Pride & Prejudice

Martin Amis’s dedication to Jane Austen in “The Pregnant Widow” piqued my interest so I’ve been on a Jane Austen “jag”. Although I’d read “Pride & Prejudice” I’ve never been much of a fan. Given my rigorous defence of “Moby Dick” there might be some scepticism of the reason for the lukewarm reception – I remember justifying my lack of enthusiasm to a friend by telling her I like sentences that if I read aloud I’d have a chance of finishing before I turned blue. Since that time, either my lungs have improved or my aesthetic sensibilities have.

I think I also might have said there‘s a limit to how much I need to know about the codes of conduct of early 19th century polite society. While I still think there’s some mileage in these opinions they’re most probably justifications after the fact. The real reason would have been political bias, that next to “The Jungle” or “Germinal”, “Pride And Prejudice” seemed slight, it’s concerns too narrow. At the risk of sounding joyless (too late), it wasn’t worthy.

Martin Amis recently said the J M Coetzee couldn’t write. (This obviously passed the Nobel committee by when they awarded him the prize for Literature). He’s retracted the comment and apologized. The original point, lost in the furore, was that literature should be fun. Whilst I’m dubious about anything Martin Amis says that isn’t solely an aesthetic call (and even then I reserve judgement) this makes absolute sense in the light of his reverence for Jane Austen. Martin Amis is unlikely to read Jane Austen novels for the insight into the inner workings of the middle class drawing rooms of the pseudo-gentry. He reads them because they’re fun. Twenty years later, but not too late, I will swallow my pride, admit my mistake, and agree.