NEXT CHANGE AT YOUR LIBRARY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 95, 18 April 1941, Page 43

NEXT CHANGE AT YOUR LIBRARY

RE you a Jane Austen enthusiast? A I certainly am, and I like to think that the filming of Pride and Prejudice has probably brought (to mix metaphors), a lot of new fans into the fold. Miss Austen would surely have been extremely amused to trace the renewed interest in her works to Laurence Olivier’s sex-appeal. ‘ Pride and Prejudice is the Jane Austen novel one should read first. You can’t help enjoying it, and then you naturally want to read all the others. The charm of Jane Austen for me lies in the allpervading calm of her plots and settings. | They restore your sense of proportion, I find them particularly efficacious after a day spent in rushing madly from place to. place, and getting excited over things -that don’t really matter. It’s such a change to find oneself in a world where the people are all sure of their bread and butter, and where even the cads have perfect manners, Like me, you probably read Emma at school and loathed it. But when you get older, you can be far more tolerant towards Emma’s’ silliness. Even now, however, I feel that Emma escaped rather too. easily, considering the harm she so nearly inflicted on both Harriet and Jane Fairfax. Jane Austen herself,

whet worling on Emma said she was writing of a heroine whom she alone would like. All those who felt, when reading Emma, that Jane Fairfax did not get a square deal, will welcome Naomi RoydeSmith’s Jane Fairfax. Mrs. Royde-Smith. always felt that Jane was the real heroine of Emma, but that Miss Austen’s rigid standards of behaviour stood in the way of making her and her secret engagement the centre of the tale. For the lovely Jane was not, alas, completely straightforward. In building up her heroine’s early life as the adopted daughter of the philandering Colonel Campbell, Naomi Royde-Smith has introduced characters from Miss Austen’s other novels, and from the works of Thackeray and Fanny Burney. It is rather amusing to find Mrs,

Lydia Wickham as the gay divorcee with! designs ‘on Colonel Campbell, and to stumble over little Bingleys playing with their Darcy cousins. It would have been so easy to introduce jarring notes in a book that covers what is, to so many, sacred ground, but Jane Fairfax should not offend even the most bigoted Austen lover. The modern authorship is revealed, however, by its preoccupation with clothes (Miss Austen’s ‘heroines never noticed what they wore), and by the interest shown by the characters in events outside their immediate sphere. Jane Fairfax would, I think, have been less concerned with Napoleon’s threatened invasion had not Naomi Royde-Smith written her book in 1940.

M.

I.