It’s the Little Things in Life
The little things in life are supposed to be the greatest; they make life worth living. Not so much Aunt Fay. A discussion of Austen’s Northanger Abbey leads to a philosophical musing on the way memory works when it comes to those little things in life:
“The mind slips away, hastily gets round, somehow, like a car going into rapid reverse, grating its gears, when it encounters these small, scraping memories which do not count as Major Life Events.”
The Talons of Aunt Fay
Aunt Fay really digs her talons into selling Alice on Emma, recognizing that the first hurdle is the largest: the mundane reality of the world Austen writes about is hard to sell as an example of fantasy. Fantasy in the form of the foreign world of the past commingling with the reading of books in the present. Alice, having grown up in a world where fantasy has become reality, has to jump high because, as Aunt Fay observes:
“Dr. Who flows in your blood-stream.”
A Writer's Life
Aunt Fay’s advices extends beyond merely informing Alice about the greatness that is Jane Austen; she attempts to get Alice to penetrate into the mind of Austen to understand why she wrote what she wrote. And more so: how writing was not just some job or hobby for Austen nor, indeed, for anyone who tries to make a living at it:
“Writing is an odd activity—other people have occupations, jobs; the writer’s life is work, and the work is the life…if the pen is not working, the mind is thinking”
The Student Disorder
Alice has complained to Aunt Fay about the torture of her English Literature class. The torture, of course, is being forced to read Jane Austen. That’s what kicks of this entire enterprise. Later, Aunt Fay will convey to the reader the stark metaphorical dread which going to class inspires. It is a description that those who love English classes might use to describe math classes or which physics majors might use to describe…any other class:
“You write complaining of the dreadful feeling of dry despair which your course in English Literature induces in you: you feel you are suffocating; as if your mouth was being stuffed with dry leaves; as if your brain was slowly dying of some mental poison.”
The Noose of...Something
Alice writing a novel. Aunt Fay gives her a pep talk with the reminder that even Pride and Prejudice was initially rejected. Then comes the most memorable metaphorical image in the book:
“Success kicks away the stool of masochism, on which female existence so often depends, and leaves you hanging, gasping.”
