Amanda Price (Jemima Root) reading (2008 Lost in Austen) — whom I watched and swooned with two nights ago …
We must not reproach ourselves for unlived lives (Jane Bennet in Lost in Austen)
Dear friends and readers,
I now I’ve told this before but thought I’d put it here again as it’s prepared as a 2-3 minute talk I hope to give next Tuesday if public transportation can get me to where I need to be by 10 o’clock.
I was between the ages of 12 and 13 when I took down from my father’s shelves two books which were part of one of his collections of English classics. He had hard-cover sets covered in a sombre brown, with yellow lettering, some covered in black with gold or silver lettering. They announced themselves as classics. I fell in love with Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and read and reread them. The father and mother in Pride and Prejudice reminded me of my own parents, only very idealized; I bonded with the heroine of Sense and Sensibility Elinor and she was a sort of role model for me helping me out in my later teens as I aspired to imitate some of her prudent behavior.
Age 15 I was in a local drugstore of the type that doesn’t exist anymore: they often had a set of shelves in one part of the store selling paperbacks, sometimes classics. And there for 40 cents each I found Jane Eyre and Mansfield Park. I’ll speak just of Mansfield Park: the cover was white, the figures looked like theater types and it was labelled “rollicking comedy.” I loved the message about how we have much to endure in life, what a struggle it is, and when I got to the end, I turned the book round, and began at the first page to read it again. Naively I couldn’t get over that the description and cover were so inappropriate.
I read Austen’s gothic parody, Northanger Abbey and her last melancholy book Persuasion between the ages of 17 and 19; I don’t remember the experience only that I know I had read them both by age 20 because then in a college classroom Austen’s Emma was assigned reading and I remember thinking the teacher had assigned the one Austen novel I had not yet gotten to. I imagine Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were printed, as they still often are, in one volume, sister books. At the time I disliked the heroine of Emma, and found the scene where she mocks an elderly poor spinster more painful than the end of King Lear. When I was in hospital at age 33 I had a copy of Persuasion to help me get through.
Sometime in my thirties I came across a copy of Love and Freindship and I couldn’t get over that 200 years later it was still hilariously funny.
Another 20 years and I was on the Internet (1995), joined a Jane Austen list-serv discussion group and read her letters, the unfinished novels, and the rest of her burlesque juvenilia. I was shocked by the letters: she was in them not what I had expected at all; I have since grown used to them. I like The Watsons as much as the famous six, and wish she had lived to finish it. The History of England is as brilliant a parody of history as Sellars and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That if you know it.
This is the first time I’ve taught a course just on Jane Austen …
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
P.S. I reread Love and Freindship this afternoon and found it nowhere as funny: the famous hilarious lines, passages, scenes, felt crude, and it rather seemed a story which hammered away at a group of people who fancied themselves romantic all the while getting on by stealing other people’s money and property and ignoring these other people’s feelings and rights. It even contains a warning lesson: act like this and you end up dead in the cold wet.