A few of you who attend book club meetings on the Palatka campus may be aware that I’m no fan of Jane Austen. I think her books are boring, her writing is mediocre, her romances are both unrealistic and undesirable, and every character she’s ever written is one of the most insufferable people to ever not exist. These are opinions that have scandalized many an English major and casual classic lit enjoyer alike, but I don’t say these things simply for the shock value—I genuinely struggle to find anything enjoyable about her books.
My beef with Austen began in the summer of 2018, when I took a class at the University of Florida on her writing. I had never read any of her books before, nor had I seen any films based on her books, but I had high hopes that I would enjoy that class because I was a history major and an English literature minor, and because I loved period dramas. I was quick to learn, however, that Austen’s stories lacked the elegance and nuance of modern historical fiction, the intrigue of late 19th and early 20th century mysteries by authors like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, or the humor and drama of William Shakespeare. Her books were bland by comparison to anything I liked or was used to, and on top of that, none of her characters were even slightly relatable. I was severely disappointed, and though I did well in the class, I didn’t enjoy a single minute of it past the first day.
But hold on—I promise my whole point in writing this isn’t just to go on a rant about Jane Austen and drag her through the mud for being a just-okay writer. Allow me to briefly digress.
A few days ago, I saw a video on YouTube Shorts in which a man was reacting to popular “classic rock hot takes,” and he opened it with one I’ve heard dozens of times: “The Beatles are/were overrated.” He politely disagreed. He went on to explain that a lot of the musical styles and sounds prevalent in the Beatles’ music might sound boring, primitive, basic, or even just plain bad to listeners in the present day, especially those of us who are used to hearing current popular music, but that’s not because the Beatles weren’t talented composers and musicians, or because their recording equipment was poor quality. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The Beatles were groundbreaking musicians who pioneered a lot of the techniques used in modern music recording, they used state-of-the-art equipment that a lot of other artists didn’t have the money or influence to access, they experimented with different types and combinations of instruments, and, not only did they define the music of a generation, they have also been credited with inspiring and even inventing some genres of music which would become more developed in the decades following their career as a group.
This YouTuber’s opinion about the Beatles made me stop and think, not about the feats of innovation and creativity performed by the Beatles in their own time, but about my own “hot takes” about Jane Austen. The more I thought, the more I came to realize that perhaps my assessments of Austen have been too harsh. I have always known as a scholar, an educator, and a writer myself that Jane Austen was highly innovative and influential in the development of the modern novel, but I had never really stopped and thought about what that meant. I merely accepted it as a fact of literary history, never really considering why it might have been true and not just something I’d heard half a dozen English teachers say and needed to remember and claim to agree with in order to get a good grade.
Of course Jane Austen wasn’t as interesting to me as the modern historical fiction I enjoy reading, or even as exciting as the Victorian detective stories I’ve loved since childhood. Comparing her to Shakespeare is entirely unfair as well because writing for the theatre and writing a novel are two completely different art forms which require different sets of skills. Jane Austen is boring to me, but that isn’t because she’s a bad writer. It’s because she did what she did first. The same conventions, themes, tropes, and depth found in later writing couldn’t be found in her writing to any currently impressive degree simply because they hadn’t been invented yet, or were still developing.
I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan of Jane Austen’s books. They have never appealed to me, and they probably never will, but that’s okay. They were a product and an impetus of a certain period of literary history that existed well before the one in which I find myself as a reader, and with that in mind, my respect and understanding of these books and why they are the way they are have increased.