Jane Austen for the Lads
In your face Tom Hanks: the lads come out for Jane
‘Men don’t read Jane Austen.’
Ever heard this? I had always thought it was commonly understood that men are turned off by the bonnets and the lace and the and-they-all-got-married-in-the-end storylines, and was under the impression that you’d never see a dude opening Emma or Sense and Sensibility willingly, except to impress the ladies. Think Tom Hanks hauling himself through Pride and Prejudice in You’ve Got Mail in an attempt to slip more successfully into a pixie-haired Meg Ryan’s DMs, rolling his eyes and huffing his way through the prose, dropping sarky critiques of women’s unaccountable weakness for will-they-won’t-they romances. The clanging irony is, of course, that Hanks’s character, Joe Fox, is very much based on Austen’s dreamy Mr Darcy (if profoundly less sexy) and You’ve Got Mail probably wouldn’t exist without Pride and Prejudice. In as much as men read novels at all, the expectation seems to be that Real Men would be reading Bravo 2.0 or The Godfather while spitting tobacco into a tin pail, not dabbling in the lives and loves of Georgian gentlewomen.
Well, guess what? The stereotype is wrong. It’s a myth. Or, at least, not as clear cut as generally thought. A few weeks ago, I put out a post on X to find out whether there are any guys reading Jane Austen, and received more than a few responses indicating that not only are the lads reading her novels, they are loving them—and they are not embarrassed to say so.
To my shame, I was surprised. Without realising it, I had swallowed the Hanksian typography willingly—thinking to myself, extremely patronisingly, that I would need to persuade these philistines out of their underlying sexist attitudes to the Queen of the Comedy of Manners. As it turns out, the lads came out in force to show me how wrong I was. I came to X expecting to meet a bunch of blockheaded John Thorpes, and found a gaggle of Henry Tilneys instead. Forgive me, man-readers, I have sinned.
From these exchanges, I have gleaned that the fellas are reading Jane Austen for these reasons:
Influence of family members - Guys reported being encouraged to read Austen by their mothers mostly. This was my favourite reason, having a son of my own whom I plan to indoctrinate as soon as he is able to hold a book the right way up. As it happens, my own gateway to Jane Austen was through my dad, who adored Pride and Prejudice—it was probably the reason he always preferred to call me ‘Lizzy’. I had always thought dad was an exception to the rule as a male Austen Appreciator, and think he’d have got a real kick out of the fact that there are hordes of other guys out there reading her work.
Popular culture - Austen’s novels, like any other major canonical work, have had an outsized influence on modern pop culture. Adaptations, whether faithful to the novels (like the ’95 BBC P&P*, which is basically the novel word-for-word), or modern paraphrases (Clueless interpreting Emma for Xennials with a fashion problem, Bridget Jones’s Diary deftly butchering P&P for Gen Xers with a drinking problem), many authors and screenwriters have attempted to bring Austen into the present, and their efforts seem to have tempted many watchers to attempt opening her work for themselves. DISCLAIMER: in case you were wondering, Bridgerton doesn’t count as an adaptation, nor does the Netflix version of Persuasion, both of which are crimes against period dramas.
Moral enrichment - Tucked in every Jane Austen novel are cautionary tales, moral mazes, and character arcs aplenty; while never preachy, her work always challenges the reader to think about their own actions and attitudes. She does this through particular characters and their stories—the rakish Mr Wickham**, the caddish Henry Crawford and the Bryonic Willoughby are lessons in Red Flag Spotting, as the fates of Lydia Bennet, Maria Bertram, and Eliza Williams attest, and many of her characters, perhaps Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennet in particular, go through a long journey to a realisation of their shortcomings through the whole course of a novel. Readers sometimes criticise Austen for not being interested in the broader social issues of the time, but this is simply untrue. Austen engages with many issues, but on a subtler frequency. She is a master of the ‘show don’t tell’ technique in her narratives, preferring to show the damaging effects of wicked systems, rather than writing long moralistic homilies on each matter, a la George Eliot or Anthony Trollope. Rather, through the storylines themselves, her novels routinely expose and challenge the system of male-only primogeniture (see the plight of the Bennets, the Dashwoods, and the Eliots), the struggles of single women of lower social class (poor spinster Miss Bates and impoverished widow Mrs Smith spring to mind) and the transatlantic slave trade (see Sir Thomas’s machinations in Antigua). If you read carefully, you will find a moral challenge threaded through practically every story.
Imagination - One commenter wrote that Austen’s work had ‘furnished [his] imagination’. I’m not 100% sure what exactly he meant; however, I think I can relate to the spirit of the comment. Austenworld both seems a million miles from 21st century Britain (or US, for that matter), with all the foreign manners, traditions, ideas, and, of course, the antiquated (but truly lovely) language, but her stories and her characters also feel so incredibly and strangely close to our world. In short, Austen, like Shakespeare, really understood The Human. And when you read her novels, you find yourself meeting, again and again, your friends and neighbours—and perhaps, on occasion, even causing you to see them in a whole new light, and with greater understanding.
These are all great reasons to read Jane Austen, and a major W to the lads for laying them out; however, I can assure you, there are many, many more to discuss and delve into. This year, I’d like to present to you, exhaustively and in tiresome detail, some of those reasons in future posts.
So, whether you are a lad or a lady, a lifelong Austenite or a total Austen n00b, prepare yourself for the Jane Auddessy, 2024!
*a particular reader, I know, prefers the fluffy ‘05 Pride and Prejudice adaptation to the plainly superior ‘95 BBC version. He is, of course, incorrect, and should repent immediately.
**one of the most thrilling moments of my life was the time when Mr Wickham smiled at me at Surbiton station in 2007. I am sure I will bore (or thrill??) you all with further details in future posts.
I've only read P&P but was delighted to find that it was genuinely funny, entirely bucking my stuffy expectations.