Jane Austen would have killed me off as a character | GUEST COMMENTARY

Talk to many young, female Jane Austen-lovers and whom do they identify with?  Elizabeth Bennet of “Pride and Prejudice,” of course.  Teens and 20-somethings reading the book for the first time often believe they are Elizabeth, and who wouldn’t want to be?  She’s attractive, spunky and skilled in glittering repartee.  No one has comebacks like Elizabeth, especially when she’s facing off against the formidable Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

I, too, had always imagined myself as Elizabeth: bold, gutsy, articulate. That is until my husband died and my daughter graduated college and left home (when I was significantly older than Elizabeth’s nearly “one-and-twenty”). Unexpectedly, I found myself sympathizing with Mrs. Bennet’s imaginary ailments and “poor nerves.”

This was both disturbing and disorienting. Seriously, do you know anyone who admits to identifying with the tiresome Mrs. Bennet? Not to mention hypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse in “Emma” or much-put-upon Mary Musgrove of “Persuasion,” who eats her cold meat with relish (in the movie she manages to chomp on a formidable hunk of ham while complaining of indisposition).

We all want to be Jane’s bestie. But have I, unawares, morphed into one of Austen’s less sympathetic characters?

It’s a sobering realization: I lately do, albeit uneasily, identify with these foolish characters, and I’m wondering if Jane Austen, who was born 248 years ago on Dec. 16, would have hated me — or even killed me off. It is humbling to find oneself a possible object of derision in Miss Austen’s eyes: ridiculous, unsympathetic, mocked, like Mrs. Bennet who takes to her bed upon hearing of her daughter Lydia’s elopement.

Austen’s scorn for hypochondriacs is not limited to fictional characters.

Writing to her brother, Frank, away at sea, she described an acquaintance as: “… the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well and who likes her spasms and nervousness, and the consequence they give her, better than anything else.”

In Austen’s perspective, death is the only escape from abuse and mockery: “The great Mrs. Churchill was no more,” she wrote in “Emma” “after being disliked at least twenty-five years, [she] was now spoken of with compassionate allowances. In one point she was fully justified. She had never been admitted before to be seriously ill. They even acquitted her of all fancifulness, and all the selfishness of imaginary complaints.”

This sentiment is anticipated by Austen’s acerbic comment to her sister Cassandra, two years before the publication of Emma in 1815: “Only think of Mrs. Holder’s being dead!  Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to make one cease to abuse her.”

In “The Body in Illness and Health: Themes and Images in Jane Austen,” Anita Gorman writes that “hypochondriacs and hysterics serve as models of undesirable behavior, and their lives as cautionary tales for the astute reader.”

Jane Austen’s perspective on death was unstintingly realistic, unsentimental, and often darkly funny, as in her notorious observation to Cassandra: “Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright.  I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”

Ouch.

The fear that, having mocked me, Austen would have had no compunction about killing me off is sobering for a lifelong Austen fan who also happens to be a hypochondriac. But perhaps I am, as Gorman observes of Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park,” “saved from hysteria by inner strength, sensitivity [and] strong moral principles.”

At least, that’s what I’ll tell myself for now.

Pamela Jane (pamelajane@pamelajane.com) is, with Deborah Guyol, author of “Pride and Prejudice and Kitties: A Cat-Lover’s Romp Through Jane Austen’s Classic” (Skyhorse, 2015).