Jane Austen’s birthday was last week and, had the venerable author possessed the power of immortality, she would have been an impressive 235 years old. The special date got me thinking about how much her life has impacted mine. If she had never been born, or if she had never become a writer, my life would be very different right now.
When I was in elementary school I read. A lot. I read every book in the Baby-sitter’s Club series, Sweet Valley High, Nancy Drew, The Westing Game, The Egypt Game, and pretty much every book that came via the Scholastic catalog. But there came a point, maybe in high school, when I realized (aka was led to believe) that the books I liked to read “didn’t count.” They weren’t important like the works of Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.
I kept reading for fun, but my tastes moved to action-adventure thrillers like Michael Crichton and Clive Cussler. I still felt like those books “didn’t count” because they were fun and I enjoyed reading them; the complete opposite of my required reading for school. (I can count on less than one hand the books I enjoyed reading for school: The Diary of Anne Frank, Romeo & Juliet, A Separate Peace, and Animal Farm.)
Then I went to college and a magical thing happened. At Columbia, all freshmen are required to take a two semester literature sequence called Literature Humanities (aka LitHum). In my first semester we read things like Dante’s Inferno, Augustine’s Confessions, and Homer’s The Iliad. And then … we read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
I will make a confession now: Pride and Prejudice was the first school reading I actually read cover to cover. I fell in love with Darcy and I admired Lizzy and I cared about them. I wanted to be transported into that world. In that moment, my view of literature changed. There was no longer a heavily-guarded dividing line between “books I like” and “books that count.” They could be one and the same.
Thinking about what my life would be like right now if Jane Austen had never been born, if she had never written Pride and Prejudice for me to read in my freshman literature class… well, it’s just too scary to imagine. Thank you, Jane Austen, for making me realize that great books can be fun, too.
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