Fun with Jane Austen

Reading Jane Austen is a required taste.  In college, I read all the words in a handful of Austen novels without really getting what the book was about.

We 21st century readers suffer from a cultural knowledge gap when encountering the 19th century upper class world in which Austen's character reside.

My goal in reading her work today is to find the funny stuff.  Believe it or not, Austen's work is comic.  The novels fall into the comedy of manners genre.  As opposed to tragedy in which the protagonist must rise to some epic goal, only to be foiled by fate or the gods, resulting in his/her bloody end, a 19th century comedy always ends in marriage.

The person most sensible, smart, attractive and underappreciated is generally prevented from getting married until she (almost always a she) overcomes every last conceivable object in between her and the ideal partner.

In Austen's work, that character is a stand in for Austen and thus for you the reader as well (the majority of whom were educated middle class women who aspired to the upper class world described in the novels).

Re-read one of the author's first descriptions of Sir Walter's middle daughter:  she has "an elegance of mind and sweetness of character, which must have placed her high with any people of real understanding, was nobody with either father or sister: her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way."

I have highlighted several similar passages in each of the seven chapters that I have read so far.  Keeping track of the comedy--Anne's great, which any smart person should see, so therefore her dad and sister can't see it--will help you power through this archaic world where the characters don't do  much except go hunting, have tea, and complain about the behavior of other people.