A woman’s works, by Megan McGlynn

I pass the threshold of Barnes & Noble, and immediately I am overwhelmed with the scent of paper and ink. So many titles fill the rows of bookshelves that I cannot imagine how many words exist in this space.

It’s heaven. Truly. 

I pass shelves until I reach a relatively small section, compared to the larger categories with multiple bookshelves dedicated to respective genres. The Classics section is piled high with volumes whose stories have transcended time. Dickens, Shakespeare, Bronte, Fitzgerald.  Austen… 

I stop when I reach her collection. Bound in one large volume are all six of her works. I pick up the heavy volume and my hand cripples beneath its weight. I leaf through the pages, but then turn back to Pride and Prejudice and look to the first page. It’s amazing that only a sentence has lived long past its initial publication in the early nineteenth century. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. 

Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey…  Each of Jane Austen’s works have pioneered a path for other female novelists in an era when woman were unable to do more than marry for financial security. Of course, originally writing anonymously, she did not get the recognition that she so much deserved. 

Jane was a woman well-advanced for her time, and it isn’t surprising that her novels have become the cornerstone for modern works. It isn’t hard to find variations of her work within this store—movies and books, I’ve become familiar with all of them. Biographies aside, other accomplished female novelists have taken her concepts and modernized them.

Yet, I know that this isn’t completely by sheer posthumous acknowledgement. Although for the time it was a scandal, her humorous and cynical prose, while polite, is something that still resonates today. Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, imaginative Catherine Morland and even fragile Fanny Price, I’ve gotten to know each of them personally, both in reality and fiction.

The first time I came across Austen, it wasn’t long after beginning my freshman year of high school. Pride and Prejudice was the first of her novels that I tried and, instantly, I knew that I’d encountered something special. Soon after, I’d devoured Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park and the others. Beginning with her, it was easy to transition to other classic works, but it seemed that I always found myself going back to her. Always.  

 After countless reads, the novel that I find always on my bedside table is Emma. Though she is stubborn and vain, which causes many conflicts in the novel, Emma’s actions are always good-natured.

Austen’s first written novel, though one of the last to be published, is Northanger Abbey’s. Catherine Morland is a character that I most identify with. She has an intense imagination and a desire to be a hero in her own life, like her beloved Gothic romance novels. The strong sense of creativity and imagination that Catherine embodies is a trait that I greatly understand.      

And it isn’t any wonder that Mr. Darcy--a notorious brooding, prideful individual—has been swooned over countless times. Or perhaps that is only a consequence of Collin Firth’s portrayal?  But either way, Mr. Darcy, George Knightly, or even Edmund Bertram have become the stuff of fantasies.   

Actually, Austen’s entire collection has become just that. What I wouldn’t give to live in the English countryside! Albeit not so much in the Regency era, but still—with single men of good fortune in proprietorship of a stately home and in want of a wife. Her happy endings are what drive her readers. 

While Austen never married, the emotion that comes through in her novels is profound. Out of the films that I have viewed, and biographies I read, I am certain, as many scholars and Hollywood have been, that her brief affair with wealthy Tom Lefroy was what drove the plot for Pride and Prejudice. Lefroy, a man of good fortune, and Austen were acquainted through mutual relations. Though at first Austen found him arrogant, love soon blossomed. On several occasions, they agreed to marry but, unlike the happy endings that are experienced by each of Austen’s heroines, Lefroy’s wealthy uncle and benefactor denied his blessing because of Jane’s genteel poverty. Soon, Tom and Jane parted ways and lived separate lives. Without her hardships in romance, and in life—choosing to live by her pen rather than marrying, as so many woman of the time did—I don’t think that her novels would have been as successful, if at all. Her ability to speak to the reader, even centuries later, on circumstances of finance and marriage are issues that woman still struggle with today.

I set down the collection, finding no more use in staring at its pages that I’ve come to memorize.  There are many more books to look at, rather than something I already own. 

I go to different bookshelves, where their genres are printed in white letters against a forest green background—Non-fiction, Contemporary, Young Adult, Biography… I find several books that I am not willing to part with—always a problem when I enter the bookstore. But with some of the novels that catch my eye, it is strange to see that their plots are similar, if not exactly the same, to Ms. Austen’s works.  Bridget Jones’s Diary, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—all different portrayals of Pride and Prejudice.  Austenland… A Jane Austen mystery series…   I’m beginning to see a running theme… Clearly Pride and Prejudice, her most noted work, has formed its own sub-genre. And there are countless others. Is there no more originality?

Clearly not.