Alankrita Shrivastava
Strangely enough, just around the time I was re-reading some of Jane Austen’s work, Sir V.S. Naipaul made the disparaging remark about women authors. He particularly talked of Jane Austen being a sentimental writer. As though being sentimental is a bad thing. I must say I was quite offended.
I think Jane Austen’s books are timeless. I recently re-read Persuasion, Mansfield Park and my all-time favourite Pride and Prejudice. I absolutely love the world that Jane Austen creates. The drawing room intrigue, the countryside, relationships unspoken, matches fixed for reasons of fortune… I love how she maps the inner world of a woman. Austen is a master at delineating and drawing her characters.
Like generations of women before me, and I’m sure generations of women after me, I loved the character of Mark Darcy. He is the eternal romantic hero. While Elizabeth is “prejudiced,” Darcy has too much “pride”. And that is what gets in the way of their coming together. However, it is old fashioned, comfortable and feel-good to see Elizabeth triumph in love, when they do get together in the end.
I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was 17 and I enjoyed it as a romantic classic. Today of course, it is fashionable to criticise Austen, for propagating Victorian values and restraint. But I think Austen’s characters and stories stand the test of time. The conflict, the confusion, the trials and tribulations are as relevant to our emotional lives today as they were a century ago.
Re-reading it, I love it more than ever. I can see how Austen’s writing was a wonderful telling of the world of Victorian England. The social mores, the restraints on women, the limitations on how one had to act, the pressure of the class-based divisions of society... I can see clearly now that Austen was so much a part of that world, understood it so well, that she could write about it with so much depth and detail.
Alankrita is a young filmmaker
As told to Nidhi Sethi