Here’s a brief quote by Peter Leithart from the introductory essay to his book Miniatures and Morals:The Christian Novels of Jane Austen.
The essay is entitled “Real Men Read Austen.” While discussing the various ways that Austen deliberately limits the number of characters and variety of settings of her novels, he also points out that she also limits what happens to the characters in those settings. In reality, not much happens at all. Here he elaborates on why this miniature aspect of her writing is a strength instead of a weakness:
In fact, even the apparent lack of incident in Austen’s novels is part of their particular strength. The events of an Austen novel are the kinds of incidents that most people are involved in most days and weeks and months of their lives. Nothing happens in Austen–nothing but marriages, engagements entered into and broken, scandals exposed, evenings spent in conversation at the card table or around the fire, secrets kept and revealed, promises made and kept or broken. If “nothing happens” in Austen, it is because “nothing happens” most of the time. yet, precisely because of this limitation, because so little seems to happen, every nuance and contour of what does happen takes on considerable importance. We begin to realize that men can be cads without kidnapping women and confining them in dark towers, and women can be vicious without poisoning their rivals. Men can be cads just by being male (John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey is the prime illustration), and women can kill as effectively with words as with arsenic. If we read Austen sensitively and begin to see things through her eyes, we begin to realize that much is happening in our lives even, or especially, at those frequent moments when “nothing is happening.” If this is a “feminine” vision of the world, it is one that men would do well to pay attention to. For it is not good that we should be alone.
Thank you to Dr. Peter Leithart for helping us to learn how to read. He’s explained it using Scripture in Deep Exegesis and shown us how to read other literature in books like Miniatures and Morals and Brightest Heaven of Invention.
If you’re interested in reading these works in their entirety, they’re super-cheap right now at Canon Press. Click on the pictures below to visit the Canon Press website.
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