Birthday Books

Dittoes

And now, from the department of people who enjoy receiving copies of books they already own...

By the way, what is so wrong with that?  I mean, I tell people that I own (if you count the book on tape) seven copies of Pride and Prejudice, and have no plans to refrain from buying additional copies in future should they come my way, and you'd think I'd just confessed to consorting with known puppy-stranglers. 

Oh, boy.  I feel a rant coming on, which means we're about to go off-topic big time here, and my editor, or whatever you'd call the guy who helps me set up and maintain this site, hates it when I do that.  So if you want to hear about why exactly it is perfectly reasonable to own so many copies of one book even if one lives, as I do, in a two-room apartment with two other people and thousands of other books, go and see my spiel.  For now, I have birthday books to write about.

One of the books only partly counts as a book I already own, since it's never been released in this particular form.  It's Sylvia Plath's poetry collection Ariel, but it differs significantly from the previously available edition.  At the time of her death, Plath left the manuscript of the poetry collection she'd planned, including a table of contents and the poems themselves (except one, which was listed in the contents but not included in the manuscript), on her desk.  The book Ted Hughes ultimately decided to publish differed from the one she'd planned.  He removed some of the poems she'd included, shifted the order of some of those retained, and inserted some of her late poems.  In her extraordinary introduction to Ariel:  The Restored Edition, Plath and Hughes' daughter Frieda Hughes explains the merits, difficulties, and origin stories of the book Plath planned and the one Ted Hughes published.  Frieda Hughes doesn't blame her father for his editorial choices -- quite the contrary -- but she asserts that "each version has its own significance."  I have the feeling that I'm going to spill a lot of ink on the subject of Plath and her various biographers at some point; for now, I would simply say that anyone interested in learning something useful about her life and work should buy this book, read the introduction, realize that Plath's daughter is also an extraordinary writer, jot down a reminder to yourself to buy one of her books the next time you're in the mood to shop, and then read the rest of Ariel. 

I also received a second copy of Agnes Grey a neglected novel by that most neglected Bronte sister Anne.  I have written elsewhere at some length about the impact Agnes Grey had at the time of its publication.  I will say here that Agnes Grey can be fairly accurately described as a real-life Jane Eyre -- a nineteenth-century woman of intelligence and sensitivity, forced by circumstances to become a governess, with no prospect of a Byronic hero to recognize her extraordinary inner qualities and rescue her from servitude.  This book's happy ending is milder and far more plausible than Eyre's.  Sadly, nothing like it was ever granted to its author, who also wrote the better-known Tenant of Wildfell Hall and who died before her thirtieth birthday. 

I've mentioned my fondness for old tattered copies of books, which goes hand-in-hand and no inherent contradiction whatsoever with my adoration of crisp lovely new ones.  My husband, who doesn't seem to mind being married to paradox, got me an old geezer of a copy of Shirley Jackson's The Witchcraft of Salem Village, although I have a perfectly current one.  The bad news is, whoever used to own this book apparently smoked a great deal.  The good news is it still has the original illustrations, which my neat little paperback doesn't. 

Spousal-type partner also got me a copy of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds and again the illustrations are a high point.  This is a re-release of an edition elegantly illustrated by Edward Gorey several decades ago.  For some reason, possibly because the universe is a cruel and senseless place, it hasn't been available for years and years and years.  Now it is.  My enthusiasm for this little hot-pink gem may seem inexplicable for those who know my taste in books and hear that this one has no footnotes, no introduction, and no supplementary material whatsoever.  No, not so much as one of those terse paragraphs in the front of the book into which some harassed editor tries to stuff all the major facts about the author in question.  I know those bioettes are meant to help, and they're better than nothing; but it strikes me as depressing that even an ordinary life could be crammed into a few deliberate sentences, though that kind of thing happens every day in newspapers all over the world. 

This volume assumes, perhaps not unreasonably, that anyone coming to this book knows at least enough about H. G. Wells to look for his name when searching for a copy of War of the Worlds, and having gotten off to that good start alone the reader can jolly well go on as far as he wants by himself, allowing some poor overworked editor to get on with her life, already.  The book is just the text, accompanied by Gorey's distinctive art.  You may think you don't know who Edward Gorey is.  You may be wrong.  It's happened before.  Admit it.  His art is all over the place; you just never knew the name attached to it.  If you want a really good time -- pure pleasure -- get one of the collections of his work to curl up with.  I envy you the opportunity of reading his books for the first time.  I'll buy it from you if you don't care about it.

But back from the land of dreams.  To make up for the dearth of supplementary material in the Gorey WotW, I got a Norton Critical Edition.  These are famous for being more extra stuff than text.  I love that in a man.  Sorry, book.  Anyway, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey has finally (and not a minute too soon) been inducted into the Norton canon.  All her other works have for years been cushioned smugly on lengthy introductions and contemporary book reviews, snuggling under warm modern essays, resting their pretty feet on ample footnotes.  Only NA has been left out in the cold.  Now, at last, she has been heralded triumphantly in to the ranks of the illustrious. 

Sorry, but I'm pretty darned thrilled.  I know that NA is considered by many to be the least worthy of Austen's works -- too light and bright and sparkling; too silly, with young Catherine Morland's flights of fancy and imaginations of gothic horror in a perfectly ordinary (if rather dreary) household; too unlikely by half.  I have heard that the tone of the book alters sharply and distractingly in the middle, and the Bath half and the Northanger Abbey portion of the book fit only awkwardly together.  I have yet to see it.  I love the book.  I find it a romp and a delight and all those other ridiculous words.  To me it is nothing but pleasure.  I find no flaw.  The heroine is the most winning of all of Austen's main female characters -- candid, in the old sense of always thinking the best of people against all odds; eager to adore and to enjoy; and a reader.  Not a reader of tedious, eat-this-it's-good-for-you, great and worthy works, but a girl whose idea of a really good time, if she can't go out and play with her friends, is curling up with a good book for the afternoon.  A novel, to be exact.  Yes, only a novel -- "only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language."  I was in a bookstore when I read that famous passage -- working in the bookstore, to be exact, and reading shamelessly on the job -- and I laughed out loud for sheer pleasure and didn't care who saw or heard me. 

I suppose Virginia Woolf would have considered NA's famous "only a novel" passage, like the scene in Jane Eyre in which Jane scolds the world for not understanding that women have wishes and hopes and dreams just like men, to be a flawed piece of writing -- one in which the plot comes to a screeching halt while we wait for the writer to stop making a speech and get on with the story.  But I love JE's "who blames me?" passage, and I love every word of the justly celebrated "only a novel" speech so much that it was only with great restraint that I contented myself with quoting that little snippet from it, instead of unleashing the whole page-long power of it on you, the unsuspecting reader.

That passage is representative of what I enjoy most about Northanger Abbey.  The book is written as if the writer is telling us something, speaking as if we are in the room with her.  When, in the course of relating the story at hand, she thinks of something else she wants to mention, she does so -- eagerly, almost breathlessly, always laughingly.  NA is the transitional novel between Jane Austen the family entertainer, spinning uproariously funny stories like Love and Freindship (sic) to read aloud to parents and brothers and beloved sister and thus while away the long dark evenings; and Jane Austen the writer, still laughing, but taking the work of writing novels seriously and moving with steady step away from the broadly comic and toward something more subtle and brilliant.  The very first paragraph of NA includes a reference to the name of Richard that is puzzling to readers but apparently an inside family joke.  And in that same paragraph she makes a crude, painfully funny statement that seems to have slipped straight out of the juvenilia -- not because it isn't funny, but because it is all too much so:  "A family of ten children will always be called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number." 

Austen would never in her later writing be so deliberately insistent on producing a laugh, except in her letters to her sister, where her comments on friends and neighbors are just as harshly hilarious.  "Dr. Hall [is] in such very deep mourning that either his Mother, his Wife, or himself must be dead," she writes with mock solemnity in one of these; and in another, "Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing [sic] to a fright.  I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband."  The laugh that provokes is fairly jerked out of one.  As presumptuous and prying as it is to imagine any such thing, I always think of Austen's sister Cassandra receiving such words with a smile she tries to hide, a shake of the head, at last the laugh that can't be suppressed, and (more out of a sense of duty than any real displeasure), an attempt at a severe tone:  "Jane, how can you?"

But to return to the book.  Although books and reading figure more or less prominently in all of Austen's works, this is the only one in which novels may be considered characters in their own right.  They are discussed, they are described, they are defended; a character's admiration or dislike of a particular book can be used as a yardstick to measure his or her moral worth as surely as in the works of Anne Bronte an act of kindness or cruelty to animals shows whether a character ought to be approved of or despised.  Jane Austen shamelessly plugs her own favorites and makes the books she dislikes the favored fare of her least likeable characters.  Reading books and talking about books takes up real space in the novel; even the act of learning how to read is discussed, in one of the sprightliest and most entertaining conversations of the book.  The very first chapter of the book contains a list of Catherine's favorite quotes, and what they've taught her about life.  A love of the same novels and a habit of reading them aloud together is a bond between Henry Tilney, the man with whom Catherine falls in love, and his sister.  Isabella Thorpe, Catherine's new friend in Bath, draws up a list of the "horrid" novels that she and Catherine simply must read, and we hear it in loving detail.  Too unguarded and unquestioning a faith in the assured truth of the gothic novels Catherine adores leads her briefly but thoroughly astray.  When Catherine comes home from her adventures in Bath and Northanger Abbey, her mother thinks that she must be bored with home after so much excitement, and goes off to look for a specific article about "young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance" in a specific periodical, a real one of the time.  Reading is more than simply an amusing pastime in this book.  It is an integral part of life, not for some elite crew of lofty, ivory-tower types, but for real, ordinary, wonderfully lively people. 

I am glad to say that I'm not the only one who is wild about this particular novel.  There is a site devoted to it that I haven't visited for a while for the simple reason that it is so enchanting that once I get there I never never never want to leave, and that's a great way not to get the dishes done.  But please, if you want to understand how much fun a small, devoted group of skillful writers and humorists can have with a single adored novel, and if you want to see what a Celebrity Death Match between Henry Tilney, the hero of NA, and Edmund Bertram, the hero of Mansfield Park and easily the dullest and stuffiest of all of Austen's main male characters, would be like -- now you know where to go.  The site is called Tilneys and Trapdoors, after a line from the novel, and you'll have almost as good a time there as you will reading the novel itself.  Promise.

Speaking of which...gotta go.  The book is calling.

Got a question or comment?
Write to the Book Lady.

If you found this essay helpful,
please visit the Filthy Lucre page