I've been in a nostalgic mood lately and felt compelled to revisit some of the entertainment that had given me so much joy in my youth. Back during my school days, I was always an avid reader who pretty much read everything under the sun and never had a preference for any particular author or book. That all changed when I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time in eighth grade and fell in love with Jane Austen's unique sense of humor as well as writing style. Up to that point, I had already read a fair share of "classic" novels, but it wasn't until I encountered Austen's work for the first time that I realized reading classics could actually be so much fun. Austen was the first author I remember publicly declaring as a favorite (to the point that I was nicknamed "Austen fangirl" throughout junior high and high school). While my "favorites" list has expanded to include plenty of other authors over the past three decades, Austen has remained, without a doubt, at the very top of that list (a position that I don't foresee ever changing).
So I guess it should come as no surprise that, to satisfy the nostalgic itch to re-immerse myself in Austen's world, I decided to enroll in a class about Jane Austen that I had come across recently. The first book we explored in class was Emma, the "comedy of manners" that happened to be one of the few Austen works that I had never read in its entirety. Reading Emma for the first time was a delight! Of course, it was very different from P&P (which will always be my all-time favorite Austen work), especially with its focus more on language and prose than plot. Also, in another departure from P&P, the main characters here (including our main "heroine" Emma Woodhouse) were less likable, and could even be considered "annoying" at certain points — but yet, despite their flaws, you can't help rooting for them by the end of the story. For me, this is one of the brilliant aspects of Austen's writing — the way she is able to make her characters memorable to the reader, even the unlikable ones.
There is so much that could be said about this book, especially in comparisons to Austen's other works. This, for me, is one of the joys of studying an author in depth and seeing how their style evolves (or doesn't) across their works. One of the things that has always stood out to me about Austen's works is how each re-read of the same novel still manages to feel different — for example, you catch things that you might not have noticed the first go-round, or some scenes / dialogue take on a different meaning upon re-reading. In that sense, Austen's writing is nuanced, yet not complex to the point that it it takes a lot of brainpower and deep thinking to understand what she is trying to say. While I don't plan to re-read Emma any time soon (mostly because I have an overflowing TBR stack that I need to get through), I am looking forward to staying in Austen's world a little longer by exploring (and in some cases, actually re-reading) some of her other works in the coming weeks.
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