Review: The Jane Austen Handbook

First of all, I’m not really a fan of Jane Austen. I’ve tried to read “Pride and Prejudice” more than once, but never made it. I fought my way through “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, but didn’t enjoy the experience. Yet, I do enjoy “The Jane Austen Handbook” by Margaret Sullivan, which speaks clearly for the entertainment value of the book.

 

I have always been interested in history. I do enjoy certain eras more than others and have become interested in the Regency era (the time in which Jane Austen lived and her novels are set) quite a while back.

One big problem with history, though, is that we know little about the life of the everyday person. There’s written protocols of what happened every morning when the king of France was getting ready for the day, but there’s no notes on how your average citizen of Paris started their day. Rulers matter, the ruled don’t, so there’s little information about how the ruled spent their lives. To be honest, even newer and newest history, both from a time where people have written down a lot, rarely talk about the life of the regular people. You don’t easily find a biography about the baker around the corner, but there’s lots about celebrities and politicians.

“The Jane Austen Handbook” delivers precisely on that. Okay, it’s not about the life of a simple peasant, but it is about regular things in the lives of the landed gentry of that time. There’s chapters on how children were raised and what they were taught by whom. There’s chapters on how to spend your day as a member (especially a female one) of the landed gentry. There’s chapters on where to spend which time of the year for optimal exposure to eligible bachelors, on how to plan a big dinner with guests, on what kind of servants were employed for what - a lot of the small details of life at that time, right up to what people would be wearing when. Did you know that women at the time of Jane Austen usually went commando (no panties, bloomers, or suchlike)? Because I didn’t and it gives me a thrill to think of it now. All those well-behaved young ladies and elderly matrons weren’t wearing panties - panties were even thought to be ‘suspicious,’ since only women who regularly lifted their skirts would need them.

 

The writing of the book isn’t just informative - almost all non-fiction works I’ve ever read can do informative. Non-fiction is supposed to do ‘informative.’ The writing is also amusing and makes it much easier to digest the information delivered. Reading “The Jane Austen Handbook” is not a chore, it’s a delight, which is why I’m on my third time through right now. I even call it research this time, since I’m about to start writing a book set in the Regency era and among the landed gentry.

There’s also beautiful pictures to go with the writing. Some are actual diagrams to explain things like netting a purse or writing a letter (though I think the ‘write in all four directions on the same page’ part is not meant seriously) or dressing in the morning. Others are merely breaking up the text and showing things mentioned before - like a harp-playing young lady or a landscape showing ‘the picturesque’ in all its glory. Yet, all of them are very pretty, even on the black-white-and-grey screen of my kindle.

There is a lot of information, too, from the definition of ‘landed gentry,’ which is necessary to understand whom we’re talking about in the first place, over a complete schedule for the day of a married lady of the Regency era to things like ‘what do Mr. Darcy’s 10,000 £ a year amount to by today’s standards?’ (Depending on whom you listen to, the answer is somewhere between 500,000 £ and 6,000,000 £ - you can see now why Mrs. Bennett wanted one of her daughters as his wife, can you?) It’s not just the big parts, it’s a lot of the small ones, too. After reading the book, you can imagine what the life of a young lady looking for a suitable husband was like or what said lady (aka ‘any of Jane Austen’s heroines’) would probably do as soon as she was the mistress of an estate after the wedding. (Especially Elisabeth Bennett - I mean, six million pounds a year? You can do an awful lot of picturesque landscaping with that money.) It’s a lot of fun.

I have to admit that this book (which I bought in e-book format together with “Monster, She Wrote” which I’ve already reviewed here) also helped me to come up with the story for “The Haunting of Winterthorne Hall”. It gave me the necessary knowledge I needed to figure out how to put my characters in their places and how to progress with the plot. Being able to imagine what the life of Emilia and Florence would be like, especially once Emilia is exiled to Cornwall for slander and Florence has come with her, helps a lot with plotting the story and figuring out what will happen with the haunted wing of Winterthorne Hall. Knowing what kinds of servants to expect at the hall, what a day they would have there, how they would spend spare time helps make the story feel more alive.

I couldn’t have done all of this without “The Jane Austen Handbook” - just as I would never have thought ‘it was Old Man Munson all along’ would be a valid solution for a Gothic Romance novel without reading the entry on Ann Radcliffe in “Monster, She Wrote”. Who would have thought that the basic plotline of all Scooby Doo episodes is that old?

 

I’m sure that “The Jane Austen Handbook” will be even more thrilling for fans of Jane Austen who have a much bigger interest in all the things described and discussed within the pages and can connect them to the books they love. Those are not the only target audience, though, despite the title. The book has a lot to offer and is certainly worth your time if you like the Regency era (or want to become acquainted with it) or generally love historical topics or just want to read something that’s both informative and entertaining.