Marie Sprayberry writes: At our Sat., Nov. 16 meeting at the Pittsford Barnes & Noble, I will lead a discussion inspired by Maggie Lane’s 2014 book Growing Older with Jane Austen (published in the UK by Robert Hale, London). Unfortunately, this book is not currently available in the US except at outrageous prices from online booksellers.
However, coming to our rescue are two guest posts by Brenda S. Cox on Vic Sanborn’s blog “Jane Austen’s World.” In these posts, Cox (the author of the book Fashionable Goodness: Christianity in Jane Austen’s England) summarizes Lane’s chapters; provides (at the end of the first post) a list of characters Lane discusses in her book; and gives us much food for thought. I thank both Brenda Cox herself for these posts, and our own Celia Easton for bringing them to my attention. Here are the links:
To get things going on the 16th, here are some discussion questions to consider. Let’s definitely discuss this first set:
(1) Here are Cox’s own questions at the end of her first post: Who is your favorite older character (let’s say over 35; lifetimes were shorter then) in Austen’s novels? Who is your least favorite older character? Why? Do they show you anything particular about aging in Austen’s England?
And then let’s pick a few of these others:
(2) In her consideration of characters growing older, Lane also includes some characters under 35 who are encountering the limits of marriageability in Ch. 1, “The Loss of Youth and Beauty.” Whose loss of “bloom” and “approach to the years of danger” may become a problem for them, and how do they overcome this problem (or not)?
(3) One topic Lane discusses in Ch. 2, “My Time of Life,” is that of older characters who have arrived at a certain “time of life” and use this perspective (sometimes explicitly) to give advice to younger characters. Which pairs of characters do you see as falling into the advisor/advisee pattern, and how successful is the advice-giving in each case?
(4) In Ch. 3, “Parent Against Child,” Lane considers several characters in parental roles who get into tense situations with their children or wards. Who are some of these parents/guardians and children/wards, and how are the tensions eventually resolved?
(5) In Ch. 4, “Old Wives,” Lane discusses the characters who have “been married long enough to come to some accommodation with the choices they had made in youth and to live with whatever idiosyncrasies they may have discovered in their husbands” (p. 72). Who are some of these characters, and what do you think of their ways of adapting?
(6) In four chapters, Lane considers the fates of “Old Maids” (Ch. 5) and various types of widows (Chs. 7-9). Among the various spinsters and widows, how do money (as also discussed in Ch. 10, “Age and Money”) and the professions or social status of fathers or deceased husbands influence their situations? And whose adaptations to their situations do you admire most and least?
(7) In her final two chapters, Lane discusses “The Dangerous Indulgence of Illness” (Ch. 11) and “Nothing to Do but to Die” (Ch. 12). In which of Austen’s works do the illnesses or deaths of characters play roles in the plots?
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