AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Jane Austen created stories that cause readers and viewers to swoon.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE")
MATTHEW MACFADYEN: (As Mr. Darcy) You have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you. I never wish to be parted from you from this day on.
RASCOE: That's, of course, Matthew Macfadyen from the 2005 movie version of "Pride & Prejudice." This month marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, so NPR's Melissa Gray asked some of the writer's most ardent fans what they love about her work.
UNIDENTIFIED AUSTEN FANS #1: (Singing) Bingley, Bingley, Bingley, Bingley, Darcy.
MELISSA GRAY, BYLINE: Where to find Austen enthusiasts? Not England, but Baltimore, where more than 900 members of the Jane Austen Society of North America gathered for its annual meeting this fall.
UNIDENTIFIED AUSTEN FANS #1: (Singing) Bingley, Darcy.
UNIDENTIFIED CONDUCTOR: One more.
GRAY: To help them get into a Regency-era mindset, there were sing-alongs...
UNIDENTIFIED AUSTEN FANS #1: (Singing) Round and round the Earth is turning.
GRAY: ...Jewelry-making - brooches with tiny portraits.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I love that you chose the eye. These are, like, lovers' eyes. It was a fashion because you could wear your loved one, and no one would know.
GRAY: Also...
TOM TUMBUSCH: God save the king.
UNIDENTIFIED AUSTEN FANS #2: God save the king.
GRAY: ...Since to be fond of dancing was a certain step toward falling in love...
TUMBUSCH: Right-hand star. One, two, three. One, two, three. One...
GRAY: ...50 people in two lines face each other, some in period dress.
TESSA HARINGS: Knowing your right from your left with your partners and knowing which way to turn. That was the biggest challenge.
GRAY: But overall, pretty easy, says Tessa Harings. She's a high school teacher from Phoenix here with her friend Katie Yu (ph). While Harings was turning her body, her mind was turning to "Pride And Prejudice," the 2005 movie where Lizzie meets Mr. Darcy at a dance. He's rich. He's broody. He's a snob - the last man in the world whom she could ever be prevailed to marry. She rejects him. Her mother freaks out. Then baby sister runs off with a libertine. The family will be ruined. Mama's really freaking out now. So is Papa. Wait. It's Mr. Darcy to the rescue. He's not really a snob. No - he's a hero. Second proposal accepted. The end.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GRAY: Whew. Tessa Harings says her English students are receptive to Jane Austen, thanks in part to that movie.
HARINGS: They want to read "Pride And Prejudice" because they want to understand all of the memes and the jokes about Mr. Darcy and so on and so forth.
KATIE YU: In that particular movie, though...
HARINGS: Oh, Mr. Collins.
YU: ...The big meme is about the boiled potatoes.
HARINGS: Yes.
YU: What excellent boiled potatoes.
HARINGS: Boiled potatoes.
GRAY: That's the unctuous would-be suitor Mr. Collins.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE")
TOM HOLLANDER: (As Mr. Collins) Many years since I've had such an exemplary vegetable.
GRAY: As Harings and Yu point out, Austen's characters are archetypes. That's what makes them so relatable today. We all know someone who's awkward and ingratiating, like Mr. Collins, clever and independent, like Lizzie, or reticent and reserved, like Mr. Darcy. Dance instructor Tom Tumbusch has read Jane Austen's books several times.
TUMBUSCH: I advise young men all the time, read Jane Austen. learn how to dance.
GRAY: And he knows what he's talking about, too. When he first began dating Toni, his future wife, she insisted they watch the BBC's adaptation of "Pride And Prejudice." Yes...
(SOUNDBITE OF SPLASH)
GRAY: ...The wet Colin Firth one. But...
TUMBUSCH: My favorite Jane Austen character is actually Mr. Knightley from "Emma."
GRAY: Mr. Knightley - a hardworking gentleman and magistrate who shows Emma where she's been wrong.
TUMBUSCH: Modern men struggle to find good role models. Her heroes show how men can be men, do masculine things, make the world a better place.
GRAY: And, he says, treat women with respect.
Away from the general meeting now for views from two modern writers.
SANDRA CISNEROS: I didn't come to Jane Austen immediately. I came to Jane Austen eventually.
GRAY: Author and poet Sandra Cisneros first read Austen decades ago. These days, she really appreciates the anxiety behind all those marriage plots.
CISNEROS: There are all these issues of characters who are on the edge of poverty, who are living in poverty or fear of poverty in every single one of her books.
GRAY: There's so much talk about debt and inheritance and who has it and who doesn't, and whether someone has enough income to live independently or even comfortably.
CISNEROS: And that's why women are so concerned about who they marry and how much each eligible bachelor makes when he moves into the neighborhood.
GRAY: Jane Austen was an unmarried member of the gentry class, though on the bottom rung of it, as Cisneros writes in a new introduction to the Vintage Classics edition of "Sense And Sensibility." When Austen's father died suddenly in 1805, he didn't leave much money for his wife and daughters. His sons provided some support. A well-off one eventually provided a cottage, but the household budget was tight. With few socially acceptable ways to earn an income, Austen turned to the writing she'd long shared with family and friends. She revised an old manuscript about two sisters named Elinor and Marianne and got it published.
(SOUNDBITE OF AUDIOBOOK, "SENSE AND SENSIBILITY")
JULIET STEVENSON: (Reading) The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex.
CISNEROS: They're people of money, and they're gentility. And then they get pushed out and moved to a little cottage that a relative gives them out of pity.
GRAY: How familiar. While "Sense And Sensibility" didn't make Jane Austen rich, it did sell, and more novels with satiric takes on class and human folly soon followed. All six novels are still selling today.
(SOUNDBITE OF AUDIOBOOK, "PERSUASION")
JULIET STEVENSON: (Reading) I think you ought to be made acquainted with Mr. Elliot's real character.
BRANDON TAYLOR: She's, like, an exquisite choreographer of conversations and exchanges.
GRAY: That's novelist Brandon Taylor. He got hooked on Austen thanks to the audiobooks narrated by Juliet Stevenson. He loves how Austen uses language. It can be delicate and poetic, funny, as well as blistering.
(SOUNDBITE OF AUDIOBOOK, "PERSUASION")
JULIET STEVENSON: (Reading) Oh, he is black at heart, hollow and black.
TAYLOR: Black at heart, hollow and black - a line I think about all the time. It's my favorite read in a Jane Austen novel, maybe.
GRAY: It's also from his favorite Austen novel, "Persuasion." Anne Elliot was persuaded to reject the man she loved because he didn't have enough money. Eight years later, he's back. He's now Captain Wentworth, rich and single. But she's wilted, a spinster at 27. Still - a second chance?
TAYLOR: I think of it as being a book about what happens when you survive the worst decision you've ever made. It's like, oh. Jane Austen has provided me, like, the novel to teach me how to live with the after.
GRAY: Austen completed "Persuasion" as her health was in decline. She died a year later at 41. The novel is melancholy at times, threaded through with regret and wisdom - a state well-known to anyone who's hit middle age.
TAYLOR: There's ever more thematic things at work in her novels that I discover. It's not like the book is shape-shifting. It's that I am now finally able to pick up what Jane Austen has always been putting down.
TAM PAYNTER: What are we looking at?
GRAY: Back at the Jane Austen Society of North America's general meeting, Tam Paynter of Lopez Island, Washington, flips through "The Jane Austen Insult Guide For Well-Bred Women."
PAYNTER: (Reading) What strange creatures brothers are. You are never sure of a good impression being durable (laughter).
GRAY: That one is awful.
PAYNTER: That one's really bad.
GRAY: OK.
The author's biting wit is only one reason Paynter thinks these novels endure 250 years after Jane Austen's birth.
PAYNTER: There's a comfort to it. It's the comfort that you get from reading beautiful language, well-expressed ideas, but it's still going to have a happy ending. She's still going to get married at the end.
GRAY: Anne will have her Wentworth, Emma her Knightley, Lizzie her Darcy. And we will have characters who are not just good company, but the best company.
(SOUNDBITE OF JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET'S "DAWN (FROM PRIDE AND PREJUDICE SOUNDTRACK)")
GRAY: Melissa Gray, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET'S "DAWN (FROM PRIDE AND PREJUDICE SOUNDTRACK)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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