Northanger Abbey (1803)

Although this novel by Jane Austen was published in 1817 as her fifth—indeed, published posthumously—it is actually her first completed novel as of 1803, when she was in her late 20s. She just couldn’t get a publisher for it during her lifetime. Honestly, it’s not hard to see why, even given that things change over two centuries. It doesn’t have the light touch she maintains in the best of her stuff. It’s more like apprentice work, the novelist working out how to do it. There are some fun details here, such as Austen’s fascination, via the main character, Catherine Morland, with gothic literature and the “seven horrid novels,” such as Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons, The Necromancer by Lawrence Flammenberg, etc. We end up at the abbey of the title, now the home of the Tilney family, with some timid gothic flourishes there. It does take us half the book to get there. It’s a short novel but the scenes at Bath that occupy the first half are an arguably overlong prelude. This is what I mean by somewhat awkward apprentice work. The situation is complex, with youths and their siblings sorting themselves into friends and prospective partners. You know the drill: single men in want of wives and the women who want them. Friendships and love relations blossom or go sour. Austen’s characters here seemed more stock to me, but the situations can be ingenious in terms of moving players around the board. To a certain degree I wish she had leaned harder into the gothic stuff, but the better choice is probably what she came up with. Again, if the prelude felt too leisurely, the finish is certainly too rushed, polished off lickety-split in two or three chapters. All’s well that ends well, I guess? I have to admit this one makes me much less interested in pursuing the stories or fragments that came before it, though Love and Friendship still bears some interest because of the movie by director Whit Stillman. That just leaves me with Persuasion for now, taken as her sixth novel, also published posthumously but the last she wrote before her death (at age 41) in 1817. I have some high hopes for that, but we’ll see.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

"The Idol of the Flies" (1942)

I have little conscious memory of it now but I was exposed twice to Jane Rice's unpleasant story when I was a kid reading these things, including the These Will Chill You anthology my folks gave me for my birthday one year along with the Rubber Soul album. I see better now that that whole collection is full of unpleasant stories, as it also has Poe's "Valdemar" and one by George Fielding Eliot called "The Copper Bowl," which I will be getting to down the line. But this Rice story also made it into an Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology I probably read too. In 7th grade, as it happens, there was a fad in my junior high school that lasted a few weeks for kids to capture flies, remove their wings, and keep them as so-called pets in tins (Sucrets, as I recall). This inspired me to write a jokey how-to piece about having flies for pets in an English class assignment which somehow ended up as officially my first publication anywhere later that year, in the junior high literary annual. Many years after that I showed it, thinking it was funny and maybe even precocious, to a woman I wanted for a girlfriend but she was so horrified by it that it was kind of a bad episode for me. In fact, I don't even have the heart to dig it out of my papers at the moment. The annual had an unusual name, which I wish I could remember.

At any rate, Rice's story is quite thoroughly creepy, about a boy named Pruitt who is cruel to servants and animals. It has a "happy ending" which does nothing to mitigate what we witness. Pruitt goes out of his way to humiliate the servants and he kills small animals in grotesque ways, such as running a toad through with a stick. It dies slowly. We would now consider Pruitt prime material to be a serial killer sooner or later, and we might even wonder a little about Rice (perhaps the way that woman did about me). It's a fiendish imagination Rice applies here. I was tempted to lay it off on the publication date, thinking she was British because the story feels so British, and it must be her rage about Nazis fueling this. But no, Rice was born and spent much of her life in the US South, so I'm not sure what to make of that. It's probably not fair to mention that Nazi laws were often based on their close study of the Jim Crow South. But two more points need to be made about Rice and her story here considering the 1942 publication date.

Sense and Sensibility (1811)

This was the first Jane Austen novel I read (some time ago!) and I guess I'd have to call it a decent start, as I enjoyed it very much and went on to read more. But circling back to her self-published literary debut now shortly after reading a few of the others, it's notably weak—not even close to her best, Pride and Prejudice, which was written in a similar time frame. The two main characters are hampered a little by the allegorical positioning (older sister Elinor as "sense," Marianne as "sensibility," whatever these things mean). Even worse are mechanically staged scenes, based on improbable encounters and coincidence, whose purposes are more didactic than anything—always annoying for me in fiction, any kind of single-purpose "lesson." The last few chapters of Sense and Sensibility are remarkably crowded with this. But it's not bad aside from that, especially given it was essentially written by a 19-year-old. In many ways all Jane Austen's novels are the same, which is true of most great novelists, and here one sees the basic terms most plainly: the thicket of family and friendship ecologies, the mature young woman, the less mature others, the graspers, knaves, and schemers, the foolish and the wise, all of them concerned primarily with marrying one another off in the terms that suit them, whether it's for love and/or respect and/or character or for various types of gain, usually monetary. There are few of the complexities and subtleties of character that make many of Austen's others more interesting. Here pretty much what you see is what you get, except for the calculated surprises at the service of the plot. It may be obvious but it's well constructed. She already knew how to write a novel. So even the plot developments that would have to be called trite—various confessions and deathbed scenes and whatnot—still keep things moving right along. I do find that my patience for her language varies by mood. At times she seems like one of the most lucid writers I know. Other times it seems painfully clotted with heaps of clauses and abstruse references to Mrs. or Miss First / Last Name jumbles or by maddeningly vague relation, "her sister," "his aunt," and such. But that seems to be a random matter of mood mostly. Her language is also really consistent, which contributes to the clarity.

In case it's not at the library.

Mansfield Park (1814)

In many ways I find I approach Jane Austen novels much like mystery stories. Where the latter has a murder or other crime, the former will have a marriage. There is always a plucky, handsome, and most sensible heroine—in this case one Fanny Price, an impoverished niece of a "great" family—and one or two or three prospects, at least one of whom will turn into some variety of rat. The pleasure for me is all in the subtleties of character, which Austen is so good at conceiving situations to show. Good people turn out to be something less than good, and bad people can mend their ways, so it's never clear where things are headed, except generally toward the sacred altar of betrothal. The most interesting character for me in this one is a Miss Mary Crawford, who is lively and spirited and seems capable of an interesting development. Unfortunately (and I think unfairly) she turns out to be something of a villain, doing things I don't think fit with her character as I understand it. Now and then the judgments (of the author? the characters?) are blurred and distorted and hard to read—antiquated, I guess. The way "theater" is routinely deplored as corrupting, for example, and indeed shown to be so. That seemed on the wrong side of ridiculous to me, and I particularly thought Miss Crawford's skepticism about religion was sharp, apt, and well-placed. But I think it is also intended to make her villainous. Thus, alas, I run somewhat afoul of what I believe are Miss Austen's own biases and morality. I am altogether just a little cockeyed to her judgments here. But honestly that's part of the engrossing appeal for me of her work. These are generally well made worlds she has left us, and it's fascinating to feel through the moral labyrinths to find how one is aligned. The resolutions reached in Mansfield Park may feel off to me, but I'm sure many find them by and large satisfying. But I don't. I would like to speak up again for Miss Crawford, and gently remonstrate against the felicity of first cousins marrying. But there you have it. Now I'm trying to write like Jane Austen. She casts that strong of a spell. Mansfield Park is not as good as her gold standard Pride and Prejudice but it's plenty fine.

In case it's not at the library.

Emma (1815)

I will likely be testing this theory of mine again soon, but in many ways Jane Austen's novels work for me in ways that are similar to genre novels. If I haven't looked at them in a while they are instantly absorbing, and perfectly charming, and I want to read another right away. But they resemble one another enough that I don't always have the energy to actually finish the next one. I love this world of Jane Austen's that is so single-mindedly focused on achieving happy unions between consenting adults, and all the daunting complexities back of them. There is always a deeply practical woman at the center of it, a few good men and women, and a host of lovable (and one or two not so lovable) recalcitrants to round it all out. Emma concludes on three felicitous—if I may use a Jane Austen word—marriage weddings, a typical if hyper Austen climax. Much of the novel is attempting to figure out who will end up with whom. It does not achieve the dramatic tensions of Pride and Prejudice, but it's a very pleasant journey. There is comfort even in the characters one does not like, partly because they so much resemble people we've known and are thus reassuring of our judgments, and partly by the familiarity. Austen was a uniquely alert observer of people, so even when her plotting begins to go flat or wayward it remains a great pleasure to follow along with her characters. It works at levels that are at once gossipy and profound, and enormously complicated, with fractured families and webs of relations across them, laid against an ever-shifting timeline of seasons and holidays, with events both pedestrian and momentous occurring in a regular rhythm. The language seems to me unusually lucid by 19th-century standards, and the society, while plainly antiquated, nonetheless recognizable. It's people just getting on with their lives, respecting their fundamental needs for human congress, to love and to be loved, and to be accorded respect and dignity too, in a world where both are so very easy to lose.

In case it's not at the library.

7. Velvet Underground, "Sweet Jane" (1970)

(listen)

It's practically impossible by definition to pick a favorite Velvet Underground album but if forced I'm going with Loaded. There's a warmth and an unaffected and generous adolescence to it, looking forward to Mott-style glam, that never fails to catch me up. It's an odd affect, particularly coming at the tail end of their ride. It hardly hurts that it piles on upfront with one of the great rock anthems in "Sweet Jane," an allusive tale, supported by a nearly perfect array of acoustic guitar chords, about kids moving to the city and living their lives. In the right moment it is the thrill of a lifetime. I've talked before about how a person may aspire to master the phrasing of certain signature songs, enabling a kind of process of transubstantiation in order to actually become those beloved singers and songwriters (Buddy Holly and Prince), at least for the duration of the songs and one's ability to sing with them perfectly. I have long held strong suspicions that the same holds for Lou Reed and this one, but I have never managed (yet) to entirely duplicate the various asides and chortles and feints and dodges of his deceptive singing in the verses, not for lack of trying. It's a pleasure every time to hear, particularly when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, folksinger Lou Reed style. As loud as you can now: "And there's even some evil mothers / Well, they're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt / Y'know, that women never really faint / And that villains always blink their eyes / And that, y'know, children are the only ones who blush / And that life is just to die." P.S. Never mind the later metal versions of this, as on Rock n Roll Animal. I insist it's the Loaded version you want.

Jane Eyre (1847)

I never got around to Charlotte Bronte's magnificent mid-19th-century novel until recently, but I'm here to tell you now that it's definitely worth getting around to. As with Jane Austen's work—and unlike, for me, Charles Dickens's—the language is pellucid and shimmering, the plot carries its own headlong momentum, and reading the thing is as easy as falling into a warm pool. Recounting the life and various hardships and triumphs of the titular character, it's a big sweeping melodrama of orphans and cruel foster parents, of privation and grit, of haunted houses and secret debts long owed, of marriage proposals made in bad faith and good, of arson and suicide and unspeakable kindness when least expected, of misperceptions and misapprehensions of character, of love found and lost and denied and found again. Some of its tricks are terribly obvious—the class conflicts, for example, or the various coincidences on which the story relies, or the symbolism of the tree where Jane and Rochester rendezvous at some of the most critical points of their relationship—but the entirety of it is carried off with such poise and confidence that it's impossible not to believe every word, and more, want to stand and cheer at them. I understand from the introduction to my ancient Rinehart edition (by one Joe Lee Davis in 1950) that, in 1846, Charlotte and her two sisters, Emily and Anne, set themselves to the task of each completing a novel. They had previously published poetry under the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton, respectively; at that time Charlotte, the eldest, was barely 30. In a year's time Emily produced Wuthering Heights (which I loved the first time through, and liked much less a second time), Anne Agnes Gray (which I haven't read yet but intend to), and Charlotte Jane Eyre, taking a bit longer. That's a stupefying feat of production for a single household in such a short period of time. Emily died a year later, and though Charlotte and Anne would go on to produce other work both of them died young as well, Anne at 29 and Charlotte at 38. While we're at it, Jane Austen died pretty young too, at 41. Hard times back then, as the first-person Jane Eyre will detail for you at length in Charlotte Bronte's brilliant and essential novel.

In case it's not at the library.

Pride and Prejudice (1813)

A recent Salon article discusses the fetishization of Jane Austen's work since approximately the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, a Colin Firth vehicle, noting that the infatuations for it actually extend to well before that. I know when I first read her work in the '70s she did not seem to loom much above the surface of college literature survey courses. I started on her because I read how Joseph Heller mentioned in an interview that he was making a project of reading her, so I did too. At the time, I was impressed with the clarity of her language and her brisk, straightforward plotting. More recently, reading this again as backgrounder for a look at last year's fleetingly brilliant concept of taking Austen's public domain text and incorporating zombie battles, I was impressed by the many levels on which it works (and subsequently have postponed the zombies version. Maybe I'll see the movie). The language is plainspoken and direct as ever, continually advancing a neatly complex story, but it's also much more acerbic and knowing than I had noticed in my 20s. More importantly, the characters are genuine, palpably human and flawed, funny and curious and charming and repellent. Best of all, Austen not only inhabits them believably, but renders their various changes of heart with unerring veracity. It's startlingly contemporary in its ability to strip away the unnecessary and concern itself only with what matters. It even made me blow my nose in a couple of places; for a book, that's really something.

In case it's not at the library (as if it wouldn't be, but you might like your own copy).