A love for
books and mischief is often born in childhood, and it seems possible
that no child in English letters has ever had as much fun pillaging her
father’s library as the young Jane Austen; certainly no other child has
left such a record of her resulting spoils. In her juvenile notebooks,
Austen logs a series of literary performances in various forms that also
serve as a reader’s diary and a partial family scrapbook. Austen began
these sketches around 1787, having survived two stints at boarding
school, neither of which was a model academic experience. At the first,
she and her sister, Cassandra, nearly died of typhoid fever, while the
second was overseen by a one-legged huckster who claimed to be French
and called herself Madame la Tournelle, but who in fact was an
Englishwoman named Sarah Hackett. She couldn’t speak a word of French,
but the imposture of her exotic last name seems to have convinced
various fathers of the gentry that hers was a school where their girls
might learn the European niceties—the sort of school, as Austen would
later write in Emma, “where a reasonable quantity of
accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might
be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little
education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.” The peg leg, at
least, was real.
Instead, Austen’s true education was in
the family library, which she approached as a young marauder who marked
her favorites with wicked parody. This period of artistic
apprenticeship, beginning in earnest when Austen was 12, includes some
of the most vigorous short comedy in English prose. These days, to the
uninitiated, Austen is remembered as an artist of manners, a prim
moralist, a feminist avant la lettre, or merely a kindly
domestic ironist—or more likely some mixture of all these. But in
childhood, hers was a dark imagination, where she applied the cadences
of 18th-century moral writing and popular melodramatic novels to
narrating tales of viciousness and dissipation. As her family would
emphasize almost to the point of annoyance after her death, the young
novelist loved Alexander Pope’s moral epistles and Samuel Johnson’s
moral essays even more, but the truth is she was an eclectic (and
certainly not a squeamish) reader who devoured the bestsellers of the
day, some of them rather lurid for preteen consumption. Like Catherine
Morland in Northanger Abbey, the young Austen read French
romances and all manner of Gothic novels, the juiciest of which were
heavy on rape, incest, and grisly death. George Austen may have been a
clergy man, but he was hardly censorious, and his daughter read what she
pleased, whatever her siblings and Victorian descendants might claim
thereafter. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/how-i-became-a-jane-austen-superfan/
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