Jane Austen and the ludic possibility of the ten pound note

Austen: good choice

If you look at who's currently on the British pound notes, you may find yourself shamefully turning to Google, as I did. Matthew Boulton and James Watt? They made steam engines. Sir John Houblon? He was the first Governor of the Bank of England. They're a pretty serious bunch. Economist Adam Smith, prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, scientist Charles Darwin... They all remind us of power, empire, good works. When we use those notes, we think - that is what money is. It forms society.

So what about a little bit of playfulness on our banknotes? There has been a lot of sneering at the choice of Jane Austen for our tenners. I will leave aside, for the moment, the case for other women - there are myriad others, of course, but I intend to look at why we should celebrate Jane Austen.

Austen writes "romances", apparently. First of all, let us correct this misapprehension. The term romance has now been entirely degraded; helped by a vision of Austen as purely motivated by a kind of soppy, Barbara Cartlandish love in which all that is necessary is to get a man (and Bridget Jones hasn't really helped us in that regard), we now categorise Jane Austen in the same breath as Mills and Boon.

This is entirely, almost flabbergastingly wrong. Romance is what drives the novel. In French, novels are still called "romans." The structure of Austen's novels may have the teleology of marriage - but that is because, generically, their ancestors are the Jacobean and Regency comedies that went before her. She is using one of the deepest structures of fiction, and she makes it not a stricture, but something alive and eternal.

That's not to mention the economic and practical necessity that would beset a single woman in the Regency period. This isn't about love. It's about decisions that might mean the difference between wasting away in a garret, or having a real roof on your head.

Her novels are supremely intelligent, ironical, and well-structured; keenly observed and with an eye that deflates pretension. Her heroines live, love and sparkle, their shining sharpness cutting through the flim flam around them. They know what money is for. They know that too much of it is awful; they know that too little brings the wolf.

Paula Byrne's recent biography of Austen reassesses her life: gone is the reclusive, spinster maiden; in her place is a canny businesswoman with relatives who saw the French revolution and many wars; who knew how to negotiate her contracts; who had a deep understanding of people - and, more importantly, what motivates them. 

That is why she's a perfect choice to adorn a banknote. Not because she's a novelist that is beloved by millions. But because she understood the world, and she understood that the little scraps of paper that we pass to each other every day are heavily weighted with more than just a financial obligation. They are the difference between life and death. And she laughed at it all, a cool, clever glimmer in her eye.

So no more economists, no more scientists. Let's have a little Austen in our lives, and let's live, and love, like she did.

The Real Jane Austen by Paula Byrne: review

It's the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: I've reviewed Paula Byrne's The Real Jane Austen for The Telegraph. Put on your bonnet / cocked hat and read it here.

Beautiful Classics for Christmas

I've done a round up of beautifully produced classics for Christmas for The Telegraph, which you can read here. It was a bit truncated, so I've pasted the full version below.

As ephemeral e-books continue to flourish on the screens of their ugly readers, could we be seeing a return of a need for the haptic? Psychologically it makes sense: one doesn’t feel that one owns an e-book (in fact, legally, you don’t – you only have a licence to it); a beautifully produced book, however, not only belongs to you, but to future generations. Publishers have responded to this deep-seated hunger in time for Christmas with a selection of gorgeously bound classics which are full of grace and charm.

Published earlier this year, in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, was a series of books with starry designers. Iris Murdoch’s strange and beautiful The Sea, The Sea (Vintage Classics, £9.99, 608pp) is a stand-out, with a bold, swirling, abstract cover by Zandra Rhodes, throbbing with allure and conflicting emotions. There’s also a striking geometric cover for Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (Vintage Classics, £9.99, 288pp) by WilkinsonEyre Architects, which encapsulates the tick-tock precision of the book’s relentless, uncomfortable strength.

Penguin Classics don’t disappoint with their compact cloth-bound editions: they fit in your hand (or man-)bag, and are a serious treat to hold and contemplate. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (Penguin Classics, 1276pp, £18.99) is the dark green of the waters around that fabled isle; on its cover are crimson venetian masks, reminding us of the layers of deception and glamour that inhabit this most wonderful of romances. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (Penguin Classics, 1231pp) is a more serious black, with scarlet birds poised between vertical lines – souls trapped, yet singing.

Small publisher Alma Books has concoted an elegant selection of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, with illustrations of spindly, flapperish characters set against raised gold lettering that capture the books’ jazzy brilliance: The Great Gatsby (Alma Classics, 256pp, £6.99) has that ominous motor car, a memento mori amongst the brightness. A 50^th Anniversary of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (Heinemann, 320pp, £18.99) has a simple cover with elegant endpapers repeating the colours, gentle yet powerful as its contents.

If you want something both affordable and essential, you could do a lot worse than the Complete Jane Austen (Wordsworth, 1440pp, £11.99), which looks fabulous and would delight the eyes of any family, fortune-seeking or not. More Christmassy are two editions of Charles Dickens: a splendid A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books (Everyman, £10.99, 456pp), which has an introduction by Margaret Atwood, and Dickens at Christmas (Vintage Classics, 592pp, £15), both of which exude jollity. You can practically taste the mince pies.

For the fashionable there are some stylish tomes: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (Virago, 448pp, £12.99) and Elizabeth Jenkins’ The Tortoise and the Hare (Virago, 288pp, £12.99) are so sophisticated you can only read them with a cigarette holder and a martini; the latter is introduced by this year’s paramount novelist, Hilary Mantel.

Go into any Waterstone’s and you’ll see a selection of everybody’s favourite novels, bound in leather and shrink-wrapped in plastic so that you can’t look inside and spoil the pages. These are the sorts of books that are both wonderful presents and lasting reminders of the pleasures they bring: Barnes and Noble’s leather-bound classics, which include Sherlock Holmes, C S Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Bram Stoker and the Complete Works of Shakespeare, are so beautiful that you’ll want to buy one just so that you can unwrap them. They only cost £15, which, if ever there were a snip, would certainly be one. You’ll want to keep them for yourself, to be read by the fire with a glass of mulled wine and a paper hat on your head.You might even stay awake until dinner.

The Three Wisemen... I mean Weissmanns, of Westport, by Cathleen Schine: review

My review of The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine is in The Tablet this week. It's a lovely novel. The review is unavailable online, so you'll have to mosey on down to the newsagents to get a real actual ink and paper copy. Gosh! It's a very Jane Austeny novel, so it's all the more suitable to read a review of it in hard copy. In fact, you all ought to go out and buy a frock coat now.