Books for Writers: Undressing Jane Austen

Many of the “classics” I've read were consumed in my teens and 20s, some dozens of years to decades ago. Unlike the reluctant high-school and college academics of today, I actually had to read these books to do well on my literature assignments, rather than placing my hopes on understandings gleaned through online study guides.

There have been a lot of books under the bridge since then, and while I remembered reading Jane Austen's work, I'd completely forgotten how it made me feel like my head was stuffed full of excited chickens. My voyage through Pride and Prejudice this month brought it all back.

I picked up P&P on Adam Sexton's recommendation. Sexton, in his book Master Class in Fiction Writing, devotes his chapter on “Characterization” to Austen, represented by her Sense and Sensibility.

Like S&S, P&P is chock full of characters: the Bingleys, the Bennets, Mr. Darcy, Mr. Collins, the soldier Wickham, Charlotte Lucas, Lady Catherine, Georgiana Darcy, the Gardiners, and the old military officer Lydia Bennet stays with for a time, not to mention the scads of servants, one-shots and drop-ins. Since P&P is a book about the rules of socialization, it stands to reason society and its members would be the most important part of the book. Pride and Prejudice  is not a story of grand vistas and dripping description; it's all about who knows who and what names can be dropped in the right circles. As the nigh-omnipotent narrator and creator of this social scene, Ms. Austen can drop a mighty pile of them.

However, as Sexton noted, Austen only develops a few of her characters to roundness. We know Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, the Bennet parents, Jane Bennet and Charles Bingley best. Austen leaves most of them flat, more akin to furniture or set dressing than actual character

“Austen recognized as well that storytelling is by definition undemocratic, and idea that novice writers (Americans, at least) can find discomfiting. In other words, the writer should not devote the same amount of detail to every character in her book.” (Master Class in Fiction Writing, page 42.)

 The effect of this lack of democracy, in the case of P&P, is to create 360 pages of twittering, squawking society, only a few members of which we are able to hear clearly. Austen uses her characters — primary, secondary and tertiary — to paint the sound of the social scene of her day. And that's where the chickens come in. Austen's characters squawk, chirp, and chatter their way into your heads.

Readers learn about characters in three ways. Way one is seeing what the character does and thinks. Way two is seeing how other characters react to them. Way three is the old-fashioned info dump, in which the author, usually through the narrator, drops into exposition mode. Austen uses all three to show readers the face of protagonist Elizabeth Bennet. When Mr. Darcy opts not to dance with her, we understand she is not socially desirable. When Elizabeth rejects Darcy after learning he may have cheated Wickham out of his inheritance and possibly tried to break up Jane and Charles, we see she is a woman of loyalty, principle and, perhaps, gullibility. Austen, herself, in the guise of the narrator, tells us little directly about Lizzy, relying on the other, better Ways to flesh her out. Lesser characters, like Mr. Collins, get the full-on-exposition: “Mr. Collins was not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had been but little assisted by education or society.” (Pride and Prejudice, page 68). The way Austen shows her characters to readers reveals whether a character will be important or mere window dressing.

I find I appreciate Austen even more now, courtesy of my second ride with her. Still, I think, I will be picking feathers out of my ears for weeks to come.