Certainly no enjoyment is as amiable as studying Jane Austen. The 12 months 2025 could be yet one more 12 months of busy nothings, nevertheless it does mark the 250th delivery anniversary of the world’s best drawing-room novelist. (In any case, when Jane Austen’s characters aren’t plotting about paisa-pyar-shaadi, they’re discovered huddled within the drawing-room, gossiping concerning the climate and the lace on neighbour’s robe).
Delight and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s second novel. (HT Photograph)
Jane Austen died at 41. In her transient life, she wrote solely about what she knew most intimately—the lives of ladies and men of rural England. However her storytelling has magically transcended the hyperlocal, changing into relatable to all of us worldwide. Her heroines are our very personal mummies and mausis, her heroes our jijajis and phoophajis.
The countdown to the nice author’s birthday (sixteenth December!) is hereby launched with a bit this reporter as soon as wrote about experiencing Delhi by way of her sensibilities. It was later excerpted in Claire Harman’s 2010 ebook Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World. Right here’s the drastically re-written model:
Such happiness when good folks get collectively, and so they all the time ought to. Each Delhiwale shall be free to affix Delhi’s Jane Austen Society, a studying group of our desires. The situation being that the girl or the gentleman should have their lungs stained with Delhi’s foul air, and he or she should have learn all of the six Jane Austen novels.
Every Sunday night, after the purchasing expedition in Mahila Haat’s weekly Ebook Bazar, we Jane Austen bhakts shall stroll to the Urdu Bazar, and agreeably calm down on the Jama Masjid stairs, on a regular basis conducting small speak in a continuous state of magnificence. Over doodh-waali chai and elaichi biskuts, we will learn picks from Miss Austen’s novels. After which the ground shall be opened to social points, beginning with the newest fashions on organized marriage lehengas. In some unspecified time in the future, the agenda shall be allowed to float to extra democratic themes, priority given to the considerations of Jumna-paar citizenry who persistently protest that one half of the opposite Dilli is unable to register the existence of their half.
The Society shall naturally encourage members to share their delights and disappointments in ishq-prem-mohabbat. (Whether or not raised in Vasant Kunj or Vikas Puri, you will need to have been touched with love a little bit from time to time within the verdures of Lodhi Backyard, or Nehru Park possibly?)
The Society shall sometimes lead literary excursions to landmarks corresponding to Vikram Seth’s tony household property in Noida, and the haunting stays of Mirza Ghalib’s rented property in Ballimaran. Fastidious members shall learn aloud the respective author’s immortal strains as feelingly as Marianne Dashwood recites Shakespeare’s sonnets in Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s first printed novel.
Final and least, will probably be appreciated if a number of the members command a big family on Golf Course Highway or Golf Hyperlinks Colony. In order that the remainder of us — the widespread gentry — can condescendingly assault these moneyed members with barefaced questions, ingenious suppositions and distant surmises to realize titillating reportage on the personal lives of Delhi’s extreme-wealthy.
On the finish of the meet, members shall be obliged to invest wildly on the following day’s AQI index.
Jai ho Jane.