Was Jane Austen the Original Chick Lit Writer?

Portrait of Jane Austen - by Cassandra Austen (1810) watercolour and pencil

I’ve sniggered at the insanity of Becky Bloomwood’s behaviour in Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series. I’ve owned the whole series of “Princess Diaries” by Meg Cabot long before I had a daughter to justify them by saying one day I would share the books with her. I’m a big fan of Jennifer Weiner because she made the heroine in “Good in Bed” a plus size woman who didn’t fall into the predictable line of society’s demands for womanhood. If my bookshelves are anything to judge by, I am, in short, a “chick lit” kind of reader.

But for the longest time I have kept my reading preferences hidden, as if women’s contemporary fiction was my dirty little secret. Why you ask? Well, that genre of writing isn’t considered, shall we say, profound, now is it? Admitting to reading such novels does not make you look at all discerning. Not according to the intelligentsia anyway.

For it seems sometimes to me that for people sitting on discussion panels on book shows (like First Tuesday Book Club ), or people who write reviews over at the New York Times Book section can, intentionally or not, appear somewhat boorish in their need prove their superiority to the average person who reads, shall we say, contemporary women’s literature. Apparently writing doesn’t become good literature until its gut wrenching or emotionally tiring so that, yes, you are in awe of the authors’ ability and skill, but still in the end, feeling oppressed. And the good literature that the intelligentsia laud takes work to digest; it isn’t something that you enjoy for a time and then move on.

But I happen to agree with Jennifer Weiner, who in her own blog said;

(Give us) Contemporary women’s fiction (duh!) reviewed by people who do not think that contemporary women’s fiction and/or contemporary women themselves represent a pox upon the land. Reviews of books people are actually reading, instead of the ones the critics think we should be reading.
- Tuesday Feb 3rd 2009

Now don’t get me wrong. I spent a whole day in the bathtub one summer long ago, reading “Fall on Your Knees” by Ann-Marie Mac Donald with baited breath. I knew what was coming in the deepest part of my heart… I just didn’t want to see it confirmed in black type on the page. I’ve been whisked away to a time long ago and felt the softness of the silk kimonos against my skin in Japan with “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthur Golden. The gritty desperation and sadness in the story of “Angela’s Ashes” by Frank McCourt made me think of my own mother’s life. And I’m confident enough in my opinion of good and bad to say that I really wasn’t impressed with Wally Lambs’ “She’s Come Undone”. I think it was a success primarily because of the hype he gained from being chosen for Oprah’s Book Club.

So why is it that I’ve felt the need to hide my enjoyment of pure literacy ‘girliness’? And why have I felt the need to deny that if I were to ever write the stories that I know are floating around in my head, they would more than likely end up being considered contemporary women’s literature? I dream of writing neither the great Australian novel, nor Canadian for that matter. I do think it would be an amazing gift to write something that would change the world forever, but in all seriousness I do not dream that my writing skills will one day earn me a Pulitzer Prize. A Nobel laureate I am not! What I do dream, is of going into a book store and seeing books, printed and bound, with my name on the spine. Of being able to in some way support my family financially using the talents God has placed in me.

I decided, on a whim the other day to pick up a ‘classic’ in the form of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility.” I had been putting it off reading it for the longest time because I assumed it would be hard work, a piece of literature I would have to really work at to enjoy. How wrong I was; it was pure reading pleasure. I confess that I had Emma Thompson’s screen adaption and the latest BBC version by Andrew Davies playing in my minds eye as I read the story, but that only added to the pleasure. The gloriousness of the vocabulary, the extensive speeches, and the very richness of words that Austen used struck me strongly. Such a book, if it written today, would, I doubt, ever be published. Or if it were accepted by a publishing house, an editor would probably rip it to shreds in the name of readability; condensing it into a concise book with 10,000 words less to its girth, slap a pink cover on the front and apologise for its existence by placing it in the contemporary women’s literature category.

But a few days after finishing the book I had a thought strike me so strongly that I have been able to think of little else whenever I think on the subject of books. Jane Austen was the writing heroine of her age. She wrote novels that had the whole of society talking, despite her stories placing women as central characters and the heroines in an age where they counted for very little in a culture ruled by men. Austen wrote domestic fiction, putting the dynamics of human relationships into a sharp and often critical focus.

True. She didn’t sit down and plan on writing novels that would be lauded decades into the future. She wrote the story that played itself out in her mind over the course of several years and when it was published, hoped that people would read and enjoy it. She hoped that people who read Sense and Sensibility would come to love Elinor and Marianne as much as she herself must have loved them as she wrote their stories. And in the end, she herself would admit that she wrote stories to make money. And here it is, two hundred years later; Jane Austen’s books are still being published, still be discovered by new eyes and still delighting afresh.

So now I’m thinking that its high time I got over my fear of the title contemporary women’s writer and just started writing, in honour of Jane Austen. And by the by, indulge my current craze and tell me, which is your favourite Jane Austen novel?

Related posts:

1. Cassandra and Jane (A Jane Austen Novel) -Jill Pitkeathley
2. Everything Austen II Challenge List
3. Coining a New Term in Erotic Writing
4. To Call Myself a Writer
5. Carrots, Cake and Ruth Saberton