In The Divine Jane, Fran Lebowitz says, “Any artist who has that quality of timelessness has that quality because they tell the truth. Obviously, details change. . . . Her perceptions don’t date because they are correct. And they will remain that way until human beings improve themselves intrinsically; and this will not happen.”
Witness Sir Walter and Miss Elliot confronting their financial situation at the beginning of Persuasion: “. . . he had gone so far even as to say, ‘Can we retrench? does it occur to you that there is any one article in which we can retrench?’—and Elizabeth, to do her justice, had, in the first ardor of female alarm, set seriously to think what could be done, and had finally proposed these two branches of economy: to cut off some unnecessary charities, and to refrain from new-furnishing the drawing-room; to which expedients she afterwards added the happy thought of their taking no present down to Anne, as had been the usual yearly custom.”
Oh yes, Jane knew what happens when people who have a lot have to face having less.
Do our times make us hunger for truth? Escaping the truth? Both? Lately I’ve read some interesting articles on desire for truth: truth in the bodies of models who walk the catwalk, the eroding and perhaps gone-forever truth of our photographs, the uncanny valley of avatars who look so like the humans (or monkeys) that they are not. Escapism is thriving too, of course—”reality shows,” alcohol sales, zombies, Mafia Wars, and Farmville, to name a few.
I like reading fiction because it’s easier than non-fiction. In non-fiction, you have to always be evaluating what the author says: is this true? Or does the author have some agenda? But in fiction, you just know whether it’s true: if it isn’t, something cracks, and you put the book down. Or did Jane actually teach me what is true in human relationships? This is possible. And in fiction there is of course the element of escapism: the characters seem to have so much time, and servants, and barouche-landaus. Their problems do not affect your life (except in certain modern adaptations.) The problems of non-fiction are all too depressingly real.
Do you read Jane Austen to find truth or to escape reality? Or both?
Photo credit: ©2009 Heather Dever. All rights reserved.
austenacious 
I think that if *I* were having a dinner party with Jane, I’d invite Cornel West. How’s that for meta? But I love that guy.
(Okay, maybe not. I do like the idea of Mary Wollstonecraft, though I worry that Mary would take up all the conversation time. STEP OFF, MARY.)
As for the question you *actually* asked, I suppose that I read Jane for both reasons, but primarily for the truth. My most intimate Jane moments happen with her rightness about, say, Elinor Dashwood at the end of S&S, or, since I’m currently reading Persuasion, about the way Anne feels watching Wentworth from afar. She just knows, a hundred percent.
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Both! I read Jane to escape the trapping of modernism and indulge in a romanticized world of country lanes, carriage rides, and a tangible (if stifling) code of morality. At the same time Jane’s observations of human nature are the most astute ever recorded. Since I first picked up Northanger Abbey as a preteen she has been my guide to becoming the person I want to be, in tune with the needs and motivations of others while being self-reliant and true to my own sense of right.
I couldn’t agree more with Miss Ball’s assessment of Anne Elliot – she has to be one of the most psychologically astute characters ever created, more than 50 years before the advent of Freud!
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If I read Austen to escape, it’s not reality I’m running from, but chaos. For me there is something deeply comforting about the order inherent in her fictional worlds. Even when the plot is at its most disorderly–say, when Lydia runs away or when Marianne falls gravely ill–you know that the drive for order will ultimately prevail. People’s bodies and hearts will heal (unless they are standing in the way of an inheritance, like Frank Churchill’s benefactor, who conveniently pops off) and the right people will finally come together in the end.
Life, sadly enough, doesn’t always work that way.
And oh, Miss Ball, is not Persuasion sublime?
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I read Austen because I recognize truth that I already know in her, but then she builds upon that to truths I don’t know – expanding my world. And so I learn that Emma (and myself) can change for the better, that keeping one’s word is good even when hard with Elinor, that love is painful yet so very powerful with Anne, and that changing one’s mind is often a good thing with opinionated Lizzy.
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Rosemary, it is indeed–I’ve read it before, but I think it may be the book of Jane’s that improves the most as I, the reader, age.
(I’m just at the part where we compare Anne to Mr. Benwick and his dead fiancee, and it’s SO SAD–but she’s so right about the loss of a loved one being the loss of a loved one, whether there’s a death or no. Just lovely, if heartbreaking.)
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