I am a mere
white middling Australian
male who likes,
among many other
non-masculine things,
to listen intently to
the voice of a woman
long deceased,
whose gentle satiric laughter
at the foibles and ways
of petulant humankind
can still be heard
across the distances
of history and place
in the exploratory words
of the fiction she wrote.
I like to think that
I am channelling Jane Austen.
I am getting inside her keen
and anthropological look at
what she saw and imagined
in her limited English world
of mannered characters,
women and men,
who lived their lives
with boundaries
and encumberments,
customs and
class distinctions,
that they never saw
as we do today:
we who look back
with the advantage of
Austen’s forensic eye
to see the sense
of being a person
in such a time,
in those estates
and manors
that held captive
her characters and
their stories.
Yet, as I read and
think about these six
novels that sit
well worn and
thumbed on my shelf,
and still live
and breath into the
lungs of my thinking now,
I also see the humanness
and the core desires
that she fine-spun with words,
desires that I also share,
desires that still drive all of us
in our not-so-different foibles today.
Yes, I am channelling Austen.
I am connecting with
this woman who
never married
and had children
of her own,
and thus did not
fulfil the expected
social convention
of her times.
But that is the irony and
the laughter into
the face of time:
for she spurned her children
far beyond her mortal deck.
For she had the distant eye
outside the processes
that she could never share;
and as she looked in
and saw the intricacies,
ambiguities and pretenses
of all that were in the circles
and patterns of that
life that has now gone
to the grave of history,
she saw it as
few others could;
and not even Dickens
got inside what she saw
and heard what she heard.
I am channeling Jane,
as a friend of truth
and a truthful friend,
with grace and wit
and subtle charm,
who brings me a vision
of a long-gone world,
an alluring surface place
to which I am
strangely drawn.
22/10/2016