Just the words “Pride and Prejudice” leave me feeling instantly relaxed. I don’t know if I have gone without sighing at the mentioning of anything Austen for a long time now. Funny, how it can be such an automatic reaction.

Take Dickens, for instance. Here was a man who came up with perfectly good stories, and then made them at least four times longer than they needed to be. And not even by way of excessive character development! – simply by restating the same thing over and over and over again. How many ways did he say that Marley was dead at the opening of A Christmas Carol?

Anyway. I do trust that, at least, you will allow that Jane Austen engaged her fellow man (well, probably mostly her fellow woman) to the best of her ability, considering the limitations on women of small means in Georgian society. No way she could have, say, gone into politics – she didn’t even have the right to vote.

Posit that Lord Beaconsfield actually changed the world, by going into politix and engaging his fellow man, rather than wafting away in the country like so many other Victorian nitwits.

I’ll put Disraeli onto the list, right after Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park…

Read you some Benjamin Disraeli, woman.

JW, who resents his middle name

With the caveat that I am decidedly middle-class and probably quite spoiled…

One of the things I love so much about P&P, particularly, is how sharply Austen lampoons some of the social norms of her day. And one of the reasons she does so is that Austen herself was painfully aware that in the society she lived in, marriage was really the only “respectable” path for a woman to take, and as it wasn’t “respectable” for upper-class women to work, they had to be somewhat mercenary about their choice or else depend totally on the generosity of relatives and friends. It was an awkward way to live.

But Austen herself was a born romantic who couldn’t bear the thought of marrying for security – she only wanted to marry for love (and as it turned out, never did marry); and her disapproval of the options available to women definitely shines through.

That all said…I can respect your opinion and your co-worker’s both. I just still love the stories.

She has absolutely no ability to relate to the characters in Austen’s novels, whom she views as spoiled elitists who spend their lives pining and scheming for socially-acceptable men of means.

One of my co-workers is a rather ordinary middle-aged woman. She’s from working-class roots, served in this nation’s military (something for which I’ve not thanked her enough), and earned a vocational education in general office/secretarial skills. She’s also a divorced mother of one adult son. Now why do I mention all of this? She has absolutely no ability to relate to the characters in Austen’s novels, whom she views as spoiled elitists who spend their lives pining and scheming for a socially-acceptable man of means. And I pretty much share her view – I simply can’t relate to these types of stories.

Have you read any other Austen?