Jane Austen died in 1817. She wrote brilliantly about a world that was psychologically and socially a million miles away from present-day America, in the kind of stately, exact English that nobody speaks or writes any more. She seems an unlikely candidate for media celebrity in the twittering age, yet her works are still enormously popular. Some people have even read the books, but the real boost to her celebrity has come from a flood of movies and TV specials. Austen’s characters and plots have been all over our screens in the past few years, with nice costumes, beautiful settings, simplified plots, and lots of soft-focus photography. There have also been pastiches and parodies like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and if you can believe it, Pride and Prejudice goes to Bollywood.
It has been suggested that some people feel starved for romance, and they find it in Jane Austen's stories. This is an extraordinary notion. Jane Austen had little time for romance, and satirized it relentlessly throughout her work. Her portrayal of relationships between women and men is more economic than romantic. Always in the immediate foreground is the question of money – how much she has and, even more important, how much he has. Economically speaking, a good marriage in the early 1800s was like winning the lottery. It was about as romantic as an investment seminar.
More plausible is the hypothesis that the revival of Jane Austen’s elegant fairy tales reflects a yearning not so much for soft-focus romance as for a return to good manners in everyday life. Edward Rothstein, writing about this in The New York Times suggested that we suffer from "Manners Envy," because good manners imply civility, consideration for others, and all kinds of desirable qualities that are getting hard to find. It certainly would be nice if watching Jane Austen movies brought back the archaic habit of self-control.
Consider, for example, her last novel, “Persuasion.” The heroine Anne Elliot was gently persuaded, and obediently agreed, not to marry the man she loved (Captain Wentworth) because he had no family or fortune. This was a painful though sensible decision based on a rational argument. How old-fashioned is that? Of course it all ended happily with the rediscovery of their love eight years later, by which time Captain Wentworth had had the good sense to become extremely rich. Game over.
My point is not simply that in affairs of the heart, money conquers all – although that’s a theory worth considering. It is that gentle, rational persuasion based on our best interests can lead to a happy ending. Public radio needs money to survive, just like a Jane Austen heroine. Love alone is not enough. It seems vulgar to talk about it, or even think about it, but sometimes we must. Jane Austen would have understood this perfectly and I’m sure that, with her fine understanding of the balance between love and economics, she would have responded to our gentle persuasion in the most practical possible way.
