On Becoming

I recently had the pleasure of seeing one of the current films referencing Jane Austen, and indeed that is what it's down to. In the information age, there is such a void of cultural silence to be filled that even the dead are dusted off. On Becoming Jane is a film with some biographical attachments to Jane Austen's life. It is, on the face of it, light and nothing much happens. It is in story-line rather terrible: Jane was forced into spinsterhood and early death because she could not afford to marry, not the man or a man she could love anyway. It is an angry film, about something . The episode it describes- if true - is so close to an ordinary life-event in the life of all women to make one uncomfortable. What else is new.

Ann Hathaway creates a larger-than- life heroine. Her Jane is a winner and one is left to conclude that women of merit get the awful fate they deserve. My Jane, the one whose picture is in Wikipedia - drawn by her spinster sister Cassandra - is petite and has smiling eyes. She was mischievous. Her works - for me - are wonderfully shallow. The larger questions are never touched on, they are the background, the unspoken to the domestic and the trivial. She must have had great fun writing these, it was an escape for her to do so and the questions being touched on must have been NOT questions to her.

Which brings me to Wikipedia. The New York Review of Books is currently running an article on how Wiki was put together. It was eye-opening for me to learn that Wiki has uploaded, for the fun of its editors, entire encyclopedias which are in the public domain, like an early 20th century Britannica. That is where that wonderful sense of authority comes from in historical articles - we are still in the Empire - the whole lovingly updated and re-polished for current use.

I do not view Jane Austen's books as chick-lit. Jane A. was a witness to her age, an age of terrible certainty. Characters leave the drawing room to go off to war, come back from India, lead or not dissolute lives. She shares that moment in history with all of human culture. It is easy reading but so are the dialogues of Plato once one gets pass the silly notion that a group of grown men are going to have dinner together without women to discuss grand ideas because Socrates is such a stick-in-the-mud. The voice of the human spirit. Does anyone ever ask a male writer who he is writing for. So tell me, Ian McEwan, who are you writing for: the guys, right?