The Jane Austen revival

Modern Library

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Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller Find it in a WorldCat library Compare prices at major online bookstores

Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller Find it in a WorldCat library Compare prices at major online bookstores

Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller Find it in a WorldCat library Compare prices at major online bookstores

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Review by Ellen Myrick

It somehow seems especially appropriate that just before the beginning of the filming of Sense and Sensibility, screenwriter and actress Emma Thompson receives a gift from makeup artist Morag Ross. It's an eyeshadow container with an inscription that reads "It was a delightful visit. Perfect in being much too short." The quotation is from Jane Austen's Emma.

Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay and Diaries (New Market Press, $23.95, 1-55704-260-8) is a rare treat for those interested in the process of developing a first-rate (and ultimately award-winning) movie from a classic novel. Thompson's contemporary genius in translating the early nineteenth century to the screen is revealed in the screenplay, while the diaries chronicle her struggles with portraying one of literature's most reserved but nevertheless emotional heroines. Being the screenwriter also presented novel situations to Thompson: When told the studio was considering a "novelisation" of her screenplay, she countered with "If this happens, I will hang myself. Revolting notion." No one messes with Jane Austen.

What is it about an author born in 1776 that seems to have found a sudden relevance in 1996? In the past year a plethora of Jane Austen inspired material has burst upon the filmic landscape--from the critically revered Persuasion and the Emma-inspired Clueless to the equally delightful Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Small wonder, then, that Modern Library has decided to reissue this peerless author's works in six handsome new editions. Included in this latest collection is the companion volume to the A&E/BBC presentation of Pride and Prejudice, featuring an introduction by Anna Quindlen.

If you liked Jane Austen before she was cool, then the comic economy of her perfect novels is a known quantity. If her wit has just burst upon you through one of the above-mentioned works, then you have a world, or rather a neighborhood (she once wrote that three or four country families is the thing to work on) awaiting you.

Jane Austen has often been accused of rehashing the Cinderella story ad nauseum. Perhaps those who say this should read her works with humor rather than nausea and apply a willing suspension of the twentieth century to revel in the domestic dilemmas of an Emma Woodhouse or watch the unfurling of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park.

And what pleasure to discover Jane Austen for the first time! In Music for Chameleons, Truman Capote includes a vignette of a radiant elderly woman who confesses "My tragedy is that I've read all her books so often I have them memorized."

So what is it about Jane Austen's life and literary output that inspires such fanatic devotion? Perhaps the author puts it best herself: perfect in being much too short.

©1996, ProMotion, inc.

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