It's a while since I have paid any attention to Jane Austen, until last week that is. It hadn't been widely advertised but Joanna Trollope was giving a free evening lecture at our local Hogwarts, the subject Updating Jane Austen, and so I went along. Joanna Trollope one of those authors whose books saw me through those years of work and growing children. According to my reading journal, A Village Affair in 1990, swiftly followed by The Rector's Wide, A Passionate Affair, The Choir , The Men and the Girls, A Spanish Lover. Looking back I see this was also my Alice Thomas Ellis era along with Mary Wesley, Anne Tyler, Garrison Keillor, Deborah Moggach, Maeve Binchy and the wonderful Susan Howatch...does anyone still read Susan Howatch. I loved them all back then.
This would also be back in the day when I was a full-time health visitor, and when the master's wives had babies I would trot up to Kelly College (now Mount Kelly) with my baby scales and drift back to the surgery afterwards bathed in a sort of reverie of Goodbye-Mr-Chips-like fantasy. Long corridors with shields and painted alumni boards, echoing halls, stone staircases and a school motto to brace the sinews...Fortiter Occupa Portum - (Defend Your Harbours Bravely). Wasn't that the thwack of willow I could hear out on the cricket pitch, I Vow to Thee My Country surely echoing from the school chapel...it seemed a world far-removed from the hustle and bustle going on beyond and it was always a pleasure to go there.
Now of course I'd have to say it's all Gryffindor and owls delivering letters, and Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus (Never Tickle a Sleeping Dragon) but it was still good to wander along the corridors and imagine what it must be like to be young and in receipt of an education here. The girls glide along in their distinctive uniforms of floor-length kilts (never very practical when walking into town in the pouring rain though) and the boys all in ties and blazers, and I almost wanted to stop them and say think how lucky you are with all the life-opportunities awaiting you, don't waste a minute of this. Interestingly the woman sitting next to me turned and said 'I know you from somewhere,' and, as is most often the case when this happens locally, of course I had been her health visitor for the baby now doing a law degree.
Anyway enough of that. Joanna Trollope was excellent and I now want to read Sense & Sensibility again and read her updated version alongside.
Joanna Trollope recounted how, having been approached by a publisher to be the first of six authors chosen to update Jane Austen's novels, she could take her pick and chose Sense & Sensibility. With Jane Austen's themes of money, class and romantic love it seems surprising that little has changed, those themes still the bedrock of much fiction. Pondering her approach carefully Joanna explained that she felt Jane would have objected to the sanitisation of the novels, and nor would she have approved of excessive sentimentality. The Georgians were 'robust and very unsqueamish' and my thoughts turned instantly to my recent read of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock...unsqueamish indeed.
The particular nuances of Jane's characters also needed to be preserved; the idleness of the upper classes, their extravagance largely funded by either the sugar trade or coal mining; the reduced respect for the clergy so apparent in a character like Mr Collins in Pride & Prejudice. And on the subject of money, it being a grim necessity and without which utter destitution beckoned, the threat of rags and the gutter sharpening elbows considerably in the quest, thus making daily life alarmingly harsh, with marriage the only career option for women.
It all set the scene perfectly for Joanna's approach to updating Sense & Sensibility which she decided to follow with a 21st century exactness that proved remarkably entertaining to do, the characters becoming modern versions of their 1811 selves, revealing the same preoccupations that existed then as now. This something that became immediately and very amusingly apparent when Joanna read the same episode from both books.
In Joanna's words when she came to dissecting the novel (literally, she carved up several copies into small chunks) and rewriting and updating...
'200 years had made not a dent in its brilliance, the sign of a truly great novel'
Apparently and very teasingly, a single Jane Austen sentence has been transposed into the new version and is buried in the book somewhere. No one has found it yet. I did ask how the book had been received by the Janeites and Joanna proceeded to explain that there had been 'a lot of upset. In the end I told people just don't read it.' Her hope was that it might lead a new generation of readers back to the original which can surely only be a good thing and there was much nodding of heads. Given that the Kelly College school motto is fortiter occupa portum - "defend your harbours bravely" I think Joanna was in the right place.
I was really pleased to have made the effort to be at this talk and of course will now read both versions with added enthusiam. I'm thinking to read an alternating chapter of each might be quite interesting.
Meanwhile I'm braced for it... I'd love to know your thoughts...
Have you read the updated version...
Or would you not deign to have it cross the doorstep...
Should Jane Austen be left where she began, in the nineteenth century..
And now I'm thinking about all the updated Shakespeare plays, and how Shakespeare himself was updating and recycling old stories...
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