Six Degrees of Pride and Prejudice

Simply told, the plot may sound more Harlequin Romance than Great Book. We begin with the Bennets, a family in rural 19th Century England. Though burdened with the universal difficulties of a flighty mother and preoccupied father, the clan's true problem is more time and place specific: too many daughters to marry off, and not enough money to do it. Elizabeth and Jane are the eldest Bennet offspring, burdened both by their... family's social inadequacies and by their own justifiably high standards when it comes to choosing husbands. Will the girls find the men of their dreams, or will they settle for less than a true marriage of minds and hearts? What follows is one of the great love stories in English literature. Jane Austen was just 21 when she completed the first draft of Pride and Prejudice. So it's especially remarkable that her writing is one of the wonders of British literature funny, clear and wonderfully detailed. Elizabeth Bennet feels like a truly modern heroine, if one constrained by her time and place. Austen herself never married, though her great subjects were the politics of courtship and social conventions. Famously reclusive, she neatly penned her novels on a tiny wooden lap desk in the drawing room of her family's home in Bath. Rarely perhaps never before or since, has a writer written so much, so well, under such strange circumstances. But many readers and viewers don't necessarily know how truly difficult Austen's writing life must have been, especially given the enormous popularity of her work these last few years. First, there were the multiple movie and TV versions of every novel, from Emma to Northanger Abbey. Then there were Austen "spin-offs": from The Jane Austen Book Club (contemporary women look to the author as a font of wisdom and romantic inspiration) and Becoming Jane (Anne Hathaway is lovely but fictional) to last year's unlikely hit read, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In the midst of all these versions and revisions, it's too easy to forget why Austen's work and life inspires so much in the first place. Which is why it seemed more than fitting to lay out a network of her literary descendants.

Poor Bridget Jones. She's been blamed for so much: the rise of hot pink book jackets, Mr. Darcy jokes, the stereotype of single women-as-shoe-shopping, cheese-eating-megalomaniacs, Renee Zellweger's yo-yo dieting. I'm convinced, however, that most of the people who condemn Ms. Jones out of hand haven't actually read the books. Because, actually? They're hilarious. Fielding's skewering of British social conventions, and her ability to use pop culture against itself (the term "singleton," first... appeared in Bridget Jones, for example) is in the grand Anglo-satirical tradition of P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and Jane Austen. Yes, the progenitor of rom-com is funny sometimes even laugh-out-loud hilarious (Mrs. Bennett is a particular object of ridicule, but the various snobbish sisters and priggish parsons across the Austen oeuvre keep the giggles coming as well). Back, however, to Bridget Jones. The End of Reason is the second installment, and it's actually weirder and more outrageous than its predecessor. Fielding seems to have decided that her character deserves whatever ridiculous torment she can devise (such as trading tampons for cigarettes in a Thai prison); it's almost as if she's deliberately playing with the stereotype she so infamously created. Hmm. Nothing chick-lit about that.

The connection between the high priestess of sarcasm and the sly wit of the drawing room may not be immediately obvious. Dorothy Parker was a product of the new freedoms of the Roaring '20s, smoking and drinking and cracking wise with the boys around the Algonquin roundtable; Austen's idea of a big night out was a quadrille at Bath. But in the latter's prose is the constant, discernible longing for more freedom... freedom that Parker had in spades. We'll never know if, in Parker's time and place, Austen would have chosen to use her sharp pen on the same odd (and, frankly, often dated) combination of unstinting criticism and lovelorn short fiction.

One of Austen's great subjects was sisters: their love for one another, their rivalries, the differences in the ways they deal with family, suitors and society. While Smiley's Pulitzer prize-winning novel is explicitly based on Shakespeare's King Lear (there are three sisters and a crazed, power-mad father), the work reflects the canon of female authors as well as the Bard's play. Like Lear, it is a tragedy, harrowing, heartbreaking, and inevitably doomed.... It's also profane, upsetting, and focused on aging, rather than the relatively optimistic problems of proposals and betrothals. It does, however, concern several truly Austenian subjects: the inheritance of property by female rather than male heirs; and the parental expectations placed on too-dutiful daughters. I'd like to think that had Austen lived in a time when women's problems could extend outside the parlor (in her era, women were totally legally dependent on men), she would have come to write something as disturbing and un-comely as Smiley's novel.

Atwood has claimed with characteristic dry wit to be the first chick-lit author. According to any other yardstick, she is one of the finest, fiercest and most varied authors currently writing. While these short stories don't bear quite the heft of her now-classic dystopian fantasy, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), the overly feminist bite of her collection Life Before Man (1979), or the historic sweep and multiply narrated range of Alias Grace (1996),... Moral Disorder is Atwood in her emotionally subtle mode. The stories center on Nell, a woman growing up in post-war Canada. As Nell ages, we follow her relationships with family, friends, children and lovers. The connection to Austen could feel tenuous: after all, neither she nor her heroines lived to enjoy the contemplativeness of old age, and we rarely meet them after the first blush of young love. Nell is an Austenian protagonist: independent and intelligent, she seeks a marriage of equals. What could be more disorderly?

In A Room of One's Own, Woolf's seminal nonfiction treatise on women and writing, Jane Austen appears as literary folk hero, able to transcend the restrictions her gender placed upon her. On the author's ability to compose her works, in public yet in secret, Woolf explains, "[she] was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in." Yet, "I could not find any signs that... her circumstance had harmed her work in the slightest." Okay, but how does this relate to To the Lighthouse, one of Woolf's trickiest and most tenaciously Modern works? The novel centers on the Ramsays, a middle class family, emotionally and physically close to each other, but with repressed desires and ambitions that they cannot fully express. Austen's writing always concerned the push and pull familial relationships: sisters and parents, cousins and uncles. In this way, To the Lighthouse is almost a continuation, or twentieth-century retelling of Austen's work. Like Austen, Woolf struggled: to write, and to live happily. Ultimately, she lost the battle, killing herself at the age of 49. Perhaps she saw in Austen an example of why and how it was worthwhile to keep on, no matter how futile her efforts might feel. At the British Library in London, Woolf's final blue-pencil edited manuscript lies in the same glass case as Austen's tiny wooden lap desk. Both are powerful reminders of what it means to write, no matter what.