Jane Austen and the All-Access Pass

N.: Doctor, the blogger patient shows renewed signs of topical clumping. He wants to get out 500 words or less about Jane Austen's apparent 'accessibility', but if we're not careful we'll have a whole novel (you should pardon the expression!) on our hands, about the early history of the US paperback, and the role of cinema and TV adaptations, and Colin Firth and Laurence Olivier--

D.: And I know you'd just hate that part.

Your 'classic' Persuasion

N.: I think we can leave the stereotypes aside, Doctor. Besides, you'll only encourage him. As I was saying: Colin Firth, Laurence Olivier; purists versus popularizers; the history of the UK publisher Hodder, Eric Ambler, the Hachette publishing empire, Le Livre de Poche; 'romance' fiction--

D.: Nurse novels?

N. (ignoring him): --genre fiction bias, gender fiction bias--

D.: Gender fiction bias? You mean 'chick lit'? Can we talk about chick flicks for a minute? How many chick flicks do you think I'd watch in a lifetime if I didn't need to get--

The patient regains consciousness and attempts to regain control. Obviously, it's not easy. Some radical surgery is called for--if possible, before 'great books'/'the canon'/'DWEMs' find their way into the mix.

Hodder Headline's Austen (2006)

Let's scroll back to 2006, the year in which UK publisher Hodder Headline, newly under the Hachette umbrella, issued new (and, to the best of my knowledge, its first) paperback editions of Jane Austen's principal six novels and set about getting them onto retailers' shelves--'wherever paperbacks are sold', as the advertising copy for just about any other popular paperback might read. (We're not talking about the 'classics' section, and we're including stores where nary a Penguin Classic is to be found.) There were discussions in the press about whether Hodder (more readily associated, historically, with the Saint, Eric Ambler and John le Carré) was trying to market Austen as 'chick lit', 'Regency romance', 'guilty pleasure'--and the expression 'dumbing down' came up more than once.

A different Persuasion ?
Penguin 'red' cover

It was also in 2006 that Penguin included the six principal Austens in the much more extensive 'red' reissue (of that era)--new editions of what in competing Penguin editions were called 'classics' but here, in the 'red' series, appeared with no historical introductions, no annotations or other 'classics' cues, often a more generous typeface and better paper... and late-20th-century photographs or line drawings as cover illustrations. (Fairly or not, the Penguin 'red' Austen line, and indeed the entire red series, seemed not to get the same often-chilly reception that commentators reserved for the Hodder Austens.)

But whatever else one might say about the Hodder (and Penguin 'red') Austens, no one doubted that the public would buy them--and read them. (For the record, and in the interest of full disclosure, I admired but did not buy any of the Hodder six; I bought the Penguin 'red' Austens and inhaled the 'red' Northanger Abbey on my way back from the UK to Florida that year.) The Hodder six and the Penguin reds sold well, and, over five years later, are still in print--alongside their Penguin Classics counterparts.

In the case of Austen (and, I suspect, also of Dickens and Gibbon), the secret's in the marketing--but in the broadest sense of both terms. The real 'secret', to put it bluntly, is that we already have abundant access (and not just market access) to the 'classics' (whether we call them that or not). And the 'marketing' includes everything we do or witness every day that labels a text, or genre, or work of art--or anything or anyone else--as, let's say, 'our sort' or 'not quite our sort'.

Of course, it's easier to make the argument about Jane Austen, not only because of her--I would say her 'greatness', but I don't want to impose that judgement on you--but also because her accessibility has been tested and established. Not in every case is it so clear. But it's always worth exploring.

Still to come, on other days: Thomas Paine, the Bible, and why we might want access to the 'classics'.

Towards an All-Access Pass: Dickens & Co.

A week ago, when I started writing about the coming Dickens bicentenary, I said I was addressing 'primarily… people who in some way or another love Dickens, or who can remember deriving pleasure from a Dickens novel at some point in their lives'. The response to that post suggests that there are many such readers. But what about the others?

I'm not talking about people who prefer Austen or Thackeray or one of the Brontës or George Eliot or Henry James or Virginia Woolf to Dickens.

What concerns me today, and what has concerned me for decades, are the perceptions, or beliefs, or phobias, that inhibit some readers' access to all of these authors, if in differing degrees--to say nothing of the factors that inhibit access to books in general, or to art in the broadest sense.

Even if we restrict ourselves, for now, to questions of the accessibility of 'Dickens', by which I mean to say, roughly, of authors from Austen through Virginia Woolf, this is still an enormous topic, one that I approach with great humility and with no illusion that I can resolve anything with a single blogpost. My ambition, instead, is to start a conversation, one that will be open both to those who have and those who don't have the 'access' we're talking about.

I said that this has concerned me for decades. One starting point for me was a conversation in Washington, D.C., in the late 1980s, at one of the Endowments. I was there to interview for a job, but the conversation was small talk between interviews. Someone was mentioning the 'exiling' of 'classics' (meaning something like Austen-through-Woolf or Homer-through-Steinbeck) to a separate section in the back of some bookstores in shopping malls, and the fact that most readers had their last contact with 'classics' when they took their last formal literature course in high school or college. I asked why the speaker thought that was, and he or she quickly responded, 'Oh, they find them too difficult.' At this point, without thinking, I said something like: 'Yes, but how do they end up with that perception? After all, Dickens isn't any harder to read than Robert Ludlum.'

Well, it was immediately obvious that I had 'lost' my audience--and I hadn't seen it coming. Here I was in a group of writing and reading professionals, all of whom, I'm still certain, had been reading Dickens and all the other 'classics' for most of their lives. I expected them to be briefly taken aback but then, on reflection, to agree with me. But they weren't having any of it. (It later emerged from the same conversation that at least one of them, an 18th-century specialist, found Gibbon hopelessly dry and perhaps a bit forbidding. Go figure.)

Perhaps I was wrong. Or perhaps I was trying out my material on the wrong 'room'. (I didn't get the job, either, but that's a different story.)

To be continued. Soon: the example of Jane Austen.