I gave this speech at a screening of the Pride and Prejudice movie, at an event hosted by the wonderful Riverina Readers Festival. This is a community group that I have been involved with for a few years now, and I absolutley love being part of this community of readers. 

After the welcome and hello, we begin...

Jane Austen was born on this day in 1775, the seventh of eight children born to her parents George Austen, an Anglican rector, and her mother Cassandra. Jane began writing in her early teens and wrote consistently over the course of her life.

She had what we might now call a modest or unremarkable career. During her own lifetime her books were published anonymously, as was standard for women authors, lest full-time work as a writer be promoted as preferable to being a wife and mother. After Sense and Sensibility was published and well received, her books were credited to “the author of Sense and Sensibility,” although in some smaller circles her identity was openly known. Fans included the Prince Regent, whom she met, and he kept a copy of all her books in the royal library.

Her life was one of financial precariousness. After her father died suddenly, Jane, her sister and mother were reliant on male relatives for financial support. Insecure publishing contracts and royalty deals made some money, but never enough to make her financially independent of others. After a long illness, which may have been lymphoma, Jane died on 18 July, 1817, aged 41. Later that year, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published as a set, and in that publication her brother George wrote a eulogy that identified her, by name, as the author. In the years after her death, her books sold steadily, but not in huge numbers. However, perhaps more significantly, they remained a fixture in libraries and private collections, were passed from one reader to another with quiet recommendations, and a following of beloved readers and admirers slowly took form. In 1832, publisher Richard Bentley purchased the copyright to her books and published them as illustrated editions. Since 1833, they have never been out of print.

We often refer to Jane as the founder of romance as a genre, and with good reason. In her books, she gave us banter. She gave us the meet cute. She gave us longing looks, and pining, the grand gesture and the very best in heart felt confessions of love. And there are two things that Jane gave us that I believe are the most important, and why we love her so very much.

The first is that in her books, we not only watch two people fall in love, but we also watch them settle into a power dynamic where they face their future as equals. After the wedding ceremony, He will practically own Her, but we know that she will be okay. She will not be bullied. She will be loved. Not only Elizabeth, but also Jane and Lydia, Anne, Emma and Charlotte, all of Jane’s women, no matter how badly they have behaved or how silly they have been, they are forgivable, redeemable and have a future of financial stability. There is
no Anna Karena or Madam Bovary style tragedy for them. Jane’s women are allowed to falter and still be okay. And this leads to the second thing that I believe Jane gave us, and that is, the book as a safe place.

One of the criticisms of Jane has always been that her stories are fail to address the historic realities of life for women. And even all these years later, “unrealistic expectations” is a common criticism levelled at those of us who hang out a lot in Romancelandia. At the time Jane was writing, marriage was a contractual arrangement that transferred property from one man to another.

Fifty per cent of pregnancies ended in the death of the mother, baby or both.

Jane wrote her stories more than a century before the introduction of the Married Women’s property act of 1882, which allowed women to maintain private ownership of the things they brought into a marriage, and more significantly, allowed them to keep any wages they earnt while they were married. Jane and her contemporary readers did not need a fiction book to tell them that the world could be an unfair, unsafe place. They needed a place to rest, to dream, to imagine, without wondering if the character a bit like them
was going to be killed off to advance the plot or make a point.

At the time, Jane’s books offered a gentle space, and now, we see this played out as not a failing, but as the defining feature of romance. Because regardless of the sub-genre, regardless of the pairing (or throuple or why-choose), regardless of the planet or dimension or world of the story, no matter how light or how dark, what romance books offer is the promise of happiness embodied within the journey, no matter who you are. Jane wrote the book not as a moral lesson or instruction, but as a safe place to be. And this certainty of the Happily Ever After is, to me, the best thing she gave us.

With that, I ask you to raise a glass. 

To Jane.