Chicago-Based Freelance Writer/Author Avis Yarbrough

I thought, the way of Jane Austen was not for this black woman. After all what do I know of teas, balls, and marrying for comfort and ease, but there is something about Austen that had grabbed hold of me as a woman. Maybe it is her heroines who for all their brilliance are in a world that requires them to marry or be forever a spinster, or maybe it the ever so sexy heroes that make a woman want to show themselves off to, or maybe it is the writer herself.

            I started reading Austen as a teenager, and I am as black as I am American. Give me a hey girl any day of the week with a Coke Cola Zero not a cup of tea.  However, besides being black, I am a woman, and the woman in me loves Jane Austen. I would take books out of the library determined to read the classics, trying to see what the big deal about them was. In reading classic literature,  I found Austen and her characters and realized that for all my blackness I had  much in common with them.

            I am Elizabeth, in Pride and Prejudice, plainly pretty and clever, who feels sometimes that she isn’t enough. I am Fanny, in Mansfield Park,  who mostly keeps her thoughts to herself. I am Catherine in Northanger Abbey, who has read too many trashy novels and lets her imagination runs wild. I am Emma, in Emma,  thinking she knows best and who meddles in other people’s business, not knowing she does not have a full grasp of what is going on.  I am Elinor, in Sense and Sensibility, seemingly cold but so full of emotion she can hardly contain it.

            When I read Jane Austen, I feel like all things are possible for me as a woman, and I never feel more fully human or more seen. In Pride and Prejudice, I remember laying in my bed as teenager reading it and understanding why Elizabeth had such an attitude toward Mr. Darcy. I also remember reading about Elizabeth walk to Mr. Bingley’s house where she arrives disheveled, and it is the first time that Mr. Darcy really notices her. I too have taken such walks not in the country like she did but in the city, on the south side of Chicago, where there are no country houses or miles of green grass. I walked on grey, concrete streets.

When I arrived disheveled to where I was going, there was no Mr. Darcy waiting for me, but the walk made me realize how I love the feel of my body moving, breathing in the fresh air, knowing that I was young and healthy, and that my body could support me in any thing I did. I imagined that is how Elizabeth felt on her walks.  She may have been a 19^th century woman while I am a 21^st century one but, in those moments when I walked like she did, I understood the need to work out my frustrations and feelings through physical activity.

When Fanny in Mansfield Park finally speaks her mind to Henry, telling him that he did  want her and that what he really wanted was just something he could not have. It makes me  remember being approached by a man on several occasions which I had  no interest in and no matter how much I said, “no” he kept insisting that  it had to be him, and he was wrong.

I understand pride, prejudice, being nosy, being unable to speak your mind when you are young, being ridiculous, or losing your looks as you get older. I know this as a black person and as a woman. The brilliance of Jane Austen’s books and why I think they are still read today is because  for all the teas, balls, gowns, and grand houses it has happened, even in a small way, to every woman-The annoying man. The man you were wrong about. The advice you took instead of following your own heart. The being too young to know better, and the realization that there is such a thing as a second chance.

            I am no longer a teenager.  I am middle-aged and for all the characters in Austen’s stories, Anne in Persuasion, moves me the most. I am what you call a spinster-no children, and no husband like her and when Anne pines for Captain Wentworth, I pine. When she looks on and wonders, what if, I can’t help but feel my breath constrict and my heart beating heavily in my chest in sorrow for her.  As she gazes on at Captain Wentworth, hoping despite herself and waiting for a bit of encouragement, I gaze with her sure that all her hoping is not for nothing. When he says to her words of love, I rejoice.

            That is what Austen does with her writing. She makes you see yourself in her characters, but I wonder sometimes if my blackness supersedes my being a woman, and is that a good thing? I do not think so. I am sure that my race and gender stands side- by- side in conjunction with each other. For all my love of Austen and her characters I can’t,  however, reconcile my blackness with the obvious cultural differences in her books from me.  As a woman I understand, but oftentimes it makes me wonder if, for all my love of Austen’s books, will I ever be able to breach that difference?

            I don’t know if I ever will, but I realize that the differences are external. However, the differences fade away when it comes to the internal, and what I have in common with her heroines stands out with intensity. The heroines in Austen’s books are lower to middle class to wealthy and in their own way limited by their circumstance, youth, or imagination. I used to wonder if Austen’s characters can transcend their circumstances, can I? If only I was clever, courageous, admit my wrongs, or was  patient? I believe I can, but would I have been able to in the 19^th century with slavery? 

I think that  Austen’s female characters manage to do it through their thoughts, actions, and personalities which makes them three- dimensional; something more than a stereotype. I can’t help but realize that through my own thoughts, actions, and personality I become, not a stereotype, but, as with any woman, capable of confusion and complicated feelings.

             I am a 21^st century woman with all the privilege that comes with it. I am  the female captain of my own destiny.  I have enough freedom that I can choose to marry or not, no matter what my family tries to tell me. I go where the wind takes me for good or bad.

            In the end, I have to say, that Jane Austen will always be the writer who holds up a  mirror to me. She makes me realize that for all the cultural differences I have from her characters, they helped me enter a world that was intriguing; not my own while also showing me that my insecurities, hopes, immaturity, mistakes, and thoughts were not so strange. They were common for any young woman.

            I am sure that there are other books that will speak more to my experience as a black woman, but as just a woman, Austen’s writings have stood the true test of time. She manages  to make me feel that there is a place in her books for me. I have concluded that I can bring my blackness and womanliness to her books because that is what you do as a reader.

 I believe that reading is interactive, and that Austen’s writings do not work passively on me. I work like in a dance with the author and engage with their words where my thoughts and feelings and who I am are bought to the page. I am black. I am a woman. I love Jane Austen’s books. I bring it all to her writings and it makes for a better reading experience. It makes for a better me.

So, I read Jane Austen and know that who I am won’t be lost. My voice will be amplified, will be heard and is as unique as her characters.