LitPicks - Aug '07 

The Inimitable Englishwoman, Then & Now: This month features three very different English heroines from three different eras. Bridget, Edith, and Elizabeth —all divergent characters, but each delightful...and each very, very English.

A Lighter Touch | Wonderfully Written | Great Works      




Bridget Jones's Diary
Helen Fielding, 1998
271 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
Quintessential "chick-lit," Bridget Jones is a romp of a read, a modern send-up of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (below). Yet when it comes to her main character, Helen Fielding departs from her literary model: Bridget is one of literature's silliest, most hapless heroines. Elizabeth Bennett, she's not.

Aside from Bridget's self-deprecating voice, her fruitless attempts at self-improvement, her friends, her mother, her job, her boss...the great fun of this book is to find its parallel points with Austen's P & P

Here, for example, is Bridget's first impression* of Mark Darcy whom she meets at a New Year's Day party:

It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.

Talk about writing with a knowing nod and wink to your readers: we have to be in-the-know to get the double joke—on Austen's P & P and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. And then, of course, we're tickled with ourselves because we do get it. Cheeky, really cheeky.

The book is written as a diary with blow-by-blow, up-to-the-minute entries. It might well be a spoof on another famous novel, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, one of the earliest English novels, also in diary form. Henry Fielding (of Tom Jones fame) thought the heroine Pamela so self-absorbed and manipulative that he wrote a parody of it called Shamela—and that kicked off a very public row between these two literary giants. It took little Jane Austen to settle the issue at the heart of the dispute (see P & P below).

I think Helen Fielding, a descendant of Henry Fielding—in kind, if not kin—, knew exactly what she was doing, using a 1st-person diary approach. It's very funny stuff. And the movie's funny, too—especially with Colin Firth playing Mark Darcy: another nod and wink, this time to the BBC version of P & P (see our Great Adaptations).

Be sure to check out our Reading Guide for Bridget Jones's Diary.

* "First Impressions" was Austen's original title for Pride and Prejudice.

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Hotel Du Lac
Anita Brookner, 1984
184 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
One of Brookner’s earliest works, and some think her finest, this slender book contains some beautiful and very funny writing.

Edith Hope, a romance novelist, who writes “under a more thrusting name” (oh, really, that is so good), finds herself exiled to a posh but sedate Swiss hotel. She has committed a serious social infraction, though we don’t learn exactly what till about three-quarters of the way through.

The book opens as Edith, newly arrived at the hotel, peers out her bedroom window onto a gray “anesthetic” landscape, blanketed in mist or fog, which conceals major landmarks. Of course, the view subtly parallels her state of mind and her degree of self-knowledge, and both landscape and personal vision will attain clarity by the novel’s end.

In one rather funny luncheon with her editor, Edith holds forth on the tortoise and the hare: she writes her love stories, she claims, for tortoises (read "losers" here), and in her books the tortoise always wins. But that's only in books...and in Aesop's Fable! In real life, Edith says, it’s the hare who wins—every damn time. And by this book's end, we're not sure whether Edith herself is a tortoise or hare—whether she wins or loses. 

That’s part of the charm of this work; the loose strings aren’t so neatly tied-up at the end, and we’re left to wonder. This is a sophisticated piece of writing, and I think book clubs will have fun figuring out exactly what will happen after the last line, in fact, what is even meant by the last line.

See our Reading Guide for Hotel du Lac.

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Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen, 1813
480 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
Not long ago, a friend forwarded me an email from someone struggling through Pride and Prejudice. Why, she wondered, is it considered such a great classic? It's so wordy. Good question! — particularly in light of the work's important role in the development of the novel.

First, though, there's the wordiness—which can make it hard to catch Jane Austen's dazzling wit—on display right from from the famous first line. (It is a truth universally acknowledged...) The best way to handle it? Take it slowly and stick with it: eventually, you'll find your rhythm—along with the humor.

Despite the humor, there's serious stuff going on here. Austen pins her sights on society's mercenary marriage market. Poor Mrs. Bennett—she may be foolish, but she's not stupid. She understands quite well that the only security for her daughters lies in getting them married off. A single woman's prospects are bleak indeed—the reason 27-year-old, plain-faced Charlotte Lucas jumps at the chance to marry "one of the stupidest men in England." *

Then there is Elizabeth Bennett, surely literature's most delightful heroine: smart, perceptive, witty, and self-possessed. She stands up under Lady Catherine de Bourgh's scouring tongue and throws off Mr. Darcy's "not pretty enough to tempt me" insult as more indicative of his sour nature than her own appearance. (Who among us wouldn't obsess over that remark for...what, two, three months...years?)

The character of Elizabeth brings us to the work's place in the history of the novel, at that time still a new art form (see LitCourse 2). With Pride and Prejudice, Austen achieved a major breakthrough in one of the most persistent structural problems facing the young novel—point of view, who tells the story (see LitCourse 7).

Austen was able to resolve a nasty and very public dispute between two literary giants during the 18th century—over how a story should be told (see Bridget Jones above). She placed the point-of-view not in Elizabeth (as in the 1st-person "I") but very close to her, perched on her shoulder. Thus, we have a narrator who takes us into Lizzie's inner thoughts yet who also stands outside her—a stunning innovation at the time, allowing readers to see Lizzie's willful misperceptions regarding Darcy and Wickham. It was a brilliant compromise between a self-absorbed 1st-person account and a totally objective 3rd-person narrator.

The full answer to "why is Pride and Prejudice considered a classic?" could take (and has) an entire book or full week of classes to cover. Most of us, though, simply revel in the story: a wonderful young heroine attains fulfillment without compromising her integrity. And in the end she wins a prince, transforming him from a priggish frog into a devoted husband. Hard not to love it.

Don't miss our Reading Guide for Pride and Prejudice.

* I'm cheating: that quotation is not from the novel: it's from the 1995 BCC production. It's just too good not to use.

      

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