I’m reading “Pride and prejudice” and I’m strangely enjoying it. I like the characters and the story, I’m really hooked with the book, but I don’t really know why it is so interesting and how Austen makes me feel interested in a book that, maybe just in the surface, is so mundane.
In the past, I also read “Sense and sensibility” for University and I also enjoyed it very much.
How do you think Austen makes this? How does she make a realistic and simple book so interesting in its story and its characters?
Charlotte Bronte agreed with you about Austen’s writing being mundane (though well crafted). Here is what Charlotte wrote about Emma:
“She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well. There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood. Even to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition—too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress. Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores. She no more, with her mind’s eye, beholds the heart of her race than each man, with bodily vision, sees the heart in his heaving breast. Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman.”
It’s all a little wry, a little dry, and a little saucy, all buttoned up in a corset. What’s not to like?