Rosemary Santini’s Jane Addiction

Rosemarie Santini is a poet, journalist, and novelist who has lectured for more than a decade at The New School. She’s been published in Playboy and other major magazines and is the author of a nonfiction book called The Secret Fire: How Women Live Their Sexual Fantasies. I mention it because her latest novel, Sex and Sensibility: The Adventures of a Jane Austen Addict offers a fictional foray into similar territory, heavy on the romance. In this essay, she thinks about why she and her character just can’t get Austen out of their heads.

I’ve always been a Jane Austen fan. In the last decade, my creative writing classes have been populated by young Sex in the City gals who also love Jane Austen. Invariably, the contrast between our present era and Jane’s comes up in discussion, and I’m constantly surprised at the similarity in courtship rituals and romantic dilemmas.

That’s what inspired me to write Sex & Sensibility. I’ll be reading from the book at an upcoming meeting of the Jane Austen Society. The theme of the meeting is: “Is it possible to lead a Jane Austen-inspired life?”

Well, can we?

Some decades ago, popular opinion held that Jane Austen fans were maiden ladies who wore large hats and sipped tea, preferably while seated on well-tended lawns. These high-minded devotees gossiped about their neighbors and the fashionable life with its scandals.

In the present era, however, publishing experts claim that the current chick-lit phenomenon was begotten by dear Jane. And even after more than 200 years, writers and filmmakers continue to use her as a source of creative energy and guidance.

What are to make of all this? Yes, Jane Austen is a superb writer, her language is glorious, its rhythm meticulous. Her characters are deeply sculpted and her plots structured with a mathematical texture that makes filming her books a joy. However, these are literary topics much discussed by the experts, and I’m not going to debate them.

I’m much more interested in Jane Austen as a force of nature, which many revered writers become. Remember when all of us were impressionable and picked up a beloved novel for the first time? Whether it was Austen or Bronte or Eliot, those books stayed in our memory and have had enormous influence in our work and in our lives.

I’ve never forgotten Elizabeth Bennett; she remained with me throughout my teenage years when I was struggling with becoming a woman. I read Pride and Prejudice zillions of times and saw every film version–and when the miniseries with Colin Firth appeared in the mid-nineties, I fell in love with Darcy all over again.

The amazing thing is that my students, many of them savvy Manhattan singles, all feel the same way. That’s when I got the inspiration to write about a young media critic who adores Jane Austen yet is bombarded by the cosmetics and fashion industry to be a Sex and the City girl. When confronted by life’s events, my heroine, Lizzie Parsons, asks the questions:

What would Jane do?

What would Jane think?

What would Jane say?

Odd questions for a thirty-three-year-old film critic who cut her teeth on her mother’s feminism. Yet Lizzie and her pals, who have formed an organization of Jane-o-holics, meet weekly to discuss the ins and outs of living a Jane Austen life. And they ask the question constantly: Are you brave enough for Jane Austen?

For Jane Austen is very sexy! The sensual undercurrents in scenes like those between Elizabeth and Darcy have mesmerized readers and audiences for many, many years. It is this kind of exciting courtship that Lizzie and her peers search for, and that is what Lizzie’s adventures in Sex & Sensibility are all about…

16 September 2005 | guest authors |