The Problem With Jane Austen

(for Canadian readers only)

I'll start by saying that Jane Austen is one of the best writers in the English language. But a lot of people find her difficult (and by this I mean that a lot of students don't seem to enjoy her, especially males. But more on them, later.) There are a few reasons for all of that, but I don't accept them. Surprise, surpise.

So, here it is. My essay on how reading Jane Austen is patriotic. (Again, Canadian readers are the least likely to be offended by this post. I say least.)

British English started forming long ago, hundreds of years before even Shakespeare. In the 1200s to 1300s French was the language of the aristocracy, thanks to the vigour and success of William of Normandy and the happy aristocrats that followed him in 1066. But in over those centuries there was also a growing resentment of the supremacy of a foreign language, as well as the awareness that French was more civilized. So, English writers (like Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales) were revolutionary in pursuing English as a proper language for literature: until then it was only a language for peasants.

But as they wrote these writers were also finessing English, adding words (Latin and French) and altering its style to suit a more civilized mode. (The peasants still spoke - peasant. Don't worry.) As an example, it was considered a virtue in Latin to be able to express a complex and elegant thought with a similarly elegant and complex sentence. Cicero was a master of this; some of his sentences are a paragraph long. But they were beautiful and they made sense. Latin writers also enjoyed using ironic understatement and double-negatives (sometimes at the same time) and the British eventually took on a surprisingly similar tone in their language. Hence the wordy, ironic, dry British prose that we so often can spot but not understand.

Now, fast forward to the mid-twentieth century. An American group of writers, including such greats (ahem) as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, broke from this old mode in favour of shorter, more direct language. Hemingway in particular, who was a fan of boxing and bullfighting (not to mention drinking and getting married) felt that writing should be like wrestling: strong, visceral work with no room for elegant rejoinder. Almost all our literature today is a child of the American system of Hemingway et al. And admittedly, the style is easy to read and powerful in its own way. But it has two problems. Three. (Three, milord.) Right.

First, it makes it hard to approach British literature. When you're used to short, pre-chewed senetences expressing short, pre-chewed thought, Victorian sentences are hard.

Second, and more specifically: it makes Jane Austen seem like a burden rather than a blessing for young Canadian students. So they often avoid it.

Third, and for Canadian students only: An addiction to American style prose makes your mind a small colony to the United States; your thoughts become their thoughts. Our history as a country, whatever your ethnicity (and I'm a Francophone for the love of all that's holy, and I'm writing this) is decidedly British. So, at least we have an excuse to follow one mode rather than the other, since we have yet (I say yet) to be American. Reading something like Jane Austen is more than a wonderful literary experience: for the Canadian it can be a step towards reclaiming a lost heritage and exercising some real independence from the Yanks (God Bless 'Em.) Seriously.

So, an unlikely entreaty: Free yourselves! Free your minds from the oppressive burdens of lazy prose! Revitalize a past that is British in focus rather than American! Read Austen! Read Robertson Davies! Read Shakespeare, Chaucer, O'Brian, Milton! And maybe, just maybe, your mind will slowly awaken to subtlety and the joy of an English language that was, once upon a time, dry, clever, and mischievous. I dare you.