In Good Company: Thoughts on Persuasion

Some way into Jane Austen's Persuasion, heroine Anne Elliot is deeply distressed when she overhears a conversation between her former fiancé, Captain Wentworth, and the girl he has been flirting with, which makes it clear that Wentworth considers Anne weak-willed, and holds her in disdain for breaking off their engagement eight years ago, when he was a penniless lieutenant with no prospects, on the advice of her mentor Lady Russell.  Mind churning, Anne is glad when the three are joined by the rest of their group, thinking that "Her spirit wanted the solitude and silence which only numbers could give."  That line seems to me to sum up Anne, and indeed the whole of Persuasion, perfectly.  Anne Elliot is exactly the sort of person who is always most alone in a crowd.

Persuasion is an odd entry in Austen's bibliography.  Her last novel, it is the most sober of the six, with very little of the sharp, acidic humor that characterizes most of her writing.  In other Austen novels, characters like Anne's vain father Sir Walter, whose chief enjoyment is reading and rereading his family's entry in the Baronetage, and her sisters, proud Elizabeth and self-pitying Mary, would be figures of, admittedly quite barbed, fun.  In Persuasion, they are grotesques, and their ridiculousness is more often used to evoke horror rather than humor--that the petty concerns and selfish passions of these worthless people should proscribe and direct nearly every decision in Anne's life.  Persuasion is also the most blatantly romantic of Austen's novels.  Its plot is a straightforward Cinderella story--an unappreciated but superior young woman longs for a prince to whisk her away from her unhappy life, and then he does--and the terms in which it is related are earnest and heartfelt.  "You pierce my soul," Captain Wentworth writes Anne at the end of the novel.  The same writer who in her other novels could never seem to write a confession of love without either stepping away ("Elizabeth ... immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change ... as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances.") or poking fun ("exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire."), and usually both, here gives us such protestations as "I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago.  Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.  I have loved none but you."

What's most unusual about Persuasion, however, is that unlike all of Austen's other novels it doesn't revolve around the protagonist's growth.  Anne Elliot, who is unique among Austen's heroines for being a woman rather than a girl, is a finished person, and one that Austen quite obviously finds admirable.  There is in Persuasion none of the not-so-gentle authorial poking and prodding that Fanny Price--probably the Austen heroine who comes closest to Anne's mixture of self-possession, selflessness, and moral rectitude--endures in her own novel, because Anne has none of Fanny's flaws.  She's mature and confident enough to know her own worth and can hold her ground when it really matters.  Neither does Captain Wentworth undergo a Mr. Darcy-like transformation, though one might very well be in order given that he spends the first two thirds of the book coldly ignoring Anne, insulting her to her face, and flirting with another woman in front of her (and in the process leading that woman on).  Most of this is inadvertent or unwitting, but that's not usually an excuse for an Austen hero.  Persuasion, however, keeps making excuses for, and trying to downplay, Wentworth's behavior, and his journey is mostly about letting go of his anger towards Anne and realizing that he still loves her.  Even this revelation isn't the source of the novel's tension.  There's never much doubt that, if they can only keep from attaching themselves to anyone else (never a great temptation), Anne and Wentworth's reunion will happen--"We are not boy and girl," Anne thinks, "to be captiously irritable, misled by every moment's inadvertence, and wantonly playing with our own happiness."

What Persuasion is actually about is Anne's search for a place, a group, in which she no longer has to feel alone.  In one of the novel's most famous exchanges, Anne's cousin Mr. Elliot asks her what her idea of good company is.  Upon hearing Anne's requirements of "clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation," he laughingly replies that "that is not good company, that is the best."  But the best company is exactly what Anne, who is terribly lonely, terribly unappreciated, and terribly under-stimulated, is looking for, and Persuasion is made up of set pieces in which she moves from one social group to another (each time observing how completely the social mores and priorities change, how what seemed vital in one setting becomes a trifle in another), looking for that perfect fit.  She doesn't find it in her father's cold, unloving house, where family pride trumps manners and propriety, nor among her brother-in-law's family, the Musgroves, who though warmly appreciative of her are not on her intellectual level, nor in the stuffy drawing rooms in Bath, where the gossipy, fashion-obsessed chatter rises to a deafening din.  Anne finds her place among the retired officers of the British Navy. 

Persuasion is a book-long paean to the navy, whose officers are described as friendly, courtly, virtuous, loyal, and intelligent.  Anne is struck by these qualities in Captain Wentworth and his brother-in-law Admiral Croft, but upon falling into a whole set of former officers at Lyme, she feels "such a bewitching charm in a degree of hospitality so uncommon, so unlike the usual style of give-and-take invitations, and dinners of formality and display, that Anne felt her spirits not likely to be benefited by an increasing acquaintance among [Captain Wentworth's] fellow officers.  "These would all have been my friends," was her thought".  Of course, Anne can't enter the society of the navy on her own power.  It's her reconciliation with and marriage to Wentworth that achieve this, and so the novel's central romance is actually a means to the end of finally placing Anne in that best company she's been longing for, of finally ending her loneliness.

There are two points that mar my enjoyment of Anne's journey from loneliness to the society of her peers.  The first is that, whether intentionally or not, this journey is also one in which Anne rejects relationships with women--which dominate the circles she moves in in her father's house, among the Musgroves, and in Bath--in favor of those with men.  Sisterhood, whether literal or figurative, is never an unalloyed good in Austen's novels.  Even in novels like Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, in which the heroines' relationships with women are often deeper and more significant than even the driving romance, there are negative examples of sisterhood--Lydia, Kitty, and Mary Bennet, or Lucy and Anne Steele--and in novels like Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey positive relationships between women are often drowned out by toxic ones.  In Persuasion, however, there is not a single example of positive, nurturing female friendship, and most of the female characters other than Anne are deeply flawed.  There are wicked, selfish women in the novel--Elizabeth, Mrs. Clay--and foolish ones--Mary and the entire Musgrove tribe--but even those women Anne thinks highly of turn out to be unsuitable as friends and confidantes. 

Lady Russell is the most obvious example--the whole of Persuasion is concerned with Anne establishing firm boundaries between herself and the woman who has been like a mother to her, and whose influence over her she now views as a source of harm.  Lady Russell's attempts to exert a similar influence on Anne in the second half of the novel, by persuading her to marry Mr. Elliot, are met with steely, unbending refusal, as well as a subtle weakening of Anne's regard for her mentor for failing to doubt Mr. Elliot's intentions as she does.  Mrs. Smith, with whom Anne appears to have struck a friendship of equals, and who seems to be acting as Anne's friend when she provides her with concrete proof that Mr. Elliot is a cad, is actually one of the most designing characters in the novel.  Even knowing Mr. Elliot's character, she encourages Anne to marry him in the hopes of advancing her own interests through their marriage, and only reveals the truth once it's clear that she has nothing to gain from lying.  Given her dire straits, it's hard to blame her for grasping at any available straw, but she's hardly a moral character or a good friend.  The only truly admirable female characters in the novel are the ones Anne sees from a distance, from whom she is separated from by the lack of an entry pass into their world--the navy wives, Mrs. Harville and Mrs. Croft (the latter may very well be the coolest female character in an Austen novel--she has sailed as far as the East Indies with her husband, and calmly takes the reins from him when they're out driving in their carriage).  It is, however, significant that even in the absence of that pass Anne manages to strike up an intimacy with a navy man, Captain Benwick (who may be the only character in the novel she considers an intellectual equal), and that the most open, honest and emotional conversation she has with any character in the novel is with another naval officer, Captain Harville.

My second issue with Persuasion is with Anne herself, and with the fact that, at some point over the course of the novel, her loneliness comes to seem less like a predicament and more like a choice.  Anne is, as I've said, a Cinderella heroine, someone who is put-upon and unappreciated.  But Anne is no Fanny Price, an emotionally battered, financially dependent, mousy person who probably can't bring herself to speak out against her mistreatment.  Neither is she Elinor Dashwood, who suffers silently until she's dealt one blow too many and then explodes with anger and frustration.  It's true that her position as a single woman in Regency England means that the choices available to Anne are not so much broader than the ones available to Fanny.  She can't just pick up and leave a setting that doesn't suit her, but I'm not sure that she wants to.  I think that Persuasion wants us to think of Anne as saintly, someone who can put up with her father's vanity, her sisters' pride or dependence, her in-laws' silliness, without losing her patience or composure, but the superiority with which Anne views almost everyone she encounters in the novel belies this approach.  There is something off-putting about being the sort of person who spends their life believing themselves to be superior to everyone else and detaching themselves from their surroundings because of that belief, even if it is entirely justified.  It smacks of not trying hard enough to find one's own level.  Anne seems to enjoy being the smartest person in the room, the one who sees and silently laughs at everyone else's foibles and weaknesses, a little too much, and the novel lets her get away with this.

We are enjoined, of course, from mistaking characters for their author, and lord knows that Jane Austen has suffered from this fallacious tendency far more than most, but it's impossible to know more than a little of her life and not wonder just how much of Austen, or of her idealized image of herself, there is in Anne.  It's easy to imagine Austen as the smartest person in the room, as someone whose superiority over others was a source of both pleasure and loneliness.  Is this why Anne is missing the flaws that makes Austen's other heroines so human and so real?  Is this why she's inhumanly saintly where a real person in her position would be just a little bit wicked?  I'm dipping my toes in forbidden waters and so I'll stop, but whether or not I'm on the right track, the fact remains that there's something not quite right about Anne Elliot, something that stops Persuasion, despite being one of Austen's finest technical achievements, and one of the most romantic stories I've ever read (I swoon at Captain Wentworth's letter.  Every time), from quite working.  In the novel's penultimate chapter, Anne glides through her father's house in Bath, rapturously waiting for Captain Wentworth to formally ask for her hand in marriage, benevolently observing the characters who have imposed on her throughout the novel: "Mr. Elliot was there; she avoided, but she could pity him. The Wallises -- she had amusement in understanding them. Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret -- they would soon be innoxious cousins to her. She cared not for Mrs. Clay, and had nothing to blush for in the public manners of her father and sister."  Ignoring them, she finds a quiet corner, and talks about the past with Captain Wentworth.  It's hard not to think that, instead of finally finding her good company, Anne has found someone with whom she can feel superior, someone to be alone in a crowd with.

The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing: Sense and Sensibility Thoughts

I've been promising myself to write something substantial about Sense and Sensibility since before I even had a blog, and one of the reasons I've taken so long getting around to doing so is that it tends to fall through the cracks. It's not a perennial favorite like Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion, nor a work I didn't get along with in my teens, and which I can set myself the goal of reengaging with as an adult as I did with Mansfield Park and Emma (and really, it is time to try to do the same with Northanger Abbey as I promised I'd do only two years ago). I liked Sense and Sensibility when I first read it (though at least some of that affection is due to the transcendent Emma Thompson/Ang Lee adaptation which I watched soon after finishing the book for the first time) and I come back to it every now and then, but not so much with the enthusiasm one feels when returning to a beloved work as with a grim determination to finally, once and for all, work the novel out. This is to sound rather negative about what is, after all, as fine and well-observed a work as any of Austen's novels (though stylistically I think it may be her weakest--the humor is a little belabored, and the plot flags in the middle segments) but my problem with it is simply that I'm not sure what Austen is saying, and have a sneaking suspicion that I wouldn't like it if I did.

Sady Doyle, in a characteristically thoughtful and insightful post about Sense and Sensibility (as part of a series about books by, for and about women, which also encompasses Little Women and Valley of the Dolls) calls it "a comedy about sadness, and how to get through it intact." This strikes me as an accurate but incomplete observation. Doyle is right to point out Austen's deliberate contrasting of the ways in which the Dashwood sisters, pragmatic Elinor and romantic Marianne, deal with their romantic disappointments--Marianne weeps and wails and takes to her bed and in general gives as much trouble as she can to the people who love her; Elinor conceals her pain and tries to medicate it with activity and concern for others--but the comparison between the two sisters' temperaments and outlooks is in place even before these disappointments occur. Long before she gets around to prescribing the correct way of dealing with heartbreak, Austen is prescribing the correct way of being in love. While Elinor reveals only the barest hints of her affection for Edward Ferrars, Marianne cries her love for the roguish Willoughby from the mountaintops, and whereas Elinor has other activities and interests to occupy her in Edward's absence, for Marianne, love is as feverish and all-consuming as grief.

When Marianne, in the novel's moral climax, having survived not only Willoughby's abandonment but a near-fatal illness to which her surrender to grief left her vulnerable, compares her behavior unfavorably with Elinor's, it's easy to conclude that Sense and Sensibility is, as Doyle says, a story about the choice between controlling your emotions and wallowing in them. This is not, however, the only axis on which Marianne's behavior is found wanting. As central to the novel as the question of whether to control emotion is the question of whether to display it. At first glance, it may seem that the two dilemmas can be folded into one, but to do so, we have to ignore the novel's historical context, in which the finding and getting of husbands is not simply a romantic pursuit, but a business, and sometimes a necessity of survival. In this context the question of whether to reveal, conceal, or even feign, emotion is not simply a moral one, but a matter of calculated pursuit.

It is a calculation which very nearly every character in the novel but the Dashwood sisters makes at one point or another, and which the sisters themselves find deeply mortifying. Early in the novel, the girls' mother haughtily exclaims at a neighbor's joking assertion that Marianne has Willoughby in her sights. "I do not believe ... that Mr. Willoughby will be incommoded by the attempts of either of my daughters towards what you call catching him. It is not an employment to which they have been brought up. Men are very safe with us, let them be ever so rich." So that when Marianne rejects Elinor's criticism of the uninhibited display of her affection for Willoughby, she's doing so not simply because of her self-absorbed determination to impose her feelings on her general surroundings, but because she takes Elinor's reproach as an admonition to stick by the Regency version of The Rules--play hard to get, make the guy jump through hoops of gold before you show any affection. Similarly, Elinor's growing closeness to Edward, and later on her friendship with Colonel Brandon, are perceived by both her friends and enemies as an attempts to draw the two men in and land herself a wealthy husband. With romantic and mercenary considerations so intimately linked, it's no wonder that both of the Dashwood sisters find it difficult to know just where the happy medium between too demonstrative and too reserved is.

Against Elinor and Marianne's struggle to behave honorably in the unforgiving arena of husband-hunting, Austen sets the character of Lucy Steele (or, more precisely, she sets Lucy and her sister Nancy, who like the Dashwood sisters make up a duo of one observant, controlled sister, and one demonstrative, unheeding one). To the unsuspecting observer, Lucy preforms the role of the perfect fusion of the two sisters--romantically overcome by Edward's charms like Marianne, and cautiously concealing their attachment and planning for their future like Elinor--and this is only one of the many performances--of helplessness, gratitude, self-sacrifice, generosity, and regard for others--that Lucy puts on in order to secure the affections and support of everyone she meets in her single-minded pursuit of financial security. And the thing is, I love her. She is Austen's most fascinating villain, and may well be one of her most interesting characters.

In my first rereading of Sense and Sensibility as an adult, I was bowled away by Lucy, and by the impression she creates of there being a shadow novel, a sort of proto-Vanity Fair starring Lucy in the Becky Sharpe role, stomping over broken hearts and ruined lives on her way to respectability. Lucy plays the game that Elinor and Marianne are too proud to acknowledge like a pro, taking advantage of vanity and honesty alike in her manipulations of everyone she meets. The scene in which she confides with Elinor about her engagement to Edward is a tiny masterpiece of psychological torture, with Lucy, always simpering with deference and feigned simplicity, hammering in one proof after another of her claim on Edward while subtly sowing doubts in Elinor's heart as to Edward's feelings for her and his character. In so doing, she places Elinor in the position of having to not only impassively listen to accounts of Edward's engagement to another woman, but to assist in that engagement's consummation, for fear of giving away her true feelings and compromising her honor. Though it's probably giving Lucy too much credit to say that she engineers the Ferrarses' making a pet of her as a way of slighting Elinor, whom they believe to be the object of Edward's affection, she certainly doesn't fail to take advantage of the situation, and when her engagement is revealed and Edward is cast off by his family with nothing, she leverages even that debacle to her advantage, and ends up married to his now independently wealthy brother Robert. We never get a glimpse of Lucy's internal monologue, and her external one is deliberately insipid, but given this virtuoso performance it's hard not to suspect that that placid exterior conceals a sharp intellect and keen powers of observation--Elizabeth Bennet on her meanest day, or Mary Crawford at her most designing, except much coarser (though that coarseness probably has something to do with having had to claw her way even to the genteel poverty that Elinor and Marianne take for granted)--and even Elinor, though despising Lucy's methods, acknowledges her skills, calls her "better than half her sex," and envisions Edward's life with her as comfortable and well-managed, albeit loveless.

Alone among Austen's villains and romantic rivals, Lucy triumphs, and not only does she triumph, but so complete is her victory that she can afford to be magnanimous in it, and let small fry Edward go while she enjoys the bigger fish she's landed. The letter in which she releases Edward from their engagement is, once again, a tiny masterpiece, and in its own way may very well be the most honest piece of communication between men and women in any of Austen's novels:

Being sure I have long lost your affections, I have thought myself at liberty to bestow my own on another, and have no doubt of being as happy with him as I once used to think I might be with you; but I scorn to accept a hand while the heart was another's. Sincerely wish you happy in your choice, and it shall not be my fault if we are not always good friends

You don't love me any more than I love you, Lucy is saying, and we both know it. And since I've found someone better, I feel free to behave dishonorably, secure in the knowledge that such behavior will make both of us very happy. And the fact is, Lucy may very well end up the happiest of any of the novel's characters. Or rather, she ends up with exactly what she set out to have, and is about as happy as a woman whose greatest aspiration is wealth and position could ever hope to be. Elinor and Marianne, meanwhile, are forced into compromises. Elinor marries a man she loves, but their style of living will always be pitiful compared to the expectations they both grew up with. Marianne marries a wealthy man whom she respects and admires, but whom she does not come to love until some time after their marriage (and it's never sat very well with me, the way Austen describes the growth of that love--it's hard not to see it, as the Emma Thompson version paints it, as a flight to safety by someone who has been grievously wounded and finds themselves more in need of a parent than a lover). Willoughby, meanwhile, is miserable in his choice, but not forever--"His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable! and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in porting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity."

Sense and Sensibility ends, therefore, with a complete rejection of the romantic ethos. There is not a single traditionally romantic couple to be found at the end of the novel, unless one counts Elinor and Edward, who from the get go are described as unusually unaffectionate, and whose courtship and infatuation happen entirely off-page, so that the readers' romantic gratification is denied even by their union. This is clearly deliberate, and sits well with the raw, uncompromising nature of many of the plot elements Austen employs. The Dashwood sisters are the poorest of Austen's heroines, their situation the most desperate, their prospects the grimmest. The specter of premarital sex and illegitimate children, which haunts several other of her novels, is here on full display in the person of Colonel Brandon's lost love and her daughter, who is seduced and ruined by Willoughby. Marianne very nearly dies. There's an undertone of anger at the very notion of a romantic disposition, which seems to prioritize the mercenary aspect of husband-hunting over the romantic one.

Which is why I find it difficult to accept Doyle's reading of the novel as an admonition against being mastered by emotion. It seems to me to go much further, and caution against being guided by it at all. In all of Austen's novels, there's a tension between the romantic text and the decidedly unromantic subtext, but in Sense and Sensibility the two seem to be almost at war. This is probably in keeping with Austen's own character, which was likely much closer to the cynical, money-obsessed spinster from the miniseries Miss Austen Regrets than the starry-eyed romantic she was made out to be in Becoming Jane, but also makes for an uncomfortable read in the early 21st century. Though I certainly wouldn't say that money no longer plays any factor in courtship, or that games of control and manipulation have disappeared in the wake of feminism and the sexual revolution (the very existence of The Rules, and more recently of seduction manuals, gives the lie to that claim), Sense and Sensibility's moral feels more of its own time than any of Austen's other novels. It's hard not to feel that when Marianne says to Elinor that she compares her behavior "with what it ought to have been; I compare it with yours" that what she's saying is that she should have played hard to get and waited for an engagement ring. That's a little more unromantic than I can comfortably stomach.

The Least-Liked Austen: Thoughts on Emma

I don't know if this is still the case, but when I was growing up it was customary to give books as Bar- and Bat-Mitzvah presents. These were usually of the 'serious' variety--handsome coffee table books and hefty reference volumes. I got my share of each, and leafed through the former and used the latter for schoolwork, but the gift that has proven the most enduring, and from which I've gotten the most use and the most pleasure, was a set of six unassuming paperbacks--two Wordsworth Classics and four Bantams--of Jane Austen's novels. I think every voracious reader can name several books the gift of which opened their eyes to a new literary vista and shaped them as a reader, and for me this was one of those occasions. I made my way through the six Austens over the next five or six years. Some of them--Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion--have become staples of my reading diet, books that I return to periodically to discover new aspects or take pleasure in the ones I already know. Others are ticks on my ever-lengthening to-be-read list. 2007, however, seems to be the year in which I return to my less-beloved Austens. A few months ago, I reread Mansfield Park, and found it to be sharper and funnier than I had remembered, though by no means without flaws. Now it's time for Emma (which, I suppose, means that Northanger Abbey is next).

I first read Emma while on holiday in Sweden when I was fifteen, and found it a hard slog. At the time, I had trouble explaining my resistance to the novel, and ultimately settled, somewhat reluctantly, on the title character, whom Austen herself famously described as "a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." Arrogant and self-important, Emma is a sort of feminine Mr. Darcy. Like him, she has been "given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit" (although, unlike Mr. Darcy, Emma's attempts at ordering the world according to her own notions of what is right and proper are rarely successful, and in fact often have the opposite result of the one she intended). Emma is supposed to be the narrative of its heroine's moral and emotional growth, but I found her--and therefore the novel--unsatisfying. Ten years later, I expected to have more sympathy for Emma Woodhouse, and a greater appreciation of the novel which bears her name, but instead I found myself nearly overwhelmed by Austen's treatment of a secondary theme which I had, almost inexplicably, managed to overlook in my first reading--the theme of class.

Class is central to Emma in a way that far outstrips its importance in Austen's other novels. The most obvious example is the sub-plot involving Harriet Smith, a young woman of no family and very little education whom Emma takes under her wing, and Robert Martin, a farmer who is in love with her. In spite of his many qualities--he is described as intelligent, serious-minded, and conscientious, and Mr. Knightley, Emma's mentor and the novel's moral center, holds him in very high esteem--Emma is brutally dismissive of Robert Martin because of his class.

"The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do. A degree or two lower, and a creditable appearance might interest me; I might hope to be useful to their families in some way or other. But a farmer can need none of my help, and is therefore in one sense as much above my notice as in every other he is below it."

Emma's animosity towards Martin is motivated in part by her belief that Harriet can do better. Partly out of blind affection, and partly out of a desire to gratify her sense of her own importance, Emma schemes to attach Harriet first to the local vicar, Mr. Elton (who has set his sights on Emma instead), and later to her neighbor's son, Frank Churchill (who is secretly engaged to another young lady, Jane Fairfax), in spite of Mr. Knightley's assertions that Harriet has nothing more than good looks and a pleasant nature to recommend her.

Emma's coming to accept Harriet and Robert's marriage at the end of the novel is motivated not by her learning to look past his class and to value him for his character and abilities, but by a clear-headed evaluation of Harriet, and the realization that she possesses very little of either. This reevaluation comes about when Harriet, encouraged by Emma's bolstering of her self-esteem, sets her sights on Mr. Knightley. An oblivious Emma has, of course, been in love with Mr. Knightley all the time, but beyond this personal reason to object to a match between the two, we are also told that "It was horrible to Emma to think how it must sink him in the general opinion, to foresee the smiles, the sneers, the merriment, it would prompt at his expense". At the end of the novel Emma, now happily married to Mr. Knightley, is drifting away from Harriet, and the novel treats this cooling of their friendship as something inevitable and desirable.

Emma's inability to accurately gauge Harriet's value, both in terms of her class and of her abilities, is part of a larger theme of social and personal blindness within the novel. Emma, obviously, suffers most egregiously from this failing--she doesn't realize that Mr. Elton is interested in her, and unwittingly encourages him while believing him to be in love with Harriet; she falls for Frank Churchill's pretense of infatuation, which in reality is a blind meant to conceal his attachment to Jane Fairfax; she is fooled by Jane and Mr. Knightley's reserve, and fails to realize where either of their affections truly lie. But Emma is far from being the only blind person in the novel--the entire cast blunders about, groping helplessly before them and constantly coming to the wrong conclusions about their friends and neighbors. Mr. Elton believes that Emma reciprocates his affections. Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax are certain that the entire neighborhood is on the verge of discovering their secret, and that Emma has already worked it out and given them her tacit approval to use her as a beard. Harriet thinks that Emma is encouraging her to pursue Mr. Knightley, whereas Emma is actually talking about Frank Churchill. Even Mr. Knightley initially fails to recognize even those modest qualities Harriet possesses, and he also shares in the common misconception that Emma is so in love with Frank Churchill that the revelation of his engagement to Jane Fairfax must break her heart. As the narrative tells us just at the moment in which Emma and Mr. Knightley realize that the object of their affection returns it, "Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken".

Were Harriet and Robert Martin's sub-plot the only reference to class in the novel, it might be easier to conclude that it is introduced in service of this greater theme of blindness, but there are other references to class in Emma that are not so easily disposed of:

• Emma is scandalized by Mr. Elton's presumption in proposing to her--"Perhaps it was not fair to expect him to feel how very much he was her inferior in talent and all the elegancies of mind. ... but he must surely know that in fortune and consequence she was greatly his superior. He must know that the Woodhouses had been settled for several generations at Hartfield, the younger branch of a very ancient family, and that the Eltons were nobody."


• When Frank Churchill proposes holding a ball in the local inn, Emma tries to persuade him that there aren't enough families of sufficient rank in the neighborhood to make up a sizable crowd--"The want of proper families in the place and the conviction that none beyond the place and its immediate environs could be tempted to attend were mentioned; but he was not satisfied. ... Of pride, indeed, there was, perhaps, scarcely enough; his indifference to a confusion of rank bordered too much on inelegance of mind. He could be no judge, however, of the evil he was holding cheap. It was but an effusion of lively spirits."


• "The Coles had been settled some years in Highbury and were very good sort of people, friendly, liberal, and unpretending; but, on the other hand, they were of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel. ... The Coles were very respectable in their way, but they ought to be taught that it was not for them to arrange the terms on which the superior families would visit them."


• When Mr. Elton does marry, the woman he chooses is wealthy but unrefined, and the narrative lambasts her for her belief that her nouveau-riche relatives are the equals, and perhaps the superiors, of the old, landed families in Highbury. Mrs. Elton figures quite prominently in the latter half of the novel, and in most of her appearances she is consumed with elevating herself to a position which, we are told, neither her rank as a vicar's wife nor her family connections entitle her to.


• In the only instance in any of Austen's novels of a physical assault against a character, Harriet is accosted by gypsies violently demanding charity, and has to be rescued by Frank Churchill.

Emma's personal growth over the course of the novel doesn't extend to rejecting her snobbery. Although it is somewhat tempered by a sense of obligation to her social inferiors--one might argue that the infamous scene in which she callously mocks a silly, impoverished neighbor and is later rebuked by Mr. Knightley is the beginning of a realization on Emma's part that her class prejudices often spill over into cruelty--at the end of the novel Emma is, if anything, even more firmly ensconced in her belief in her inherent superiority than she was at its beginning, and ready to fill the role of civic leader. Her failure, we must conclude, was not in assuming that she is superior to her neighbors, and therefore capable of and entitled to order their affairs, but in failing to do so wisely and respectfully, and in being motivated by a desire to feel important rather than to be genuinely useful.

Obviously, it should come as no surprise that Jane Austen, an author who hewed so closely to a conservative worldview in other respects, was nothing like a radical when it came to class. Her main characters are all gentlemen and ladies, and although they don't always marry within their exact level their chosen mates are usually gentlemen and ladies as well. Nevertheless, in her other novels there is at least a sense that, although she frowns on social climbing in general, Austen has a grudging respect, even an admiration, for those who practice it. In Persuasion, Anne Eliot is warned that her sister's friend Mrs. Cole, the daughter of Sir Walter's lawyer, is trying to win Sir Walter's affections and make herself the new Lady Eliot. The narrative rewards Mrs. Cole for her troubles, however. Sir Walter's heir, recognizing a formidable opponent, essentially makes her his ally by marrying her--she can no longer threaten his claim to Sir Walter's estate by producing a nearer heir, and he will one day make her a baronet's wife. Sense and Sensibility's Lucy Steele is one of Austen's most fascinating creations--an intelligent, calculating young woman, more chaotic neutral than villain, whom Elinor Dashwood herself calls "better than half her sex."

Mrs. Elton is very much in the vein of these characters. In spite of her coarseness and presumption, she is clearly intelligent and accomplished, and yet, with the exception of Mansfield Park's ghoulish Mrs. Norris, she is Austen's most objectionable creation, whose attempts to place herself in a position of authority within Highbury society--taking on, unasked, the roles of hostess and patroness in communal functions--are viewed with disdain by the narrative and the novel's right-thinking characters. One of the positive results of Emma's marriage to Mr. Knightley at the end of the novel is that it gives Emma the crucial advantages--she is now a married woman, and mistress of the largest estate in Highbury--which allow her to regain the position from which Mrs. Elton ousted her, as Highbury's social leader.

Emma's emphasis on class distinction is also unusual because unequal marriages are so common in her other novels. In Austen's world, husbands and wives can be unequal in their character, class, or wealth, and in her other novels an equality in the first sense, and not the latter two, is held as crucial to the success of a marriage. Anne Eliot, the daughter of a baronet, can marry Fredrick Wentworth, a sea-captain and the son of no one at all, because he is her intellectual and moral equal. Elizabeth Bennet makes a much better wife for Mr. Darcy than Caroline Bingley, in spite of the fact that Caroline has tons of money and Elizabeth is poor and not very well connected, because she is Caroline's superior and Darcy's equal in terms of character.

In Emma, the situation is reversed. The three marriages agreed upon at the end of the story are equal in terms of class and wealth--the gentleman farmer marries the illegitimate daughter of a merchant; the poor young people raised by wealthy relatives marry one another; the landed gentry marry each other--but unequal when it comes to character--Mr. Knightley, Jane Fairfax, and Robert Martin are superior to their chosen mates. In another Austen novel, we'd expect Knightley to marry Jane, Emma to marry Frank Churchill, and Harriet to... well, not to exist. Though Austen is a deft hand at writing persuasive romantic relationships, it's hard for a reader versed in her novels to forget all those instances in which a person marries their moral or intellectual inferior hoping to teach and better them, and ends up being dragged down to their level. Are we really supposed to believe that the same won't happen to Mr. Knightley and Jane Fairfax?

The difference, presumably, is that at the end of this novel, Emma and Frank Churchill know what they've got and how little they deserve it. Emma resolves to adhere more closely to Mr. Knightley's guidance and advice, and has even begun to do so at the novel's close. As I wrote in my essay about Mansfield Park, however, Austen doesn't usually go in for redemption by proxy. Guided by those good principles I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Emma tries to reform several times over the course of the novel and fails. At its end, she is just at the beginning of a more comprehensive attempt, but I find it difficult to believe that her success, if it even happens, will be complete or long-lasting unless she sublimates herself completely to Knightley's guidance. I can't help but believe that Emma will always be driven, at least in part, by pride and conceit (and that Frank Churchill's impulsive nature will always drive him). More importantly, I don't get the sense that for Austen, the question of whether or not Emma has truly reformed is as important as the question of whether or not she marries Mr. Knightley.

Jane Austen's fans are always moaning about her works being mistaken for romantic fiction when, in reality, the romance is nothing but a delivery system for her moral ideas--the old-fashioned and objectionable ones as well as the universal ones. Rereading Emma, I can't help but feel that the main character's romantic triumph is given precedence over her moral growth. As opposed to Mr. Darcy, who has to prove that he's a better person through actions, at the end of the novel Emma gets Knightley without having done anything to earn him beyond realizing that she is in love with him. She's wiser, but not yet wise, and yet the narrative leaves her with what is, for Austen, the ultimate reward--marriage to a good man. I had hoped to come away from this reevaluation of Emma with a greater appreciation for it, but instead I like it less--it may be my least-favorite of Austen's novels, for the simple reason that I think it may actually deserve that ignominious moniker, the romance novel.

Thoughts on a Film I Have No Intention of Seeing

Ever since it opened in Israel last month, I've been struck by the occasional urge to see Becoming Jane, for no better reason than that I want to know for certain whether it truly is as vile and offensive as the trailers and reviews make it out to be. The thought of subjecting myself to a two-hour version of the trailer is usually enough to bring me to my senses. It's not even as if I'm likely to get a blog post out of the experience--most of the salient points have been made time and again. AustenBlog has been pretty good about rounding up the sane reviews and skewering the silly ones, and the same objections I had when I first heard about the film keep cropping up: why is it necessary for a man to jump-start Austen's genius? And whence the belief that the creative process is nothing more than glorified stenography? This rather brilliant condensation of the film says it all quite nicely.

Maggie Judy Smith Dench:

Hello Austen! I am a cruel and haughty and one-dimensional snob, but I do lament that it is my misfortune to not be very funnym either. Miss Austen, there's a prettyish sort of wilderness over there.

Jane:

Stop! I must take a moment to crib your writing in a cheap gesture towards my observational talent. [writes it down] Okay, done! Heave, bosom, heave.

But it's the inimitable Anthony Lane, reviewing Becoming Jane for The New Yorker, who offers what I think is the most important criticism of the film:

the whole film, though dotted with passable jokes and packed—this being period drama—with long-gowned maidens hoofing about the dance floor, builds up to a climactic grief, with the middle-aged Lefroy encountering Austen and letting her know, through the moistness of his eyes and the graying of his whiskers, that he mourns What Might Have Been.

For any Austen reader, this sadness will be hard to share. Lefroy rose to become Chief Justice of Ireland, and the idea that Jane might have married him, and spent her days organizing soirées for the legal profession instead of sitting peacefully at home writing about Emma Woodhouse, is dreadful to contemplate.

And therein lies the fundamental fallacy of Becoming Jane, and of the 2005 Pride and Prejudice before it--the belief that Jane Austen wrote novels about romance and love, when in fact she was writing about marriage, and about the moral and practical considerations that go into making it. The endings of her novels are happy not simply because her heroines have found True Love but because they've been spared from spinsterhood and the poverty that would almost inevitably accompany it, and her stories are largely concerned with the question of where the right balance between sentiment and mercenary considerations lies--is Charlotte Lucas right, in other words, to accept Mr. Collins? If Becoming Jane were truly interested in depicting Austen's growth as an artist, it would show her coming to understand these hard truths, and realizing just how precarious her position as unmarried, female artist was.

Which, for all I know, it does--but no one seems to have said so.

Noted Without Comment

Jane too plain for publishers:

Helen Trayler, the publisher's managing director, said: "She was not much of a looker. Very, very plain. Jane Austen wasn't very good looking. She's the most inspiring, readable author, but to put her on the cover wouldn't be very inspiring at all. It's just a bit off-putting.

...

Publishers have traditionally used a portrait of Austen by her sister Cassandra, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. This portrait has been now been digitally adjusted to remove her nightcap, give her make-up and hair extensions for a new edition of a memoir by Austen's nephew.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Fanny Price? Thoughts on Mansfield Park, Novel and Films

ITV kicked off its "Jane Austen Season" on Sunday with Mansfield Park, an indifferent adaptation starring a good but woefully miscast Billie Piper. Mansfield Park is probably Austen's most problematic novel, and possibly her most divisive (the other contender for that title is Northanger Abbey, about which there seem to be nothing but extreme opinions. Personally, I am at a loss to understand how I can be expected to enjoy a parody of a genre that no longer exists, and which I have never read in), and most of those problems can be traced back to its main character--the dull, timid, deferential, passive, self-abnegating goodie-two-shoes, Miss Fanny Price.

In Austen fan circles, one is often made to feel a little guilty for not liking Fanny. The very point of Mansfield Park, after all, is to stress the importance of character by pitting a heroine who has it--and almost no other virtue--against a romantic rival who possesses everything but. To dislike Fanny, we're told, is to put a higher premium on the surface of things--on stylishness, cleverness, wittiness--than on what lies beneath it. Fanny's victory over Mary Crawford, with whom she competes for the heart of her cousin Edmund Bertram, is the victory of substance over style.

On the other side of the debate, we have those who, like Alison, here writing in response to the ITV adaptation, feel that

The Crawfords are more fun than anyone else, and while they are cruel and destructive, they are redeemable, and it is part of the tension of the story that Edmund and Fanny could redeem them, but choose not to. It's very problematic to the reader. You do find the two goodies to be priggish. You do want to say to them - get together with the baddies, you'll give them a bit of depth, and they'll give you a bit of fun for the first time in your dull self-sacrificing lives.

I have problems with both approaches, but most particularly with the latter. The Crawfords--Mary and her brother Henry, who flirts shamelessly with Edmund's sisters, one of whom is engaged, and then turns his attentions to Fanny--are redeemable, of course--what would be the point of the novel if they were mustache-twirling villains (and I disagree with Alison's assertion that they are cruel--destructive, to be certain, and quite thoughtless, but one never sees them take real pleasure in the pain of others, or pursue that pain as an end in its own right)? And how much lesser would the glory of Fanny's victory over Mary be if Mary did not have good qualities as well as bad? The problem is that they do not wish to be redeemed. Mary in particular is almost beyond hope--unlike Henry, who realizes that to win Fanny's heart he will have to change and make sacrifices, Mary expects those changes and sacrifices to come from Edmund, whose career as a clergyman and life in a modest country parish she finds completely unacceptable.

Throughout the novel, Mary shows herself to be shallow and mercenary, her moral compass warped out of true, and even her deepening feelings for Edmund do not change her fundamental character. She begins to wonder whether she might not be able to tolerate a life of relative poverty for Edmund's sake, but she never learns to appreciate the value of that life for its own sake. Just about the only thing Mary does to recommend herself to the reader is strike up a friendship with Fanny (although Austen goes to some lengths to point out that she does so out of boredom, and only after the Bertram sisters leave the neighborhood), to whom she is very kind, but in her last letter to Fanny, Mary callously expresses hope for the death of Edmund's older brother, then grievously ill, as a baronetcy and a fortune might go some way towards making marriage to a clergyman tolerable. There can be no doubt--this is a completely shallow, completely hollow person.

Henry is a more problematic character. As previously noted, he changes--or at least tries to--to please Fanny, and I've more than once come across the opinion that, in having him run off with Edmund's by-then-married sister Maria just as Fanny starts to soften towards him, Austen is performing something along the lines of character assassination, getting rid of a what is by that point a worthy suitor because she wants Fanny and Edmund together at the end of the book. It's a persuasive argument, but for me it falls flat because the novel makes it quite obvious that Henry only ever tries to change to please Fanny. He never learns to love goodness for itself, although it's possible that, at the time of his slip with Maria, he was on the path to doing so. And a slip, albeit a disastrous one, is precisely how Austen describes the rekindling of the affair:

Had he done as he intended, and as he knew he ought, by going down to Everingham after his return from Portsmouth, he might have been deciding his own happy destiny. But he was pressed to stay for Mrs. Fraser's party; his staying was made of flattering consequence, and he was to meet Mrs. Rushworth there. Curiosity and vanity were both too strong for a mind unused to make any sacrifice to right; he resolved to defer his Norfolk journey, resolved that writing should answer the purpose of it, or that its purpose was unimportant--and stayed. He saw Mrs. Rushworth, was received by her with a coldness which ought to have been repulsive, and have established apparent indifference between them forever; but he was mortified, he could not bear to be thrown off by the woman whose smiles had been so wholly at his command; he must exert himself to subdue so proud a display of resentment; it was anger on Fanny's account; he must get the better of it, and make Mrs. Rushworth Maria Bertram again in her treatment of himself.

As we know that Henry's infatuation with Fanny is directly attributable to the fact that she didn't swoon at his advances, it doesn't strain credibility to imagine him, halfway between roguishness and respectability as he is at that point in the novel, falling victim to the same impulse where Maria is involved. Taken on its own, it is a trivial setback, but its consequences destroy his chances for redemption.

Most importantly, Austen doesn't really go in for redemption by proxy. A young person's character and ideas can be shaped by the guiding hand of a parent or a mentor, although one more often encounters examples of the opposite, of parents spoiling and ruining their children, in her novels, and Mansfield Park in particular is littered with victims of such bad education--the Crawfords, all of the Bertram siblings but Edmund, even Fanny's sister Susan is nearly overcome by her parents' coarseness and inattention--but once they reach adulthood, her characters are expected to better themselves. "We all have a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be," is Fanny's response when Henry calls her his moral guide. All of the redeemed characters in Austen's novels--Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Darcy, Marianne Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse--achieve redemption on their own, and they seek it because they want to be good people and have had it pointed out to them that, in a certain respect, they fall short of that goal, not as a way of securing a lover. The notion that one might fix or elevate one's spouse is rarely given any credence in Austen's novels--one more frequently encounters examples of good people dragged down into ridiculousness or intellectual stagnation through the poor choice of a mate, and I can only imagine that this is what would have happened to Edmund if he'd persisted in his pursuit of Mary.

All of which is not to say that the anti-Fanny viewpoint is completely without merit. Fanny may possess an adamantium core of moral conviction, but it is surrounded by nothingness. Relentlessly beaten down by her more-or-less well-meaning aunt and uncle Bertram, who never fail to remind her of the debt of gratitude she owes them for taking her in, and who stop short of making her feel like a member of their family, and even further down by her inexpressibly evil aunt Norris, Fanny is almost bereft of personality. She is a keen observer of humanity--which is part of her protection against the Crawfords' charm, as she sees them as they are instead of as they pretend to be and as others wish to see them--but that keenness is only achieved through complete self-abnegation, a total absence of any opinions, interests, or desires of her own, of any identity not inextricably bound with the people around her. It is only through paying so little attention to herself--and thus ensuring that there is very little to pay attention to--that Fanny can manage to pay so much attention to others, and the end result is that, instead of opposing style and substance, the juxtaposition of Fanny and Mary ends up being a competition between two different kinds of substanceless-ness. While I would certainly agree that, when choosing a lifelong mate, one would be better off with Fanny's strength than Mary's capacity to amuse, it is hard to imagine how one could love a person who loves herself as little as Fanny Price does.

Even worse, in her dealings with the Crawfords, Fanny's deference and meekness soon become indistinguishable from hypocrisy. She allows Mary to make a friend of her even though she despises the other woman. She allows Henry to pursue her even though she despises him and is in love with another man. When Edmund and Sir Thomas mistake Fanny's unwillingness to accept Henry's proposal for a virginal panic which might be worn away at with time and kindness, we're expected to pity her, but the entire ordeal might have been over with in an instant if Fanny had only spoken out, and the longer she refrains from doing so the more she appears to be standing in silent, priggish judgement of those around her. One is reminded of Jane Eyre, another morally staunch, downtrodden young woman, but with a willingness to speak out when asked for her honest opinion. As the novel progresses, Fanny's lack of a similar courage begins to seem less and less like a pitiable character trait, and more like a moral failing.

As one of the commenters on Alison's post points out, the problem of representing Fanny in adaptations of Mansfield Park is usually dealt with by "turning her into someone else." The ITV version (with a script by Maggie Wadey) gives us a Fanny who is something of a tomboy, a girl amidst elegant females, either incapable of or unwilling to play the game of courtship, to flirt and bat her eyelashes and gently seduce. There is an argument to be made for reading Mansfield Park as a novel about Fanny's coming of age--coming to womanhood. Very soon after the novel's beginning, there is a lengthy discussion about whether or not Fanny is 'out'--a woman, and eligible for courtship and marriage--with the ultimate conclusion being that she isn't. After Maria marries and takes Julia with her on her honeymoon, Fanny becomes Mansfield Park's only young lady. She begins going out into company, starts wearing jewelry, has a ball thrown in her honor (essentially a coming-out), and eventually receives the attentions of a man. In Wadey's version, the experience of being courted by Henry prepares Fanny for Edmund's attentions, to which she responds with a gentle, teasing coquetry--a happy medium between her previous girlishness and Maria, Julia and Mary's artifice. As Edmund's falling in love with Fanny is, in the novel, done away with in a single line, this is one of the few places in which Wadey's version is superior to Austen's--she manages to persuade us, as Austen doesn't, that Edmund's choice of Fanny is more than a convenient one, that he longs for her as completely as she does for him, which goes some way toward justifying the anachronistic waltz at the end of the movie (am I the only one who had flashbacks to the Torchwood episode "Captain Jack Harkness" at that point?).

Patricia Rozema's 1999 adaptation went even farther than Wadey's in transforming Fanny's personality. Rozema's scoops Austen's Fanny out of the story entirely and substitutes her with Austen herself. Rozema's Fanny is an aspiring author, and examples of her fiction are in fact taken from Austen's juvenilia. Her letters to Susan are meant to recall Austen's close relationship and correspondence with her own sister Cassandra. The result is an enjoyable, well-made period romantic comedy with little but basic plot and character names in common with the novel. The only thing actually wrong with it, however, is its unspoken but ever-present underlying assumption, that this is the life Jane Austen ought to have lived--that a person who wrote so well about romance should have lived a romantic life herself--which rather trivializes both the author and her novels. Of course, nowadays Rozema's liberties with Austen seem almost quaint. There is a level of meta-fictionality--along the lines of the Stratford-upon-Avon souvenir mug placed prominently in the foreground of one of the opening shots of Shakespeare in Love--that cushions her Mansfield Park, and prevents us from taking her version of Austen's life as gospel truth. In spite of their softly-whispered acknowledgment that their film takes great liberties with the facts, the producers of the upcoming Becoming Jane seem interested in eliciting the opposite response.

There is a 1983 BBC version of Mansfield Park of which I've seen only a few scenes--it seemed faithful enough, and had horrible, horrible production values. Apart from these three adaptations, I'm not aware of any other attempts to solve the problem of Fanny Price. Wadey's version, in spite of the missing Portsmouth section, is more faithful to the novel. Rozema's is more enjoyable. Neither one of them captures the essence of the novel, which, upon a rereading, turns out to be sharper and great deal more cynical than I had remembered. None of the characters--not even Fanny and Edmund--escape the narrator's barbed tongue, and even the readers receive a lashing or two for their romantic expectations ("exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire," is her only concession to readers eager for a romantic climax between Edmund and Fanny). I can't escape the impression that Mansfield Park was written with tongue firmly in cheek, that Austen was very much aware of how ridiculously saintly she was making her main character, and almost daring the readers to put up with her. Or perhaps I'm reading too much into the matter. What is certain, however, is that neither Rozema nor Wadey, nor, I suspect, any writer on the face of the earth but Jane Austen herself, could ever do justice to that being of pure, unadulterated evil that is Mrs. Norris.

Mr. Darcy in the Fields of Bethlehem: A Shavuot Post

Last night we celebrated Shavuot, a much-repurposed harvest festival. Proving, yet again, that I should no longer be allowed anywhere near a synagogue, I found my mind wandering to strange places during the traditional reading of the book of Ruth. Specifically, to the similarities between this ancient family drama and the novels of Jane Austen (waits to be struck by lightning. No? OK then). Like Austen's novels, the book of Ruth is a celebration of the way in which a careful adherence to social conventions and customs, when coupled with wisdom and generosity, safeguards both the happiness and security of individuals and the continuity of society as a whole. As expressed through the device of a romance between two incredibly sexy people.

The book of Ruth is short (barely four chapters) and worth reading. You can find an English translation here. The story in brief, however: having lost her husband and two sons in Moab, the Israelite Naomi returns to her clan with her two widowed Moabite daughters-in-law. The first, Orpah (whose name literally means "She who turns her back") returns to her own people. The second, Ruth, remains with Naomi. While gathering leftover grain in order to feed herself and Naomi, Ruth catches the eye of Boaz, the owner of the field, who is impressed by her devotion to Naomi and, presumably, by the fact that she is incredibly hot, and gives orders to his men to show her special consideration. Like a good Jewish mother--or a Biblical Mrs. Bennet--Naomi responds to the news of Boaz's generosity by making marriage plans. She sends Ruth, all dressed up, to lie at Boaz's feet in the manger at the end of the day's work. The text gracefully elides over whatever it is that happens after Boaz discovers Ruth, but the next thing we know, he's promising to marry her. The book ends with the birth of Boaz and Ruth's son, and with the revelation that he is the ancestor of David, and therefore the Solomonic dynasty.

Like Austen, the Biblical author sees marriage as the most desirable state for his female protagonist--it ensures both her financial and physical security and her dynastic continuity. In order for the marriage to be a good one, however--something beyond the mercenary or the expedient--it has to take place between two moral individuals. Nearly all of Austen's characters act in accordance with societal conventions and within the guidelines that manners and morality lay out for them. Only the best of them, however, act with a full understanding of the importance of manners. Whereas other characters act unthinkingly, accepting the customs of their society because to do so is easier than to buck the trend, and others still believe that the appearance of propriety is all that matters and ignore its substance, Austen's heros and heroines--her Darcys and Elinors--have a deeper understanding of the importance of morality to the preservation of the fabric of society. They therefore go beyond the requirements of convention--Darcy bribing Wickham to marry Lydia, Elinor securing a living for Edward Ferrars from Colonel Brandon--and are rewarded for their generosity by having that quality recognized by others who possess it, and by the privilege of teaching the importance of tradition and goodness to the next generation.

The book of Ruth seems to offer the same moral tale. Ruth and Orpah both discharge their duty towards Naomi by escorting her safely to her own clan's lands. Naomi sends the two women home because, as she says, she has no more sons to marry them to (which would fulfill her responsibility towards these two young women who have tied their fates with that of her family). Orpah's actions in returning to her family, who will find her another husband, are entirely correct. Ruth, however, goes beyond correctness, and remains with Naomi because of her love and concern for the older woman. In doing so she essentially seals her own fate--she has no property to tempt a new husband, no dowry, and no male relatives to protect her. In spite of the fact that they are not related by blood, Naomi takes on the responsibility of finding Ruth a husband. Ruth gathers grain in Boaz's field in accordance with the cutsom of gleaning, which states that stalks of grain dropped by the harvesters should be left on the ground for the poor to gather. Boaz goes further than custom requires when he orders his men to intentionally leave more grain on the ground for Ruth. Boaz promises to marry Ruth because he is related to Naomi's clan, and therefore has the responsibility of 'redeeming' the lands of Naomi's husband--buying them back from an outsider who has bought them and keeping them in the family. There exists, however, another relative with a greater claim to both the lands and Ruth, but he begs off. Boaz, therefore, steps up, and ensures both Ruth and Naomi's security. As the book's coda is careful to inform us, the union between these two excellent people is the source of a line of Israelite kings.

It occurred to me last night that Austen is almost alone in the history of the novel in writing about conformity as the path to happiness. Her contemporaries wrote about characters who defied convention and were heavily punished for it (with the possible exception of Anne Bronte in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in which the main character acts shockingly by leaving her husband, and is rewarded with a better one). Modern novels frequently deal with conformity as a burden, crushing and stunting the individual. Their plots are often concerned with an individual's escape from the stifling bonds of tradition, or with a failure to escape which damns the individual to a lifetime of misery. The reason for this, of course, is that conformity does crush the individual--that's practically what it was intended to do. The laws that govern the lives of the Biblical characters in the book of Ruth, or the ones that rule the lives of Austen's characters, were never intended to safeguard the individual's happiness. Their purpose was to protect the community, the clan, and the family--for instance, the tradition of leaving the family's entire property to the eldest son, with the youngest sons forced to go into some sort of profession, which forms the foundation of so many of Austen's and her contemporaries' plots. It sounds cruel, and it is, but there is no other way to ensure that the family's lands aren't split up, and its power increasingly diminished.

The underlying fantasy of Austen's novels--and of the book of Ruth--is that the protagonists' happiness just happens to be secured by laws which, objectively, have no regard for it. Lucy Steele conveniently runs off with Robert Ferrars, thus removing the obstacle to Edward and Elinor's marriage without requiring that Edward act immorally. The relative with a greater claim to Ruth's hand declines to marry her, thus leaving the stage clear for Boaz (who, conveniently enough, is related to Naomi's husband's family) to make his move. Through these romances, Austen and the Biblical author make the strict adherence to tradition palatable even to readers who aren't accustomed to thinking of themselves as members of a group first and individuals second. The same laws, however, which in Biblical times were enacted to ensure, if not the individual's happiness than at least the security of the weaker members of society, have become, in modern times, a crippling burden. The tradition of yibum, for instance, in which a childless widow is married to her husband's brother in order to ensure both her security and her husband's continuity, has become a cruel joke.

Shavuot, as I said, is a much-repurposed holiday. It started out as a harvest festival, probably with pagan origins, in which farmers would make an offering of the first crops of the season. It was later folded into the tradition of ritual sacrifice at the temple in Jerusalem. After the destruction of the second temple, the tradition arose that Shavuot was the date on which Moses brought the Torah to the Israelites, and the holiday was celebrated with a night-long study session. In the years that followed Israel's inception, the holiday came full circle and became a harvest festival again--agricultural settlements and kibbutzim appropriated it and transformed into a socialist- and communist-tinged celebration of their self-sufficiency, a demonstration of their success in rejecting the urban lifestyle of 19th century European Jewry and transforming themselves into tillers of the land. By the time I was growing up, the kibbutzim were mostly bankrupt, and the dream of an agrarian Israel, the home of the Hebrew worker, had given way to capitalism and a flourishing high-tech industry. Nevertheless, we'd grab a couple of cucumbers and a tomato out of the vegetable crisper, plop them in a wicker basket, dress in white and go to school to offer the first of our crops.

Last night I sat with bankers, human resource managers, and computer programmers, and read a tale about farmers living thousands of years ago, punctuated by 50-year-old songs about the joys of working the land and watching this nation bloom. A celebration of tradition embraced by middle-class individualists, because the former is intertwined with a love story and the latter have catchy tunes and evocative lyrics. It's a testament, I think, both to the skill of the Biblical author and to the human desire to belong to something greater than ourselves that this tale of tradition triumphant still resonates even with modern Israelis, who for decades have been forced to watch helpless as a thoughtless adherence to the letter of the law, coupled with venality and foolishness, have all but severed the ties between Israelis and their rich cultural heritage. When greedy, unthinking religious institutions force secular Israelis to jump through hoops in order to be granted to right to marry, divorce, adopt children, or even assert their Jewish identity, is it any wonder that ordinary Israelis recoil from the merest whiff of religion? Is it any wonder that the Jewish holidays dwindle into nothing more than an accumulation of tropes and empty gestures, with nothing to support them? I am gratified, therefore, that there still exist groups like the one I attended last night, whose members are willing to let themselves be conned by a story like the one in the book of Ruth, who are willing to consider the lesson that Jane Austen offers in her novels--that tradition, when tempered by generosity and by the understanding of the inevitability of change, can be a force for good, both for the community and the individual.

Everything's Already Been Said About the Movie, Pride and Prejudice Edition

In particular, buckets of ink, virtual and otherwise, have already been spilled about the Bronte-fication of the story (and since I've recently been profoundly unfair to male film reviewers, I'll just point out that Anthony Lane's review in The New Yorker is the definitive version of this argument), and about the poppycock that is the film's alleged 'gritty realism' (said realism, I noticed, didn't quite extend to the scene in which Elizabeth arrives in Netherfield after walking there. Keira Knightley looks as dewy and fresh as if she'd just walked out of the hair and make-up trailer, and the camera doesn't even bother to show us the infamous six inches of mud on the hem of her dress).

But I'll start with the good, which is that the minor characters are almost uniformly a delight. One of the problems with the BBC miniseries (and yes, I'll be comparing the film to the Ehle/Firth version as often as I compare it to the book. Deal with it) is its reliance on shrill caricature--it's a rare viewer who can stomach Alison Steadman's turn as Mrs. Bennett for extended periods of time. Wright's P&P tones down Mrs. Bennett's cartoonishness, but more importantly, it does a better job with the three younger Bennett sisters. I don't think I realized how much I dislike Julia Sawalha's version of Lydia before I saw Jena Malone's effortless performance. Malone, who takes to the role of 18th century English flirt as if she hadn't made a career of playing slightly disturbing middle-American girl-next-door types, probably makes Lydia a bit more sympathetic than she ought to be, but at the same time her performance is girlish enough to remind us of the character's very real limitations (and of Wickham's odiousness in taking advantage of her), while her behavior when she returns to Longbourn has just the right amount of vinegar to it.

Similarly, I enjoyed Wright and Moggach's take on Mr. Collins, who is both less ridiculous than David Bamber's Collins and quite a bit more disturbing--there's an unthinking imperiousness to the character, particularly in his way of ordering Charlotte around, that suggests an extra dimension of hell in her married life. Penelope Wilton, AKA Harriet Jones, PM, is so thoroughly right as Mrs. Gardiner that I don't think I'll ever be able to stand anyone else in the role. But the real revelation, of course, is Talulah Riley as Mary Bennett, who in Wright's version of the story is transformed from a spinsterish egghead type to a heartbreakingly awkward geek. She tugs at the heartstrings of any of us who have hugged the wall at a party, not knowing how to join in the fun but desperately wanting to. It's a tiny part, but Riley quickly comes to dominate the film--our eye is drawn to her when she appears on screen, and we keep hoping for more insight into this sad young girl's heart.

What a pity, then, than none of the main characters have been treated with this kind of delicacy. I can't think of a single one who hasn't been poorly cast, written, and directed. Bingley as an idiot. Wickham as a thoroughly charmless fop. Lady Catherine as a creepy mafia don type instead of a thoroughly spoiled, and ridiculous, woman (it shouldn't be humanly possible to utter the line "If I had ever learnt, I should have been great proficient", and not bring down the house, but Judy Dench manages it. The scene in which Elizabeth tells Darcy and the Gardiners about Lydia's elopement, on the other hand, had me in stitches).

It certainly doesn't help that the adaptation butchers Austen's dialogue, so that the narrative moves forward in fits and starts that aren't justified by anything the characters have said to one another. Frankly, it put me in mind of the most recent Harry Potter film, which kept trying to hit all the salient plot points without justifying the transition from one to the next. Since feature-length adaptations like Thompson and Lee's Sense and Sensibility and the Root/Hinds Persuasion have previously managed to squeeze Austen's plots into less than two hours and still maintain their narrative flow, I don't think it's at all acceptable to use the film's limited running time to excuse its frenetic pacing, and I genuinely don't understand why Moggach couldn't create an equally coherent narrative.

It's already been said that Wright's version reduces the film to its basic romance plot, casting off Austen's wit, her social and moral commentary, and her delicate character development (there is absolutely no indication that Darcy changes during the film's course, or that he learns anything from Elizabeth's rejection of him. His crime and Lizzy's are simply that they have been fools in not recognizing that they love each other), but I hadn't realized just how thoroughly he eschews period manners, and how desperately they are needed in order for the story to make sense. Austen may have mocked her society's manners, but they were also vital to her understanding of human relations. Manners were the signposts by which society navigated itself, and Wright and Moggach do away with them entirely. Sure, the ladies and gentlemen bob up and down like rubber ducks in a bathtub whenever they run into each other, but the more subtle forms of propriety and decorum are nowhere to be seen. In the macro level, this justifies such absurdities as Darcy and Lady Catherine intruding on people in the middle of the night, and strange men being in the presence of unmarried women who are, by their own standards, completely undressed. On a more subtle level, however, it leeches the story of nuance.

Knightley and Macfayden are to be blamed here as well. When Ehle and Firth are on screen together, the air between them crackles. Prevented by the proper forms of etiquette from saying what they really think of each other, they let their eyes, their facial expressions, and their silences do the talking. They speak volumes with an arched eyebrow or a subtle smile, both of them brimming with intelligence and intensity. Knightley and Macfayden have had all that subtlety and nuance brought up to the surface, and yet (or possibly, therefore) they can't seem to manage a sliver of Ehle and Firth's passion. Their Elizabeth and Darcy are blanks, who are attracted to one another because the narrative tells us so. There's no hint of chemistry or attraction between them, nor any indication of the ways in which these two people challenge and complete each other. Beyond the standard conventions of the romantic comedy, we have no true understanding of why these two people initially dislike each other, and why they come to love each other so intensely.

When I catch an airing of the Ehle/Firth P&P, or even a very brief glimpse of it, I am invariably seized by the urge to take down the book and reread it. Wright's version didn't make me want to do that at all, so little did it recall that well-loved book. I don't honestly have a problem with a director and a screenwriter who take a written source and put their own spin on it--I think my reaction to Peter Jackson's variant on The Lord of the Rings speaks to the truth of that statement--but at no point during my viewing of Wright's Pride and Prejudice did I gain an inkling of what Wright and Moggach's spin on the novel might be. What kind of story were they trying to tell, beyond a paint-by-numbers romance that's been done, and done better, a thousand times before? Wright's film isn't Pride and Prejudice, but neither is it anything else.

An Open Letter to Male Film Reviewers Writing About Pride and Prejudice

Dear male film reviewers writing about Pride and Prejudice (and, sad to say, at least one woman).

I want to assure you that I have no doubts with regard to your masculinity. I'm sure you're all big, burly men with thick and bushy beards as long as your arms. I'm sure you drink your weight in beer and belch hugely afterwards every single night. I have no doubt that you can pleasure a woman, and have done so consistently since you were old enough to tell women and livestock apart. Nothing you or anyone else can say will ever cause me or the rest of your readers to doubt your virility or your manhood.

So could you please stop prefacing your Pride and Prejudice reviews with some variant on 'being a man, I naturally hate Jane Austen and everything having to do with her. I've never read Pride and Prejudice and don't intend to, since it's a fluffy, girly book for fluffy girls, and is about love and feelings and all those things that men find icky and gross. Nevertheless, I'm certain I would hate this book, which only fluffy girls who like reading about icky love and gross feelings would enjoy, since I'm a manly man and therefore above such things. Now, about the movie...'?

I want to be clear that I'm not requiring you to read Pride and Prejudice before you offer an opinion about the film. I don't think everyone on the planet should love Jane Austen and I wouldn't be distraught to read a review prefaced by a declaration that the reviewer disliked the book (I hardly could, as I myself have been known to trash a well-loved author or two). Similarly, a reviewer who simply announced their disinclination to read Pride and Prejudice would probably get a pass from me--there are plenty of lauded books that I don't care to read simply because they don't appeal to me. It's the implicit assumption that you must distance yourselves from icky Jane Austen romance cooties that drives me up the wall. This is precisely the kind of attitude that causes mainstream reviewers to launch into a paragraph of 'aren't Trekkies funny and pathetic' before saying anything even remotely positive about genre. But while I can almost see the rationale in wanting to maintain a distance from Klingon-speakers, by trashing Jane Austen you're blithely distancing yourselves from half of humanity, or at the very least a large sub-group of them who read a well-received and highly appreciated classic author, and making proud grunting noises as you do so.

The fact that you feel justified in distancing yourselves from Austen's novel is either an indication that you truly are profoundly insecure in your masculinity, or, more disturbingly, that Austen's fiction is still perceived as girly stuff, romance novels that won't get you laughed at too much, but romance nonetheless. That one of the finest authors in the English language, the author of genuine gems full of wit, keen insight, cutting observations of human nature, and brilliant characterizations should still be on the receiving end of this kind of condescension, even if it's only from silly film reviewers, is deeply disheartening.

But crusading for Austen's position in the canon isn't my purpose today. I just want to make one thing clear, dear male film reviewers writing about Pride and Prejudice: the fact that you are either too insecure or too set in your ways to even make an attempt at one of the finest novels in the English language is not, I repeat not, something to be proud of.

So zip it, OK?

(For those of your wondering why I'm only going on about this now when the film has been out for six months, it was released in Israel this week, and the local review--in Achbar HaIr, for interested Israelis--is textbook male condescension.)

And a Fifth Misconception

Over at Salon, Gina Fattore is getting all bent out of shape over the new Pride and Prejudice adaptation, in a less than dignified manner. The article goes rather far at points--no way would Jane Austen do anything as melodramatic as spinning in her grave over a silly movie--and as one of the commenters points out it's pretty obvious that Fattore only went to see the film because she wanted to feel the righteous indignation that permeates the article's every word (although the commenter is wrong to say that such behavior makes her a chump--I think I'd be more inclined to pay ten bucks for a chance at a good rant than I would in order to see most of the movies currently in release), but she does rather succinctly summarize the fundamental failure--as I understand it, the film not having come to Israel yet--of the adaptation:

Jane Austen understood these romantic conventions, how they worked on people, what they implied. If she'd wanted to go there, she could have. She chose not to. And that's where the genius lies, in what the critic Terry Castle has called "the implacable anti-romanticism of her vision." That's what makes "Pride and Prejudice" endure -- what makes it more than just your average, run-of-the-mill, bodice-ripping fairy tale about soul mates and true love conquering all. "Jane Austen kept to her compact," Virginia Woolf once wrote. "She never trespassed beyond her boundaries. Never, even at the emotional age of fifteen, did she ... obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an outline in a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have said, pointing with her stick, end there; and the boundary line is perfectly distinct."

The current film version, of course, captures none of this distinction. It's all spasms and rhapsodies. But since it's so "alive," "whirling," "voluptuous," "intoxicating" and "delirious" no one seems to care that it's not ..... well, it's not exactly Jane Austen.

Just When I Thought It Was Safe to Get Back in the Water...

I was coming around to the notion that the Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice might not suck as badly as I had feared, so naturally the universe hadto come up with some other way to make me lose all hope in humanity:

Anne Hathaway ("The Princess Diaries", "Brokeback Mountain") confirmed to Empire Online that she is set to play author Jane Austen in "Becoming Jane".

Austen is the author of such legendary books as "Persuasion," "Emma," "Mansfield Park," "Pride and Prejudice" and "Sense and Sensibility".

The film is written by Kevin Hood and will take a portion of Austen's life that reflects the wild romanticism of her novel.

Gah.

4 Popular Misconceptions About Pride and Prejudice

Last week, perhaps because of the new adaptation around the corner, saw the publication of not one but two different articles that completely fail to understand even the most basic truths about Jane Austen's little slice of posterity, Pride and Prejudice. First it was Bookslut's Jessa Crispin, who really ought to know better, wondering if "the point of Elizabeth Bennett [is] that she’s completely mediocre". Then it was Emma Garman, doing the semi-annual chick-lit tar and feather, who displayed not so much a lack of understanding as a lack of reading comprehension when she brought Pride and Prejudice up as an example of a novel in which the rich suitor is a villain and the poor suitor is Mr. Right. But these are only the most recent examples--it seems that every few months some journalist with more free time than sense dredges Pride and Prejudice up as a prop to a theory that has absolutely nothing to do with the book itself. The burden of enduring popularity, I suppose, but to a devoted Austen reader since the age of 12, it's getting a little tiring. So, as a public service, here are a few statements I'd like to see the end of.

1. Jane Austen wrote chick-lit
   
   Look, I feel for the authors and readers of chick-lit. The amount of crap they put up with is completely out of proportion to the cheesiness of their genre. When books like The Da Vinci Code and the Left Behind series get treated seriously in major newspapers, and Michael Crichton testifies before Congress on environmental issues, it really does seem churlish to dump on this new evolution of the romance novel (actually, it seems a lot more than churlish, but I don't have enough evidence to talk about where I really think this backlash is coming from). And the fact is that in terms of plot, chick-lit, like romance before it, is the literary descendant of Austen's fiction. But to turn that correlation around and call Austen's fiction proto-chick-lit is so far beyond the pale that it would be laughable if there weren't people out there saying it seriously. I'm not talking about the issue of the quality of Austen's writing as opposed to your average chick-lit novel (that way lies 'but this is good/why, then, it's not SF')--I'm talking about the fundamental building blocks of the genre.
   
   The stereotypical chick-lit heroine is the representative of a lost generation--women who, although they have rejected the traditional subservient, domestic role of the female in their actions, have done so almost unconsciously, and are now searching for a new paradigm for their lives. Austen's heroines, in contrast, know their place in the world--as wives and mothers--and are eager to assume it. More importantly, chick-lit is almost universally concerned with the gratification of desires--I want a great job, I want a studly yet sensitive boyfriend, I want a child--whereas Austen's novels, Pride and Prejudice in particular, are morality plays. The reward for becoming a better person, Austen tells us, for shedding the petty selfishness of childhood and emerging into maturity, is a good, stable marriage, the right and privilege of becoming the bedrock of a new generation of Englishmen and -women. This is so far from chick-lit's themes of self-actualization and self-acceptance as to very nearly make the works polar opposites, which is hardly surprising--Austen wrote 200 years ago, when conformity and self-sacrifice were virtues, not vices as they are, for better and worse, today.


2. Elizabeth Bennet is a 'modern' woman
   
   Why? Because she refuses to marry an odious man simply for the comfort of financial security? Because she won't degrade herself by accepting Darcy's parsimonious and grudging first marriage proposal? Because she's intelligent and strong-willed? All of these qualities make Elizabeth a remarkable woman, but no more in Austen's era than she would be today. As far as her desires and dreams are concerned, Elizabeth is firmly and steadfastly a woman of her own time. She wants to marry a good, honorable man, hopefully for love, but at the very least out of mutual respect. Her refusal of the obsequious Mr. Collins is anything but modern--it is the only correct action, Austen tells us, for an intelligent woman when faced with the prospect of being ruled, her entire life, by a fool. Elizabeth is dismayed by her friend Charlotte's decision to accept Mr. Collins not because she has romantic notions of marrying for love, but because she has a clear-eyed image of what their marriage would be like.
   
   Like many of Austen's novels, Pride and Prejudice is a blueprint for making a good marriage. Elizabeth and her sister Jane are surrounded by examples of how not to choose a mate--Charlotte and Mr. Collins, Mr. and Mrs. Hurst, their own parents--and one or two examples, chiefly from the Gardiners, of what a good marriage should look like. In this, Austen is anything but modern--she is an arch-conservative. The notion that they might not marry, that they might be forced to make their way in life as governesses or as spinster sisters, dependent on the goodwill of their relatives, occurs to her characters only as a frightening fantasy, and to her readers almost never.


3. Mr. Darcy is a reformed rake
   
   I came across this one in an especially insipid article in the Guardian a few years ago, which trotted Darcy out as an example of how women like to fix men. Which is true, but not about Darcy. It's what makes Pride and Prejudice such a singular novel--for maybe the only time in the history of the romance, the guy fixes himself. Not that Darcy was ever a rake by an stretch of the imagination. Austen makes it clear that he's a pretty stand-up guy--honorable, generous, intelligent--even before Elizabeth gets to him. Like every single one of us, Darcy is flawed, but unlike most people, when that flaw is pointed out to him, he tries to make himself better. His actions in the book's second half are an attempt to show Elizabeth that he's taken her words to heart, even as she becomes aware of the many fine qualities she's missed in him. Her love is his reward for learning humility and overcoming his snobbishness, but apart from the first push, Darcy achieves that transformation all on his own.


4. Elizabeth Bennet is a twit / Elizabeth Bennet is perfection incarnate
   
   Like Darcy, Elizabeth is flawed--she allows her hurt feelings at his prideful manner to dictate her behavior towards him, refusing to consider that he might have good qualities as well as bad. She allows herself to lose sight of morality when she tacitly approves of Mr. Wickham's fortune-hunting behavior simply because he's flattered her with his attentions. And, like Darcy, Elizabeth is made aware of her faults and is deeply ashamed--"I had not known myself", she tells her sister. Although her actions in response to this revelation aren't as pro-active as Darcy's (Elizabeth's role as a woman in Austen's fiction is, after all, a passive one), she does try to make amends for her mistakes. It's her intelligence and her keen moral sense that allow Elizabeth to recognize her faults and change into a better person, and while she's hardly a paragon, there's no question that she is an admirable character.

As deeply fond as I am of Jane Austen's novels, and of Pride and Prejudice in particular, I don't pretend that they're without their flaws. Austen's romances are cerebral and mostly passionless, and her characters' world is no wider than her own limited, proscribed existence. The wonder of Austen's fiction is the fact that she took these coldly moral tales, combined them with her warm wit and keen powers of observation, and came up with a miniature of humanity in all its glory and silliness. Some things, some aspects of human existence, are missing, but in much the same way that we don't turn to Tolkien for complicated and flawed characters, and we don't read George Eliot when we're after a barrel of laughs, it's wrong to try and impose those aspects on our reading of Austen. For better and worse (but mostly for better), she is what she is--one of the finest authors in the English language, and well worth a first, second, and third look.

UPDATE: Welcome, Bookslut readers! Feel free to poke around. Here are my thoughts on what we can expect from the new Keira Knightly P&P. If you're interested in my thoughts on other books, here are reviews of Angela Carter's Wise Children, Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, two novels by M. John Harrison, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and, on a more humorous note, a condensation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. On publishing issues, here are my thoughts on last year's Booker decision, and the magic of short books.