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When the Going Gets Tough, Readers Go to Jane Austen
By Joan Klingel Ray
Jane Austen is a novelist to whom readers frequently turn when the going gets tough. Recently, Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels provides her account of how five Austen novels- Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion-and memoirs about the author helped her during stressful periods of her life, particularly her father’s multi-year struggle with cancer that led to his death. She read and reread Austen as a form of meditation. Cohen only “dipped” into Northanger Abbey.
I learned about Cohen’s book from Sophie Gee’s review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (August 2, 2020). Gee writes:
Austen complained in a letter to her sister [February 4, 1813] that Pride and Prejudice was ‘too light, & bright, & sparkling; it wants [i.e., lacks] shade.’ Cohen provides ample shade for all five of Austen’s major novels.
By (jokingly) saying that her novel wanted “shade,” she used the word like this: “ light and shade: in a literary work . . . or the like, the contrast necessary to artistic effect, of passages of lighter and graver tone, or of greater and less brilliancy” ( Oxford English Dictionary, shade def. 3 b.).
