Where to begin? I suppose perhaps I should start around the time I was twenty. I am not sure what prompted me, and maybe I was slightly older. It all began with Jane Eyre, and I am not sure how since it began before my study of literature. I had wanted to take a victorian literature class at university, but the semesters offered never fit my electives. It was not until grad school that I took the class.. However, Jane's attitude and repartee was brilliant to me:
"your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.”
Text here:
The context at the time was in a relationship where I was not getting what I needed, but felt led along by someone without clear intentions. Obviously, a fault of my not taking more agency myself. As with all of my personal life, my relationship with my mother about this relationship was strange - certainly never honest. However, she latched onto this book, Jane Eyre, and started collecting and giving me multiple editions over a few years.
It was a few years later I was not only reading Jane Austen, because it started long before Jane Austen. I was reading the thoughts, philosophies, and writing that would have been her influences. It began with Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith, and Richardson. Of course they were frequently debating things like Pope, and Frances Burney responded to some of their mansplaining moral instruction novels: Clarissa, Vicar of Wakefield. All of this was the backdrop of my studies before coming back to Austen.
Clarissa text:
Vicar of Wakefield:
My takeaway from Austen was a study of men, seeing in the modern time and age the same faces and behaviour patterns, however less dressed up with the fancy world readers romanticise. The context of my life during this time was taking a break from dating, but having a manager at work stalking me because his words "he liked a challenge," but in everyone else's "he didn't know what to do when he was told no by a woman." He came with a reputation I decided I did not need in my life trying to heal from the strange relationship, and - I was less aware of the motivation - from sexual assault. I remember one of the first conversations I had with him when he tried to talk to me about Ivanhoe. I had it next to me in the kitchen while preparing my lunch, and he picked it up and said "I have the same edition. How do you like it." I said "That's nice," took the book and my lunch, and walked away. No matter how many times I shot him down, nevertheless he persisted. I was a bit of a snob at that time in my life, thinking surely he would never be able to match my intellectual thought about my readings due to his art degree. And so one time I decided to show him exactly how much of a challenge he was up against.
At that time, I was reading Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke. As he was wont to do, he sat down to ask me about my thoughts. I unleashed on him exactly what he asked for, and was quite deserving, if I do say so. I went into the literary references and correlation to other contemporaries, and inspiration quoted by C.S. Lewis. His eyes glazed over, and I was satisfied internally, thinking "I told you so." Nevertheless, he persisted.
During that time of his persistent harassment, a young administrative assistant who was 23 started working there. I saw her immediate fixation on him, and went out to drinks with her and another young woman who was a recent hire, who I quite liked, to pass along the warning about his behaviour. Little did I know that she would interpret the warning as my interest in the guy and place a target on my back. I do not remember at what point I returned to Austen, but that episode in my life did not require it, since I could watch it play out in front of me.
"The loo table, however, did not appear. Mr. Darcy was writing, and Miss Bingley, seated near him, was watching the progress of his letter, and repeatedly calling off his attention by messages to his sister. Mr. Hurst and Mr. Bingley were at piquet, and Mrs. Hurst was observing their game.
Elizabeth took up some needlework, and was sufficiently amused in attending to what passed between Darcy and his companion. The perpetual commendations of the lady either on his handwriting, or on the evenness of his lines, or on the length of his letter, with the perfect unconcern with which her praises were received, formed a curious dialogue, and was exactly in unison with her opinion of each."
Text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm
At one point, I believe I witnessed the administrative assistant draping herself over his desk doodling on something or admiring something he had done. Unironically, as if she was completely unaware that someone had written a description of her two hundred years prior. During that time, I myself saw myself in this unrealistic dowdy governess role. Eventually this situation became so toxic I realized that it was not the reality of the attraction and social place I held, and it was ridiculous that I had this toxic energy and time sucking situation forced on me. So I left.
I do know I included more of Austen's works in my study of the time, along with many other studies of social interaction fictionalised by writers in the 19th century. My first novel was meant to be a similar social study titled "Men and Women," and when I started writing it, it was with a very different character and premise than originally outlined by me during this stint. I did not start it until much later, in a different episode of my life, but when I told my literature graduate professor, he was inspired by my conversion to modern times. The goal being to take the lessons learned from Austen and translate them for the readers who get lost in their romantization of the time period.
It was this later era when I was in a situation where I invested heavily and felt betrayed by friends and family support who sabotaged my success with an agenda to give up on overcoming obstacles. This real life great love instance is why out of all of Austen's work, I most closely identify with Persuasion. The book opens with a father and daughter taking stock of their family pedigree, and instead of running from it, I owned my own. As a guy friend with his own family history observed, and named. And in the words of Jane Austen, put my social standing in a different light, though it is unknown to me whether it came to play in my story. The man in question is rumoured to have met me and decided it might be love, with some knowledge of our shared background. The truth of the matter is we met the first time as teenagers, but he did not speak to me. His father had wanted him to, and my relationship with his father very likely worked on my behalf.
However, the longer that situation has endured, the more I can say assuredly, how Jane Austen's social commentary falls flat, and none of the stories of warning of moral virtue are able to prepare any reader for reality. She was, as one might describe, protected from the harsher parts of reality, and living under the umbrella of "benevolent patriarchy," which she was never wholly a critic of. Recently, I saw a new adaptation of Persuasion, and queued it up, only to feel disinterested.
Persuasion text:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm
