I know this will seem strange to you
But it makes me sad that Jane Austen is dead. Or maybe that she died so young. Sad in a personal way. Isn't that strange?

And then today I was reading in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen that while she was fairly shrewd and pragmatic regarding the business end of getting her books published, she died before seeing most of the profit. That's sad!

I mean, as a reader I am sorry that when I finish all 6 of her novels, the fragment of a 7th novel and the short fiction that there will not be anything else, but this isn't really about that. I'm sad for her. Was she happy? Why didn't she get married? If she was gay, did she have a partner? What more might she have achieved if she had lived longer? She was so insightful. I hope she had at least a friend (maybe her sister Fanny or nephew Henry?) who really got her. I can't say that I would put her on my list of "5 people who ever lived who I would want to have dinner with," because I'm not sure we'd get a long and she'd probably be shy in a way that came across as aloof, but I just hope she was happy or satisfied or content or something.

This is weird.


Goodbye Jane Austen
Though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself
While those around you crawled
They crawled out of the woodwork
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on the treadmill
And they made you change your name

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in, though you generally kept your wits about you, to your credit.
And I would have liked to have known you
But I was not going to be born for a couple of centuries
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did

Loneliness and penury were tough
The toughest role you ever played
The socio-economic strata at the time created a real binding situation
And pain was the price you paid
Even when you died
No one cared enough
All your nephew had to say
Was that Jane wrote for fun and not as a professional, because that would have reflected badly on the family

Goodbye Jane Austen
From the young man in the 22nd row
Who sees you as something as more than sexual
More than just the anonymous authoress of the best-selling novel Pride & Prejudice



- posted by k @ 1:55 PM