Why “A Sleepy Conscience” and misreading Jane Austen

The story of the newest £10 note is, for me, one of the funniest Jane Austen related news I ever heard. Since 2017, the Bank of England has been distributing a new version of the £10 note with Jane Austen on the reserve and the quote “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading”. How ironic it is that the character who makes this rather powerful statement, Miss Caroline Bingley, is never a great reader and probably only reads, or pretends to read, so as to impress the rich and handsome Mr. Darcy. Whether this was exactly what the designer had in mind when sketching the back of the £10 note, I knew not, but regardless of the truth, I wanted something with the same kind of irony for my blog’s name. From there, I decided on “A Sleepy Conscience” from Mark Twain’s “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life”, among other phrases penned by authors who weren’t Austen’s fans.

Personally, I quite like Mark Twain for many reasons, from his satirical writings to his love for science. Nevertheless, as a devoted Austen fan, I can’t help but feeling a bit uncomfortable with his overtly critical remarks regarding her works. To say that Mark Twain didn’t like Austen is a ghastly understatement. When reading his comment on Pride and Prejudice, I could feel my blood boiling, my breathing quickening, and my hand gripping the phone so tight that I could have broken it in half. In Mark Twain own words:

“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

Mark Twain and Jane Austen belonged to very different worlds. Though they both chose satire to ridicule the society that they were a part of, the way they executed their craft were ultimately very different. At this point, I confess that I have stopped trying to explain Mark Twain’s dislike for Austen, for I knew I could never be rational when thinking about it. In my most composed state, I would think that he grossly overlooked the differences between his and her lives while at the height of my passion, I would deem him a very condescending man, trying to put down a woman whom he should have thanked.

In the last two hundred years, Austen’s quizzical writings have baffled many people. Some criticized the narrow scope of her writing. Some call her writing unfeeling and impassionate. It it most natural that many don’t feel a connection to Austen and don’t resonate with her, since Austen, after all, only wrote about the thing she saw and made fun of the society that she knew. There’s a clear limit to what she could have experienced and understood well enough to recreate in her books. She could reach many people, but certainly not all people. However, to hate her with such a passion, cast her out and consider her trivial are akin to a crime. She wrote about relationships and marriages, but very little true romance. She depicted domesticity, but with all the complexities and nuances that were extremely important and often overlooked. She told stories about rich and very rich people, but only to expose their hypocrisy and not to indulge readers with an escapist fantasy. It is very easy to misread Austen, but once we looked deeper into her writings, we can see a labyrinth of ideas waiting for us to explore. Was she a liberal or a conservative? Was she a traditionalist or experimentalist? Was she an all-out realist or still somewhat romantic? All of these questions are very difficult to answer, but then again, as an Austen fanatic, I can tell you that delving into these questions and making arguments for both sides are much more fun than you might think.

Austen, the one author whose characters misunderstand each other on a daily basis, is probably just as regularly misunderstood.