Jane Austen

I was ten when my mother got me a copy of Emma by Jane Austen. It was an abridged version with illustrations on every alternate sheet. At that point my reading extended to Famous Five by Enid Blyton, kiddie magazines and comic strips. So Emma was like something from outer space, an unknown world of dance parties, cottages, and horse driven carriages and I was not sure if I wanted to venture in.

I did and I was fascinated by her world. I read the abridged version of Emma about fifty five times (yup I counted). Well after all the readings I decided to move on to the unabridged version of Emma and I was still hooked on. I read and reread all of Jane Austen’s books except Northanger Abbey.

It was a completely different world, an era long past, but the characters, were somehow real and believable. Over the next few years I moved on to other Victorian classics, liked a few but always came back to Austen.

So what was it that always got me back to Austen? The only thing that comes to mind is “simplicity”. If you read any of her stories, they are all about ordinary people, living in a world, when even the smallest of words or actions could change your destiny, but who have believable emotions, aspirations, and insecurities.

There are no fantastic situations but her style of writing renders the commonplace, ordinary characters and events of day to day life, interesting. For me another thing that stands out in her work is the wittiness and cleverness of the women. It was a time when for women, just about everything depended on the conformity to an unforgiving social code, and it’s a pleasant surprise to find intelligent and witty heroines hidden behind those pages.

There are no horribly vicious villains, no larger than life characters or situations, nothing fancy, just a normal set of people, living in the nineteenth century middle class England, but their stories are universal, contemporary and just timeless.