What would Jane Austen have thought? The film The Jane Austen Book Club, like the novel by Karen Joy Fowler from which it is adapted, is not embarrassed to ask this question. Six self-obsessed Californian characters gather to discuss in turn each of Austen’s six novels, “which seem”, as one admiring American reviewer put it, “to have an uncanny relevance to events in their own lives”.
With variously screwed-up marriages and love affairs, they find themselves guided to felicity by the blessed Jane. One of them, an uptight teacher who lusts after one of her students, actually has a moral eclaircissement at the traffic lights when she suddenly asks what the sage of Chawton would have made of her conduct.
The notion of testing yourself against Austen’s novels would not have been so unfamiliar to their author. Austen liked to try out her fiction on unsuspecting acquaintances. When Pride and Prejudice was first published, Austen and her mother read out a large part of it to a neighbour, Miss Mary Benn, who had come for dinner, but without ever telling her who the author was. Austen was gratified to note the unsuspecting lady’s admiration of Elizabeth Bennet.
The modern book club echoes habits of reading in Austen’s day. Reading was often a communal experience. And so, too, in the novels themselves. If something is worth reading it is worth reading aloud to someone you like. On rainy days in Bath, Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe retire to “read novels together”. When the perfidious Willoughby inveigles his way into the hearts of Marianne Dashwood and her mother and sisters, the sign of their intimacy is that they read aloud together. When he abruptly leaves them, they are in the middle of enjoying Hamlet.
In Emma, the young farmer Robert Martin effectively woos the sexy, witless Harriet Smith by reading to her “sometimes of an evening”: “something aloud out of the Elegant Extracts — very entertaining”. And remember when Mr Collins comes to stay with the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice, he agrees to read aloud to the family after tea, but recoils when he is handed a volume that appears to be “from a circulating library”. Instead he gives them a good dose of Fordyce’s Sermons, read “with a very monotonous solemnity”. Characters in the novels who read badly or misread are always suspect.
Members of Austen’s own family constantly read to each other. All her novels were road-tested on her siblings and her mother before they reached any publisher. After publication, her acquaintances would share their impressions. We know this because Austen transcribed their opinions, and two of her collections — for Mansfield Park and Emma — have survived.
Austen made no comment on what she recorded, but you cannot help thinking she did so with satirical relish rather than authorial anxiety.
Readers reveal themselves when they grapple with Mansfield Park in particular. Benjamin Lefroy, husband of Austen’s niece Anna, is a good-hearted chap, decently siding with Austen’s most elusive heroine. “Angry with Edmund for not being in love with her, & hating Mrs Norris for teasing her.” George, the 20-year-old son of Austen’s brother Edward, is beguiled in the manner of some unsuspicious modern readers: “Edward admired Fanny — George disliked her — George interested by nobody but Mary Crawford.” Fanny Cage is merely dull-witted: “not to be compared to P & P — nothing interesting in the characters — language poor”.
Befuddled students might be relieved to find that plenty of this early Jane Austen book club “could not bear Fanny” (to quote the reaction of Austen’s niece Anna). Or perhaps they should be worried, as it rather looks as if the novelist set out to provoke such responses from the unsuspecting.
The Jane Austen Book Club believes that we can discover ourselves and our dilemmas in Austen’s novels. So every self-respecting Janeite would believe. Most of us are happy to think we might be like Elizabeth Bennet. But why not Mr Collins or Lady Catherine de Bourgh or the immortally idiotic Mrs Bennet? Austen got her fools and monsters from her observations of people, too. One of the first readers of Mansfield Park, Mrs Wither Bramston, did think that she was herself rather like the elegant, enervated, vacuous Lady Bertram. And this was a sign of her admiration for the novel. But perhaps readers were a little more honest with each other in Austen’s day. —