About book Letters To Alice On First Reading Jane Austen (1999)
"Alice" is a fictional character, the author, Fay Weldon, signs her letters to this nonexistent niece "your aunt Fay" and most of the book reads more like essays than a novel. Sounds ghastly, right? It probably is if you read it at the wrong moment.Like many people who loved this book, I received it as a gift, put it aside, and then started reading one day when I was in the right mood. And BAM! I was hooked and read this short piece in an afternoon (127 pages in this edition). It definitely helps to like Jane Austen; it's hard to imagine someone who hasn't read Austen or doesn't like her work enjoying this book.Most of the "story" consists of Aunt Fay "explaining" Austen's life and times to her niece, a young woman of eighteen who has dyed her hair punkette style (the book was first published in 1984) and who has to read Austen for school--and isn't looking forward to it. The conceit is cleverer than it sounds, and there's a neat twist at the end. Fay delivers some lofty and, for some readers, pretentious-sounding passages on the meaning of Great Literature, while discouraging her niece from writing a novel before she has had anything in the way of a life.But the real meat of this work is the discussion of Austen as a person and a writer who lived in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and into the first two decades of the nineteenth as an Anglican clergyman's daughter in village England. As Weldon (or Aunt Fay) describes it, all these facts are inseparable, and essential, in understanding Austen's work. And if you aren't familiar with the horrible realities of that time and place, even for a middle-class woman (as best we can define Austen's level for today's world), then you lack the necessary background to appreciate her fiction--and you will be troubled by all those questions whose answers elude junior-high school students: Why didn't "they" (Austen, her sister, her fictional characters, middle- and upper-class women in general) just "get a job" instead of remaining trapped in shabby-genteel poverty? Why does Austen almost never refer to current events, among the most dramatic in English history (the Napoleonic Wars, great stuff!)? Why does she not describe all those peculiar articles of clothing that we would like to visualize, or elaborate on all those bizarre two-hundred-year-old customs? And why would anyone willingly marry Mr. Collins?For someone like me, who spent years immersed in Pride and Prejudice and who has spent even longer than that reading and thinking about Austen as a person, woman and writer, reading this book was like an alcoholic's finding a case of Jack Daniel's outside the kitchen door. I was flabbergasted as Weldon put forward every last one of what I thought were my unique opinions about Austen and her works and times. The obvious explanation is that my opinions aren't unique or even all that unusual, but even among my fellow Janeites I often feel alone in my outlook. Seeing my ideas laid out one after the other and presented as Gospel--bam bam BAM BAM BAM--was, let us say, highly addictive.Many readers who love this book cite the "City of Invention," Weldon's beautifully-imagined metropolis of all the lasting literary works, with the reeking slums of porn huddled somewhere near the docks and the prefabricated suburbs of genres like romance and mystery rising far too quickly on the outskirts. It is a nice metaphor, but it's also fair to say that times have changed. We feel very differently now about porn and genre fiction than we did almost thirty years ago. Not only do many more of us read and write it unashamedly, but the idea of a strict division between Literary and Genre is as dated for many of us as "separate but equal" as a sound basis for a public school system. And when Aunt Fay starts railing against "word processors" and decrees that longhand is the only way to write fiction ... oh, please!No, the stuff that makes me want to run down the street waving this book and shouting "Read this now!" is the wealth of insight about Austen. I could fill this generous review space several times over with my favorite quotes, but I will have to content myself with picking out two or three of Weldon's major themes.First: her discussion of fiction as different from, and superior to, nonfiction. It "rais[es] invention above description" (p. 52). Almost anyone can be taught to write a detailed, accurate description. The genius of fiction is the author's imagination (thus the literary "City of Invention"). Weldon rejects the well-worn advice always to "write what you know," seeing it as the source of Austen's duller passages when she followed it too faithfully. "Fiction, thank God, is not and need not be reality" (p. 32). "Novels are not meant to be diaries" (p. 90). "You do not read novels for information but for enlightenment" (p. 29).Second: Weldon's feminism, beginning with her accounts in the early letters of the harshness of women's lives at that time, especially the dangers they faced from constant childbearing in a world without modern medicine or access to birth control. She takes "a tender view of Mrs. Bennet" of Pride and Prejudice, with her five unmarried daughters, saying that "Women were born poor, and stayed poor, and lived well only by their husbands' favour." "Enough to give anyone the vapours!" (p. 27)Weldon's assessment of Mr. Bennet ("callous and egocentric," p. 109) and Mr. Woodhouse of Emma ("irritating, difficult and hypochondriacal," p. 80) is refreshingly harsh and accurate, even if not necessarily the way Austen meant us to see them, characters who may have been based on her own beloved father. As in her sympathetic attitude toward Mrs. Bennet ("tenderer than her creator's"), Weldon is "looking at [Austen's world] from the outside in, not the inside out" (p. 30)."Austen's books are studded with [examples of] male whims taking priority ... over female happiness," says Weldon. "[Austen] does not condemn. She chides women for their raging vanity, their infinite capacity for self-deception, their rapaciousness and folly; men, on the whole, she simply accepts" (p. 19-20). Weldon finds examples in the Austen family history that reflect the way of that world, that "when a man has a principle, a woman pays for it," as when one of Austen's aunts was accused of shoplifting and her husband refused to buy the shopkeeper off, insisting on a trial. "He believes in honour; she stays in prison" (p. 94).Finally, there is the most fascinating argument of all, one that explores ideas I have been wrestling with literally for years: whether Austen was truly "good," really accepted the morality of her times, or simply had her spirit crushed. Austen lived her forty-one years as a dutiful spinster daughter, at home with her (eventually) widowed mother and fellow-spinster sister, never allowed to achieve independent adulthood. Did she embrace this restricted existence happily and cheerfully because she believed it in her heart to be right and just? Or did she bow to necessity, accepting defeat with the good manners her society required of women? I disagree with Weldon's idea that Austen brought on the Addison's disease that killed her as a sort of auto-immune response to frustration and years of repressed anger. Claire Tomalin's biography has established the most likely cause as tuberculosis caught by nursing one of her brothers.But apart from psychobabble, there is a real sense in the arc of Austen's life and career of a brilliant, fierce, angry rebel caught, beaten down and stifled into docility. Weldon suggests that there was another reason besides the obvious financial one that Austen never married: that in the woman and the writer there was a "ripple of merriment, this underground hilarity" and that "something truly frightening rumbled there beneath the bubbling mirth." "She knew too much … for her own good" (p. 97-98).Weldon presents an interesting theory in her interpretation of Mansfield Park, the first book Austen wrote after the death of her father. In the contrast between the "unspeakably good" heroine, Fanny Price, and the "witty, lively, and selfish" Mary Crawford, Weldon suggests that Austen was working out her own internal struggle between her "good" and "bad" sides that was "never quite reconciled." The "rebellious spirit" in Austen learned the "defences of wit and style" like Mary, while the "dutiful side accept[ed] authority, endur[ed] everything with a sweet smile and [found] her defence in wisdom" (p. 109).William Deresiewicz, in his book A Jane Austen Education (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), accepts the dutiful Austen as the real one, the "good" side her only side. "Usefulness and kindness," he says, "those same standards of decency she had championed in Mansfield Park … mattered to her more than all the wit in the world" (p. 192). But this, I am convinced, is a man's view, even two hundred years later still preferring what Virginia Woolf called the "Angel in the House," "utterly unselfish," "sacrificed herself daily," "never had a mind or a wish of her own" (p. 22), to the uncomfortable reality of a genius in a woman's body.Like Weldon, I say an emphatic No! to so depressing a view. That wit is too ferocious and too powerful, too great a triumph of art and inspiration to be discarded so casually. Weldon reminds us of "Lady Susan," Austen's unpublished epistolary novella, in which a thoroughly "wicked woman" romps through genteel society but is never punished as fictional morality demands (p. 85). It's unlikely that Austen's family approved of "Lady Susan;" certainly Austen's father never tried to have it published as he had Pride and Prejudice."If it's approval you want, don't be a writer," Aunt Fay warns her niece (p. 112); earlier she has said that "A writer writes opaquely to keep some readers out, let others in. It is what he or she meant to do. It is not accidental - obscurity of language, inconsistency of thought ... it's not for everyone, it was never meant to be" (p. 106).Rather than believe in a Jane Austen who rejected her greatest gifts in favor of a dubious piety, I accept Aunt Fay's version: "I think indeed she bowed her will and humbled her soul, and bravely kept her composure ... and escaped into the alternative worlds of her novels ... and her self-discipline was so secure [that] she brought into that inventive world sufficient of the reality of the one we know and think we love, but which I think she hated, to make those novels outrun the generations" (p. 40, emphasis mine).Anyone who loves Jane Austen's work and has wondered what the person was really like, or why she wrote what she wrote, should not miss this book. Whether or not you agree with all of "Aunt Fay" 's conclusions, you will be left with some excellent food for thought--or, if you prefer, several cases of superior bourbon.
I picked this book because I haven’t read—and had no intention of reading—anything by Jane Austen; as with Agatha Christie, Dickens and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes I’ve seen enough dramatizations so as to feel as if I’ve read the entire canon. That said I’m well aware that even the best-intentioned adaptation will still miss much, so maybe there was a case for Austen and I was willing to be persuaded. I wasn’t sure what to expect of these letters but they turned out to be what they couldn’t avoid being, lectures presented as letters. Which I was fine with. All the personal stuff about Alice-with-the-green-hair and her Aunt Fay’s unsettled relationship with her sister Enid (Alice’s mum) and Alice’s dad really didn’t interest me much. Had we been privy to Alice’s letters (which we are not) then I might’ve appreciated her more but she was always at a distance; reading this book was like hearing only one side of a phone conversation. This is not why you want to read this book.Alice is struggling with Austen. She’s at uni and Austen’s one of the prescribed authors but Alice can’t see the point to her. Why is she important? Her aunt is a feminist and you might think she’d shrug off Austen as dated and irrelevant and yet she doesn’t. She was, of course, a writer of her time and much of the time Aunt Fay devotes to putting Austen in context. It’s like Austen’s contemporary, Beethoven: nowadays it’s really hard to think of him as a revolutionary but he was and Austen too in her own way. Of course both of them could’ve been more radical—Austen’s novels practically ignore the harsh realities of the world in which she lived—but that doesn’t mean steps weren’t taken in the right direction. Aunt Fay does make a very valid point about the lack of social commentary in Austen:Novelists provide an escape from reality: they take you to the City of Invention. When you return you know more about yourself. You do not read novels for information, but for enlightenment. I don’t suppose Jane Austen thought particularly much about the ills of her society. All this, for her, was simply what the world was like. She would not get upset by it any more than you are upset by the satellites flying across your sky, or the missiles dotted here and there about the earth, pointing instant and ever-ready nuclear death at you and yours. That, you think, is just how it is. You can get used to anything; preferably by mentioning it as little as possible, and using the greater peril to intensify the smaller joy. And good for you! There is a second strand to Fay’s letters to Alice prompted by the fact the young girl informs her aunt that she’s decided to write her own novel and so we have pages of advice to a budding novelist written by a certain kind of novelist; Aunt Fay (as opposed to Weldon—hard to keep the character and the book’s author separate) can’t change who she is or what she’s done successfully (because she has made a living from her books) but she also leaves room for the young girl to find her own way. Her lists, for example, peter out after half a dozen entries but she provides blanks for the girl to fill in herself. That I appreciated. She offers advice that she herself would have a hard time with. But maybe that’s how it should be. Where would Beethoven have been without Haydn and Mozart? And where would Brahms and Schubert have been without Beethoven? The torch gets passed on. That Alice’s novel sells well—“You have sold more copies of The Wife's Revenge in three months than I have of all my novels put together”—I was disappointed to hear. It smacks of the happy ending some Hollywood director felt the book needed. Better for the girl to fall flat on her face. More realistic. But then novels have little to do with what’s real:To believe a Mills & Boon novel reflects real life, is to live in perpetual disappointment. You are meant to believe while the reading lasts, and not a moment longer. Surely it’s unfair to compare Jane Austen to a Mills & Boon novel? Perhaps not:A writer’s all, Alice, is not taken up by the real world. There is something left over: enough for them to build these alternative, finite realities.[…][W]henever and wherever we live, and needs to be reminded from time to time that novels are illusion, not reality. And she’s not talking about Mills & Boon in that last paragraph but Thackeray and Austen herself.In the end Alice goes off and does her own thing and reads little of Austen despite her aunt’s best efforts. In that respect the book’s ending is realistic; the young have to find their own way. Where Letters to Alice succeeds for me as a novel is in its narrator’s flaws which I’m assuming are deliberate—I’m giving Weldon the benefit of the doubt having read nothing else by her—but where it fails is in the whole family relationship which didn’t come to life to me despite the letter to her sister, Enid, in the middle of the book; again I would’ve liked to have seen what Enid had to say for herself. It’s okay for the lecturer to be detached but not the sister although maybe that’s a part of their probem.But there’s a lot here to think about and in that respect the book is worthwhile. A few things that jumped out at me, none of them to do with Jane Austen:Fiction is much safer than non-fiction. You can be accused of being boring, but seldom of being wrong.Writing, after all, is part of life, an overflow from it. Take away life and you take away writing.Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living. It is something you do with your hands, like knitting.A writer writes opaquely to keep some readers out, let others in. It is what he or she meant to do. It is not accidental — obscurity of language, inconsistency of thought.[T]he leap between nothing and something, once made, is always made. It is the marvel at creation that can’t be destroyed: not the creation itself. Nothing Fay/Weldon says I’m afraid did anything to make me want to read Jane Austen although if I did it’d probably be the early novel Lady Susan if only because it’s short and sounds like it might be fun.
Do You like book Letters To Alice On First Reading Jane Austen (1999)?
"Elizabeth Bennet, that wayward, capricious girl, listening to the beat of feeling, rather than the pulsing urge for survival, paying attention to the subtle demands for human dignity rather than the cruder ones of established convention, must have upset quite a number of her readers, changed their minds, and with their minds, their lives, and with their lives, the society they lived in: prodding it quicker and faster along the slow, difficult road that has led us out of barbarity into civilisation." This book and I have a history. When I finished my degree, I had a precious few days before leaving when I had access to the uni library AND time to read what I wanted to read, not for my degree. This was one of the books I started but didn't have time to finish. I've thought of it with regret over the years, but it's out of print and hard to get hold of. So when I found myself working at another university library (more years later than I care to count), I checked and yes, they had it in stock. I've had it on loan for a few months (renewing it of course) and have lingered over it. It deserves that. A must for Jane Austen fans, but also those who believe in the inherent value of good literature.It follows the premise of the author writing letters to her niece (Alice) who has started a literature degree, and wants to be a writer - but who doesn't see the point of reading Jane Austen. 'Aunt' takes it on herself to convince her why she should, and along the way takes in many other writers and musings on the nature of being a writer, why and how to write, why and what to read. It's funny, it's honest, and it's been worth the wait. Before I return it, I want to go back through and write out all my favourite lines. If I could ever get hold of a copy of this book for myself, that would make me very happy.
—Kathy Dolan
So this book was sent by a friend. I was fairly certain that Bumma (who has a sticker on her wheelchair saying "I'd rather be reading Jane Austen" would probably snag this from me and squirrel it away so I read it pretty soon after it arrived. I found myself taking book off the shelf periodically and read bits and pieces from it. It is an "epistolary novel" (I usually can't recall the word epistolary, but as we just had a discussion on this recently, it is in the forefront of my brain.) Weldon, like Jane Austen, writes letters to a niece (only in Weldon's case, said niece is imaginary). Niece Alice, besides being imaginary is also a reluctant teenager forced to read Austen at school. An interesting premise.apologize.
—bookczuk
Weldon brings up some interesting points regarding Jane Austen and the overly-romanticized era she lived in but her method of presenting her theories sometimes made for tedious reading. Also, I thought that "Aunt Fay" at times came off as a bit harsh with the niece, and maybe a bit of an overly-critical book snob. And why was she so hard on her sister?? I just didn't understand what the bitter undertone stemmed from. I think it's worth at least one read for Austen fans. She does give you some things to ponder.
—Angie Fehl
