't diss the movies (well he does, a little; more on that later). But his focus is all on the books, the actual Austen, and the life lessons her small but significant output offered him.

The book is broken into six sections, one for each of the published novels, with a lesson or moral value he received from each. That can feel a little pat and I disagree with a couple of his choices -- he has "Persuasion," my favorite Austen novel, teaching him about true friendship. He makes a good case but, to me, that novel is all about constancy, and learning to have the courage to do what's right for you, even if the people around you disapprove.

As a memoir of a relatively privileged, intelligent but self-absorbed young man's journey to self-awareness and maturity, "A Jane Austen Education" is fine -- it's just that memoirs aren't really my thing, especially memoirs about learning not to be a jerk. Congratulations! I'm happy for you and those around you, really, but is that worth a couple hours of my time? As an evaluation of Austen's work, by someone trained to think critically about literature but who writes for what Virginia Woolf famously called the common reader, it is superb. And it has inspired me to pull out my 1,364-page, 3-pound (yes, I weighed it) edition of the Complete Novels. They are arranged in order of publication; I'm 56 pages into "Sense and Sensibility" and wondering why I've been neglecting Jane -- the real Jane, not her on-screen stepchildren -- so long.

About the movies: While I will swoon along with everyone else when Colin Firth-as-Darcy dives into the pond, my favorite screen adaptation remains "Persuasion" starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds. I've always had a Ciaran Hinds thing. And more significantly, it was the first Austen adaptation that struck me as remotely realistic -- the rooms were small and dark, the clothing was not unfailingly elegant, Anne Elliott did look like a woman past her prime and depressed. And the acting is superb. Plus you don't need to commit an entire weekend (or sick day home on the couch) to watch it.

My husband's favorite, on the other hand, is the 1999 Mansfield Park. He says it's because it's the only Austen adaptation that acknowledges the existence of sex. Which is just why Deresiewicz, apparently, hated it: he refers to it as a "travesty" because it "turns prudish Fanny Price into a naughty and bold young rebel with teasing eyes and a sensuous mouth."

And  for the record, the Kate Beckinsale Emma is way better than the Gwyneth Paltrow version and I much prefer the recent (2008) two-part BBC Sense and Sensibility to the much-lauded Emma Thompson/Ang Lee movie. Love Emma and all  but Elinor Dashwood is supposed to be nineteen. And Hugh Grant (way too good-looking for Edward Farrars) looks like he just left a fancy dress party at Oxford or something. The more recent version didn't have any big name actors I recognized (unless you count Mark Gatiss, the hapless patient-killing veterinarian from "League of Gentleman" as the useless older brother) but it was, like the huge majority of BBC productions, well executed all around.

Reading about a Revolution

Biographies of the Founding Fathers have been all the rage for well over a decade -- and I don't think I've read one of them. Neither of McCullough's big hits, John Adams or 1776. Not Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin. Not the works of Joseph Ellis or the many others too numerous to mention. Not for of lack of interest but ... I guess lack of enough interest. I plan to give Ron Chernow's Pulitzer-winning Washington biography a read, if only because Titan, Chernow's biography of John D. Rockefeller, is one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books. I've owned his Alexander Hamilton book in hardcover since it was published for the same reason (even if I still haven't read it). But I recently realized that I have been reading quite a bit about the Revolutionary era -- all of it in fiction. Which makes sense since, for the last couple years, my reading has veered heavily fictional -- especially historical fiction (blame that on the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar). And if you asked me what period I mostly read in, historical fiction-wise, I would have said Tudor or maybe medieval England. But looking back, and recently, it seems an awful lot of the better stuff has been set in Massachusetts, just prior to the Revolution.

Maybe I am drawn to these books because I was born and brought up in Massachusetts. Although the first of these books I read, The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss, is set in New York and the Pennsylvania frontier. But since then it's been all Bay State and it's focused largely on women: Blindspot by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, set in Boston, and Sally Gunning's excellent trilogy (so far; I'm hoping there will be more): The Widow's War, Bound and The Rebellion of Jane Clarke. The first two of Gunning's books are set on Cape Cod but the third takes place in Boston, mostly, and includes a firsthand view of the event we know as the Boston Massacre as well as a couple cameos from our future second President, John Adams.

I recommend any and all of these as fine works of historical fiction that should both entertain you and give you an idea of what living in those times was actually like. They are not history tracts; The Whiskey Rebels is set after the Revolution and the first two of Gunning's books touch only glancingly on the tensions between England and the Colonies. But they all meet what, to me, is the primary test of historical fiction set in times about which we know a lot -- they make you forget the known outcome of events and experience the tension and uncertainty of the people who were living through them.

RIP, belatedly

Recently I learned that two writers I admire - very different from each other - had died. Embarrassingly, it seems they died months ago but I somehow missed the news in both cases. Despite the fact that I try to keep an eye on literary news in all kinds of media. In my defense I can only say that I had good reasons to be a little distracted and disconnected early this winter. The first I heard about was Diana Norman - a writer better known in recent years and on this side of the Atlantic as Ariana Franklin. She wrote a series of historical mysteries generally known by the title of the first book in the series: Mistress of the Art of Death. And as I learned from this obituary in The Guardian, she had a long and interesting writing career, both as a journalist and a writer of historical fiction, before that series. The Mistress of the Art of Death books helped get me started on what has become a three-year (so far) jag of historical mysteries; set in the 12th century, they follow a female physician who winds up in Henry II's England. I have no basis on which to judge their historical authenticity but they are enjoyable reads. Now I'm going to have to track down her earlier novels, several of which are set in Revolutionary America.

The other, who actually died a few weeks before Norman, was Wilfrid Sheed. I came across the news while browsing through Slate's cultural coverage a couple days ago; here's Timothy Noah's appreciation and here's the New York Times obituary. Sheed spent quite a bit of time in Key West in the '90s; I may have met him once or twice but I certainly didn't know him. But I did really enjoy his writing, coming across his book Essays in Disguise when I was living in Miami right after college and my entire life, outside of work, consisted of buying books at Books & Books and reading. Sheed's essays, as the title indicates, were exactly the kind of literary journalism I like most -- intelligent, clear, appreciative, and written for readers, not the academy.

I am grateful to both of them for writing books that enriched my reading life. We have all four of the Mistress of Art of Death series in the library collection; unfortunately, we only have one of Sheed's books, his most recent, The House that George Built, about American popular music in the 20th century (the titular George is George Gershwin). For people who like literary essays I highly recommend Essays in Disguise and The Good Word. And for people curious about Sheed's Key West experiences, here's a Key West Diary he kept for Slate in 2001. It's a little name-droppy, to be sure, but not all the names are famous literary ones and it's definitely a picture of one slice of island life.

Simon Winchester: A (re)consideration

More than a decade ago, when Simon Winchester's book "The Professor and the Madman" came out, I was excited. This was exactly the kind of narrative nonfiction I love -- historical (set in the 19th century), literary (about two collaborators on the Oxford English Dictionary), written for laypeople. It got great reviews, both in the press and word of mouth. I bought a copy of the book. And I ... hated it. I had such a strong reaction, pretty early on, that I didn't even finish it. Which is very unusual for me. Since then, I've watched Winchester's career with regret because he continues to write about the kind of stuff I like to read about -- Krakatoa, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, brilliant oddballs who made major advances in our knowledge of the world. But I resisted, based on my bad reaction to that book.

Recently, a friend who reviewed Winchester's recent book Atlantic recommended that I reconsider. And it was just about then that a new, slim volume came across the library circulation desk: "The Alice Behind Wonderland." In that Winchester tells the tale behind the famous photograph of Alice Liddell taken by Charles Dodgson, better known to us as Lewis Carroll. The photograph is haunting and disturbing and especially famous since it was taken around the time that Dodgson entertained his young friend with a story that eventually became "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."

So I picked up the book. And ... I liked it. I wish there had been more illustrations of other photographs discussed in the text (though fortunately in this age of the internet you can nose around on Google images and see almost anything). But whatever it was that I had a bad reaction to last time, it didn't happen. So I decided to go back to the Professor and the Madman. I can't remember precisely what turned me off so strongly though I remember it came around the time of the description of the Civil War service of one of the protagonists. Cautiously, I started reading.

And ... it's fine. I'm about a third of the way through and for the life of me I can't figure out why I had such an incredibly strong reaction the first time. Obviously the text has not changed so it must be me. Which is a relief, really, because now I can go back and read all of Winchester's other books about those subjects that interest me. I've noticed before, primarily in fiction, how reading the same book at different times of your life can make a huge difference ("To The Lighthouse" is a totally different book at 32 than it is at 19, for instance). So sorry about that Simon, but glad to have met up with you at last.

Best of the best of the best lists

Once again, the good librarians at the Williamsburg (Virginia) Regional Library have performed a public service and compiled all the best lists, awards and other honors for books published in 2010 for their annual megalist -- available as an Excel spreadsheet. The fiction winner is Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, which is kind of interesting since it hasn't won the Big Name awards (though it still has a shot at the Pulitzer, which is announced this month). And I was delighted to see that three of the eight writers in the Speculative Fiction category (Gary Shteyngart, Charles Yu and William Gibson) will be here for the 2012 Key West Literary Seminar, Yet Another World (check out the rest of the amazing line-up: still room to register!).  So, by the way, will the author of the No. 2 in fiction (and National Book Critics Circle Award Winner), Jennifer Egan. And yes, we have the vast majority of the top books listed here in the library collection.

BTW, for those of you who follow books more than basketball, that other big tournament is getting ready to wrap up -- The Tournament of Books -- and the championship round features the top two novels on Williamsburg's list, Freedom versus A Visit From The Goon Squad. The best part of this tournament is you can go back and read all the different rounds in whatever order you like. I suppose some might frown on this sort of competitive literary exercise, but it's all in good faith and good fun -- I've never seen cheap shots or nasty takedowns here. And any time I get to read anything by Elif Batuman, I'm happy. I wonder if they'd consider adding a nonfiction category?

Update: And the winner is ... A Visit From the Goon Squad! Which I'm delighted to hear, not only because I happen to have a copy of the book in my house (though I'll admit I haven't read it yet -- or Freedom, either) -- and because Egan will be here in Key West, in January, for the Key West Literary Seminar -- still time to sign up!).