Last night I began my project of re-reading all of Jane Austen’s novels, in the order in which she finished writing them. The order matters because while Northanger Abbey was published posthumously, it was the first novel she wrote. She sold it for ten pounds to a publisher who failed to publish the work (reminiscent of the Decca Records executive who failed to sign the Beatles). Only after the publication of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, did Jane feel financially secure enough to buy back the manuscript, which she had originally titled Susan. We know little about to what extent she revised the novel after this point, other than changing the name of the heroine from Susan to Catherine.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings—and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on—lived to have six children more—to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any…
It was like opening the door and finding a friend one hasn’t seen for years. “Catherine! It’s been forever. Let’s talk about old times, tell the old stories, remember what happened all over again.”
The pleasures of re-reading are unique. The first time through a book, I admit I am an impulsive reader. I want to know what happens, and—especially as the plot become more intriguing—I pick up my pace, feeding the sentences into my mind as fast as my eyes will take them in. Only on subsequent readings am I able to slow down and read with more deliberation. The intensity changes from the sustained burst of a sprint to the measured focus of a marathon. Instead of “Where am I going and what will be there?” I now ask “What do I see along the way?”
We are all familiar with the pleasures of re-reading, but how many of us give ourselves permission to indulge in those pleasures on a regular basis, especially with the temptations and pressures to keep up with bestsellers, finish assigned books for school, fit in required reading for work? In a Newsweek article, David Gates compares re-reading books to re-listening to music: “Most of us…have our own musical canon—or why do they sell so many iPods?—and no one feels guilty about listening to, say, Talking Heads’ ‘Once in a Lifetime’ just once in a lifetime.”
In re-reading Austen, I am not alone. Again, from Gates:
“I suspect that the most widely reread writers in English have been Dickens, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen—hardly a month goes by without my revisiting one of them—who combine the sleepy-time comforts of story and character with all the challenge and complexity, the inexhaustible newness, that anyone could ask for. I’ve taught them all in the classroom, while in the bedroom their books have slipped from my hands as their stories shaded into my dreams.”
My greatest lesson in re-reading has come from my husband. After nearly thirty years in the college classroom, he still re-reads every novel, every short story, every poem, every time he teaches it. Because he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on Jane Austen, he has read Pride and Prejudice over twenty times, and he says that each time he finds something new.
I’ve read Northanger Abbey only two or three times before. I wonder what I will discover this time around?
See “Tales Twice, Indeed Thrice: Rereading Personal Classics” to learn what a few well-known writers and readers love to re-read.
