Jane Austen’s England
Even if you've never read Jane Austen's novels you probably have a clear image of what life was like for her characters thanks to excellent adaptations for film and television. Women wore white muslin dresses. Gentlemen wore precisely tied cravats and really tight pants. Red-coats wore, well, red-coats. People went to dances, visited great houses, walked astonishing distances, rode, and worried about status, money and marriage.
It's a pretty accurate image as far as it goes, but it's only a small part of the story.
In Jane Austen's England, Roy and Leslie Adkins present a detailed picture of the things Jane Austen didn't tell us about her characters' lives.
It was a tumultuous period, marked by almost constant war and the economic and social upheaval of the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. Like Austen herself, the Adkins do not focus on the larger events of the period--except to note their impact on daily life. (Mechanized textile mills, for instance, not only created a new class of urban poor, but transformed what people wore.)
The structure of the book loosely follows the course of life from birth to death, stopping along the way to consider education, fashion, filth, illness and belief. In addition to Austen's novels and letters, the Adkins use newspapers, diaries, letters from more ordinary folk, reports by foreign visitors, and accounts of criminal trials to create an intimate picture of daily life. They consider not only the middle and upper classes that Austen portrayed so brilliantly, but the full range of a highly stratified society: from clergymen and governesses to farmers, mid-wives, barbers, and chimney sweeps.
Fans of Austen, Georgette Heyer or Regency romance novels will find explanations of familiar tropes, including a detailed account of the marriage laws that led eloping couples to head for Gretna Green, the first town over the Scottish border. At the same time, the world the Adkins portray is darker, dirtier, and colder than it appears in the novels or their movie adaptations. Keeping those white muslin dresses white was hard work.
A version of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers
From The Ruins of Empire–Revisited
If you've been following along for a while, you've probably figured out that I like books that look at familiar history from another point of view. (For example, here, and here, and here.) Pankaj Mishra's From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, is an excellent example.*
Misra begins with the statement that the intellectual and political awakening of Asia was the central event of the twentieth century for a majority of the world's population. That event came about as a result of a new class of western-educated Asian elites. As a group, they typically rejected their traditional heritage in favor of western modes of thought, then later re-embraced their native traditions, transforming those traditions in the process.
Instead of concentrating on well-known Asian historical figures, Mishra centers his book on the intellectual journeys of three men who are important historical figures in their own cultures but largely unfamiliar to most Westerners. Journalist and political activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) was a founder of Islamic modernism. Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao (1873-1929) inspired a generation of young Chinese activists with his calls for reform. Indian poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a leader of the Bengal Renaissance.
Over the course of the book, Misra shows how his characters are shaped by and respond to the familiar events of European imperialism in Asia, giving those events a new perspective for the Western reader. His stated goal is not to replace a Euro-centric view with an "equally problematic Asia-centric one", but to look at both the past and the present from multiple viewpoints. For the most part, he succeeds.
* I previously reviewed From The Ruins of Empire when it first came out in October, 2012. Now it's being released in paperback and I have a lovely new copy to share. If you'd like to have a chance to win, tell me your favorite non-Western thinker or historical figure in the comments on the blog. If you don't have a favorite,** tell me who you'd like to know more about.
**Really? Not even one?
This review appeared originally in Shelf Awareness for Readers
If You Love Jane Austen…
Allow me to introduce Emily Eden--aristocratic spinster, political hostess, accomplished painter, and talented novelist.
I first discovered Emily Eden through her connection to India. Her brother George Eden, 1st Earl of Auckland, was appointed Governor-General of India in 1835. Emily accompanied him to India and served as his Burra Lady Sahib (the rough equivalent of an American First Lady) for the six years of his tenure.*
For the first twenty months of their stay, the Edens stayed in Calcutta, then the capital of British India. Emily was miserable. She didn't like India--or more accurately, she didn't like Anglo-Indian society in Calcutta, which she viewed with all the snobbery of an aristocrat accustomed to moving in the highest political circles. She felt herself exiled in what she described as a "second-rate society".
Things got better when Emily accompanied her brother on a two-year-long tour of the country, though her first response to their extravagant camps was "I thought I had never seen such squalid, melancholy discomfort." Her diary and letters, published in 1866 as Up The Country, offer a witty and carefully observed account of a specific moment in Indian history as seen from a very specific viewpoint. I read Up The Country for work, but found it an absolute pleasure.
Several years later, I was delighted to stumble across two novels by Eden in which she observes her own society with the same sharp-eyed wit that she brought to India: The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House.** Although Eden's experience of the world was much broader than Austen's, their novels are similar in scale. Instead of writing about her experience of India or political London, Eden wrote comedies of manners that drew on the same social mores and concerns as Austen's novels. Both Eden and her characters live higher up the social ladder than Austen, but they too are concerned with the intersection between money, manners, and marriage.
I don't claim that Eden is Austen's equal. (No one who writes the kind of thing Austen writes comes even close.) Her novels are a good read in the same general vein by an author with a distinctive voice. Her writing on India is even better.
* Lord Auckland doesn't fare well in history He is best remembered for the paranoid decisions that resulted in the debacle of the First Anglo-Afghan War.
**Amazon is convenient, but there is no replacement for browsing with serendipity at a real life bookstore. Use them or lose them.