4.5 stars
CBR17 Bingo: Black (a book with a black cover)
I had completely forgotten that I read and reviewed this book back in 2016. My original review can be found here.
My plot summary of the more than 200-year-old novel can be found in my previous review. Nevertheless, my reading experience this time around was different enough from earlier times that I wanted to write about some of my thoughts and observations, not to mention some of the points of discussion that came up during my book club discussion about it recently.
There are some rather uneducated modern beliefs that there were no neurodivergent individuals in the past. Because there has been a sharp rise in the number of people (especially children) diagnosed with either ADHD or Autism, many believe that this is something new, and not something that has always been around, just unacknowledged by people, because they didn’t have the diagnostic tools to identify it. Case in point, some now suspect Jane Austen may have been on the autism spectrum, and eagle-eyed readers claim that there is at least one autistic-coded character in each of her published novels. The reason I’m opening with this is because one of the members of my book club, who is on the autism spectrum, posited that Marianne Dashwood is clearly also neurodivergent and, over the course of the novel, forced to adapt and conform to societal pressures and learn to mask her true self. Based on my own experiences, with an autistic husband and a son with ADHD, I’m now more convinced than ever that Mr. Darcy is on the spectrum, so once this member explained her reasoning, it seems likely that she might be right about Marianne as well.
According to her, Marianne’s complete disdain for the thoughts and opinions of others, to the point where she is frequently brusque and rude at social gatherings, her inability to govern her emotions (or “sensibility”) and her hyper-focused love of her own interests, at the expense of anything else, are all very autism-coded. She has difficulty with social cues, which is one of the reasons she causes a scene in public when she finally sees Willoughby again at the ball in town, after months of no contact. By the end of the book, heartbreak and prolonged illness have made her a mere shadow of her former self, and she seems to accept that she needs to be a quieter, more moderately behaved young woman.
Another thing that was strange and a bit uncomfortable when re-reading the book this time is realising that I’m now older than most of the characters. Colonel Brandon, who is frequently described as old, set in his ways and fussy, is only 35 years old! Also, it is mentioned more than once that he like wearing a flannel waistcoat, as if this is something negative, and not proof that the man dislikes the cold and likes to be comfortable. I totally defend his desire to be snug and warm. At 46, I am now older than Mrs Dashwood, the girls’ widowed mother, and the character I am probably most like in social status and age is the meddling, yet ultimately kind-hearted Mrs Jennings, a matron with two grown daughters. So all I can look forward to now is trying to match-make and chaperone younger women.
Another point of discussion was the fact that all the men in this, yes, EVEN Colonel Brandon, are kind of awful. He is the least worst, but his attraction to Marianne does seem to be based on her similarity to his doomed first love, rather than because of her own personality. And every single character, even Marianne’s mother and beloved sister Elinor, seems to think that it’s only right and proper that he get Marianne as his wife for being patient and pining, without really considering Marianne’s agency in the slightest. Marianne seems so exhausted and dejected towards the end that she’s clearly willing to go along with anything, especially if it means she will stop her family from worrying about her. He does get points for raising his dead love’s illegitimate child, ignoring all the gossip that whispers that she is his child out of wedlock.
I think it’s only because of Hugh Grant’s adorable puppy dog portrayal of Edward Ferrars, Elinor’s love interest, that I didn’t recall that he is one of the dullest people I have encountered in fiction. He is described as not particularly attractive physically, he makes absolutely no attempts to try and influence his life, and even though his mother treats him appallingly, he never stands up for himself. He’s not brave enough to confess to Elinor about his secret betrothal when they first meet, and he falls in love with her; she has to find out in the worst possible way from conniving snake Lucy Steele. He doesn’t even end his own unhappy engagement; he waits around until he is dumped by Lucy Steele, cast off for his own brother. If she hadn’t eloped with someone else, he would just have dully suffered in silence in a dreadful marriage of unequal partners.
Then there is Willoughby, who, one of the members in my book club feels, is actually even worse than Wickham, who is despicable and an absolute predator, but at least owns his own actions. Willoughby not only knocks up and callously abandons Brandon’s ward, leaving her absolutely no way of contacting him (ghosting was WAY easier in the 1800s, you just had to move to a different part of the country and leave no forwarding address), and actually seems surprised and dismayed when his elderly aunt takes him to task for this. He never makes any concrete promises to Marianne, and when she is on her deathbed, he shows up and drunkenly rants at Elinor about how sad he is, because while he loves Marianne, he loves himself and his financial security more. He HAD to marry the extremely wealthy young heiress with 50,000 pounds a year, because true love doesn’t pay for expensive horses and fancy carriages and the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed. We were all in agreement that if he lived now, he would have a podcast and be a manosphere influencer. No taking responsibility for his own careless actions and owning up to his mistakes for Willoughby.
We also agreed that while Lucy Steele is a conniving, mean girl, if the ultimate goal for Regency women was to marry someone who could secure them for the rest of their days, she is absolutely the winner. Her constant “worried” confessions to Elinor about her secret engagement to Edward are obviously meant to taunt and torture the other woman, and she is obviously a social-climbing opportunist. She even takes all of her poor sister’s money when she runs off to marry Ferrars the younger. We all hoped her boring sister ended up happily married to her doctor eventually.
Some of the members of my book club were rather surprised at this being categorised as romance, and those of us who are long-time fans of Austen had to explain that because SOME of her novels have a strong romantic plot, it would be more accurate to classify them as social satires. Because Pride and Prejudice is so very romantic, and her most popular one, all of her books have been labelled by publishers as romance, because that sells more. This book is more a family story, and a coming of age novel, and the plot would have worked just as well if all the suitors were taken out of the equation. Marianne would certainly have been better off because of it.
Judging a book by its cover (and illustrations): The cover I have chosen to feature is that of my older paperback edition (because it is actually mostly black, except for the lady faces). These women seem much older than 17 and 19, though. The edition I actually read, this time, was my tiny pocket-sized hardback, the 250th Anniversary Edition, which has a red and green cover, and cover illustrations inside by Hugh Thompson. While they are lovely, the pedant in me got annoyed that they are not period-appropriate. Austen’s novels are famously set in the Regency era, while all the clothes and hairstyles from the illustrations were clearly from the Georgian era, several decades earlier. It’s a stupid niggle, to be sure, but it annoyed me throughout.
Crossposted on my blog.