One
THE BEGINNING
A READER
About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author. I began to read her before sleep every night, and when I woke in the night; I read her at my desk when I couldn’t make progress with the biography I was supposed to have finished writing, and on the slow bus that crossed the river to the ob-gyn. I would come to the end of a scene and turn the leaves back to read it again, almost without noticing. I was not sure what to make of my condition.
Was this a retreat, a seclusion? Life was running thin and fast across unfamiliar land. A baby was coming, a baby that M and I had wanted for a long time. We had known each other for twenty-one years and had been together for four. He and I are both slow to step forward. I had lived and taught in New York, but now we were where he taught, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The rhythm of days altered.
My father was ill. His cancer had recurred two years before I got pregnant. We were going forward, and we were also waiting. Sometimes anticipation was joyful; at other moments, time held like that odd prolongation one may feel right before an accident.
The world careened. When I saw pictures in the news of people who had been hurt, or killed, I was newly aware of the mourners at the edges and beyond the edges of the pictures. Over every person I saw cross the street seemed to hover the anxious thought “That is a mother’s child.” I had stopped teaching and did not have a place to tend. The weather, the seasons, were unpredictable and strange. At night, I folded up the day, as I did the small clothes people were giving us, uneasily.
In the past, as I had worked on writing my first book, and on different series of essays, if anyone happened to ask me what I was reading, I was relieved. To say “I’m reading James Baldwin,” or “I’m reading Russian poets,” was to give the truthful answer one never does to the polite question “How are you?” I had meant, among other things, “I’m paying attention.” Now I sat on the bus that went across the river, with a finger holding a place in Persuasion, and heard again in my mind the sound of the coming baby’s heartbeat. On the pages, there was asperity, definiteness, endings known, bearable, even triumphant. Still, if you had told me that years were coming when I would hardly pick up another serious writer with any real concentration, that the doings of a few English families would come to define almost the entire territory of my reading imagination, and that I would reach a point of such familiarity that I would simply let Austen’s books fall open and read a sentence or two as people in other times and places might use an almanac to soothe and predict, I would have been appalled.
* * *
The baby was born, in spring. Light and sound ran through her, every lamp, every shadow of a leaf. I would walk with her in the streets around our apartment, stepping softly because she would startle awake at any passing car. I tried to be with her, I was with her, in that hushed iridescence. This is still the atmosphere around S, quiet, intent.
In those first months, I would sometimes walk with her into one of two used bookstores, but the books seemed almost to repel me. I bought other copies of Jane Austen’s novels, ones with abstract covers, or interesting prefaces. In the evenings, we would put S to sleep next to our bed, in the cradle that had been mine when I was a baby, and then my sister’s, then, decades later, her daughter’s, and now was ours. M and I had attached a mobile with soft turtles to it; the light from the streetlamp outside would shadow the turtles on the wall, and they would tremble as S moved a little in her sleep. Coming and going in the night, I would read a few lines from Persuasion, and then a few more.
There was repose near Anne Elliot, who was experienced, and thoughtful. She had fallen in love with Captain Wentworth at nineteen, and had been persuaded to give up her engagement, “forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older.” It has happened gradually, “more than seven years were gone since this little history of sorrowful interest had reached its close.” She meets him again at twenty-seven, an age when love and family would have begun to seem unlikely for a woman in Austen’s day. I was thirty-nine, M was forty, we had had two decades of complicated friendship, missed chances, other relationships. It still seemed very near to me, the lives that might have been. I had been with women and men, relationships serious, deep, but I had not been able to promise permanence. Writing from within a household had made me territorial and secretive; I had followed the writing out of the relationships. It had been when I had learned, the first time, that my father had cancer, that I had gone through a year of loneliness and change that I could no longer postpone. Second chances may come when some chances are gone. Austen is always described as witty, stylish, but Persuasion is a melancholy book. Anne is still in mourning for her mother. I loved its odd mixture of sorrow and hope.
* * *
As month followed month, I sometimes said to friends, bookish friends, that Austen was all I read. They were usually somewhere between encouraging and tactful. “Austen is domestic,” one said, looking around at our living room, which was littered with objects that I by then categorized as intended to be chewed on and not safe to chew on. The implication, one I couldn’t entirely disagree with, was that my sphere of life had been constrained more or less to the walls of our house, and that naturally I would read something drawn to similar dimensions.
It was 2012 when S was born. Until I was pregnant and my father was ill, I had preserved my concentration and my apartness by avoiding having a cell phone, but I felt I should be more reachable and bought one. Now, wherever I was, there was elsewhereness. I had been afraid that this would change the shape of my mind, and it did.
I had been a copious keeper of journals. I began instead to take very brief notes, more often visual ones. I photographed my ever-different body in the mirror. Was this self-acceptance or bidding farewell? My mind went on playing over certain phrases from Austen, not the famous epigrams and ripostes, but ones that to me suggested depths. Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice exclaims to herself, “Till this moment I never knew myself.” In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price wonders aloud about memory: “Our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.” Emma’s inner life moves “with all the wonderful velocity of thought.” Anne Elliot in Persuasion speaks out loud to a friend of her experience “of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.” I did not know why these little groups of words felt so clear and whole and inexhaustible, but they did.
MEMOIRS
Last thing at night, I almost always read Austen. But in the morning, I would read the news online. The pictures were of the worst refugee crisis since World War II; of mourning and protests in different American cities after a series of racist killings; of repeated acts of terrorism; and of calamitous forest fires, earthquakes, oil spills, the end of tigers, of frogs, of polar bears, of the migration of the monarchs. At the beginning of these years, I did not think that an even darker period of national and international life might be coming, but the world was full of foreboding signs. I began to read one other thing: memoirs.
In my reading life, I had, to this point, avoided memoirs. I had taught what is called creative nonfiction at universities and colleges for nearly ten years, and at first, I had been quite sharp in discouraging my students from writing about themselves. I wanted them to look outward. I taught them to write about history, rivers, art, but could not avoid noticing that many of their best pieces began from their own experiences. One of the students had grown up on the Navajo Nation in what is now called Arizona; another had grown up working on urban farms in abandoned lots in downtown Detroit; many had been through violence; several had survived cancer; most struggled bravely for money and time. My students were eighteen, and fifty-four, and eighty. Over years, I learned to see how their stories brought the world, and now that I had stopped teaching, their stories were often with me.
A few months after S was born, my friend Jessica gave me Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, about Lamott’s first year of being a single mother, and about the death of her best friend. I read that straight through, laughing and crying. A number of months later, I took the train for a rare overnight trip to New York. I didn’t even bother to bring a book, I was reading so little. Missing Austen, I stood in the Penn Station bookstore, contemplating aspects of Austen devotion that I still thought were quite different from my own reading—P. D. James’s Pemberley and also Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I chose instead Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue.
On the train home, I read Mphahlele’s memoir, published in 1959—of growing up, first in the rural village of Maupaneng, and then in a condition of poverty and police brutality in the restricted township of Marabastad, Pretoria, in apartheid South Africa. The book made the constraint and motion of the train car indelible. Mphahlele worked to make sense of his own history, “beginning to put into their proper places the scattered experiences of my life in Pretoria.” Reading, I saw the world assembled again, differently, with room for things I had seen and heard, this world in which S would grow up.
At home in Cambridge, I would sometimes sit at my desk and try to see what my students had been doing. I thought that my view of history and rivers and art was actually a lot like their ideas of memoir. I had always been interested in letters, and diaries, in what felt like private history. It was as if my students and I believed in a vast tapestry of the inner lives of all the people who had ever lived, and we were trying to weave every figure into it, our own and everyone else’s.
As the Austen years went on, I accumulated shelves of memoirs. Most of the time, reading memoirs seemed contemporary, and like it might be the opposite of reading Austen. I had noticed, but not looked into, something Anne Elliot says in Persuasion. Anne recommends to a new friend that he should read “memoirs of characters of worth and suffering.” Another phrase of Austen’s that I put in my pocket like a stone.
* * *
The people I knew took it as a given that the domesticity of Austen was isolated from the wide world and its violence, and they were charitable about what they assumed was my impulse to hide away at the end of messy days. If they were women without children they said “That sounds delightful,” or even “I want to do that,” and the tone was like that of a well person saying to an invalid that we all deserve a little time at a spa. If they were men with grown children, they nodded in confirmation, and the gesture meant “You are in a woman’s situation, and you must make the most of it.” Sometimes they were couples with young children, bravely undertaking their new life by reading out loud together, and then I found that they were often reading Austen, too, but when they said “Delightful … like Mozart … no trouble…,” that didn’t make me feel better.
In the first Austen years, I didn’t even argue with my friends in my head, I just felt a dim detachment in my mind that was myself, not yet insisting that there was more to it, but feeling that insistence taking shape. Austen’s subject, I would be able to say years later, is not women embroidering on sofas but life with other people, and, if you are reading again and again, she will not really let you forget this.
“Comfort reading,” one intellectual said briskly when I, some springs ago, after a little hesitation, once again confessed that Austen was all I read. It is another kind of comfort, not, I think, the kind my friend meant, that the people who live in Austen’s rooms know that much of the time will is all one has to work with, that there is often not going to be guidance, that one will wait a long time for understanding to come and will have acted, over and over and probably not for the best, before it arrives. These are repeated lessons of being a parent and of watching a parent sicken and die.
A DEATH
The summer after S was born, my father began to have trouble breathing. When his cancer had recurred, he had retired, precipitously, from the university where he had worked for his whole career, studying organizations, and the ways people work and play together. He had grown interested in how much you can understand about people and relationships by watching what they do habitually, and he was often drawing our attention to the things we do correctly without giving them much thought—driving without accidents, walking to work without getting lost, even explaining so that we make sense, listening so that other people do.
In the first couple of years after the cancer recurred, he had undertaken new research. And he and my mother, a professor of theater and a director, traveled together, as they loved to do. They were able to be with my sister in the fall and then with me in the spring, when our first children were born. The symptoms came on late that summer; he couldn’t get his breath, his back was very painful, taking a walk became hard.
In what seemed a matter of months, my father’s life tore from his hands. He died eight months after S was born. My father and I had been very close. I did not know what to do.
Grief runs through the whole of life and leaves nothing untouched. A voice on the car radio, a knife in the kitchen drawer, each carries a thought of the dead. The baby was so little, and I did not want her to feel the death, and the fear of death, that I knew I was imparting to the objects in our house. At the same time, I was also, sometimes, less afraid of death, and beginning to have ideas about how people continue in the world, and I wanted to be able to tell her about that, how it was that I would be with her when death comes, and after. I wished that I could talk to my father a little more, and that from this I would learn what to say.
When this feeling was strong, I turned to Austen, but it was not obvious why. She doesn’t talk much about mortality, and she wasn’t a writer my father particularly thought about. He read widely, but not novels, and I only remember one conversation with him in which I raised Jane Austen. It is my mother whom I dimly remember talking about Austen with, as I first rushed through all six novels in high school. Another woman important to me, the woman with whom I did psychoanalysis for five years, was also an avid Austen reader. Reading Austen was a way to stay near to writing women who had watched over me, as I now felt responsible to do for our child. Which also seemed peculiar in its way, since Austen hardly writes about children. She does, though, write about growth, and about death, rupture, and imagination. Even so, for a long time, I thought of her books as mere comedies, and all of the same kind.
On any given night, I would read any one of them—any one of five of them, really, for I only looked into Northanger Abbey. But, for each of the novels I read repeatedly, there were concentrated reasons within what seemed diffuseness. When I began to write about Austen’s books, I saw some of what I had asked of each one.
* * *
Here is a woman, a reader, in winter, reading Persuasion. In the spring, she has a baby. She and her husband and the baby, her father and her mother, all go out to walk together. The next winter, her father is hospitalized. She and her husband and the baby go home for the last week of his illness. She brings Mansfield Park. For her, Mansfield Park is a book of constriction and breadth. Sometimes it seems a painfully muted book. Later, when she has thought more, she will see how, in its rooms, memory is accompanied by forgetting.
The reader’s father dies. There is a memorial service, at which she and her sister both speak. She comes back to the life she has had. For the first year, she reads Sense and Sensibility, about two sisters, who are going through the first year after their father’s death. She is struggling to think about her father’s death, she and her sister both are; they are planning to have second children, whom their father knew nothing of. The reader wants to begin writing again.
She unfolds Jane Austen’s novels like a map. She is pregnant a second time. And now it is Pride and Prejudice—a book about changing one’s sense of time, and reading again—that goes with her to the hospital. When the second baby can sit up, and the weather is warm enough to take him for a walk, she thinks she is probably done with Jane Austen. She plans to write an essay about reading Jane Austen and mark the conclusion. But they move to a new city. There is an election and the world changes. Only now, two children growing up around them, does she begin to really read Emma, and then, again, Mansfield Park.
Emma and Mansfield Park are important to each other. She cannot shake the sense that between the two of them she will find it—whatever of the past she must retrieve, whatever of the future she must imagine. She will write until she finds it. She tries one way, another way. It will be done this season, next season, next year. Four years go by.
She is always, and still, reading Persuasion. She loves Persuasion. It is not the most brilliant or elegant or formally demanding, but it seems to know her, and all of them, so well. It has the depth of dreams, and like dreams it is incomplete, and she cannot really understand it.
WRITERS IN THE WORLD
Over time, I discovered that many writers I admired had written about reading Austen. I came upon a series of short essays that Ta-Nehisi Coates had posted in the midst of the experience. After some lines considering how Austen brings Mr. Darcy across, he remarks that it is “a portrait without a face, a portrait that, for me, needs no face.” Something collaborative is at work. He is thinking of an artist, Teresa Jay, and a painting of hers called Hide No Seek. In the painting, “the girl’s face is obscured by a tree, and that interruption is an appeal to, a place-holder for, our imagination. The picture seemingly ends, but just beyond the border is a place for me, a place where the thing becomes mine.”
These odd spaces, in which the writer and reader both may be present, not necessarily mingled but each needing the other, in these thinner spaces behind, almost within, the pages, a reader may place her own memories, or a sense of the troubled world. Space that will open for a writer who lives in New York and is soon to begin making the case for reparations, and for another in Tehran, trying to decide whether to leave the Islamic Republic.
In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi writes of having resigned from her last academic post, about her struggle with “the tyranny of time and politics.” She formed a private seminar, later, wrote her “memoir in books.” In their clandestine meetings, she and her students chose to read, among other books, Pride and Prejudice. “Every great book we read,” Nafisi remembered, “became a challenge to the ruling ideology … Nowhere was this challenge more apparent than in the work of Jane Austen.” Why was that—because, she says, Austen had sharp ideas of individual freedom, an incredibly fine sense of the relationship between the public and the private, and something else, something peculiar, to do with voices, and with memory. “If a sound can be preserved in the same manner as a leaf or a butterfly, I would say that within the pages of my Pride and Prejudice, that most polyphonic of all novels … is hidden like an autumn leaf the sound of the red siren.”
Austen’s novels offer strange friendship; in their company you may feel more yourself, look out at the world with clear sight.
* * *
Jane Austen was born in 1775, drafted her first three novels as a very young writer in the 1790s, went through a relatively quiet period until about 1809, and then, in a great stream of revision and creativity, between 1811 and 1815, published Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. She became ill, and died in 1817, leaving several manuscripts in varying states of completion. After her death, her family titled and published two novels—Persuasion, which, she had written in a letter that year, was “ready for publication,” and Northanger Abbey, which she had written was not.
Austen lived, and wrote, and died, in a period that must have seemed to her almost as convulsive as ours does to us. For much of her adult life, England was under threat of invasion, was fighting the Napoleonic Wars, and was pouring its resources into building a maritime empire of rapacious and complex power. There were shortages of food and of basic necessities. Austen and her brothers and sister grew up in an England in which merchants were turning to more systematic exploitation of workers, and she observed in the aristocracy a kind of fever for enclosing what had been common green lands for their own use and profit. The trade in people who were enslaved, a trade in which the British were among the most greedy and merciless, was not abolished in Britain until 1807, and slavery itself not until 1833. Austen’s own sympathies were firmly with the abolitionists. In the England she lived in, the position you took on enslavement was a moral question that every person had to answer.
Jane Austen and her family learned their times by living them—two of her brothers were naval officers—one, Frank, eventually reached the highest rank, admiral of the fleet, in the British navy. In 1805, Frank was on a ship sent by Lord Nelson to fetch supplies and so, to his lifelong regret, missed the Battle of Trafalgar. He sailed everywhere from Penang to Antigua. The other brother, Charles, also commanded ships, caught French vessels, received prize money, was stationed in the West Indies, married a young woman whose father had been attorney general of Bermuda, and died in 1852 in Burma in the Second Anglo-Burmese War. Frank and Charles were both active abolitionists and, after 1807, were employed in the suppression of the slave trade, sailing to catch illegal trade vessels. Austen wrote a voluminous correspondence with these brothers, and lived in Frank’s household, not far from the shipping hub of Portsmouth, with his wife and children for more than two years. Another brother, Henry, who was her favorite brother, served in the militia, worked as a banker to the army, lived in London, and, when she stayed with him, went with her to the theater as much as they could. Henry was married to Eliza de Feuillide, a cousin of the Austens, whom they had grown up knowing, and who had first been married to a French nobleman. This first husband had been guillotined at the time of the revolution. A fourth brother was a clergyman, like their father. A fifth had severe disabilities and lived with a family in the countryside. A sixth was adopted by landed gentry, inherited wealth, and lived among the country aristocracy, at whose tables Austen herself sometimes dined. The events of the great world were intimately known to Austen through family life.
This knowledge was in the future for me. It took me four more years, of reading about Austen and her times, to get used to seeing that radical ideas about women and men and people and language, that extremities of brutality, subjection, and greed, were not absent from her books—I just had not known how to look for them. When, in Sense and Sensibility, the supremely selfish Mr. John Dashwood sits at a lavish dinner in London, describing how he is enclosing the village green, I had not seen hungry farmers. In Persuasion, the information that Anne’s beloved, Captain Wentworth, had been rewarded for his bravery in “the action off St. Domingo” had not become a part of my thinking about him. Not having read Edward Said’s famous interpretation of Fanny Price asking her rigid uncle Sir Thomas Bertram about his estate in Antigua and “the slave trade,” I read the phrase in the novel with only the feeling of something misaligned. I thought the narrator of Mansfield Park was concerned with whether Fanny Price would get to live there, and I only later realized that I had also been taking up ideas about property and plantations, about the separation of families and forgetting. That the narrator of Pride and Prejudice might be laughing at the declarations of Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Burke: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” That the author might have read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that the author had read, with passionate attention, Thomas Clarkson’s abolitionist works on the slave trade, that she read the naval papers, delved into the worldly pages of historians and economists and travelers, and knew not only the works of Walter Scott and William Wordsworth and Madame de Staël but also the kinds of works that these worldly writers were themselves reading … well, for a long time it didn’t occur to me to wonder. And, even once I did wonder, for an even longer time I didn’t know how to put together the most interior experiences I had had reading Austen—going over the death of my father, the births of our children—with the world, hers and mine.
Copyright © 2020 by Rachel Cohen
