Please excuse me, Dear Aunt Jane

Sunday is the 211^th anniversary of the publication of our beloved Pride & Prejudice, dear readers, and as I contemplate, it amazes me how late in my life I came to Jane Austen.

I have been a prolific reader since I first figured out Green Eggs & Ham on my own. (That’s forty-seven years, in case you were wondering.) My mother held a bachelor’s degree in British Literature, so she had been handing me classics since I started reading chapter books: Black Beauty, The Treasure Seekers, The Princess and the Curdie; books by Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and later Dickens, Shakespeare, and Charlotte Bronte. We read through the mysteries of Agatha Christie, Patricia Moyes, Dorothy Sayers, and PD James; the Bertie and Wooster stories by PG Wodehouse; the high fantasies of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien – all of this by my thirteenth birthday.

But somehow… someway, my mother never handed me an Austen novel.

In fact, I cannot recall my mother so much as mentioning Jane Austen.

My first memory of Jane Austen pertains to my best friend throughout junior high and high school. She, too, was a prolific reader – in fact she is the first person I met who surpassed my reading speed. One afternoon, she handed me Pride & Prejudice, saying, “This is my all-time favourite book. You will love it!”

However, by this time I had been scarred one too many times by her suggestions that I “would love” something as she favoured books in the genre of Stephen King. And to my current sorrow, I dismissed P&P as another of that ilk, delaying my introduction to Miss Austen.

Another chance to read P&P passed me by like a ship in the night when I skipped my senior year of high school and went directly into college instead. My first real exposure to any of Austen’s works was when dh and I watched the 1995 Emma Thompson/Hugh Grant/Alan Rickman adaptation of Sense & Sensibility. I loved period dramas, so it was right up my alley, but I was a busy mother of three very young children, then four, and never got around to reading the book.

Next exposure was when watching Wishbone with my children, but see above as to why I didn’t read the book at that time. (Though, the Jack Russell terrier in a cravat remains my favourite portrayal of Darcy!)

However, Fate finally got angry with me and my blindness to the greatness of our dear Aunt Jane and decided to send me into premature labour with my fifth child – grounding my butt to a bed. As the mother of a five-, three-, two-, and one-year olds, convincing me to remain grounded was the trickiest part. My dh stumbled upon the idea of going to Barnes & Noble to purchase bribes to keep me in the bed we moved to the living room so I could supervise the children.

As much as my dh is my first partner in JAFF crime (otherwise known as writing), it was his best friend who selected the omnibus of Jane Austen’s novels that day. My dh argued against it, but his friend insisted. “These are my mom’s [a high school English teacher] favourites; Cherith will LOVE it!”

And that, my dear readers, was that!

I was hooked from page one of Sense & Sensibility. I read all of them in order of publication, and even now, twenty-five years later, I reread them at least once a year. Persuasion was my favourite then, and remains my favourite. Northanger Abbey comes in second, followed by P&P; S&S and Mansfield Park tie in middle; and Emma comes in last. I, of course, watched all the movie adaptations; for P&P, we started with the 1940 Greer Garson/Laurence Olivier version, then the 1980s BBC, and ended with the newly released 1995 Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth adaptation. (I admit to being a ’95 fan.) We did the same for all the novels, another good thing which kept me in bed both through the complicated pregnancy and recovery process for dear child #5.

In honour of the publication of this most beloved novel, please, dear readers, share with me your stories of “discovering our dear Aunt Jane”.

Godspeed!