SOUTHAMPTON, England — When you spend three days on a Jane Austen-themed tour of England with a group of highly literate ladies (and one gentleman), the conversation naturally turns to such questions as “Which of Austen’s novels is your favourite? “Oh, ‘Persuasion,’” one of the ladies, Mary Marshall, said, referring to the book whose heroine, despite her advanced age (27), finds romance with the man she ill-advisedly spurned years earlier. “I’m actually rereading it now for, I think, the 25th time. It’s a more mature novel. The writing is
“Oh, ‘Persuasion,’” one of the ladies, Mary Marshall, said, referring to the book whose heroine, despite her advanced age (27), finds romance with the man she ill-advisedly spurned years earlier. “I’m actually rereading it now for, I think, the 25th time. It’s a more mature novel. The writing is more pure.”
It was early July, on the first day of the Jane Austen Society of North America’s “Commemorating Jane Austen” pretour. (This teaser tour was for particularly keen participants; two longer tours, with bigger groups, would begin afterward and take 10 days each.) The society conducts such trips every year, but 2017 is the 200th anniversary of Austen’s death, so there was a special sense of occasion in the air.
Austen is being enthusiastically celebrated this summer on both sides of the Atlantic, with parties, lectures, festivals, dances, plays, exhibitions, walking tours, costume balls, conferences, role-playing weekends, new books and the like. But perhaps nowhere can you find people as thoroughly passionate as on these sorts of trips, where participants live and breathe Jane Austen in the very places she (most likely) visited.
Leading the pretour was Frances Brook, a redoubtable Englishwoman with an authoritative manner and a flowery hat. Though she has been a guide for 42 years, this was her first Austen tour. From a position at the front of the minibus, she interspersed helpful Jane-related information with tidbits from her vast supply of situational trivia. “The sign off here is to Farnborough, which has a splendid flying show every year,” she said, as the minibus sped along. “Basingstoke played a big part in Jane Austen’s life.”
“I think the books are the most remarkable things I’ve ever read,” said Noel Butler, a former software engineer and fashion designer from Sunnyvale, California, who keeps them all by her bed and reads a bit each day. “When you read Jane Austen, your brain is fired up in different ways than when you read anything else.”
Delia Bisgyer, a retired teacher from Fairfax County, Va., said she turns to the novels at times of distress, as when her father died more than 20 years ago. “It was the first time in my life that I felt how loud the silence was,” she said. “Jane Austen took me away from the heaviness of reality and made me feel less lonely.”
The group checked into a quaintly un-air-conditioned hotel in Southampton, where Austen is said to have danced on her 18th birthday. Mrs Brook then presided over a walking tour of the city, where Jane lived from 1807 to 1809, with special attention paid to Austen landmarks.
On the second day, the group attended the annual general meeting of the Jane Austen Society at Chawton House, an Elizabethan manor house that was owned by Austen’s brother and is now a library devoted to pre-19th-century women’s writing. The mood was giddy. Speeches were followed by tea and cakes.
“Fellow Janeites, my lords, ladies and gentlemen,” began the club’s president, Sir Sherard Cowper Coles, a former diplomat who was Britain’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009-10. “As your president, my main job is to talk to you about the lavatories.” He provided some logistical information and beamed out at the crowd. “Thank you for coming to our small oasis of civilization in a rising sea of barbarism.”
The keynote address, on the theme of idiolect — the distinctive speech patterns of particular characters — was delivered by John Mullan, Lord Northcliffe chair of modern English literature at University College London. Janeites are so steeped in the literature that they regard the characters as intimate friends (and enemies). So there were knowing murmurs when Mr. Mullan noted that the title character herself delivers one-fourth of the dialogue in “Emma”; that the sentences uttered by Mr Collins, the puffed-up cousin in “Pride and Prejudice,” are by far the longest of any Austen character; and that Isabella Thorpe uses the word “amazingly” so much in “Northanger Abbey” that the book’s impressionable heroine, Catherine Morland, begins using it, too.
Janeites are so steeped in the literature that they regard the characters as intimate friends (and enemies). So there were knowing murmurs when Mr. Mullan noted that the title character herself delivers one-fourth of the dialogue in “Emma”; that the sentences uttered by Mr Collins, the puffed-up cousin in “Pride and Prejudice,” are by far the longest of any Austen character; and that Isabella Thorpe uses the word “amazingly” so much in “Northanger Abbey” that the book’s impressionable heroine, Catherine Morland, begins using it, too.
The meeting was full of distinguished guests, including Deirdre Le Faye, who has been writing about Austen for more than 40 years and is an object of near-veneration, the Mick Jagger of Janeites. But there were also amateur historians, like Barbara Calderbank, a former manager for the Royal Post Office who once presented a paper to her local group about the significance of the mail in Austen novels. “I had to read all the books and note down every instance when the postal service is mentioned,” she said.
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