I blame my first marriage on Jane Austen. Elizabeth Bennet
married for gratitude and esteem, and these were exactly the feelings I
had for my first husband. If they were good enough for Elizabeth,
why wouldn’t they be good enough for me? But I wasn’t Elizabeth; I
was much more like Emma, a far more flawed heroine. The romantic
Emma would never have been satisfied with gratitude and esteem, and
neither was I. To be fair, I know my husband felt the same way, although
I don’t think he blamed Austen for his mistake.
For better or worse, my hasty marriage was simple to undo—at least
with respect to its legal and social aspects. For my next chapter, I
returned to graduate school, pursuing a doctorate in English
literature and specializing in Austen and other novelists of her time.
Had I been a more daring scholar, I might have realized that my
youthful folly had posed some interesting questions: Why did I look to
Austen and her characters for guidance about how to live my own life?
And I’m not, by far, the only one to do this. Surely this trust couldn’t
be separated from the great love I had for Austen. Why do so many
people love Austen so intensely, and in such a personal way?
Austen certainly isn’t the only literary celebrity among
Anglo-American authors whose work inspires interest in her life.
Captivated by the dark drama of Wuthering Heights, we visit
Haworth, home of the famous Brontë family; drawn into Emily Dickinson’s
poetic vision, we tour the unassuming clapboard farmhouse where she
slowly retreated to a life of solitude and poetry. Nor is Austen the
only author who’s created realistic characters. Nathaniel Hawthorne said
that Anthony Trollope’s novels were “just as real as if some giant had
hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with
all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting
that they were made a show of.” Indeed, readers tend to think of
characters as real people when they read, especially when they read
novels. One reason we read for the plot is that we want to find out what
happens to people we’ve come to know and care about.
Nevertheless, Austen exerts a power above and beyond that of
most other authors: She has a fandom rather than a following, readers
whose devotion goes well beyond literary appreciation to infuse many
aspects of their lives. “Janeites,” the term for Austen devotees, are
more like Trekkies than Brontë enthusiasts; many are willing to dress in
Regency fashion at the annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society as
easily as a Trekkie dons the Federation uniform at a Star Trek
convention. Many, like myself, find guidance about how to live their
lives in Austen’s work. But unlike Trekkies, who are more absorbed by
the Star Trek world itself than by the writers who created it, Austen
fans idolize the author as well as her works. Austen is our beloved wise
cousin, our ally in the quest for the good life. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/i-blame-my-first-marriage-on-jane-austen/
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