See Jane Stitch

I’ve caught the Jane Austen bug after so many years of saying I didn’t like her books at all – who wants to read the minutiae of social discourse, I used to think, of which the sole goal is to arrange a “propitious marriage that secures a profitable future . . .”

 It’s as though one pot of money had been given to the British at the beginning of civilization, and Jane Austen’s characters were charged with the job of making sure it flowed into the proper channels via favorable marriages via influential connections via properly honed qualities and tempers. Money is an unwieldy river that needs coaxing and damming up and guidance lest it go astray.  Marriage is the levee.

For the young woman poised on the brink of marriage, time is a blank canvas to be used for long walks of discovery through meadows, daily practice sessions on the pianoforte, daydreaming at the embroidery hoop, social discourse at a ball, lace making and sewing, and much practice in the female art of letter writing.  One Austen heroine spends her time “nicely dressed sitting on a sofa doing some long piece of needlework of little use and no beauty.” Austen’s books chart the meanderings, the twists and turns, and the flood walls encountered by young women as they navigate toward this singular goal.

I did not enjoy Jane’s writing back in my early years as a mother when time was so hurried and my own love of writing was in holding for nearly two decades . . . and every minute was earmarked for something practical such as folding laundry or feeding a sourdough or . . . never mind.  Every minute was earmarked.

 When I read Austen now, however, I no longer resent the young woman’s expanse of time, but rather laud her for it and rest humorously in the suspension of time she endures.  Enjoy it while you can, I say.  I immerse myself in that useless needlepoint – for the supreme pleasure of watching Jane stitch.

In Jane’s world, a visit to a relative 30 miles away was meant to last no less than three weeks and more politely three months.  Her heroine's time was spent in all of the above mentioned ways, adding a broadened social circle that might likely result in a marriage proposal before she returned home.  Letters traveled, giving the news that some rich relative was sick, and by the time it reached his heirs, the old man might be buried.  A fortnight later, when all ‘hopefuls’ had gathered round for the reading of the will, they’d find out which lucky soul had inherited all the wealth (think male and oldest and nephew – nephews seem to inherit quite often in her books).  The rest would go home dejected and anxious as to where one’s resources might be cultivated next.

Refinement, discourse, position, title, civility, eloquence, approbation, disapprobation, means, defilement – these are the words she uses on every page, words that make all the difference in one’s social standing.  The discussions, habits, and carefully observed gestures of her characters, most of them derived from her own circle of friends and relatives, are mulled and cogitated and rehearsed again and again through page after page – and the only plot that underpins all these nuances is for the girl to be married well.  Most of her heroines do so, even as some of them equivocate and consider their losses and gains.

 Jane Austen herself must have thought daily about such losses and gains.  Her own parents would have loved for their aging daughter, nice looking enough, to finally say yes to one of the lucrative suitors who came her way. She did say yes once, just to make everyone happy, but changed her mind the next morning.  If a young woman married well, her entire birth family might be snared from the fate of having to dig their own potatoes (that phrase is spoken by Jane’s mother in the movie, "Becoming Jane").

 It is believed that Jane actually fell in love with a young man once – but he was not an eldest son and she was the seventh child with no stipend to bring to the marriage – therefore the connection was not “sensible.”

 Jane wasn’t thinking straight for her times.  Something in her made her think that marriage ought to be about love.  Some of her heroines have the same problem.  But Jane wasn’t stupid either.  Her own family tottered on the fence of having to dig their own potatoes every day.  Poverty is a real live wretch that lasts forever, maybe even longer than love.  She knew this.  Her first published book, Sense and Sensibility, is all about that internal struggle – the emotional versus the practical.  If only the two could be combined . . . and that’s why Jane wrote books, I’m convinced.

 Most of her heroines do get married off – for both love and money.  It must have satisfied her to make it that way.  But in our author’s real life, neither was to be her fate.  You see, there was another problem, as Jane saw it.  Jane really liked to write – and those real women in her circle, more than a few, either died in childbirth or gave birth year after year as though taunting fate with such a prospect.  There were others who had died in a different sort of way before childbirth took them – that is to say, they died to their girlhood dreams and pleasures.  One favorite niece "died" to the book she had nearly completed writing under Aunt Jane’s encouragement.  There’s no copy in existence, but there is a letter to her Aunt Jane which ‘closes the book’ on writing forevermore – for she was “a wife and mother now.” A letter back from Aunt Jane offers heartfelt condolences.  By that age, already a published author and resigned spinster, Jane must have understood the gravity of those early life decisions she had made unwittingly.

 I haven’t read all of her books yet.  I’ve started those at the beginning of her career when she was prime marriageable age, and I’m working my way chronologically to the one she left unfinished, Sanditon, when she died at age 42.  I hope she has it all figured out by then; many generations of women are counting on her.