In the same way in Jane Austen there’s this unspeakable tension. In a kung fu film, there’s always the threat of unspeakable violence … there’s a sort of weird tension … and every so often it gets resolved with a fight. Morton’s theory might sound silly – but I find it hard to argue with its substance. After all, wasn’t the whole joke of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that you couldn’t get further away from heavy-footed brain-eaters than Austen’s bone-china world? What could be more absurd than high-kicking ass-whupping Bennets?īut as Ford also says, Austen’s apparent “delicacy is strength itself”. Yes, my first instinct was to dismiss Morton. (Google “Jane Austen feminist” and you’ll see what I mean.) I highly recommend listening to this lecture given by Professor Timothy Morton at UC Davis, who rather enjoyably says: “I always think the way to read Jane Austen is the way to read a kung fu film.” As intimate as Jane Austen’s world is, it remains very far away.įaced with such distance, the temptation is to try to reel Jane back in to our own time. I wonder what on earth I would talk about (assuming everyone hadn’t already fled in horror). I imagine myself clumping into that morning room, dressed as I am while writing this: cargo shorts and a tattered old band T-shirt. I agree with Ford, but it’s also at this point that I wince.

You sit about in morning rooms with the characters.” In The March of Literature (1938), Ford Madox Ford wrote: “Society was rendered by Jane Austen with a vividness that made the reader feel that he was actually sitting in an armchair in Mansfield Park … That is it. Jane Austen doesn’t go in for florid description, but there’s something about her prose that puts you right in the scene.

In fact, I feel like I have already seen it all. I can also sympathise with the famous (if possibly apocryphal) story of Lord Tennyson interrupting his friends on a visit to Lyme Regis when they started talking about the 1685 rebellion and demanding: “Don’t talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth, show me the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell.” It’s exactly what I’ll be trying to picture next time I visit Lyme Regis. He quite fired up in defence of it, insisting that it was the most beautiful of her works. On one occasion I said that I had found Persuasion rather dull. When I was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr Whewell, then a fellow and afterwards master of the college, often spoke to me with admiration of Miss Austen’s novels.

Persuasion novel