Lost in Austen

I just finished reading Among the Janeites: a Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom.  It was a fairly quick read, but its breadth was somewhat surprising;honestly, I was just expecting some breezy commentary on the films, fanfiction, and cheesy Jane Austen tours in England, but the author managed to suss out plenty of interesting topics and colorful characters to interview.  She explores the tension between academics and non-specialist fans (guess who tends to look down on whom?); she probes the issue of what it actually means to be a "fan" of someone who's a pop-culture powerhouse as well as part of the literary canon (is it OK just to like the films?  Are you still a real fan if you've never read Persuasion or Mansfield Park, even though you love Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility?); she tries to achieve, through expensive corsetry, the Empire-waisted look at a JASNA (Jane Austen Society of North America) meeting.

Maybe all great literature is like a mirror held up to the reader, but it seems  Jane Austen offers more fodder than most.  For example, Yaffe interviews a clinical nurse who became convinced  that not only do many of the characters in Austen's novels display traits of borderline personality disorder (in the four types: waif, hermit, queen, witch), but that these characters reflect the actual borderline disorder suffered by Austen's mother.  Unsurprisingly, the life of this woman, Christine Shih, had been shaped by the borderline personality disorder suffered by both of her parents, and she came to see Austen's novels as a way of dealing with the emotional wreckage.  Another woman Jaffe interviews, a speech pathologist, is convinced that many of Austen's characters, like the children she treats, fall somewhere on the autism spectrum.  Chief among these is Mr. Darcy--she suggests that explains his comment to Elizabeth at Lady de Bourgh's house, about how he lacks the ability to converse with strangers.  It's an interesting thesis--they both are--but you get a sense that it's easy to become blinkered, capable of reading the novels only from your parochial perspective. (I enjoy one online commentator's point: "You know, sometimes people aren't autistic...sometimes, people are just dicks.") Or, as one academic put it, a lot of writing on Jane Austen, academic or otherwise, turns out to be "mutilated intellectual autobiography."  Burn.

 I haven't read Mansfield Park or Persuasion (I've seen an unprepossessing film version of the latter, with a young-ish Ciaran Hinds as the male protagonist), so I suppose those will have to go on my reading list.  Not that I think I qualify as an Austen fan at the level of many of the people written about in Yaffe's book; for one thing, I'm not really interested in Austen's own life and times. *shrug*  I am kind of envious of the JASNA members getting together with other people who really love a book you love, who are willing to talk about it on a deeper level than "ooh, Colin Firth is so hot!"  I miss that about college literature courses.  Over the summer I thought about joining a book club that reads classic and contemporary fiction, but they always meet in loud pubs downtown, and I'd prefer something a little more like the book club Phyllis was in, rotating among people's homes (though Phyllis' book club had its own torrid history of feuds and power-grabs, so maybe that's not a great example).  Sean pointed out that a lot of people might not have the space to host, especially if they live in apartments, which is true; god knows we couldn't fit twenty people in here.  Still, how much thoughtful conversation can you have shouting over a plate full of wings at Christy's?  The East Haven library does one classic read a month, though the next couple of months' books don't really interest me. March's book is Larch Rise to Candleford; maybe I'll join in for that one.