I adored this freewheeling essay review from Alice Spawls in the London Review of Books and it got me thinking early this morning about Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and my own life experiences reading their works.
I re-read "Jane Eyre" as an adult when my son was in high school because he so dreaded the English AP course assignment. I said, "Let's read it together." And re-reading it, I found it a very enjoyable and quite moving book. I found her prose very smooth to read in the 21st Century, which made me very happy as a reader. My son was okay with the book in the end, as I recall, and I know we had some discussion of it, but not as much as with my daughter about Jane Austen novels. I also recall I finished "Jane Eyre" first. My son, of course, had 3 other AP courses he was going through and was having at least 4 hours or more of homework after a day of school literally every weekday, and more hours of homework on the weekends, even as he was busy with being a Boy Scout working toward the Eagle status.
But back briefly to Alice Spawls' essay-review. I adore biographies, while Alice Spawls makes a case against biographies to a great extent. I think her points are valid and I am happy she recognizes she is not completely correct in her personal dismissal of biographies. I agree with her that too often, with biographies of literary people, we get caught up in their personal lives, and increasingly relegate their writings to the background. This was Gore Vidal's point in his brilliant essay-review of the first biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald that appeared in the 1950s. It is reprinted in his massive volume of essays, "United States," and is well worth reading.
What Spawls' essay-review reminds me of, however, is this: A person who reads Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte receives an enhanced understanding of modern Western culture. I believe Jane Austen's novels, and some of the Bronte works, starting with "Jane Eyre," help us understand what is known as the Regency Era of British history, and form a basis for us to see clearly what is in the background beyond their wonderfully still modern prose. The novels often take for granted their professional worker fathers who provide them with homes with servants (though "Jane Eyre" is radical in its perspective of someone who is a servant). The novels' narrators, and characters, also acutely aware that the characters' upper middle-class status still leaves them vulnerable to impoverishment if something goes wrong, unlike the aristocrats who still had major power over the politics, economics and culture in British society at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th Century.
Reading novels of Austen and, to a lesser extent, Bronte make one a more serious observer of life and political-economic history. For example, after reading Austen or Bronte novels, one reads with more depth of understanding Edward Said's "Culture and Imperialism." E.P. Thompson's magisterial, though unfortunately rarely read through, "The Making of the English Working Class" becomes a more illuminating and riveting experience. And they even help us understand that technology is not a static, independent phenomenon, and that how technology is used or developed depends much on culture and socio-economics. See, for example, Harry Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capital."
It is a shame when Austen's and Bronte's novels are reduced to their white skin, genitalia, or ethnic backgrounds. For each tells important universal human stories, as feudalism and the dawn of capitalism are what defines the last eight hundred years around the globe, and their stories appeared at a time when revolution against both trends had begun to occur, and when women had become more conscious of their second class status in both politics and culture. Their narrations re-affirm the belief that people are complex, affected by circumstances, and should be treated with more respect and dignity, which, for all the hypocrisies of Western imperialist culture, is a hallmark of Western culture that will eventually, well beyond our time, hopefully unite the world from a philosophical and political-economic perspective. For both socialism and capitalism arise from Western culture as guiding thoughts for organizing socieites, and what the Western European nations learned after fighting two ridiculously horrible wars on their turf (that spilled elsewhere due to imperialism to be called World Wars), is that a mixed economy, and policies geared toward human and environmental needs, work best for people. It is what Daniel Bell was getting at in his final thoughts of his book, 'The End of Ideology." The Austen/Bronte narrators reveal unfairness in how men and women are treated in traditional societies. Austen and Bronte narrators stand for free love, and express ridicule and contempt for inheritance laws that go through males, not females, and attack the way in which maintaining virginity in women is a means of control over women. Each of these positions may be seen as very radical, even today for many parts of our planet, and our own nation.
I end with a brief discussion of my relationship with Austen having been illuminated by having a daughter who I introduced Austen to in eighth grade, and who became so enamored that she read, on her own, the entire set of Austen novels. She and I often find Austen a touchstone to so many things, including political and economic oriented events and especially cultural events through today. It has been a wonderful experience for me, and I think for her, to be able to speak with passionate intellectual engagement about Jane Austen and even from time to time, "Jane Eyre." It has illuminated our parental child relationship as she reaches adulthood and has now to go her own way of working through and dealing with the rest of the world.
I have, in closing, to quote the opening of "Pride and Prejudice" because it is so wonderful and speaks so well of our own reactionary time. Austen opens her novel saying: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Yes, yes, it is hetero- and even cis-centric (the latter in that amusing transgender community nomenclature), but it speaks to political-economy in a way that helps us begin to understand she is not going to tell us a fantasy/romance sort of novel where we escape into dream regions. It is a romance novel for certain, but of a far more powerful nature. We are glad Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte existed, and we are wiser for it.
