An argument among friends

I spent Sunday afternoon with my particular friends Lee and Susan and amid food and drink and kvetching about our various aches and pains and triumphs and tragedies Lee asked me, and not for the first time, why I liked Jane Austen.

She’s asked me this before and this time I just said that I liked Austen because she wrote romance for unromantic people, which I think went down well with Lee because Lee is pretty unromantic herself. And I don’t mean that she’s incapable of love or shut off or hard or emotionally distant. She is none of those things, but she lives alone and at … almost the same age as myself (but she’s older) … is happy with her life, her friends, her horses and whatever Corgis will be nipping at her heels. Susan is romantic, however. She sings with the choir and is a dramatic personality and at a few years older than myself, is living happily teaching aikido and writing a book and developing her business seminars.

So I consider myself a keep the world at a distance, liberal, public transit is a good idea for the masses, down to earth, non believer but still won’t take the Lord’s name in vain and if you scratch hard enough there’s still a Catholic in there somewhere sort of person. And to a lesser or greater degree, so are Lee and Susan, although neither are Catholic and Lee’s a complete atheist.

And yet my comment about Austen writing romance for unromantic people went both ways. I had used Pride and Prejudice as the chief example of what I meant, saying that Elizabeth turned the corner on Darcy upon seeing Pemberley. Susan said that no, Elizabeth’s love for Darcy was not tainted by any gross calculus, while Lee wholeheartedly agreed with my statement. I was actually somewhere in the middle, despite my statement, because I think that she was drawn to him from the beginning. If it hadn’t been for Darcy’s meddling with Jane and Bingley and Wickham’s machinations, they would have fallen for each other almost immediately, despite that “tolerable enough” line. But I think Pemberley was the turning part and I said that I think what I love about an Austen heroine is that she loves with her head as much as with her heart.

All this goes back to my very first post here, of course, so I am saying nothing new. It was just interesting that I got to see that my two friends took the opposite sides, despite all three of us being very similar.

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