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| I cannot talk of books in a ball-room; my head is always full of something else |
I discovered Jane Austen via the 1995 BBC dramatisation of Pride & Prejudice, which I first watched on New Year's Eve, 2001. I waved my boyfriend off to a party and said I'd probably follow on later. Instead I watched all six episodes, and the next day I watched them all again. I was so overwhelmed by love of all things Pemberley that I changed my route to work so I could walk past a carpet shop called Darcy's. I was smitten.
And yet, I'd been introduced to Jane Austen years before, and had thought her a bore. The house I grew up in was full of books and among them was a Complete Collection of Jane Austen, three inches thick and in binding the colour of warm mud. I think I opened it once and quickly closed it again. Unlike the Complete Collection of the Brontë Sisters (also about three inches thick, but binding the colour of pond scum). I knew passages of Wuthering Heights by heart by the time I was thirteen.
Wuthering Heights had a song, though. A really good song. That song sustained me when I came across words like 'penetralium' where Emily Brontë could very well have said 'inside the house'. I never begrudged Emily her long words. In fact I liked them.
Pride & Prejudice did not have a song. Added to which, in school we were told we ought to like Jane Austen, so I immediately suspected her of great wrong doing. We were given only passages of her work to read in school, but I read them resentfully, with the aim of proving to myself how awful she was.
It was strange to think back to that when, in my early twenties, I worked my way through her novels, reading and re-reading them, and illustrating scenes from them just to enjoy and savour them more. I think maybe her books are a little bit like olives or pungent cheese - you have to find them in your own time, when your tastes are receptive. And coincidentally, they tend to go well with a little glass of wine.
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| He danced only four dances! I am sorry to pain you -- but so it was |
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