I’ve just finished reading ‘Sense and Sensibility’ for the first time in about 15 years. It struck me as I finished reading it how funny Jane Austen was. I’d heard that her letters to her sister Cassandra were full of wit, but I didn’t know how witty she was until I read the last few pages of the book. Her closing paragraphs discussing the ‘happiness’ of Mr and Mrs John Dashwood, Mr and Mrs Robert Ferrers and Mrs Ferrers struck me especially. She could have said the same things more bluntly but the eloquence and wry tone only added to the reader’s impression that they all ended less than happily.
I’ve read many of Austen’s novels, but most of them I haven’t read in a very long time. Going back to them I have found humour that I missed in the past, either because I was too young to understand the joke when I last read them or because I read them too quickly and didn’t pay enough attention. There are many good reasons to re-read books one has only read in youth, or where a number of years has passed. New appreciation of the same words, coloured by greater age and experience, and finding a new perspective on the same, is one of the best. Along with, ‘I like that book, so I’m reading it again’.
That being said, sometimes it is disappointing to go back to a book much loved as a teenager and realise that it’s shallow or badly written. The image it throws upon your younger self, in choosing to read something like that, can be painful.
Best be off, things to do and all that,
Rose
Everything Is Better With Dragons 