I’m a Jane Austen, Jane Eyre Kind of Girl

Otherwise titled: A Moody Girl and Her Books.  

Recently I was thinking about the books I read as a teenager.  I read once that people who think they only have one life to live have never read a book.  This particular statement brings to mind those years between the ages of eleven and sixteen, when my books became portals into unknown worlds.  Of course, a good book still feels like an open door, but it’s different when you’re thirteen.  You haven’t been on your own adventures yet.  More importantly, you’re still in the process of shaping who you’ll become.  Naturally you identify with the protagonists in your novels.

And it all began with Nancy Drew. 

My collection of Nancy Drew books weren’t the yellow bound 1959-editions most people own today.  They had the original dust jackets, which pictured Nancy as tall and thin with bobbed hair and knee-length dresses reminiscent of the 1930’s.  Nevermind the improbability of a sixteen year old girl possessing endless freedom, a sporty blue roadster, and the ability to unearth and solve criminal cases entirely on her own – ask any woman and she’ll tell you she was in love with Nancy Drew at one point in her life (and we were all equally distraught when we discovered the name Carolyn Keene was a pseudonym).  After all, Nancy had adventures just like the Hardy Boys, and she did it in heels, no less.  My absolute favorite was The Secret of the Old Clock, in which Nancy risks her life to find a missing will and help her new friends, Grace and Allie Horner (changed to Hoover in a later edition).  

Then came Anne of Green Gables, who lived in an entirely different world from Nancy Drew but proved herself to be a classic heroine nonetheless.  Considering her desperate attempt to find acceptance in a new life, not to mention her battles with friendship, love, and red hair, it isn’t difficult to see why so many melodramatic teenage girls identified with Anne.  “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.  That’s a sentence I read in a book once, and I say it over to comfort myself whenever I’m disappointed in anything.”  You understand.  I was also fond of L.M. Montgomery’s  Emily of New Moon series, although I didn’t love Emily quite as much as I loved Anne.

Then, of course, there were all the books by Louisa May Alcott.  I’m fairly certain I’ve read every single one of them, including Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Jack and Jill, An Old Fashioned Girl, and even her racier novels like A Long Fatal Love Chase (originally published under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard.  I wouldn’t actually recommend this one to young impressionable girls).  Although I loved each of these books in turn, the one I loved best was Little Women.  I wanted to be Jo March, defy social restrictions and live by my pen (or whatever the equivalent of this would be in the twenty-first century).  She was my hero.  

And finally there was Jane Austen (no teenage girl book review would be complete without her).  Austen’s work compares and contrasts the lives of several women within a society that placed heavy restrictions on females in general.  I identified most with Elizabeth Bennet, of Pride and Prejudice, but I loved Eleanor of Sense and Sensibility best.  I disliked Emma as a literary character, but Gwyneth Paltrow convinced me to give her a second chance and I like her much better now.  Also, I highly recommend the movie The Jane Austen Book Club (from which I’ve borrowed the quote for my blog post title).

P.S. Don’t forget to tell me what you read as a teenager.

Related Posts and/or Websites:

 

The Nancy Drew website
Reading to Know: 1930 vs. 1959 Nancy Drew  

The Anne of Green Gables website 

Little Women Christmas Play

The Jane Austen website 

Adair Jones: Heroines – Books and Feminism