Book 735: The Jane Austen Society – Natalie Jenner

Talk about a change of pace! I kept putting this off when it came up from my library. I was loving all the MM romance and young adult books I’ve been reading, but I finally just said okay. It was 100% worth it to slow down and take the village life pace to read this and not rush through it like some of the high-intensity romances I’ve read recently.

I’m pretty sure I stumbled across this on bookstagram and new I’d get to it eventually. I don’t discriminate between books inspired by Austen’s works, life or legacy—they’re all fair game to me and each new one I read adds a new dimension to my understanding/enjoyment of Austen and her continued impact on society.

What I loved most about this novel was how perfectly Jenner captured the feel of Chawton. I only got to spend a few hours there a couple of years ago and Jenner made me miss it something I barely got to experience! She balanced village life with such a fictionalized account of such an important historical moment for Austenites that I kept having to go back and check to make sure this wasn’t how it actually happened!

We love Jane Austen because her characters, as sparkling as they are, are no better and no worse than us. They’re so eminently, so completely, human. I, for one, find it greatly consoling that she had us all figured out. (Loc. 686)

Her grounding of the story through Austen’s writing and how those who experience trauma use the writing to move forward with their lives worked really well. I knew about the soldiers reading Austen during the war, but in taking Austen’s “domestic” writings about the everyday life of the landed gentry and using it for those who’ve experienced everyday trauma Jenner reiterated the incredibly complexity of Austen’s writings and their effects on people at all stages of life (and trauma). And setting it in the village of her final home with her fictionalized descendants playing a roll only added to the story. I legitimately LOLed when Jenner had Austen’s descendant Frances admit she preferred the Brontës writing to Austen’s, it was just the best tongue-in-cheek response ever:

Two thousand books. And all now just for her. Even more ironically, she had only read a few of them. Mainly the Brontës, the Georges Eliot and Gissing, and Thomas Hardy and Trollope. Over and over again. (Loc. 1,032)

Some people find it to be too strange and unrelentingly depressing, a little too much of the supernatural at times. But I think Villette is Charlotte Brontë’s real masterpiece. (Loc. 2,367)

And then as if she was pandering to me specifically, Jenner included what I could only hope was a veiled reference to a gay character in Chapter 20 and I crossed my fingers, because it hadn’t been determined another character was gay, but I’d suspected from other context clues, and the last line of the book was just so adorably perfect with the two gay characters getting their happily ever after, I just sighed. There were three other happily ever afters too (not just pairing off) that were just icing on the cake.

By taking a few chances, Adam was starting to see that life never completely gave up on you, if you didn’t give up on it. (Loc. 3,988)

I also found Jenner’s observations on Austen and fans of Austen, via her characters, to be incredibly apt and insightful

Part of the comfort they derived from rereading was the satisfaction of knowing there would be closure—of feeling, each time, an inexplicable anxiety over whether the main characters would find love and happiness, while all the while knowing, on some different parallel interior track, that it was all going to work out in the end. Of being both one step ahead of the characters and one step behind Austen on every single reading. But part of it was the heroism of Austen herself, in writing through illness and despair, and facing her own early death. If she could do it, Dr. Gray and Adeline each thought, then certainly, in homage if nothing else, they could, too. (Loc. 646)

‘I always find it interesting how Jane Austen’s fans are always romantics to some degree—when I swear she wrote those books with a goose quill dipped in venom,’ Yardley was saying over a paper cup of black coffee from the train station café. (Loc. 2,847)

Clearly, this book is a love letter to Jane Austen and those who adore her, but even more than that it’s in the guise of a story similar to Austen’s own writings. Sure, it’s a love letter to rural village life, but at the same time Jenner sets out to critiquing gender norms (female teachers taking too much initiative) and societal expectations and “norms” of the time (LGBT characters, “generational” gaps in relationships, bucking familial expectations), while not having the characters buck the norms so much that it becomes problematic, see where I’m going? Basically, Jenner wrote a fictionalized version of what could’ve happened to create today’s Austen legacy through an Austen lens fully of happily ever afters and perfection. Now I’m confused, but that somehow makes sense in my head.

Finally, I dedicate this book to Jane Austen, for all she has done for me in the past, present, and future, for the centuries of enjoyment her books have given the world, and for the example she has set for us all in creating art in the face of uncertainty, illness, and despair. (Loc. 4,389, Acknowledgments)

Recommendation: This was a wonderful read and a definite change of pace for me. I found the story to start off a little slow, but as I settled into Jenner’s writing and storytelling style, I found them both engaging and approachable and the pace worked perfectly for the setting. Any time an author can make you miss a place you’ve never been to (or only briefly visited) you know they’ve written something special.

Opening Line: “He lay back on the low stone wall, knees pulled up, and stretched out his spine against the rock.”

Closing Line: “On beautiful spring weekends, he and Yardley could be seen sitting atop the old hay wagon, their dog Dixon between them, riding about the village fields under the golden dappled sun.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes from The Jane Austen Society
“Because—and he still did not understand how people like his brothers could not see this—inside the pages of each and every book was a whole other world. He could disappear inside that world whenever he needed to—whenever he felt the outside world, and other people, pressing in on him—a pressure from social contact and expectations that was surely routine for everyone else, but affected him much more intensely and inexplicably.” (Loc. 124)

“During the Great War, shell-shocked soldiers had been encouraged to read Jane Austen in particular—Kipling had coped with the loss of his soldier son by reading her books aloud to his family each night—Winston Churchill had recently used them to get through the Second World War. Adeline and Dr. Gray had always loved Jane Austen’s writing and could talk together for hours about her characters, but her books now eased their own grief, too.” (Loc. 642)

“He loved Elizabeth Bennet instead—loved her in a way he had not thought possible with a fictional character. Loved the way she always spoke her mind but with such humanity and humour. He wished he could be her—wished he always had the perfect, tart remark at the end of his tongue, the ability to draw people to him, and the strength to assert himself with his mother. He saw Elizabeth as the lynchpin to the entire Bennet family, the one whose boldness and emotional intelligence was keeping her own family from the brink. But she never flaunted herself as a saviour—she just loved so thoroughly, and so wisely, that the saving of others was the inevitable result.” (Loc. 778)

“. . . that some of us are given too much to bear, and this burden is made worse by the hidden nature of that toll, a toll that others cannot even begin to guess at.” (Loc. 1,346)

“Exactly. The humanity—the love for people—mixed with seeing them for who they really are. Loving them enough to do that. Loving them in spite of that.” (Loc. 1,491)’

“And that’s exactly what Austen gives us. A world so a part of our own, yet so separate, that entering it is like some kind of tonic. Even with so many flawed and even silly characters, it all makes sense in the end. It may be the most sense we’ll ever get to make out of our own messed-up world. That’s why she lasts, like Shakespeare. It’s all in there, all of life, all the stuff that counts, and keeps counting, all the way to here, to you.” (Loc. 1,667)

“Mimi mentioned often a Henry Crawford from Austen’s books, but of all the volumes on her bookshelves Mansfield Park was the thickest, and even Mimi couldn’t sell the plot. A bunch of young people half-related to each other putting on a play so that they can make out with all the people they are not supposed to, was the best she could do. Even for Jack, that would not be enough to get him to read an actual book. Which was too bad, because contained within the pages of Mansfield Park was the playbook for making a good woman fall for a cad.” (Loc. 2,130)

“He had gone to work every day merely to survive, saving for himself a few hours every night to disappear into fictional worlds of others’ making. He was hoping to find some answers inside these books, answers for why he didn’t care about some things and cared too much about others. He had always felt different from everyone else around him, different in a way that was so essential to his being that it practically blocked everything else out, it was so huge. It was as if a whole other world were inside him, so big that he couldn’t see it without somehow getting completely out of his own way. But there was no one to help him do that, and try as he might, he couldn’t do it on his own. Not with his innate temperament, the lack of family support, or the particular lessons he had been forced to learn so far in life.” (Loc. 2,991)

“Austen saw what lack of money meant for the women in her life, and this consuming fear was what was telegraphed most loudly in all her books, hidden behind the much more palatable workings of the marriage plot. Austen knew that no amount of charity or largesse from their male relatives could ever grant women real independence. Yet, through her genius—a genius that no amount of money or power could buy because it was all inside her head, completely her own—she had accrued some small degree of autonomy by the end. Enough to work, live, and die on her own terms. It really was a most remarkable achievement, the legacy of those six books, revised and spurred on and cast solely by her own two hands, with no man with inevitably more power or money getting in the way.” (Loc. 3,188)

“For the world that really existed demanded the pain, and the living with it, and would never let you go even when everything else fell away.” (Loc. 3,241)