Jennifer Adams - Remarkably Jane

Not everyone loves Jane Austen. Even among great writers and critics there is a huge divergence of opinion and strong feelings. Its been fascinating and really enjoyable in creating this book to see who likes her and who does not, and what they have to say on the matter.

If you do love her, you know there is nothing as maddening as trying to explain her novels to a friend or coworker who just doesnt get it. On the other hand, theres nothing quite as delightful as presenting her to, say, an attorney in his forties who finds himself converted and tells you that his wife thinks hes gone insane because he goes to the video store for the new James Bond movie and comes home with Becoming Jane and The Jane Austen Book Club instead.

To those of us who love Jane Austen, she is like the brightness of burnished silver. Something lovely, with sparkle, that makes our world more beautiful. I adore her. I love the pleasure she gives with a well-turned line, the way she can make you actually laugh out loud, the bite of her sarcasm, how she lets you fall in love again and again.

I love that so much of what is realin life as well as in her bookshappens in the rich landscape under the surface of everyday living, in the subtext of our interactions. The layers of meaning behind a glance, saying one thing when the person youre talking to knows it means something else, the electricity of sexual tension between two people that is contained and unacknowledged. We may no longer go to balls or wear shoe-roses or eat petit fours, but we can still sit with someone at lunch, eating a salad and talking about nothing, and what were really thinking is how beautiful they are and how we want to reach up and touch their face.

In our lives, as in Austens world, there are limits imposed on us by the family into which we are born, real pain still comes from a cruel remark in a social setting, people we thought we loved deceive us in profound ways, we still try to make sense of who we are in a complicated world of survival. And we all still look for happiness.

People who dont like Jane Austen often complain that in her novels nothing happens. It is true that in her books there are no government conspiracies, no kidnappings, no fast-paced action scenes. What does happen happens in the mind and in the heart. What happens is all about love and sex and money and marriage and power and position, and perhaps, most importantly, the emergence of the individual through all of these entanglements, who learns how to define and maintain her own identity and also somehowremarkably and yet believablyfinds happiness. Everything happens in Jane Austen. At least everything that matters.

Jennifer Adams

I must make use of this opportunity to thank you... for the very high praise you bestow on my... novels. I am too vain to wish to convince you that you have praised them beyond their merit.

Jane Austen

"I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.... I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales's secretary."

J. K. Rowling, 2003, Author of the Harry Potter series

"I am inclined to say in desperation, read it yourself and kick out every sentence that isn't as Jane Austen would have written it in prose. Which is, I admit, impossible. But when you do get a limpid line in perfectly straight normal order, isn't it worth any other ten?"

Ezra Pound, 1938, Poet

"I do think novels are extremely important. And, like Jane Austen, I don't think their importance is measured by the amount of fizzing and popping and width of stage."

Ian McEwan, 2002, Novelist

"I love structure in the novel. It's not surprising that overwhelmingly my favorite novelist is Jane Austen-structure is tremendously important to her. I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder, which is what the mystery is about."

P. D. James, 1998, Mystery novelist

"Nothing very much happens in her books and yet, when you come to the bottom of a page, you eagerly turn it to learn what will happen next. Nothing very much does and again you eagerly turn the page. The novelist who has the power to achieve this has the most precious gift a novelist can possess."

W. Somerset Maugham, 1955, Playwright and novelist

Has any writer ever painted a truer picture of the thoughts, perceptions, motives (conscious and unconscious), speech, and behavior of men and women in everyday life, or one more entertaining, or more subtly shaded, or finely drawn, than we find on every page in the novels of Jane Austen?"

Patrice Hannon, 2007, Author of Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine's Guide to Life and Love

"Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping everybody busy. The moralists, the Eros-and-Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the Jungians, the semioticians, the deconstructors-all find an adventurous playground in six samey novels about middle-class provincials. And for every generation of critics, and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself."

Martin Amis, 1996, Novelist, essayist, and short story writer

"[Jane Austen's novels] appear to be compact of abject truth. Their events are excruciatingly unimportant; and yet... they will probably outlast all Fielding, Scott, George Eliot, Thackery, and Dickens. The art is so consummate that the secret is hidden; peer at them as hard as one may; shake them; take them apart; one cannot see how it is done."

Thornton Wilder, 1938, Playwright and novelist, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"Every writer stands on the shoulders of the old authors who have shaped and refined language and storytelling. In my mind, almost no one today approaches their greatness in either style or insight. I think I have read Pride and Prejudice -in my view the most perfect book in our language-eight times, and it has taught me something new each time."

Laura Hillenbrand, 2001, Author of Seabiscuit

"Also read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen's very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!"

Sir Walter Scott, 1826, Historical novelist and poet

"When people compare Shakespeare with Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word she wrote, and so does Shakespeare."