Persuasion.

So, my friend. Yesterday, on my social media, I shared a silly list of Jane Austen’s best insults. I post things about Jane Austen pretty often. I love Jane Austen. It’s no secret.

Something about yesterday’s silly list of scathing insults spurred you to reply. You know I love Jane Austen, you said to me, but you don’t know why; she’s a terrible writer. One of the worst, you said.

It was a surprise, coming from you. We have been good friends, if not close ones, for a very long time. We share many common opinions, but enough differing ones that our conversations are lively.You are progressive and open-minded, and I consider you a man of taste. So I answered you respectfully, explaining to you the connection I feel to the characters she penned. You did not reply; I left it, thinking the matter done.

But another surprise: a message, from you - an apology of sorts. You didn’t mean to offend; you rarely indulge in such displays of negativity; there are so many emotional weights at present, your heart heavy with worry for your dear ones in danger’s path. And yet you took the time to exclaim again, you’ve read all of Austen’s writing, and still find it miserable; you’ve been to her house, you’ve been to a lecture in hopes of figuring out her deep appeal, which still escapes you. You fail to understand why people like her. This, after I had merely hours before laid bare my own reasons.

I do not like being captive to my own anger, and so I will with patience again try to make clear to you the affection I have for her, and that I know others have for her. Rather, I will try to parse for you your own disaffection, which is perhaps more satisfying for me though less illuminating for you.

You do not like her because Jane Austen is not for you.  

She did not write in the hopes of garnering male acclaim or pleasing male sensibilities or bolstering male pride. She did not write male characters with depth or complexity, she did not examine their stories or even entertain them. She never wrote one single scene without a woman in it.

She wasn’t writing for you. She was writing for me, and women like me, and women like her.  I see myself in Elizabeth’s ferocity and pride; I see myself in Elinor’s reticence as well as Marianne’s candor; I see myself in Emma’s shortsightedness; I see myself in the loving, teasing letters Jane herself wrote to her sister, Cassandra; I see myself in the brilliance and pettiness she assigned to even her gentlest and most lovable protagonists. Jane Austen is so beloved to me because she wrote me, two hundred years before I read her, and she wrote the difficult, convoluted, precious relationships I have with the other women in my life.

Jane Austen did not write for you, and somehow to you that translates to her being a bad author. Hemingway did not write for me - you were the intended recipient for his spare, angry prose - but I know he is not a bad writer. DeLillo and Palahniuk and Franzen are not for me; Wallace is not for me; Fitzgerald and Dickens and Dostoevsky are not for me; even Tolkien and Poe, whom I cherish, are not for me. None of them spun their tales with me in their minds; I call none of them poor authors (except perhaps Dickens.) I know the appeal of each and every one of those authors, and while I find Hemingway’s bloodlust upsetting and Dostoevsky’s melancholy boring and Wallace’s elaborate word-play tiresome, I understand that none of that diminishes their mastery of their craft. That you do not find Austen appealing and therefore consider her unmasterful is not what I consider a valid literary criticism.

I do not thank you for offering your opinion, unprompted, twice, to me about something which is very close to my heart. I do not thank you for disparaging my taste, even obliquely. I do not thank you for proving that, two hundred years on, women are as subject to men’s unsolicited ideas as the Bennets ever were in the ballroom at Netherfield.

Men have been bricking women up behind the walls of their opinions since time immemorial. I kindly ask that you refrain from mortaring me within your commentaries.

Yrs,

-S.

p.s. I am not persuaded; Austen is to my mind one of the finest writers of the Romantic age.