Jane Austen Mania

Big, awful bookworm confession: I've only ever read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Haven't read Sense and Sensibility, or Mansfield Park (though I did borrow it and got to the second chapter) or Emma or anything else.

(Actually, there are many classics I haven't read. I figure I have time enough in the future to get to Dickens when Teo's old enough to appreciate Great Expectations in read-aloud, and to Austen if and when I have a daughter who'll enjoy 19th century chick lit.)

Notwithstanding, I did read The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler last year (or was it the year before) and liked it. I guess I would've loved it if I'd read Jane Austen more, but there you go.

Anyhoot, there's a rash of Jane Austen-inspired chick lit on the shelves, and here are two that I read in the last few months. Like JA's books, these two novels are set among the wealthy and literate. Each novel has an admirable heroine--beautiful, intelligent, accomplished--whose big flaw is spurning the love of her life because of class differences and family pressure. Each novel details the ways in which The One comes back into the heroine's life and heart.

In spite of their similarities, I still enjoyed each book. For one, they're both very well-written, and full of the foibles of Homo Dinero. For another, the happy endings come almost just as I'd given up on them. I loved that the characters were well into their thirties and comfortable with, though not dejectedly resigned to, the idea of possible lifelong spinsterhood. I loved the Boston setting of the Family Fortune (some familiarity with a novel's geography is always a thrill) and the descriptions of the overbearing parents and overachieving students in JA in Scarsdale(think The Nanny Diaries in senior year high school).

I think I prefer Jane Fortune, the character in Family Fortune, a tad above Anne Ehrlich (in Scarsdale), if only because she was a bit less passive in making things happen in her life. (Anne seems to have mostly let things happen to her.)

I like imagining that if I'd given in to family pressure and not married Benjie when I did, we still would've found each other later the way Jane and Max and Anne and Ben did. (Though the differences between us were much narrower!)