Journeying with Jane

Image by Martine from Pixabay

I’ve just borrowed some Jane Austen novels from the library. It’s a long time since I read any Austen, but several screen adaptations of her work are my gold standard for book-to-film adaptations: the gorgeous 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice, Ang Lee’s wonderful 1995 film version of Sense and Sensibility (screenplay by Emma Thompson), and – perhaps the best of all – the sensitive and moving BBC 1995 Persuasion, starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds. Amy Heckerling’s 1995 comedy Clueless also deserves recognition: set in a Californian high school, it’s a delightfully witty riff on Emma, with Alicia Silverstone as the ditzy but lovable Cher.

I haven’t cared for any Austen adaptations since.

Reading Northanger Abbey – it must be 30 years since I last read it – I am struck by how realistic a portrayal of a teenage girl Catherine Morland is. Catherine is naïve, easily impressed and somewhat gullible. She’s also sweet-tempered, genuine, honest, and has strong moral principles that help her learn from her mistakes. (And Henry Tilney is possibly my favourite of all Austen’s heroes, along with Emma’s Mr Knightley.)

Reading an Austen novel is to time-travel. It takes you into such a different world. The England of 1813 – the year in which Pride and Prejudice was finally published – is a different planet from the England of 1913, and certainly the England of 2025. Jane Austen’s characters, at the start of the 19th century, were to see massive social change that they could not have imagined in their own lifetimes. I find this moving. Cultures change, massively so. Human nature doesn’t. The characters of Jane Austen’s novels – whether endearing, honourable and admirable, or ordinary and gossipy, or downright vapid, corrupt and amoral – provide a microcosm of human nature as we experience it every day.

That’s one of the reasons why we should read the classics. Jane Austen was also ground-breaking, a quietly powerful writer who challenged literary and social conventions and changed the novel form forever.

It’s important that we writers read a lot. Reading enriches our imaginations, sharpens our minds and helps us learn from the best – or the worst! – about the art of writing. You may not be into Jane Austen, and that’s fine. I wouldn’t classify myself as a Janeite either. But what are YOUR favourite classics? And by classic I mean anything written up to the 1980s. The 80s, after all, were now 40 years ago.

I’ll leave the final word with Jane’s brother Henry, who wrote this moving tribute to her in his Biographical Notice in the 1817 edition of Northanger Abbey:

‘Jane Austen was buried on the 24th of July, 1817, in the cathedral church of Winchester, which, in the whole catalogue of its mighty dead, does not contain the ashes of a brighter genius or sincerer Christian.’

I’m a Licensed Lay Minister in the Diocese of Rochester. I also work full-time for the United Reformed Church at URC Church House. I wrote a devotional for the anthology Light for the Writer’s Soul, published by Media Associates International, and my short story ‘Magnificat’ appears in the ACW anthology Merry Christmas Everyone.