notes on Jane Austen

Lo these many years ago, I had Pride and Prejudice as a GCSE set text, and I loved it. I think it was the following summer, between secondary school and sixth form, that I decided to read the rest of them, though it might very well also have been between sixth form and university, or 2012 after the antidepressants had kicked in but before the start of the academic year had rolled back around. Regardless, my mother had remarked upon my reading to a friend, or colleague, or friendly colleague, who responded, wistfully, that I was awfully lucky to be reading so much of Austen for the first time.

I was distinctly unimpressed with all of them.

I spent them going "ah, this is this book's Mr Collins", or "ah, this is this book's Wickham", and so on and so forth, with impatience and no small degree of disappointment, and while I've reread P&P many times since and got more out of it every time, I didn't return to any of the others until Thursday, when I picked Persuasion back up.

It transpires that one of the advantages of (relative) age is a much greater appreciation of Austen's terribly dry and wonderfully crisp snark about absolutely everything, which I'm enjoying a very great deal if a touch ruefully; and as a bonus, I remember very little of any of the text or plots except for faint glimmers of... a walk? through a park? perhaps in Sense and Sensibility? -- so I'm getting to experience them anew again.

All of which is to say that I'm very much enjoying reading Jane Austen for the "first" time, and also, seeing "innoxious" written down made me realise that "innocuous" is from Latin nocere (to harm or hurt), so that's some extra entertainment for me and I am well pleased by it.