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How many of us who love "bonnet dramas," as our friends in the UK call period pieces, wish we could travel back in time? Or even believe we were born in the wrong century?
And how much of our longing comes from the Hollywood-BBC vision of those byone days rather than our knowledge of the real thing?
It's a question explored in my first novel, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, in which a twenty-first-century Jane Austen fan named Courtney Stone awakens in the body and life of a gentleman's daughter in 1813 England.
The more I got into the research for that book, the more I developed a renewed appreciation for all the mobility and technological wonders of my own time. Sure, there are things I still love about Jane Austen's world, like the music and the dances and the clothes and the handsome men wearing them and, of course, the respite from information overload. But I would find it hard to bear the dearth of women's freedom and choices, not to mention the absence of tampons and mascara. Or the withdrawal from my iPhone, information overload notwithstanding.
And so by the time I began writing my latest novel, Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, I was so committed to being a card-carrying member of the twenty-first century that I was more than ready to rediscover its wonders through the eyes of Miss Jane Mansfield, that very same gentleman's daughter from 1813 England who has switched places with 21st-century free spirit Courtney Stone.
Not that portraying the modern world through the eyes of a Regency lady was without its challenges. As Dr. Janine Barchas, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, said in her analysis of Rude Awakenings in JASNA* News, "Surely it is more difficult to surprise a modern reader with an entertaining description of a clock radio, a freeway, or a cappuccino...than it is to reward our curiosity about Regency life."
Indeed. But the rewards of confronting Miss Jane Mansfield with tiny figures in a glass box dancing and acting out her favorite novel, Pride and Prejudice, were worth the effort. As was watching Jane's amused detachment as she observes, for the very first time, a young man holding a strange object against his ear while conversing and gesticulating as if to the air. (My familiarity with the technology notwithstanding, I too find this modern ability to tune out the world and at the same time subject it to your private conversations while in, say, a line at the post office, remarkable. As for the former example, I cannot help but wonder: Though we, unlike Jane, know we are watching a DVD rather than tiny people in a glass box, could the almost impossibly lifelike qualities of those moving pictures be a key to their addictiveness?)
Perhaps we do, as Janine Barchas suggests, "need to gaze upon our present reality as enthusiastically and thoroughly as we do Austen's world." And laugh at it—and ourselves—heartily.
After all, as Mr. Bennet put it in Pride and Prejudice, "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"
In the spirit of gazing upon (and laughing at) both realities, check out Sex and the Austen Girl, the new comedy web series inspired by both "Austen Addict" novels. In it, my two protagonists face off to debate the pros and cons of life and love in today's world versus Jane Austen's time, and which of them is the biggest fish out of water.
For more about Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict and Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, visit janeaustenaddict.com.
*Jane Austen Society of North America
