Hello,
and welcome to My Jane Austen Book Club, Katherine! Let’s start our chat
remembering your first encounter with Miss Austen and her work. When was it?
And what was it like?
I stumbled across Pride and Prejudice when I was around nine or ten years old. Since
I was a relatively young reader for such a book, I don’t think I was able to
fully enjoy the rhythm and nuances of Austen’s language and wit as much as I
would have done, had I read the book for the first time later on as a teenager.
The novel stayed with me because of its dynamic main characters: Lizzy and
Darcy. Even as a kid, I knew, in my gut, that they would get together in the
end, and I was never able to forget either of them. I wouldn’t liken my first
encounter with Austen’s work as a kind of explosive, chemical moment. If
anything, I really grew to love Austen and to genuinely appreciate the range of
her works, only as I matured.
What
about your favorite Austen hero and heroine? What do you particularly like
about them?
My favorite Austen hero would have to be
Mr. Darcy. It’s a generic answer, but I think also an inescapable one. When it
comes down to it, he has most of the best lines in Pride and Prejudice, and the force of his dialogue always creates
such a reaction that it is an almost physical experience. He’s such an imposing
and regal character, even when he’s at his most unlikeable. He also undergoes
the most remarkable transformation out of anyone in the book, and, as the novel
progresses, the reader witnesses the spiritual betterment of a previously proud
and awkward personality. Martin Amis puts it best in an essay he wrote: “The
final paragraph gives us the extraordinary spectacle of Darcy opening his
house, and his arms, to Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle, who make what money they have
through trade. Darcy, Jane Austen
writes, ‘really loved them.’ This is the wildest romantic extravagance in the
entire corpus: a man like Mr. Darcy, chastened, deepened, and finally
democratized by the force of love.”
