On the writer’s 250th birth anniversary year.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

This year the world is celebrating her 250th birth anniversary. But Jane Austen was from cold, wet England. What is this writer to us in hot, dry Delhi? This afternoon, in Delhi University’s St Stephen’s College, the gracious Dr. Karen Gabriel, head of the Department of English, condescends(!) to give us gyan on Jane Austen. (The classroom in the photo bears a framed portrait of H.W.. Padley, the principal who founded the college’s Shakespeare Society)

According to you, Jane Austen is…?
… a safe writer. She walks the balance between conserving the orthodoxy and pushing boundaries very well. Her six novels are about young women manoeuvring the links between marriage and money and freedom… for, you must agree, some part of women’s freedom comes with money.

Why do Jane Austen fans find her great fun?
Witty, ironical, she gently makes fun of institutions, of various kinds of people… with a playful wink, she invites you, the reader, into her clever engagement with that world.

If a Dilli household has never read Jane Austen, which should be the first Jane Austen novel for the household’s mummy ji?
Certainly Pride and Prejudice. A mother might see a lot of resemblance between her own life and the life of Mrs Bennet, the mother of five girls. She will recognise all the anxieties that Mrs Bennet suffers from, and all the put downs she receives from her husband and even children. A mother might also relate to Mrs Bennet’s eventual successes, and discover that, despite being thought of as a good for nothing, she was actually the heart of everything.

Which should be the first Jane Austen for the father?
Pride and Prejudice, again. In order to learn not to be a father like Mr Bennet. Always locked up in his library, he distanced himself from the anxieties of his household, and was contemptuous of his wife and most of his children.

Which Jane Austen for the bossy didi?
Emma! The heroine is rich and beautiful, but a bit of know-it-all, prone to misjudging situations. Reading the novel will make the older sister reconsider decisions and judgments in her own life, especially if she is like smarty-pants Emma.

Which Jane Austen for the toxic uncle/aunt?
Mansfield Park. The toxic uncle/aunt will find his or her perfect mirror image in Mrs Norris (professor chuckles). Norris is a nosey-parker, talks too much about what she knows very little about… she is controlling, manipulative…

Your favourite Jane Austen novel?
Mansfield Park. The heroine is poor, plain, unattractive, socially shunned, tends to be sickly and at risk. The novel keeps threatening to turn dark. But the brilliant Jane Austen slowly draws Fanny Price out of the shadows and into the centre, making her a symbol of influence, reform and the redistribution of power.