Daphne Regrets

I've just been watching Miss Austen Regrets, a well-written, well-made and well-acted television drama about the later years of the late eighteenth century/early nineteenth century novelist Jane Austen.

It made me think a bit.

Jane Austen was the first classical novelist whose work I read really – a bit of Dickens, perhaps, but then I started with Sense and Sensibility when I was about fourteen, and then read the other five in quick succession.

Jane Austen is sometimes categorised as a “romantic novelist” - so you'd think, perhaps, that I would move on to other romantic novels.

But oh, no, I didn't. Because Jane Austen's novels are much more than that – comedy and satire and social history, for starters. Over the years I've tried a few writers who are also – in some cases, wrongly - classed as romantic novelists. I've read most of the Brontes' novels and I like Charlotte's Jane Eyre but confess that Emily's Wuthering Heights is too gloomy for me. I tried Daphne du Maurier (worth a try, there aren't many of us Daphnes about and we should stick together). But, apart from Rebecca, which I quite enjoyed, I just couldn't get into them at all.

As for the Jilly Cooper type, or her from the North-East whose name I forget - - ah, Catherine Cookson - - badly-written mush. The modern versions of these have a lot more sex in them, of course. Erotic? Sadly, no. Boring? Oh, yes. Though the most I've read, I confess, is half a page in a bookshop at somewhere like a railway station. I giggled, and then lost interest.

As part of my university course I read a few early novels – Fanny Burney's Evelina, for example, and they were - - well, okay. But wasn't romantic novels that I liked – it was Jane Austen's “take” on them: her wit, the way she uses words, her insight, her clever dialogue.

Oh, all right then, whilst we're on the "romantic" bit, I liked it- of course! - when Mr Darcy came out of the lake in his wet shirt in the excellent television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice - - but then so did every woman who saw it, and quite a few men too – and that scene was not in the novel, of course!

But there I stuck. I read all Jane Austen early: read a lot of classics at university: and these days I don't read novels at all. What, never? Well, hardly ever.

I hesitate to confess it, because as a child I was always reading some work of fiction or other. Always. Whilst eating, whilst supposed to be tidying my room, whilst supposed to be doing my homework, whilst on holiday - - always. I never thought I would ever stop, and yet I have.

Emily reads lots of “serious” novels and sometimes asks me why I don't. My answer is always along the lines of the world being gloomy enough without reading about fictional gloom.

And yet I'll read gloomy autobiographies, or other gloomy non-fiction. But that's real - I feel I don't want to read the product of someone's gloomy imagination.

I read the best – for me - too early, perhaps, and nothing else has equalled it for me. I keep waiting to come back to novels, and I keep trying. But somehow, I never quite get that can't-wait-to-turn-the-page feeling back, and I think it's a shame.