Jane Austen's Cutting Art

Apparently, when we think of Jane Austen, we think of a writer whose style is so polished and so impenetrable that to imagine her editing or changing her work is to commit a minor sacrilege. At least, that's what this article takes as its baseline -- and it's a baseline I can understand. For most people, books are finished things; their very completeness lends them credibility and solidity, makes them believable even though they are obviously fictions. From this perspective, I can understand why people who don't frequently write literature (or write about literature) might express a kind of shock upon discovering exactly how meticulous Jane Austen was in rewriting her novels, and exactly how unfinished they once were.

I remember my first experience of this side of Austen. I was a freshman in my first ever English class at Berkeley, and my professor, in a lecture on Pride and Prejudice, mentioned that the novel had once been titled First Impressions and written in an entirely epistolary style. I don't remember my exact response, but I'm fairly certain that rather than shock, I experienced something like regret for the fact that this initial draft of the novel no longer existed.

Since then, I've spent my fair share of time wondering (as I will suppose almost every Austen scholar has wondered, at one point or another) about the possibility that First Impressions could still exist, sitting in a forgotten drawer in an English country estate, or wedged accidentally behind a dresser in a neglected parsonage. After encountering A. S. Byatt's Possession this spring -- in which two modern academics discover the lost letters of two (fictional) Victorian poets, and follow the literary clues therein on a detective hunt through Great Britain and parts of France -- I'll admit, I fantasized about being the person who opened the right drawer, or pulled the right dresser away from the wall, to see the manuscript come fluttering down, the light of day reanimating the dead leaves of paper covered in the veined tracery of aging ink.

This summer, in the process of researching for my senior thesis, I embarked upon a voyage through the collected letters of Jane Austen -- and everything changed.

It didn't happen all at once. Though Austen is always an interesting writer, her letters (mostly to her sister Cassandra) deal primarily with her day-to-day life, referencing people and places and events that my minimal knowledge of Austen biography precluded me from truly understanding. But more important than the actual content of the letters was my growing understanding of Austen's style. I slowly realized that only very rarely did I feel like I could take her seriously -- even when speaking with her sister about serious matters, she always seems to address her own real beliefs from an angle, or reference them only backhandedly. I was shocked to discover that particular passages which older Austen critics frequently read as plain and simple truth were, from my vantage point, obviously spoken with a deep irony that must effect my interpretation.

For example, I had heard more than one critic propound that Austen was dissatisfied with Pride and Prejudice, because in a letter to Cassandra she writes, "the work is rather too light & bright & sparkling;--it wants shade;--it wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter" (Jane to Cassandra, 4 February 1813). I'd been uneasy with this assertion, having personally considered the "light & bright & sparkling" nature of Pride and Prejudice to be the main reason for its critical reputation. An earlier letter only provided more support for my idea; Austen writes that she has "lopt & cropt [Pride and Prejudice] so successfully however that I imagine it must be rather shorter than S.&S. [Sense and Sensibility] altogether" (Jane to Cassandra, 29 January 1813). This pride in cutting her work down to size -- in removing, excising, revising -- seemed out of touch with the Austen described by critics as disapproving of the "bright & sparkling" nature of her own novels.

To me, the falsehood of these critics' views is proven without a doubt by a fuller extract from the very letter they use to support their claims:

"Upon the whole however I am quite vain enough & well satisfied enough.--The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling;--it wants shade;--it wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter--of sense if it could be had, if not of solemn specious nonsense--about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte--or anything that would form a contrast & bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness & Epigrammatism of the general stile" (Jane to Cassandra, 4 February 1813).

The continuation of the second sentence does, it is true, suggest ways in which Austen could have lengthened the work -- but the suggestion that such lengthening might be little more than "solemn specious nonsense" suggests to me that the entire passage is a backhanded self-compliment. Why would a woman who has spent some time and effort "lopping and cropping" this manuscript down to size then complain about its "Epigrammatism," which she admits to finding "delightful"? Austen would not be Austen if she digressed from her tightly-woven narratives to provide the reader with essays on writing, critiques on contemporaries, or historical asides. And she understands this about herself -- later she writes, "I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I finished the first chapter" (Jane to James Stanier Clarke, librarian to the Prince Regent, 1 April 1816). The repetition of "seriously" and "serious" mocks the very notion of such solemnity, which Austen admits would be broken by laughter, either at herself or others, if such a project were to succeed. Even when Austen is serious, I think her avid readers can attest that she is rarely solemn. Sir Walter Scott himself, when speaking of her juvenile writing, summed her up as "the girl of fifteen [who] is laughing, in her corner, at the world" (qtd. in Johnson 29).

Austen's revising mind, then, rather than shocking us, should be acknowledged as a significant factor in her self-as-writer. In fact, Austen scholar D. A. Miller says "the founding gesture of Austen Style is the cut" (34) -- and although he means it in the sense of the cutting remark, I think it's just as applicable to Austen's cutting down of her own prose to achieve the kind of "Epigrammatism" she ironically disclaims. The result is prose that is intentionally "light & bright & sparkling," like a gemstone that must be "cut" in order to betray its true brilliance.

In light of all of this, I realized at some point this summer that even if First Impressions (or Elinor and Marianne, the epistolary original draft of Sense and Sensibility, or Susan, the original draft of Northanger Abbey) existed, reading it would be like attempting to reconstruct a perfect diamond from the fragments left behind on the cutting table, instead of merely going and looking at the diamond where it sits on its plush velvet cushion on a pedestal in the next room, all "light & bright & sparkling." I might still feel a frisson of excitement at the mention of Austen's early drafts, or her lost letters, but my fervor to be the one who makes the discovery (if there is even a discovery to be made) has died down. In the case of Pride and Prejudice, at any rate, Austen's own letters suggest that her cuts were intentional, and produced the result she desired; with this, then, I can be satisfied.

Works Cited

Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988.

Le Faye, Deirdre, ed. Jane Austen's Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Miller, D. A. Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Banned Book Spotlight: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

I first encountered this book when I was in the third grade and a boy in my class gave a book report on it. We all vaguely suspected him to have done it on a dare, since Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was obviously a "girly" book, and none of us could come up with any other respectable reason for him to have read it.

I don't actually remember how old I was when I read it for myself, but I do remember understanding when I had finished both why people got into such a fuss over it and why it was so important. The story revolves around the trials and travails of the life of ordinary twelve-year-old Margaret Simon. Well, almost ordinary. Unlike all her friends, Margaret has grown up without a religion; her mother is Christian, her father is Jewish, and since they can't come to an agreement of what to raise her, they decide to raise her as nothing at all and let her come to her own decision about what she believes.

On that level alone, this book was important to a young girl still trying to figure out questions of faith, but Blume's genius extends beyond Margaret's religious questioning and into the realm of her impending womanhood. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was the first fiction I ever read that dealt frankly with the social factors surrounding menstruation, and I only discovered one other book that touched on this topic during the length of my childhood (Tamora Pierce's Alanna: The First Adventure, if anyone was wondering).

I had the fantastic opportunity to meet Judy Blume a few years back at a Book Expo America event, and tell her the story of how I came to read and love this book. She smiled when I told her about the boy in my third grade class who'd read it on a dare and said, "Well, I hope he learned something from it!"

Her books have been challenged pretty steadily throughout the years, and as such she's got some well-articulated opinions on censorship. To me, though, the following quote rings most incredibly true:

"It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers."

Banned Book Spotlight: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

In honor of Banned Books Week, which is held every year during the last moth of September by the American Library Association, I'm going to be writing a series of posts about my favorite banned or challenged books. To kick things off, I've got quite a bit to say about the best work of dystopian fiction I've ever read, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

I actually owe my first encounter with this book to the Disney Channel original TV series The Famous Jett Jackson. In one episode -- the only one I actually remember -- Jett's English teacher assigned Fahrenheit 451 to the class, only to be told that it was inappropriate reading for such young students (they were meant to be in middle school, perhaps high school). Jett and his friends fought back, and with the help of their teacher, they were able to keep Bradbury's text on the reading list and teach a valuable lesson about censorship at the same time. I was nine years old and in third grade at the time, but I was already a voracious and precocious reader, so I approached my father (who had been a high school English teacher, and possessed a collection of books my younger self intensely admired) to ask him whether we owned the book. He was probably a bit surprised, but he promised to look through his boxes for me and find out. When it turned out he didn't have a copy, he too me to the then-newly-constructed city library, where I sought out Fahrenheit 451 (with the help of a bemused children's librarian, who kindly walked me to the "grown-up" shelves and helped me find it), checked it out, and brought it home to read.

I worked through the book slowly, haltingly, certain that there was so much I wasn't "getting" but nonetheless feeling the telltale buildup of unease in the region of my stomach that Bradbury's most thought-provoking works continue to produce in me to this day. Of course, I was still a third-grader, and even for me Bradbury's style was intense. When it came time to decide between renewing the book or returning it to the library, I decided to return it, though I was perhaps only a third of the way through.

Fast-forward about five years. By the summer before my freshman year of high school, I had been transformed from a girl who'd read anything and everything with equanimity into a fledgling fan of science fiction and fantasy (thanks primarily to the influence of J. K. Rowling and Anne McCaffrey). I was excited about entering high school, finally being one of the "big kids," and decided that it was time for me to really sink my teeth into some serious reading to prove that I was ready for this. So again I appealed to my father's book collection, grown slightly less mystical over time, and when I found it lacking, I headed for the bookstore to acquire copies of the dystopian masterpieces I kept hearing about but had never read: Fahrenheit 451 and 1984.

I read them both within the span of a few weeks, and my world really hasn't been the same since.

Most American schoolchildren past junior high probably have some idea what Fahrenheit 451 is "about": state control of the media, censorship, and of course book-burning. And it is about those things, and they're some of the reasons why you should read it. But to me, the book has always suggested a more frightening and more general premise than even these labels can provide: What would become of a society without books? Bradbury at least seems to feel like a loss of literature would result in a loss of all those things we think of as most nobly human -- and whether it's due to the power of his writing or the truth of his convictions, I'm inclined to agree.

Over the years, I've realized that I'm incredibly lucky. When I was nine years old and asked my dad if he had a copy of Fahrenheit 451 lying around, he didn't tell me I couldn't read it. Knowing full well what it was and what it represented, he didn't reproach me for wanting to read it; neither did that saintly librarian. In fact, I can't remember any adult ever telling me that I couldn't read something. If anything, they were the ones who opened my eyes to the wealth of written material the world in store for me, and the best of them offered themselves up as guides through the maze of the literary world.

Not all children grow up like I did. Not all children can take their right to read for granted. Not all adults can take their right to read for granted: censorship affects people of all ages, and though in this country at this moment we're most aware of the books that parents try to keep their kids from reading, the historical precedents in the case of book-banning don't provide particularly sterling examples.

In Berlin, there is an open square called the Bebelplatz. In the center of the square, a small glass window in the ground lets observers peer into a room constructed underneath the surface of the square. The room is full of bookshelves. The bookshelves are all empty. At the edge of the square, the above plaques are set into the ground, each of them likewise the size of a paving stone. The quote by Heinrich Heine reads, "Where they begin by burning books, they will end by burning people." As it turns out, the empty bookshelves beneath the square provide just enough space to hold all the books burned by Nazi sympathizers in this square; they are left empty in remembrance of the deeds this place has witnessed. The only thing I love better than this memorial is the living one that manifests just across the square in the form of the weekly university book market.

Why Math Matters to English Majors

For today's meeting of my English Senior Honors Thesis course, one of our assigned readings was by Ezra Pound, founder of a poetic school known as Imagism, and (in my opinion) a little crazy. T. S. Eliot famously dedicated The Waste Land to him and called him "the better craftsman" in the process, but my tastes have always leaned decidedly toward Eliot. However, this thesis course is really forcing me to think things through, and giving me a new appreciation for writers I might otherwise have dismissed, so I set out with at least some kind of willingness to give Pound a chance.

But that's not the point of this post. The point is that my professor -- affable, brilliant, possessing a PhD in English literature and a professorship at UC Berkeley -- wasn't initially able to decode one of Pound's arguments because he made it using a mathematical analogy.

Pound says:

…When one studies Euclid one finds that the relation of a²+b²=c² applies to the ratio between the squares on the two sides of a right-angled triangle and the square on the hypotenuse. One still writes it a²+b²=c², but one has begun to talk about form. Another property or quality of life has crept into one’s matter. Until then one had dealt only with number. But even this statement does not create form. The picture is given you in the proposition about the square on the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle being equal to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. Statements in plane or descriptive geometry are like talk about art. They are a criticism of the form. The form is not created by them.

We come to Descartestian or “analytical geometry.” Space is conceived as separated by two or by three axes (depending on whether one is treating form in one or more planes). One refers to these axes by a series of co-ordinates. Given the idiom, one is able actually to create.

Thus we learn that the equation (x-a)²+(y-b)²=r² governs the circle. It is the circle. It is not a particular circle, it is any circle and all circles. It is nothing that is not a circle. It is the circle free of space and time limits. It is the universal, existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time. Mathematics is dull ditchwater until one reaches analytics. But in analytics we come upon a new way of dealing with form. It is in this way that art handles life. The difference between art and analytical geometry is the difference of subject matter only. Art is more interesting in proportion as life and the human consciousness are more complex and more interesting than forms and numbers.

Now, when I was doing my reading, the last sentences of this quote thoroughly impressed me. Coming into this with no expectation of liking Pound, I actually found myself agreeing with his metaphor, and wishing I could talk it over with my old junior high math teacher!

But this section, which made the most sense to me, was the one that made the least sense to my professor, who claimed to have failed math the last time she took it. I and some other students in the class ended up explaining to her exactly how Pound's mathematical references supported his argument -- how "a²+b²=c²" describes a particular set of properties of a particular type of triangle, but "(x-a)²+(y-b)²=r²" actually defines the points on a coordinate plane that create the figure of a circle. If I were rewriting Pound, I might suggest that this is the difference between the terms "equation" (i.e. anything that has an equals sign in it, that expresses an equivalence) and "formula" (which I think of as a particularly significant equation, general enough to define or create the type it describes).

I felt a strange pride in the moment when my affable, brilliant English professor, after internalizing all the math, burst out with, "It's like a recipe for a circle! But the triangle one isn't a recipe! Oh, that's brilliant!"

I may have chosen to exist in a sphere upon which mathematics doesn't impinge very often, but that doesn't mean I'm mathematically illiterate. And it certainly doesn't mean that I think mathematics is inherently any more or less meaningful (or entertaining) than any other academic pursuits. I can be proud of the fact that I took two years of Calculus in high school, even if at the time I did it ostensibly because I wanted to avoid math in college, because the math that I've learned has genuinely changed the way I look at the world.

Sometimes, being at Berkeley and seeing the kinds of math that my friends are doing makes me feel like I'm never going to get past the tip of the iceberg as far as mathematics is concerned, and that therefore my math doesn't matter. Today helped me see otherwise. While I don't believe that I'll ever learn more math than I know now, and I certainly don't believe that my present math knowledge amounts to much, I do think there's something to be said for having taken the time to learn and internalize the math that I have encountered so far. Today, in what I am sure counts as an incredibly rare circumstance, it helped me understand a literary critic. Tomorrow it probably won't show up in any tangibly useful way -- but the more I learn, the more I come to believe in the importance of transgressing boundaries between subjects and disciplines in order to rejuvenate ideas, concepts, or formulations that seem to be growing stale. Today, math made English matter more than English could on its own, at least for me.

And so here I am doing the unthinkable and offering thanks to Ezra Pound, for answering the unspoken question of why I need math, and why it really was all worthwhile.

The Secret Life of Books

About three and a half years ago, I was seventeen, a senior in high school, and working my way through the final year of the International Baccalaureate degree. I was on the brink of college, thinking about what I wanted to do with my life and why, and utterly certain that, if nothing else, I loved books and the worlds that they opened for me, and I wanted to spend as much time around them (and around other people who thought this way about them) as I could.

Out of all the things I read for IB English, Jane Eyre is undoubtedly the one that has turned out to hold the greatest importance in my life — but second only to Jane Eyre is a slim, spare poem that had shown up on an IB English exam a few years back and was given to us as a practice text. It wasn't on our syllabus, we never really discussed it as a class, and we were supposed to give our copies of it back to the teacher once we’d finished with them.

I didn’t. I couldn’t. Because this poem reached out to me and didn’t let me go.

The Secret Life of Books

They have their stratagems too, though they can’t move.
They know their parts.
Like invalids long reconciled
To stillness, they do their work through others.
They have turned the world
To their own account by the twisting of hearts.

What do they have to say and how do they say it?
In the library
At night, or the sun room with its one
Curled thriller by the window, something
Is going on,
You may suspect, that you don’t know of. Yet they

Need you. The time comes when you pick one up,
You who scoff
At determinism, the selfish gene.
Why this one? Look, already the blurb
Is drawing in
Some further text. The second paragraph

Calls for an atlas or a gazetteer;
That poem, spare
As a dead leaf’s skeleton, coaxes
Your lexicon. Through you they speak
As through the sexes
A script is passed that lovers never hear.

They have you. In the end they have written you,
By the intrusion
Of their account of the world, so when
You come to think, to tell, to do,
You’re caught between
Quotation marks, your heart’s beat an allusion.

Stephen Edgar, from Corrupted Treasures (1995)

Every time I read this poem, it makes me think in new and interesting ways about the relationships between books and their readers. Usually, every time I read it, I spend the first few stanzas feeling absolutely absorbed in the language used to describe the secret life of these books in question, the slim personification just enough for me to believe that they’re only alive when I’m not looking, or when I can just see them shuffle their covers out of the corner of my eye.

But by the time I make it to the final stanza, I start to develop this strange and disconcerting feeling in the region of my stomach. Because I am exactly the person “caught between / Quotation marks” in almost everything that I do, and far from it being accidental or unintentional (as the poet suggests this must be for most people) I do this all of the time on purpose. I use other peoples’ words when I can’t find my own. But then I start thinking: is this really true? Do I only quote when someone else has really said it better before, or do I sometimes let the quotations do my thinking for me, providing them as an educated response to a question or problem that I haven’t really managed to find a personal response to yet?

As a writer, this idea of being caught in constant quotation is even more of a chore: what does it say for the originality of anything I write creatively? I’ve often thought this is one of the largest problems I run into as someone who writes both creatively and analytically. Writing as an English major entails endless quotation, and values that quotation as the heart of the resulting text. My ideas about the text are important, but the text I produce in describing those ideas is often attributed back to the original text — even within my own writing, this happens. I may be clever to spot a pattern in Milton’s use of chiasmus or Austen’s depictions of reading, but the ultimate cleverness reverts back to Milton and Austen for embedding these things in their works in the first place (even if they have only done it unconsciously and I have excavated their meaning through conscious effort).

And then, when I’ve spent so much time with the words of others, exploring them, extracting them carefully from the text, coaxing them out inch by inch, and venerating them in the process, writing anything of my own seems not just silly but impossible. I have been written by all of the books I have ever read, so when it comes time for me to write books of my own, sometimes I’m afraid all I can do is re-write those books that have shaped me and hope no one notices the similarities.

Most of the time, I revel in my ability to quote my favorite texts, to carry them with me always. I think about the scene around the campfire at the end of Fahrenheit 451, with these men reciting literature against the darkness. But this poem makes me ask uncomfortable questions. It makes me think against the grain of the books that have written me over the years. Above all, it makes me reimagine that campfire circle: instead of these men preserving their past, they are stifling their future. Because isn’t it almost possible that by devoting themselves so wholly to the fictional creations of former ages, they are prevented from creating new (and possibly more relevant) fictions of their own?

Fiction is manipulative. This isn’t to say that it’s inherently good or bad, but it plays with my heartstrings and has the power to make me think ideas or do things or be someone that I wouldn’t have been without it. Sometimes, I forget that. Most of the time, I forget how ambivalent this power is. But this poem always reminds me.

Developing Novel Readers: The Case of Jane Austen

To those of you who know (and those of you who don’t), this summer I was a recipient of a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship from UC Berkeley that provided me with the funding and support to begin researching for my senior honors thesis, which will be completed in the Berkeley English department over the course of my senior year. My research is far from complete, but participants in the SURF program are required to give a presentation at the end of the summer about the progress of their work so far. I only had fifteen minutes to talk about the topic that’s consumed most of my summer, so the result is (to my mind) laughably abridged and incomplete, but it does at least give an idea of the kind of work I’ve been doing this summer, so I’ve decided to post the essay that formed the basis of my presentation. This whole project wouldn’t have been possible without the financial support provided by SURF, the intellectual support offered by my mentor, Professor Celeste Langan, and the emotional support provided by my sister Corinne (who has probably heard more of my failed ideas and encouraged more of my successful ones than anyone else).

My research is ultimately concerned with the effect Jane Austen has upon the form of the novel. But in order to explain some of her formal innovations, it’s necessary to have some idea of the novel’s reception in the decades leading up to the period in which she wrote. The woman who would go on to become one of the most famous novelists writing in English grew up during a time when the relationship between novels and women was troubled at best. Women who read novels were ridiculed, and women who wrote novels faced up to even more severe criticism; almost all female novelists published anonymously, and Austen herself wasn’t widely known as the author of her own works during her lifetime.

The attitudes towards novels at the time are perhaps best summed up for my purposes by looking to Richard Sheridan’s play, The Rivals. First produced in London in 1775, its plot centers around a young woman, Lydia Languish, whose obsession with sentimental novels has caused her to desire to marry a man straight out of one of these stories. She expects her suitors to be virtuous but poor, determined to marry her despite hardship and parental disapproval, and refuses men who don’t meet these criteria because marrying them simply wouldn’t make for as good of a story.

In the play, Lydia acquires the novels she reads from the local circulating library. Unlike modern public libraries, these circulating libraries charged an annual fee for membership, but since book prices were so high in Britain at the time, subscribing to a library was still much more affordable than purchasing books outright. Though they stocked all kinds of reading material, most circulating libraries consisted principally of fictional works, and novels were in high demand. In The Rivals, the audience is first introduced to Lydia as her maid returns to her with a pile novels newly checked out from the library. The elderly and dignified Sir Anthony, upon seeing Lydia’s maid with these books, expresses his fear for Lydia’s morals, telling her guardian: “Madam, a circulating library in a town is, as an ever-green tree, of diabolical knowledge!—It blossoms through the year!—And depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last” (The Rivals, Act I Scene II). Though Sir Anthony may seem melodramatic in his presentation of this perceived threat, from at least the 1750s critics and moralists had feared that the novel’s apparent realism might encourage readers—particularly young women—to model their real lives off of what they had read.

Sheridan’s play is relevant to a conversation about Austen because it was first produced in the same year that she was born and represents, albeit in a greatly exaggerated way, the kind of world that shaped her early artistic and personal development. Indeed, when she was eight years old, her older brothers put on an amateur production of The Rivals in which she may have played a small role. Luckily, Austen grew up in a family that could appreciate novels at least as well as it could laugh at their expense. When she was twenty-three, a local woman requested the Austen family’s subscription to a new circulating library. In a letter to her sister Cassandra, Austen wrote, “As an inducement to subscribe M^rs Martin tells us that her collection is not to consist only of Novels, but of every kind of literature &c &c—She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so” (18-19 Dec 1798). On the one hand, we would expect nothing less from the great novelist. However, the quote reveals that Austen lived in a community where she viewed her family as something of an exception, and in which although people read novels, they weren’t always comfortable admitting to this habit. With this in mind, I decided to explore the question of how Austen’s novels reconcile her experience as an unashamed novel-reader with her society’s moral questions about novels, especially when read and/or written by women.

Despite Austen’s own favorable relationship with the institution of the circulating library, in Pride and Prejudice, it is connected to acts of gathering and distributing rumors and similar forms of social information. Early on, some of the best gossip Lydia Bennet can offer about the militia officers that have just been stationed nearby is that they are seen “‘very often standing in Clarke’s library’” (P&P Vol. I Ch. VII), and much later when she has followed these officers to Brighton, her letters “contained little else, than that they were just returned from the library, where such and such officers had attended them, and where she had seen such beautiful ornaments as made her quite wild” (P&P Vol. II Ch. XIX). Rather than being a place for the acquisition of reading material, the circulating library is figured as a place to see and be seen—a place where young men and women circulate just as much as the texts the library affords.

This suggested connection between the circulating library and displays of surface value is both affirmed and subtly challenged by an earlier incident in the novel. Mr. Collins, clergyman and cousin to the Bennet sisters, is shocked to find a library book in the Bennet household: “a book was produced; but on beholding it, (for every thing announced it to be from a circulating library,) he started back, and begging pardon, protested that he never read novels” (P&P Vol. I Ch. XIV). The distinctive way in which books belonging to circulating libraries were bound and packaged leads Collins to literally judge this book by its cover.

The above image is a typical label that might be found on a volume borrowed from a circulating library, either pasted on a front page or affixed to the front cover. The fact that these books could be judged so easily seems to support a negative idea of circulating libraries, the texts one encounters there, and the people who read them. But the language of Collins’s disapproval of novels savors strongly of the very kind of prejudice that Austen’s novel seeks to rewrite. The fact that Collins “start[s] back” upon “beholding” the volume suggests that he does not even open it to see whether his suppositions have any merit. In this, he bears an incredible similarity to the Reverend James Fordyce, whose sermons Collins chooses to read instead of the library book. Writing more than thirty years before Austen began writing Pride and Prejudice, Fordyce had also denied having ever read the novels that he nonetheless condemned as vice-ridden productions that would create in their female readers the souls, if not the outward appearances, of prostitutes.

But within Austen’s works, even those who approve of novels are capable of describing them in terms of their packaging. In Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney describes the typical gothic novel as “‘a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duodecimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in each, with a frontispiece to the first, of two tombstones and a lantern’” (NA Vol. I Ch. XIV). The images below are from frontispieces to two different gothic novels published in the 1800s, when gothic fiction was purportedly beginning to decline. Though these works are by two different authors of different genders writing in different years, both frontispieces contain the same major elements—a skeleton, a young man, a lantern—and both title pages label their works as “gothic romances.”

The above images suggest that publishers went out of their way to make genre visibly identifiable, so that prospective readers could judge books, if not by their covers, then at least by their frontispieces and other forms of “packaging.” Furthermore, Austen’s reference to this practice suggests her interest in the idea of form—both the ways in which it was conceived by publishers trying to sell novels and the ways in which it was evaluated by potential readers who might be interested in purchasing or borrowing novels.

The next image is the cover for a 1960s American reprint of Northanger Abbey that’s been packaged as a gothic novel, rather than as the gothic satire it really is. Most of the cover text is excerpted directly from the text of Austen’s novel, albeit with a few additions (you won’t find any “distant screams” in the original). What interests me about this particular cover is the way in which it could lead potential readers to misjudge the text; those who expect a gothic novel would likely be disappointed.

In this context, Austen’s concern with her characters’, and, in fact, her own readers’ ability to evaluate forms is unsurprising. Northanger Abbey tells the story of seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland’s first visit to Bath, where she is introduced into society for the first time and meets two important figures: Henry Tilney, an eligible young clergyman with whom she is quickly infatuated, and Isabella Thorpe, a young woman who befriends Catherine and introduces her to the gothic novel. This subgenre of the novel had risen to prominence in the 1790s and was perceived as a genre often written and almost always read by women. It was also criticized by many as having completely unrealistic plots that depended upon the same generic tropes and characters regardless of who wrote it. If those frontispieces are anything to go by, this may have been fairly valid criticism; nonetheless, Catherine’s fascination with the gothic novel leads her to believe that her own life ought to be full of supernatural mysteries and horrifying set-pieces—skeletons, dark corridors, ancient castles, and abbeys.

When Catherine is invited to visit with Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor at their home, Northanger Abbey, she’s certain that her own gothic adventure is just beginning. She expects from the first moment of her visit that

Something was certainly to be concealed; her fancy, though it had trespassed lately once or twice, could not mislead her here; and what that something was, a short sentence of Miss Tilney’s, as they followed the General at some distance down stairs, seemed to point out:—“I was going to take you into what was my mother’s room—the room in which she died—” were all her words; but few as they were, they conveyed pages of intelligence to Catherine. (NA Vol. II Ch. VIII)

The logic is simple: if Catherine were in a gothic novel, the phrase spoken to her by her friend Eleanor would have suggested foul play. In this case, it leads Catherine to believe that Henry and Eleanor’s mother, dead for nine years, was actually murdered by their father, General Tilney. Austen uses this assumption to cannily represent the way in which genre can function as shorthand for the reader; a “short sentence,” translated through Catherine’s gothic imagination, results in “pages of intelligence,” which, though ultimately incorrect when applied to the real world, would be a perfect fit for one of the novels Catherine reads.

It takes Henry Tilney’s horrified response to Catherine’s assumption to show her that she isn’t living inside one of her novels. He catches her exploring his mother’s old room and reacts with shock when she questions him about the circumstances of the late Mrs. Tilney’s death, ultimately chastising her into seeing sense. Against the “dreadful nature of the suspicions [Catherine] has entertained,” Henry juxtaposes a “sense of the probable” and “observation of what is passing” in the real world (NA Vol. II Ch. IX). He draws a distinction between the form of the gothic novel and the form of life, and seems to deny any crossover between the two.

Although at first glance it might appear that Henry Tilney is the “good reader” we have all been waiting for, who will teach Catherine how to distinguish between the forms of fiction and reality, a closer look reveals that both Henry and Catherine go out of their way to make real life conform to conventional expectations. The only difference is that Catherine unreservedly inhabits the tropes of the gothic novel, while Henry’s knowing deployment of social rituals calls attention to the unnaturalness of the forms he follows.

Henry and Catherine’s first conversation revolves entirely around Henry’s understanding of what is “proper” for dance partners who have just been introduced:

After chatting some time on such matters as naturally arose from the objects around them, he suddenly addressed her with—“I have hitherto been very remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of a partner here; I have not yet asked you how long you have been in Bath; whether you were ever here before; whether you have been at the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and the concert; and how you like the place altogether. I have been very negligent—but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these particulars? If you are I will begin directly.”

“You need not give yourself that trouble, sir.”

“No trouble I assure you, madam.” Then forming his features into a set smile, and affectedly softening his voice, he added, with a simpering air, “Have you been long in Bath, madam?” (NA Vol. I Ch. III)

Thus begins a series of rote questions that one assumes to be a sharp contrast to the conversation Henry and Catherine had been engaged in previously. Instead of discussing “such matters as naturally arose from the objects around them,” Henry’s new mode of conversation is “set” and “affected”—in other words, quite unnatural—but he insists upon going through with it because it represents the “proper attentions” that must be expressed. The text draws attention to the fact that this necessary conversation, carried out completely in keeping with conventional forms, doesn’t actually say much of anything.

This returns us to one of the first questions we asked: if Austen had no moral qualms about circulating libraries or novels, why present the circulating library as a place for Lydia to gossip, and the novel as a form that can be read from its cover? Given the evidence, it becomes clear that Austen is not criticizing the form of the novel as much as she is criticizing those who can’t look past or through the form to evaluate the substance and reality it encodes. Texts like Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice allow Austen to critique readers who place their faith in outward forms, ranging from gothic frontispieces to uniformed soldiers to established social conventions. Austen inhabits the form of the novel in order to draw attention to the formulae which govern novelistic presentation of scenes and characters. She engages in a calculated deployment of common novel tropes in such a way that their status as tropes is called attention to. In this way, she makes her readers aware of their own expectations of form and genre by subtly upsetting those expectations.

Read This Book: Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

There are those books that people recommend to you over the years, but that always remain forgotten at the bottom of your "to-read" list, because you're not quite sure what they're going to be about or what you're going to get out of them or exactly why you should invest the time to find out -- until one day, for no apparent reason, you remember a title in the bookstore or at the library and then the book is in your hands and you have no choice but to read it.

For me, Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg is one of those books. It was first recommended over a year ago by someone whose taste in literature I trust implicitly -- possibly because she is the only other person in the world who obsesses over both of my obscure favorite authors -- but though I even went so far as to text the title to myself (so that I would have it with me the next time I was in a bookstore or library), I never actually thought to purchase or borrow it when I had the opportunity. It took the actions of another friend to remind me of this book, and my desire to procrastinate on my thesis research fueled my decision to search it out at the local library.

I started this book less than six hours ago, at the start of a work-out on one of the elliptical machines at the gym and not knowing what to expect. Half an hour and forty-some-odd pages later, I had to cut my work-out short because I didn't particularly want to start crying in the middle of the UC Berkeley Recreational Sports Facility. Feinberg's portrayal of the seemingly insurmountable barriers faced by the protagonist Jess -- a Jewish butch girl from a working-class family growing up in the 1950s -- made me angry at history. But the tears didn't threaten to start until I remembered that, for some people, many of whom I am proud to call my friends, the kind of discrimination the novel depicts is anything but history. Sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, class prejudice: all of these are just as alive in the present as they were in 1950. Derogatory slurs, employer discrimination, physical abuse, and sexual assault still face people who are perceived as "different."

Feinberg's novel is ultimately a bildungsroman, a story that follows the growth and development of an individual from childhood to maturity and beyond, but its power comes from the intersection of this basic form and its unflinching (and historically informed) depiction of the butch-femme subculture with which I, for one, was completely unfamiliar. Although the account is fictional, I feel like being inside Jess's head for a few hundred pages introduced me to more of the butch experience than any non-fictional format could have. I'm certainly not presuming to really know what it's really like to be butch simply because I've read one person's take on it, but I've always believed that one of the first steps towards increased understanding and acceptance of any ostracized or excluded group is to give that presumed "other" a voice. For a few hundred pages I felt Jess's pains and joys, lived inside Jess's mind and dealt with Jess's problems and questions, and through this fiction I was able to be let into an interior world with which I'd otherwise have little to no contact.

What's more, the form of the novel, rather than drawing rigid distinctions and placing uncomplicated labels on people and forms of behavior, presents the reader with something that I would consider truer to the complex and complicated intersections between these labels and the real results of their inadequacies. It made me question the labels that I use and the assumptions that I make about individuals based upon appearance or behavior, and it did so without trying to give me "answers" -- which are often just a new set of labels. Jess identifies as butch, but it's obvious this word has different meanings to different individuals, and rather than try to codify it or provide it with a specific, exclusive meaning, Feinberg's book explores the nuanced ways in which different characters may perform the same label.

The novel is also incredibly brilliant for the way it made me look twice at pronouns. In case you haven't noticed, so far in this post I have yet to assign a gendered pronoun to either Feinberg or Jess. In Feinberg's "About the Author" blurb, ze discusses hir life and accomplishments using commonly-accepted gender-neutral pronouns (a great introduction to which can be found here). But Jess's case seems more complicated. At birth, Jess is biologically female. However, as a butch Jess's character can often come across as masculine, and later in the novel Jess begins to take male hormones and successfully "passes" as a man for several years before deciding to stop hormone treatments. Since the novel is narrated from Jess's first person point of view, the only pronoun Jess ever uses to refer to hirself is "I": all of the gendered pronouns of the novel are bestowed upon Jess by others around hir (though I was interested to note that to Jess, fellow butches were still "shes").

Some people scoff at the idea of a gender-neutral pronoun and may be inclined to think that those who use them or demand their use are simply trying to making a political statement. But pronoun use isn't just a political act for Jess. The pronouns people use to describe and discuss hir have a great effect on hir life and hir own self-concept. When growing up, Jess is frequently called a "he-she," and though the term is used in an incredibly derogatory manner it becomes the only one with which Jess can fully identify. Later on, Jess has to deal with other people on the streets, confused by hir gender ambiguity, referring to hir as "it." But the pain of an improper pronoun isn't just emotional: when passing as a man, being referred to by others as "she" could lose Jess hir job.

The real glory of this novel is that it manages to tackle such massive political and personal issues without becoming a manifesto. Feinberg doesn't tell hir readers what to think. Instead, ze presents hir readers with an account of the way the world looks through Jess's eyes, and asks the reader to make his, her, or hir own judgments regarding the politics of the situation. I can't speak for all of the readers who have encountered this novel since its publication, but for me, Stone Butch Blues ultimately reaffirmed two important ideas about the world: first, that hate, anger, and violence are real things that affect real people, but second (and more importantly) that love, respect, and understanding are powerful counter-forces that, if marshaled correctly, can encourage and support necessary action.

Still, in the end, nothing I say about Stone Butch Blues can explain the powerful experience of reading it, and reading this post is no substitute for going out and getting yourself a copy of the novel. I meant what I said in the title: read this book. And if you have (or when you do), please leave a comment behind -- I'd love to hear what others have to say on the subject.

Deciphering Henry Tilney

I read Northanger Abbey for the first time slightly over a month ago in preparation for my senior thesis on Jane Austen and the form of the novel, and ever since then I’ve been going back and forth about what I think of the novel’s purported “hero” Henry Tilney. I find the protagonist Catherine to be simple in a cute sort of way—strong-minded and genuine in her opinions even when she’s not willing to speak up and assert them, young and a bit naïve but without it being really infuriating—but Henry is a mystery that I just can’t seem to wrap my mind around.

Part of this, I suspect, can be blamed upon the BBC. I hadn’t read Northanger Abbey a month and a half ago, but I had seen the 2007 TV movie starring Felicity Jones and J. J. Field. I’d found it to be much like its heroine (short, cute, fun), and almost like Pride and Prejudice lite (all the wordplay and banter but none of the ferocious arguments or long-held grudges). In the film, Field’s Henry Tilney is affable, and he delivers his character’s more questionable lines with a smile that makes you forget that he’s not making sense. I bought into Tilney’s silliness as a result of the film, and went into the novel expecting to find him, if nothing else, a good match for Catherine, willing to tease her and challenge her in such a way that would promote their developing relationship as well as the intelligence of both individuals.

I came away from my first reading of the novel with a pretty favorable account of him. He was a little more jokey, and a little more likely to cut others off for the sake of expressing his own intelligence, than I had expected, but his playful humor left me feeling that he was, in a strange way, a male prototype for Elizabeth Bennet. The language used to describe them is, in fact, incredibly similar. Henry is introduced as having “a very intelligent and lively eye,” “fluency and spirit,” and “an archness and pleasantry…which interested” (NA Vol. I Ch. III). In comparison, Darcy relates that Elizabeth’s countenance “was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes” (P&P Vol. I Ch. 6), with “a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody” (P&P Vol. I Ch. 10). Just as Henry teases Catherine by asking her a series of rote questions about her enjoyment of Bath, Elizabeth pursues conversation-by-formula with Darcy during their dance at the Netherfield ball. They are both witty jokesters who wouldn’t be able to stand having many acquaintances at whom they were not allowed to laugh.

But where Elizabeth’s mocking laughter is tamed (at least a little) by her increasing concern for Darcy’s feelings, Henry’s wordplay remains primarily unchecked, and herein lies my problem. Upon a second reading of key passages, I found myself running across instance after instance in which Henry’s wordplay, rather than seeming playful and ridiculous, began to appear authoritarian, a method to prevent others from speaking their minds rather than a way of encouraging light and easy conversation. Take, for example, a conversation between Henry and Catherine, in which Catherine speaks first:

“I do not understand you.”

“Then we are on very unequal terms, for I understand you perfectly well.”

“Me?—yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”

“Bravo!—an excellent satire on modern language.” (NA Vol. II Ch. 1)

On a first reading, the English major in me saw those last two lines as a frankly brilliant satire on modern language, but upon re-reading, I realized that Henry is talking more to amuse himself than to enlighten or entertain his conversational partner, who honestly doesn’t understand what he means. When he interprets her confused (and possibly annoyed) remark as satire, he is applying his own reading to the situation, for his own sake. Henry Tilney certainly speaks well enough to be unintelligible.

But even when he’s intelligible, his manner of talking isn’t always agreeable. He calls his sister “stupid” to her face and seems to consider it as an endearment (or at least not an offense); Eleanor is clearly used to this kind of address, and therefore keen to make sure Catherine doesn’t take her brother too seriously. Frankly, under these conditions, I’m surprised that Catherine manages to take him seriously enough to fall in love with him. He takes over topics of conversation introduced by her and does his best to direct them toward his own experience and interests; when Catherine cuts him off from extolling himself for being so well-read, he retaliates by quarreling with her diction:

“But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?”

“The nicest;—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.”

“Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is for ever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.” (NA Vol. I Ch. 14)

Again, Eleanor must step in to assure Catherine that this man of her dreams isn’t really as rude and obnoxious as he seems—but even as she does so, she encourages Catherine to “change” her diction to suit Henry’s tastes. It’s obvious that Eleanor’s spent too much time with her brother, and has given up opposing him in these petty arguments. Some people might think this saintly of her, but I identify too much with the fierce and sprightly Elizabeth Bennet to find the idea of forbearance terribly appealing in this instance. (As a side note, when working on my thesis over the past few days, I’ve found my thoughts continually interrupted by a scene of Elizabeth Bennet and Henry Tilney meeting on the dance floor after their respective marriages and sharing an intriguing and flirty power-play of a conversation before going their separate ways. In case you were wondering, in my head it’s a power-play Elizabeth undeniably wins.)

All of this has left me asking myself a question I simply can’t answer: why does Catherine marry him?

The problem with this question is that it’s more a question of theme than of character. I can understand completely Catherine’s attraction to Henry Tilney; it’s one that I felt acutely the first time I read this novel, and in a world of limited options and minimal power for women, perhaps I would have made a similar choice. What I can’t understand is what their marriage means on a larger level—what Austen is trying to get at. I’m of the opinion that marriages in Austen’s novels pull a lot of thematic weight in addition to what they do for the plot and the form. I’m convinced that, on a metaphorical scale, the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy singlehandedly averts the French Revolution from happening again on English soil (there may be more about this conviction in a future post); Elizabeth herself suspects that her marriage could “teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was” (P&P Vol. III Ch. 8), and I don’t think this is an overstatement.

But what do Henry and Catherine have to teach us? Why should the admiring multitudes even give them a second look? Henry Tilney would probably be quite happy at the idea of teaching others; many of his interactions with Catherine are didactic in nature, intended as correctives to her overactive imagination or supplements to her aesthetic education. He seems destined to become the husband-as-teacher, with Catherine as a perfect and eager student, but their intellectual relationship seems sadly one-sided, a conversation in which one voice will always overpower the other. Perhaps, in time, Catherine will learn (as Eleanor has already learned) to stop speaking out, to laugh at her husband’s outlandish assertions rather than to challenge them. But I can’t help but think that she deserves a better future than this, and so I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something I’m missing, about Henry or Catherine or the whole scale of the novel, that would set this all right.

Fanny Hill and the Modern Romance Novel: Age Before Beauty

In researching for my senior thesis on the impact of woman readers and writers upon the form and respectability of the novel from (roughly) the 1780s to 1810s, I've encountered a lot of eighteenth-century works that I never would have considered to have any relation to the novels that initially inspired this study. I've sifted through conduct books, printed in facsimile and with the dreaded 'long s' staunchly unmodernized; I've scanned treatises on female education; I've become familiar with the plots of several forgotten novels of the century simply because they show up so frequently in modern critical literature.

But perhaps the most surprising discovery has been the frequency of references to The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland. More frequently known as Fanny Hill, this unabashedly pornographic novel that, as its title suggests, follows the misadventures of a London prostitute, was considered so obscene that a year after its publication in 1748, both its author and publisher were taken to court, and it wasn't legally published again until the 1960s.

I actually read a portion of Fanny Hill for a class while studying abroad at Queen Mary, University of London. The class, entitled "Representing London: the Eighteenth Century," ran for the entire academic year and was organized around different topics in eighteenth-century London, ranging from empire to coffee-houses to, you guessed it, prostitution. Other readings for this week included both proposals to set up a charitable institution for the rehabilitation of repentant prostitutes and a list of "Covent Garden ladies" complete with names, ages, and special skills. (I almost wish I were joking.)

Personally, I don't see a problem with reading things like this in an English classroom -- on the contrary, I'm a firm believer in the significance of literary and cultural context, and that includes popular fiction. But the more I contemplate Fanny Hill and its strangely secure place in critical literature on the eighteenth century, the more I wonder why no space exists in the critical canon for its modern descendants.

That's right. I'm talking about romance novels. (And before you ask, yes, I've read a few of those too.)

When people started to argue for the republication of an authorized edition of Fanny Hill in the 1960s, one of the strongest arguments in its favor was that the text should be considered as a valuable historical document, significant for a reconstruction of eighteenth-century interests and fantasies. I can't disagree with this argument at all; I just can't see why this argument doesn't apply to any text, up to and including present-day works to which audiences might otherwise sport objections. If Fanny Hill is suitable material for university history or English classrooms, why not the modern romance? I can see two potential and interrelated answers to this question, but I don't give either of them much credit.

The first answer is, simply, that because of its age, Fanny Hill has been awarded that strange but unassailable status of "historical document," and that perhaps when modern romance novels are two hundred years old, they, too, will be treated to such academic attention. However, this centuries-long gap that stretches between the appreciation of a work as "popular" and its establishment within the literary/historical canon seems unfair at best, and snobbish at worst. Either way, the attitude that popular literature is only significant long after the period in which it was written results in the significance so many genres being overlooked by academia despite their outrageous popular appeal.

The second answer stems, I suspect, from a sexually conservative desire not to assign as coursework anything potentially titillating, as modern romance novels are universally understood to be. Fanny Hill, in contrast to these more modern novels, is (in this view) conveniently too "old" to have any of that sort of appeal for a modern reader, and can be assigned without comment. But somehow I don't think it survived in pirated editions on two continents for over 200 years because its readers found it too "old" to excite; on the contrary, it's this very sort of engagement with the text that must have kept it in print (even if only illicitly) for centuries. Overlooking evidence such as this seems, at best, slightly silly.

In the gap between Fanny Hill and the modern romance novel, I see a great deal of room for research. For example, what does it mean that sexually explicit literary material has gone from being written predominately by men for men in the eighteenth century to (at least from the popular perspective) being predominately written by women for women in the twenty-first? What effect do the genders of author and audience have upon the presentation of sex and sexuality in print? And why is it that reading and analyzing Fanny Hill is a valid, perhaps even respectable occupation for an academic of any gender, whereas providing a modern romance novel with a similar treatment (especially if you're a woman) is not?

Critics of my argument may be quick to point out that it's unfair of me to equate Fanny Hill and paperback romances, and I admit I've been a bit slipshod in instituting this comparison. Frankly, Fanny Hill is far more explicit than any modern romance novel I've ever personally encountered, and ultimately not as well-written. I'm not about to hazard a guess at the real modern equivalent to Fanny Hill -- but I will suggest that a lot of modern romance novels would probably seem tame in comparison.

Jenna Starborn: or, Jane Eyre and Gen Tanks

It is a truth universally acknowledged -- and, in the land of English majors, almost universally lamented -- that any sufficiently popular work of literature will be cannibalized and reworked from as many different angles as there are genres of fiction, provided its copyright is expired. Sometimes, the result is considered groundbreaking, or at least intelligent enough to receive critical acclaim on its own (Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea comes to mind, as does Gregory Maguire's Wicked). But sometimes, the result is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or any one of the hundreds of Austen spin-offs for sale at your local bookstore, in which Elizabeth and Darcy return as private detectives, range abroad as spies, or simply engage in sexual activities the likes of which could make even Wickham blush (or perhaps just start taking notes).

I must confess, I have in fact read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In fact, there were moments when I rather liked it, because buried beneath all that zombified gore were the original words of Austen's text which had begun to captivate me the first time I read Pride and Prejudice. I had of course re-read the novel since then, but somehow returning to find my favorite passages within a different context made them stand out even more, and if I had any residual positive energy to spare for the spin-off, it was because it reminded me how fully I was in love with the original.

This and other examples have led me to realize two things about reading adaptations, updates, or spin-offs of favorite texts: 1) They will never be as good as the original, and 2) They will nonetheless surprise you by teaching you things about the original text you never really knew. The first point seems obvious; the second requires examples, and this is where Jenna Starborn comes in.

The idea of a science-fiction re-imagining of Jane Eyre might be enough to send many of the literary sort off to premature graves, but frankly, Jane Eyre and science fiction were probably of the two most significant forces in my life when I was seventeen-turning-eighteen. I was introduced to one around the same time that I was writing my International Baccalaureate Extended Essay on the other (in case you were wondering, "Images of Conformity and Individuality in Post-War Dystopia" got full marks), before I had ever entered a university English class and therefore before I discovered that most people disagreed with my assertion that Victorians and aliens were equally deserving of literary merit. I went through my senior year of high school blissfully ignorant of the prejudices harbored in many university English and creative writing departments against those who read or wrote the dreaded "genre fiction," and I'll never stop being thankful that I did, because I have a feeling that in the long run, being that kind of person would have diminished my ability to read and enjoy Jane Eyre as surely as it would have destroyed my ability to read and enjoy Jenna Starborn.

Sharon Shinn's novel might not live up to the source of its inspiration (see Rule 1 above), but reading it was an engaging experience in reading beyond the horizons of what the university deems "literary" and frankly gave me a deeper understanding of why Jane Eyre works on me in the way that it does (see Rule 2). The plot follows closely the basic narrative path of Jane Eyre: Jenna Starborn, grown in a gen tank by a woman who wanted a child of her body but could not conceive, becomes obsolete mere months after she is born when her "Aunt" Rentley (who has not yet legally adopted her) is one of the first women to purchase an artificial womb. She gives birth to her own son, and suddenly Jenna is left as a half-citizen member of a grand household in which her basic needs are cared for but she is ignored as something between a nuisance and a mistake. As a girl of eight, Jenna is sent off-world to a charity school that focuses on teaching its pupils useful mechanical trades, where she graduates with all the knowledge necessary to fill a post as a nuclear generator technician. After a few years spent teaching theoretical physics, Jenna, who has adopted for herself the surname "Starborn" common to many unclaimed children of the gen tanks, tires of her post and seeks employment as the personal technician on the estate of wealthy landowner Everett Ravenbeck, whose mining interests on a terraformed world with a hostile atmosphere require the constant protection of a generator-powered force field.

The extent to which Shinn's re-imagining relies on what I think of as "shorthand" -- the reader's implied previous knowledge of the source text -- made me realize the necessity of those portions of Jane Eyre which, dear readers, I must confess to occasionally skipping. When I began Jane Eyre as a girl of seventeen, I knew nothing of its plot; I empathized with Jane's childish tenacity, felt the indignity of her suffering at the hands of her aunt and cousins, and waited with baited breath to see the kind of woman she would become. But after the terror and defiance of the Red Room scenes, I was left with chapter after chapter of her experiences at Lowood, which, although certainly character-forming, were nonetheless dull. Even her first weeks at Thornfield did little to alleviate the boredom, so that by Chapter 11 I, too, began to long for "incident, fire, life, feeling" -- and in subsequent re-readings, conducted primarily for pleasure, I had a tendency to skim over everything until Jane's meeting with Rochester in Chapter 12.

It wasn't until I noticed that Shinn was attempting something similar in her retelling, by condensing the content of those first chapters so that they didn't get in the way of Mr. Ravensbeck's arrival, that I realized exactly how important those "boring" first eleven chapters really are to Jane Eyre. They subtly manipulate the reader into sympathy with Jane, so that Rochester arrives on scene only when the reader is as willing as Jane to accept his appearance as a positive change. Edward Rochester may be a deeply unlikeable character in many respects, but after the eight-year-long dry spell to which Jane (and the reader) has been condemned, it's no surprise that she falls for the first thing that makes an impact in her world, and takes us down with her.

Because I know Jane Eyre, I was ready and willing to fall in love with Jenna Starborn -- but it's precisely because I know Jane Eyre that I didn't. The abridgment of Jenna's childhood hardships made her less sympathetic to me than Jane has always been, but it also made me less eager for the Rochester-analogue to come onstage. In this and many other instances, I felt like Shinn was so bent upon delivering just what her readers expected, and getting it to them before they could complain, that she inadvertently overlooked the longing that is, for me at least, the motor of Jane Eyre's plot (and Jane's character) in volumes I and II.

This isn't to say that any change to basic plotting, style, or character in a spin-off or adaptation necessarily destine it for the worst. In fact, I frequently read adaptations just for these changes or additions, so I was quite pleased with Shinn's inclusion of the character of Janet Ayerson. With Jenna taking up the job of a nuclear technician rather than a governess, Shinn still needed someone to oversee Mr. Ravensbeck's Adele-analogue bastard child, and thus Janet Ayerson appears onstage as a necessarily less feisty Jane Eyre figure who must watch the child but will never win the love of the master. Instead, Janet runs off with a wealthy and attractive friend of Ravensbeck, who woos her with promises of marriage but installs her as nothing more than his mistress and disposes of her when he becomes bored -- a shocking and unexpected reminder of the danger that Jane Eyre and Jenna Starborn both face in loving men above their station who could so easily destroy these women's characters with no fault being returned to the men for doing so.

It was at about this realization that Jenna Starborn began to disappoint -- because, though Jane of course was trapped within the nineteenth century, Jenna maneuvers in a world of the future where one might be tempted to expect something closer to gender and class equality. Unfortunately, this isn't a possibility Shinn seems prepared to provide for; though she does concoct a reasonable backstory regarding the exploration and settlement of space by wealthy families who instigated an interplanetary class system as a means of retaining their power, doing so seems at times like an easy way out of dealing with what I consider some of the really interesting questions. For example, does the Jane Eyre plot, so concerned with the value of sexual virtue (for women, at least) and embroiled in concerns of marriage still play out the same in a future more sexually promiscuous and less traditionally bounded than the present? How would a clever author have to rearrange details of plot and character to conceive of a Bertha-analogue character who provided a significant plot impediment without the institution of marriage? At the very least, I expected Jenna and Ravensbeck to participate in a more explicitly sexual relationship than Jane and Rochester (by which I mean not that I expected them to jump each other after a relatively short acquaintance, but that I expected them to at least allow themselves to think about it, something the narrative conventions of the Victorian novel more or less forbade Charlotte Bronte to do). However, in this, as in my desire to see a retelling that managed to find a suitable replacement for the marriage plot, I was disappointed; the courtship aspect of Shinn's novel is nearly as Victorian in its sensibilities as the original. The wedding vows might require the characters to swear that neither of them are aliens whose interbreeding with humans has been forbidden, but beyond that, it's a ceremony like any other.

I could go into even more depth about the multiple minute differences of plot, style, and character between Jenna Starborn and Jane Eyre, but I think I've gone far enough now to prove my Rule 2 of retellings, and anything else I have to say will probably consist primarily of whining that should really have been silenced by Rule 1. Jenna Starborn isn't Jane Eyre, but it does manage to ask some interesting questions, whether intended by the author or not, and makes me see Jane Eyre in a newer, clearer light -- and is no less worth reading for the former than the latter.