Deborah Yaffe - Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom

Copyright 2013 by Deborah Yaffe

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

ISBN 978-0-547-75773-5

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

e ISBN 978-0-547-75779-7
v2.0116

Lyrics from This Boy, written by: John Lennon & Paul McCartney 1963 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

For Alastair

I have loved none but you

INTRODUCTION

T HE JANE AUSTEN TAROT CARD I am holding in my hand shows a series of small imagesa young woman tending to children, fetching soup, performing domestic tasks.

Anne Elliot, in Persuasion, selflessly running her lazy sisters household? I guess. But how does that answer my question?

I know nothing about the tarot, and believe less, but Ive played along anyway, following the tarot grand masters instructions to think of an open-ended question about my life and then draw a card from the deck. I am here in Philadelphia to attend the Jane Austen Society of North Americas Annual General Meeting, and I have asked the cards to tell me whether I should write the book about Jane Austen fans that Ive been mulling for months. Could I do the project justice? Now that the cosmos is supposedly giving me an answer, however, I cant figure out what it means. Typical.

This conference session on Jane Austen tarot cards is standing room only, despite the competition from the Regency ball in full swing next door, and Im not the only audience member with a question about her card. I wait my turn to ask for help from the tarot grand master who created the Jane Austen deckDiane Wilkes, a jolly woman with auburn hair falling past her shoulders. Yes, she confirms at last, my pictures do show Anne Elliot. The card illustrates the sentiment that Captain Wentworth, Annes lost love and future husband, expresses halfway through the novel: No one... so capable as Anne.

Despite my militant skepticism, the hairs on my neck prickle as the Jane Austen tarot cards yield an answer so perfectly suited to my question. And could it be coincidence that my middle name is Anne? Or that my literature-loving parents chose it from Persuasion? In spite of myself, I laugh.

Thats pretty interesting, considering my question, I tell Wilkes.

I thought it would be, she says.

The summer I was ten, I inserted a tiny key into the lock of my diary, turned to the gilt-edged page reserved for July 28, and wrote, I woke up at 5:30 and read Pride and Prejudice. We went to Central Park after breakfast, and I read some more.

That bicentennial summer of 1976, we were visiting relatives in New York, at the end of a family vacation during which Id spent every spare minute inhaling a suitcases worth of books. Next to the cot in my grandfathers apartment, I had stacked a few last volumes to tide me over the long days until the flight home to Colorado. My father was a college English professor and inveterate book buyer, and it was he who had added Pride and Prejudice to my stack. History will record that this was my first Jane Austen novel. I was about to become a junior Janeite.

I was a bright, bespectacled child, with a head of wiry, unmanageable dark curls that refused to grow into the waist-length cascade I longed for. I lived in sleepy Colorado Springs, in an old white house with red shutters; my bedroom window framed the snowcapped summit of Pikes Peak. Through sixth grade, I weathered the big team-taught classes in the open-plan rooms of the neighborhood public school, where, one year, most of the girls had a crush on a teacher with groovy 70s sideburns namedyes, reallyMr. Darcy. Then my parents transferred me to a crunchy-granola private school, where camping in the mountains was part of the curriculum and we called all the teachers by their first names. As far back as I can remember, I earned good grades, hated gym class, and read with a ravenous hunger.

I was the ultimate literature nerd. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte and Emily Bront, Mary Shelley, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Wharton: throughout my tweens and teens, I mainlined classic fiction, finishing one thick novel only to start another, like a chain smoker lighting her next cigarette from the embers of its predecessor. I finished Hard Times, began The Last Chronicle of Barset, and went to the dentist, ran a typical diary entry by my eleven-year-old self. A month later: I have started a book called Black and Blue Magic for school, because Katie recommended it. For pleasure I am reading Can You Forgive Her? by Trollope.

By fifth grade, I was spending every recess sitting cross-legged on the playground, engrossed in a book, while the other kids played foursquare. My teacher prohibited me from reading during the time set aside for wholesome physical activity, and, good girl that I was, I initially obeyed. But addicts have no morals. Soon I was sneaking books outside under my coat and pursuing my disreputable habit in dark corners of the playground, one eye cocked for patrolling adults. I finished A Tale of Two Cities that way, curled up in a doorway during lunch period, weeping over Sydney Cartons noble sacrifice.

My laconic diary entries and fragmentary memories provide few clues to what I loved in all these books, and I cant remember when Jane Austens witty courtship novels emerged from the illustrious pack to become something special. Perhaps it was the winters day when, age eleven, I finished Mansfield Park, arguably Austens least accessible novel, and told my diary, It is a wonderful book. I love Jane Austen. Or perhaps it was the summer I was sixteen, when my parents and I visited Chawton cottage, the house in southern England where Austen wrote or revised all six of her novels and which is now a museum of her life. I spent hours wandering through the quiet rooms, reading every label, gazing at the household objects she might have touched, steeping in a magical sense of connection.

Back home that September, I persuaded a teacher at my high school to add Emma to the syllabus of her Women in Literature class. (Im not sure how the other kids liked the book. One fellow student, unfamiliar with nineteenth-century language, read Austens account of Mr. Elton making violent love to the heroine and thought he was committing rape, not proposing marriage.) Sometime that fall, my parents bought me a membership in the three-year-old Jane Austen Society of North America, and a year later I took a weekend off during my first semester of college to attend JASNAs fifth annual convention in nearby Philadelphia. I think I was the youngest participantone woman told me I looked charming in the black velvet dress I wore to the banquetbut by then I had been reading Austen nearly half my life, and it was thrilling to meet two hundred other people who wanted to talk about her. Still, I felt mildly surprised when JASNAs president rose to his feet at the conclusion of the conference and reminded us that our efforts to honor Austen were more for our benefit than hersthat, by now, she was so famous that she didnt need us to keep her name alive. Jane Austenfamous? I wondered. Somehow I had always thought of her as my own private possession.

That illusion was easier to maintain back when I first discovered Jane Austen. In July 1976, she had been dead for exactly 159 yearsher novels were published during the period known as the Regency, the nine years from 1811 to 1820 when the future George IV served as acting king, or regent, during his fathers disabling illnessbut she was not yet the global brand she would become. Nearly twenty years would have to go by before Austenmanias Big Bangthe shot of a wet white shirt clinging seductively to the chest of the British actor Colin Firth, in the BBCs 1995 production of