A Companion to Jane Austen

"That certainly seems primary. You asked me for my favourite Jane Austen books; I didn’t have any particular pedagogical intention. I was saying, in effect, that I would rather read Jane Austen than about her. I decided I shouldn’t have a list consisting entirely of Jane Austen novels. Then, when it came to thinking of a piece of criticism, it seemed so arbitrary to choose one piece of criticism. There have been a lot of good books written about Austen, from many different points of view. A Companion to Jane Austen is a recent book, and it’s the kind of book that is becoming more and more popular now – a book in which there are essays by many different people. But it differs from many of those books in that the topics of the essays are often quite unexpected. And the scholars who are writing the essays are, without exception, among the most distinguished people writing now. There is an individual essay about each of the major Jane Austen novels and the essay on Pride and Prejudice is by Michael Wood – it’s called ‘Time and her Aunt’. It’s about a line in Pride and Prejudice , when Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle are walking around the grounds at Pemberley, Darcy’s estate. Darcy suddenly appears and the phrase ‘time and her aunt’ appears in that sentence. Michael Wood writes an absolutely brilliant essay about the importance of time and of the aunt in Elizabeth’s career. Time, as he points out, is essential to this particular meeting. If they had come to Pemberley a day later, they would not have been admitted, because Darcy would have been there. If they’d come a day earlier, they would have missed him. If they’d even come earlier in the day, they would not have encountered him. They encounter him because they are there at just the right time. And the aunt, in Michael Wood’s interpretation, stands for the domestic world which is entirely female. It’s not literally female, of course – there are plenty of men in the novel. But it’s the female world that really makes the judgements and controls the action, and Elizabeth’s aunt stands for/represents/incorporates all of that. To write something new about a Jane Austen novel that has been as much written about as Pride and Prejudice is quite a feat, and this is a really fresh and interesting essay. There are also other essays on very unexpected subjects, like Jane Austen and music, which is a record, really, of her relationship to musical instruments: her habits in practising, her conscientiousness in practising the pianoforte every morning (although she was not apparently a remarkable musician) and accounts of how she used music in her various writing. The book is full of things you would not have thought to wonder about; you learn about things before you even have a chance to wonder about them…"