You tell me, in passing, that you are doing a college course in English Literature, and are obliged to read Jane Austen; that you find her boring, petty and irrelevant and, that as the world is in crisis, and the future catastrophic, you cannot imagine what purpose there can be in your reading her.
Page one, paragraph two. The opening missive from Aunt to niece. This line pretty much sums up the entire point of the book. Aunt Fay is going to explain to 18-year-old Alice—who has dyed her blonde hair black and green—why Jane Austen is not boring or irrelevant as well as the purpose in reading her novels.
Let me give you, let me share with you, the City of Invention. For what novelists do…is to build Houses of the Imagination, and where houses cluster together there is a city.
The City of Invention is a recurring symbol throughout the text. It is the metaphorical place where readers meet with writers in place like the Sci-Fi suburb or Romance Alley. For a whale of good time, readers are encouraged to take a leisurely stroll down Melville Ave. It is worth mentioning, however, that among the low-budget pre-fab homes constructed without style or artifice can be found Jaws alongside the novelization of E.T. as an example of a “film first, novel after” kind of deal when, of course, Jaws was first a novel, albeit not one to be found in the vicinity of Melville Ave. But everybody makes mistakes.
“Improbable circumstances, unnatural characters”! The City of Invention is peopled by altogether more reasonable folk, with natural and consistent characters. In that City if there is an effect there is a cause; there is relevance, purpose and meaning; it is a wonderful place. She knew it.
In response to Alice’s critique that Austen writes about unrealistic characters who find themselves in the most unlikely of situations. This is, of course, a common complaint…against every writer by somebody, somewhere. Real life has proven that the most unnatural things happen in the most unlikely circumstances to the point that the criticism of any fiction along the lines of “it’s just not true to life” does not really apply quite like it used to. But the real meat of the critique is that fiction is not designed to replicate life because life offers too many unanswered questions and while a little ambiguity is nice, readers would rebel en masse if novels introduced as much irrelevance, lack of purpose and cryptic meaning as can be found in real life.
I do not wish (much) to insult Departments of English Literature, nor to suggest for one moment that you would be better out of their care than in it; I am just saying be careful.
It seems pretty clear here and from other rather pointed barbs directed toward English Lit courses that Auntie is placing the blame for her niece’s boredom with the assigned reading of Austen by at least half on the shoulders of the instructor. Which, of course, would explain the very existence of these letters (and by definition, the existence of the book.) Essentially, the existence of the book is a wholesale critique of the ways in which literature is taught by academia. The author is implicitly telling the world that she can do it better. More than that, she is putting her pen where her mouth is and showing the world. Whether her way is actually a better way or not is up to the reader to decide.
