“Such I Was from One-and-Twenty to Nine-and-Twenty” (And Continue Still)

I went to the JASNA AGM in 2016 and I’m going again in 2024. A lot has changed. And yet… not.

At the 2016 AGM with my bestie (right), wearing a totally ironic t-shirt (left) I’ll talk about below.

I am a third of the way there. Whoa-oh! Living on a prayer (and not a lot of sleep these days, hence my cringey and outdated song references).

By “there,” of course, I am referring to the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting, known as the AGM to in-the-know Janeites and “the Austen conference” to my longsuffering husband who does not have the brain space for one more acronym. He has enough to keep track of with all my internet friends, some of whom have the same name. (Shout-out to Lauren A and Lauren K, I love you guys.)

At the beginning of this Endeavor I outlined my plan to write as much as I possibly could this summer, both here on Substack and also on Medium, in an attempt to garner enough pecuniary support (via paid Substack subscriptions, Medium reader revenue, and “tips” on Ko-fi) to buy a ticket to the conference and pay for my lodging and travel to go there. I am delighted to announce that after such an overwhelming outpouring of support, I registered for the conference as soon as the online portal opened on June 19th. THANK YOU to everyone who read, shared, contributed, clicked on links, and generally put your metaphorical oar behind my boat. Is that how it works? If not, we’ve coined a phrase.

As aforementioned, the cost of my conference registration is only one-third of what I must earn before I can actually go—I have to factor in gas costs, food, and of course the price of the hotel at which the conference is held. But that first leap was the admission to the event itself, and I am incredibly grateful to have gotten this far with YOUR help. (Because even as you read this, you are helping!) And I intend to go even further, so buckle up for more Austen-related essays and posts through the end of August.

(Housekeeping note: if the “Summer of Jane Austen” posts are not really your thing, but you don’t want to unsubscribe from my Substack entirely, you can visit your subscription Settings and toggle off “Summer of Jane Austen” in order to continue receiving just my not-Austen-related posts.)

As I look back on the only other time I traveled to the AGM, I’m struck by how everything was so very different, and yet the same. My first and latest trip to the AGM was in 2016. In those days I was single, in a nebulously defined “talking” stage with the young man who would later that year become my boyfriend and is now my husband. (Also the father of my children. He wears many hats. Until our one-year-old pulls them off and chews on them.) I am now married and a mother. Back then, I was naïve and opinionated, yet timid and hungry for approval and validation. Now I am a little more experienced, still very opinionated, and a bit more secure in who I am and how I feel. I have a stronger corrective lens prescription, a larger body, a more tired mind, a greater number of distractions that keep me from reading my most favorite author, years of joy and sadness and fear and anxiety and a pandemic and postpartum depression and yet—

And yet Jane Austen has remained an island of constancy.

In eight years I have read a great many books. Perhaps not as many as I could have—certainly not as many as I would like to have read—but a conservative estimate would be around three hundred new-to-me titles. I’ve found some new favorites and revisited some beloveds, but I have not strayed from Austen. I think the reasons for this are threefold.

(I made sure to condense them into three, at any rate, because saying “threefold” sounds a lot more Janeish than saying just two or four or five.)

1.       As I’ve learned more about literature, I understand her work better (and I still have a long way to go)

I am slowly working on my bachelor’s degree in English with an emphasis on creative writing. Though there is, obviously, a great deal of writing involved in such an undertaking. But it’s the reading that I’ve done in this course of study that has cemented in my mind a) just how much Austen has contributed to the development of the English novel and b) how truly without peer she is amongst other writers of humor, of satire, of social commentary and romance and family life. I’ve read so many good books both in and out of school in these last eight years, and yet no one can touch her. (Did you know she invented the literary style of free indirect discourse? This is when the narrative follows a character’s thoughts without directly transcribing them as if they were unspoken dialogue; it allows an omniscient narrator to get inside multiple heads while also giving us a front-row seat to the action or lack thereof. Also, it’s funny!)

As an early reader of Austen (I read Pride and Prejudice at fourteen, the summer after eighth grade), I was a bit scornful of the idea of themes and symbolism. I wanted to take a lot of her work at face value. I was the proverbial “the curtains are just blue because the author wanted them to be blue!” reader, and did not want to consider just how much effort and revision Jane Austen put into her novels. I shall write about this more at a later date, but suffice it now to say that reading the writings of her contemporaries has given me fresh appreciation for her timelessness.

Learning more about Austen’s life and times, too, has helped me to better understand her writing. Certainly there is something to be said for the idea of the “death of the Author”— that once a text has been published and is available to be read, it belongs to its readers and what they make of it. The intent of the author is more or less irrelevant. (This is an argument made by Roland Barthes and is very popular in a lot of postmodern criticism.) But though I concede that a reasonable critique can be made of any work regardless of authorial intent, so long as it can be supported from the text itself, I do think knowing something of an author’s life and cultural context can inform our understanding of their artistic choices. We do not read Mansfield Park or Northanger Abbey in the same way audiences of the Regency period would have, and we are not the target audience for which Austen was writing. Knowing this helps shape our understanding of what she was satirizing and commenting upon.

(By the way, this— “Austen, Annotated”— is the theme of this year’s AGM! )

2.       Her characters and situations are still relevant because she wrote so clearly and honestly—her wit is also timeless.

Austen’s characters are finely drawn, her dialogue sharp and witty, her situations wholly relatable and her observations of human nature are rivaled by few. Charles Dickens, another social commentator and writer of biting satire, is often cited as a incisive observer of humanity, but Dickens’ characters of every description often devolve into caricatures and his drawing of female characters leaves much to be desired. Jane Austen, however, wrote of women as whole human beings, “rational creatures” with rich inner lives, complicated motivations, and valuable insights on life and love. Her heroes, too, are seen through a female gaze and not simply men living in a man’s world.

As I wrote in this piece, Mr. Bennet is one of those complex characters— likable on the surface, a cautionary tale beneath. It would be easy enough for a story of social satire (as Pride and Prejudice unmistakably is) to showcase archetypes rather than full formed people. But real life is not so black and white, and neither are the people who populate P&P.

The humor that fills her books—even the generally stolid Mansfield Park—has also endured even as societal conventions and cultural mores have shifted. Whomst among us has not met a person of such insufferable and un-self-aware hypochondria as Mary Musgrove? a wild youth with no prudence or caution like Lydia Bennet? a man obsessed with his own dubious driving skills as John Thorpe?

Image via Fran on Twitter

And, of course, Austen is not perfect! Edmund Bertram is still a nincompoop, and Mr. Knightley did not need to hold Emma when she was a BABY, and the second proposal scene in Pride and Prejudice is not wholly satisfactory. Here I stand.

3.       As I have matured, I’ve come to appreciate a lot more about her that may have gone over my head—or at least did not stick there—as a young adult.

I suppose I am still what may be considered a young adult, being just a year older than Mr. Darcy (from whose speech in chapter 58 of Pride and Prejudice the title of this post is lifted and altered) but I have toted around enough small children for enough time that my lower back is beginning to feel Elderly.

The romance and witticisms drew me in as a teenager; the sometimes-caustic observations and thought-provoking critique of established norms have driven my own writing as an adult. As I’ve passed Charlotte Lucas and Anne Elliot’s ages, I’ve realized afresh the panic a woman of that era would feel in an absence of a husband (even as I, a liberated woman of the 21st century, am happily married and a mother). As I’ve budgeted and pinched pennies and cried over the cost of living, I’ve thought of Elinor Dashwood struggling to keep her family afloat with even less agency. As I’ve grieved the death of beloved family members, I’ve come back to Austen’s poignancy in capturing feelings of loss and longing in Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. Miss Bates has ceased to be an object of amusement and has garnered my pity, much as Emma’s own coming-of-age moment produced.

I’ve also realized that the wearing of an “ironic” t-shirt (as you may see in the cover image) simply perpetuates myths about out-of-context Jane Austen quotes and does not have the effect I would have liked, at 21. (“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” is a quote from Caroline Bingley, who is The Worst. A lot of people think it is a serious quip by Austen herself, and it’s not. Even if you like reading yourself—and are more sincere than Caroline—it’s not a great choice for a t-shirt. Quotes need context.)

As I read and reread Austen, from her Juvenilia to her more measured posthumously-published work, from her personal letters to her “own darling child” (P&P, of course) I am drawn back to her prose like a younger Bennet sister to a haberdashery. There is always something new, always something appealing, always something I cannot resist. I have her quotes taped up above my kitchen sink, her silhouette on a pin adorning my bookbag, her books (multiple copies!) scattered around my harum-scarum home. Even as my life continues and hers stands still, I shall never outgrow Jane Austen, and I never want to.

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This post is a part of The Summer of Jane Austen, a literary-inspired endeavor that will (I hope) fuel both a journey of the mind and my own journey to the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting. More here.