Camp Austen_My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan
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We retreated to the hotel room that we were sharing. Before long, my phone started to jangle with text messages informing me that I had been derelict in duty. Some of these were quite direct: “My dear Mr. Crawford—I had expected that you would grace us for at least two dances, and your absence is unaccountable.” I asked my mother’s blessing to use her fatigue as an excuse, and she consented. In a text to one correspondent, I remarked that Austen’s novels tend to illustrate the virtues of filial duty. The lady was unmoved: “There are other women with claims on your time.”
Meanwhile, my mother asked that I unzip her dress. I obliged, and she laughed. “I guess this isn’t how you figured the night would play out,” she said over her shoulder. I acknowledged the joke, and we sort of chuckled and then watched an episode of Foyle’s War before falling asleep, in separate beds, my phone still buzzing.
* * *
A lady once described to me her first impressions on visiting Austenworld: “Finally, a place where one can be oneself.” For all the contradictions implied therein, the statement is true. For all the affectation, the Regency dialogue and borrowed postures, there is a holy frankness to the proceedings, a general sense of, well, let’s give this a go—let’s go mad a bit and argue over who stole the turkeys in Emma. Let’s stroll through the quadrangle with parasols and lose ourselves in a better world that never existed. Austen-mania is a collective folly, a religion in the sort of latitudinarian-Anglican sense that stresses communion over orthodoxy (though it is possible to be excommunicated). It is a shared fiction that we tacitly agree to treat as real, and by coming together we make it real. At some point, for me, participating in this fiction became impossible, coming to represent a destined thing, rather than one that I felt in my bones I truly belonged to. This was my mother’s world, and I was living out the plot that she had set in motion twenty years ago. Yet, even as a failed Janeite and a lapsed scholar, I am grateful that my sojourn on her behalf rekindled my mother’s love for Austenworld. Indeed, her love of that world has perhaps never been this deep. Austenworld is a space of contemplation, listening, kindness, and wonder—a paradise in which I was unworthy to remain but the memory of which I will cherish always.
I visited James last summer in North Carolina. He took me out for lunch and told me all about the previous month’s camp, where my mother had made an appearance as speaker, and where Michele—this time dressed and in character as the wicked Mary Crawford from Mansfield Park—had proceeded to argue with my mother about Charlotte Lucas. James told me how his summer project was looking after his infant granddaughter five days a week—they would go on walks and build things, and as he told me about these simple joys I couldn’t help but think that this was what Mr. Bennet could have been with less pride, less laziness, a greater capacity to act on his love. And perhaps what is more, that here was a true Janeite—the man who values people more than books, who is not too shy or lazy or proud to live fully in a fallen world; who does not suffer from manners envy and does not romanticize the sense of prelapsarian self-recovery that pervades Austenworld; who would rather bound across campus with a tiny girl than sit, and teach, and administer from some academic fastness.
In thinking about Austen, I cannot separate the notion of community from the notion of voice—that bewitching, crystalline narrator’s voice, the voice that shares so much with Elizabeth Bennet’s idea of a “rational creature.” Naturally, the narrator figure, the Jane, is the real allure of the novels. I think again of the first sentence of Pride & Prejudice—a sentence that, like so much of Austen’s sly, slippery management of her material, appears to depend on a mutually agreed-upon set of assumptions among Right-Thinking People: “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” But the joke of each novel is that these truths aren’t universal. Characters who fail to modulate a rigidness in their way of thinking, who leave their mannered prejudices uninterrogated, are the ones in need of correction. Assumptions—about how to act, even how to think and feel—are just that: assumptions. Rather than being “universally acknowledged,” truths must be mutually negotiated, among those whose moral intelligence will admit correction, and on the premise that kindness and curiosity and care will lead to understanding.
In a few years, the Jane Austen Summer Program will run out of novels. They will nonetheless persevere. There will be as much to rediscover in Pride & Prejudice in 2020 as there was in 2013. If my math is correct, young Clara Brodey will then be in high school, old enough to run the theatricals herself. My fondest and most selfish hope is that she will remember one summer when she was shorter than the grass, and Mr. Darcy did his best to keep up with her at the ball.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The occasional glibness of this volume makes me hesitant to implicate others. Nonetheless, I am deeply indebted to my doctoral committee—Eric Downing, Megan Matchinske, Thomas Reinert, Jessica Wolfe, and James Thompson—for supporting my nonacademic pursuits during a year’s leave and then for not blanching when I left the academy altogether. James deserves his own sentence, for many dinners and for not compelling me to read all of that Galperin book. Inger Brodey, and her daughters, Emma and Clara, were and remain far more wonderful than I can possibly conjure on the page. Claude Rawson, my undergraduate mentor, taught me to love Persuasion, and his counsel has remained indispensable in the years since.
I owe a great debt to John Knight and Emily Bell, my editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and to Lisa Silverman, my copy editor. Mitzi Angel earned my undying gratitude and confusion when she first called to suggest a book, and my agent, Edward Orloff, deserves fresh roses for his work on my behalf.
Thanks, as well, to Evan Kindley, Audrey Bilger, and my other editors at the Los Angeles Review of Books; to Nick Jackson, Jennifer Sahn, Taylor Le, and Katie Kilkenny at Pacific Standard magazine; to Jane Yong Kim at the Atlantic; and to Sadie Stein at The Paris Review, where this book began. For their writerly criticism and friendly encouragement, I cannot here omit Anne Fadiman, Brian Reed, Dan Wilner, Michelle Legro, Sarah Boyd, Lindsay Starck, John Lingan, Lucia Graves, Angela Serratore, Anne Connell, Mike Riggs, Joe Fletcher, Jerrod Rosenbaum, and Jeff Winkler. Thanks also to Doug and Lani for helping watch the cat.
Thanks to Julia Matson for the tea and the laughs; to Prashansa Taneja for letting me give her dancing lessons; to Devoney Looser for being a star; to Syrie James and Diana Birchall for arranging the theatricals in Montréal; and to Adam, Ashley, Michele, and the rest of the summer-camp crew for their pioneering work in North Carolina. To Jade Papa, clothing historian and costume genius, I can only say: thanks for your patience.
As for my mother, there is little here to add. Each sentence is for her, and none would have been possible without her. Also, I’m glad she corrected me about the turkeys in Emma.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ted Scheinman is a writer and scholar whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Oxford American, The Paris Review, Slate, and a variety of other periodicals. He lives in Southern California, where he works as a senior editor at Pacific Standard magazine. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Prelude: Juvenilia
1. A Shared Inheritance
2. Dressing the Part
3. Table Talk
4. Theatricals
5. The Ball
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Copyright
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First edition, 2018
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71234-1
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