I make jewelry and listen to audiobooks while I do it. A pattern has developed of me finding a book that interests me and also soothes me a bit, and listening to that book most of the time, interspersed with new audiobooks every few days and a few podcasts. Ones that make me laugh and have the side effect of making me study.

Basically, I get a default audiobook that I listen to most until I have wrung it dry. I have discovered that creating art with wire takes up a part of my brain that can be interfered with with too much new information. If I’m finishing a piece that’s all thought out or say, making a second earring, new audiobooks that take more attention are wonderful. But something that is coming to life from nothing as I go, something I’m working to figure out and looking at and wondering about takes almost all that part of my mind. The part of my mind that has to conjure the scenes of a new story from scratch, imagine new characters and figure them out so I can guess what they’ll do shares a lot of space with the part of my brain that conjures small wire sculptures for people to wear. The part of my brain that imagines new things does not like its attention split two ways, and a new book does that. But a good, calm story that I already know and that makes me laugh a little and has characters I enjoy spending time with, and that not much happens to—with a few delicious exceptions in the form of epic or hilarious scenes—with an audiobook like that I can create!

Pride and Prejudice became the default for many weeks late this last summer. What particularly fascinated me was the single modification to the classic Cinderella tale with a Game Of Thrones feel that made the story believable in my gut.

It’s Elizabeth as the girl to be rescued by the prince, Darcy as the prince, and Lady Catherine in place of the Queen. And the wicked stepsisters don’t even matter, because it’s like the queen ate them and absorbed their power, leaving just a little vestigial whisper we need not worry about. So maybe this princess-to-be ought not be the needs-rescuing-kind.

Girl. Prince. Queen.

But like Emma’s nephews, people don’t like their stories changed too much, and we all know the hero must do something heroic and must rescue someone, the prince must be noble to prove his nobility, so here’s Cinderella’s sister. The prince can rescue her, and by so doing save the whole family and prove his love and his worth all at once.

But all that heroic rescuing nonsense can happen offstage.

This fairytale’s epic set piece is the princess-to-be besting the damn queen.

Elizabeth earns her queendom and proves her queenliness by a showdown with the reigning monarch. It’s the part of the story that’s been missing. It’s the part that tells you she won’t go off with the prince only to have the romance wear off in six weeks and be squeezed into a corner by clever courtesans, bullied by an overpowering queen, and forgotten by the prince. Lizzy can hang. Lizzy is a fave with Bingley, with Col. Fitzwilliam, with Georgianna. She can handle herself. And she can handle herself with Lady Catherine, despite starting in the position of an “inferior” guest. Lady C likes the “distinction of rank preserved.” AKA, she likes to reign. To feel big and important and have people tell her how smart she is, which of course she already knows. Nonetheless, from the beginning Lizzy is, shall we say, different?

“Upon my word,” said her Ladyship, “you give your opinion very decidedly for so young a person. Pray, what is your age?”

“With three younger sisters grown up,” replied Elizabeth, smiling, “your Ladyship can hardly expect me to own it.”

Lady Catherine seemed quite astonished at not receiving a direct answer; and Elizabeth suspected herself to be the first creature who had ever dared to trifle with so much dignified impertinence.

Dared to trifle with so much dignified impertinence.

Can we stop and just appreciate that line for a moment?

Then Darcy and Fitzwilliam come and—whether Elizabeth has processed it or not—Darcy is pretty comfortable around her. They hung out for four boring evenings at Netherfield, so when neither of them was paying attention, and despite all the hiccups and bad blood, once you’ve had an extended slumber party there’s a certain intimacy. A certain comfort level. And that comfort level stomps any question of rank out of existence. She may not be prime marriage material for a man like Fitzwilliam Darcy, but her sister and his best friend were almost engaged and she hung out with him for days. So the revered nephew and his cousin just yanked Elizabeth from the hidden pianoforte in Mrs. Jenkinson’s room—(in the part of the house where she’d be in nobody’s way)—to the grand at the center of everything.

(To Mr. Darcy) “I have told Miss Bennet several times, that she will never play really well, unless she practises more; and though Mrs. Collins has no instrument, she is very welcome, as I have often told her, to come to Rosings every day, and play on the pianoforte in Mrs. Jenkinson’s room. She would be in nobody’s way, you know, in that part of the house.”

Mr. Darcy looked a little ashamed of his aunt’s ill-breeding, and made no answer.

The next sentence is:

When coffee was over, Colonel Fitzwilliam reminded Elizabeth of having promised to play to him; and she sat down directly to the instrument. He drew a chair near her.

And follows, one of the hottest scenes ever written.

I think seeing Elizabeth at Rosings among his relatives and in a setting comparable to Pemberly, and seeing her absolutely acing it like she does, was incalculable in shifting Darcy’s attitude from, “It’s too bad I can’t be with her” to “forget how bad it looks on paper, she’s a superstar and I will have her.”

She can hold her own with Lady Catherine, as far as that situation allows. But she was still the obsequious clergyman’s cousin’s wife’s guest.

It’s like a screen test. And Elizabeth steals the show. In Hertforshire Darcy saw her surrounded by her silly mother and ridiculous little sisters. But here is Elizabeth in Lady Catherine’s grand rooms, at Lady Catherine’s table, at Lady Catherine’s piano, and she is everything. Instead of shrinking into insignificance, Elizabeth Bennet shines.

Princess-to-be. Prince. Queen.

Then, of course, Elizabeth heads to Pemberly and suddenly she and Darcy are both picturing her there. In her very bones, Lizzy knows she belongs there. Reigning, you might say. She will walk in those woods every day. And all Darcy’s beliefs of Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s inherent-queenliness are confirmed. He knows it now: no one else can be mistress of Pemberly. It belongs to Elizabeth. It’s not a matter of weighing pros and cons anymore, the decision is made. So if he’s got to find Wickham and pay him off, that’s what he’ll do. Same as if it was Georgianna. Lizzy is his queen. There can be no other.

But somehow Austen contrived it so that Lizzy had to face off with Lady Catherine, best her, and make that showdown bring the lovers together for good. She has shown herself to be a queen, but Darcy’s known it almost all along.

It’s so perfect I’m crying.

But once this perfection dawned on me, I felt compelled to talk to someone about it. Someone who could talk about it, who knew the book well enough. Maybe even knew about Austen, and if she had ever written anything about it. I wished I had someone to talk about Jane Austen and this book with. It did not take long to discover that I did not. Most of my many bookish friends haven’t read Pride and Prejudice or even seen one of the adaptations. But I knew that surely somewhere, someone had talked about it. It’s too cool a twist, and Jane Austen too studied and obsessed over, not to have been talked about.

So I tried podcasts.

I found one I liked that went through the book slowly and gave extra attention to the big moments, but although each slice of plot was thoroughly and satisfactorily dissected, and the Lady Catherine vs Lizzy showdown fully reveled in, the “Girl-Prince-Queen” twist I found so delicious was unseen. And although disappointed that the big scenes were lumped into the five-chapter-slices, harem-scarem, I tried “Reading Jane Austen.” Also no notice of the wonderful shift in the fairytale that works in a way the original never did. But, I finally began to understand all the financial stuff, what gentility meant, marriage settlements, and more.

And that is how I landed on “Reading Jane Austen.”

And I learned something else that I already suspected. A “close read” does certain things, but you really can only re-read a book effectively so many times in a row. It’s too hard. There are too many parts of every book that you just want to skip and can’t really pay attention to even when you can force yourself through them. You know it too well. Your mind wanders and you get antsy. Reading requires physical patience and limits movement in ways that listening does not. And although I have spent many hours of scanning-electron-microscope-close, close reads with Pride and Prejudice and especially Emma, dissections are their own thing. Like an autopsy, slicing a body open and subjecting its many parts to close examination tell one many things about the whole, but so the whole tells us many things about the parts.

You need the whole. You need to look at it closely the only way you can, by ingesting it again and again and again and letting your brain just chew.

And I don’t think you can do that by reading—look at it as a story again and again and again and again until its shape and contours reveal themselves, like rock formations—because your brain and your body won’t sit still long enough. But listening is different. And I suspect that listening while stretching the creative functions of one’s brain in as tactile a way as I do is especially conducive to the creative autopilot mode of my brain. The less exciting parts of the book fade into the background, and at first I suspect I am primed for the set-pieces, until slowly the other scenes start to sink into place around the ones I most anticipate. That’s what listening to something a ridiculous amount of times does. It sinks into you. It’s like you absorb the book.

It’s like I hear—and don’t hear—the story, over and over. The words keep seeping and my mind keeps chewing—I know it does—but also I only pay attention in certain places. And those places skip around. I’ll notice something here and there that I’ve missed before. Oh, and I’ve also noticed this happening when I first listen to an audiobook of some of my old favorite books that I have read a ridiculous number of times. Sentences and sometimes even a mini-plot wrinkle seem to rise up for the very first time. In books where almost every word is expected like the words of a song, there are always a few sentences that surprise me by being new. Lines my mind has simply skipped over with every read and re-read. As if it made an executive decision early on, never questioned it past that point, and wrote it into the code my brain has been using to read the book ever since.

The thing I hate most is feeling an audiobook I love and have found to be an unexpectedly deep well of chewable curiosities and imagination-engaging crannies begin to slip into too-well-knownness. All the way through.

Like many people who have delighted in Pride and Prejudice, I was frustrated that there’s nothing else from Austen quite like it.

Then came Emma.

(Thank goodness for listening logs and notes)

On August 13th I listened to “Emma” for the first time. I felt so much for Jane. I always empathized with her instinctively. The pressure. Mrs. Elton! It’s like that woman is asphyxiating my very soul. Oh, I mean Jane’s soul, of course. All this on the first read, before I “knew” about the engagement. I had suspected—it’s all there and his excuses get downright absurd—but Mr. Frank Churchill said enough discreditable things to Emma about Jane to keep doubt alive the first time through. And I wonder if that’s the point. Otherwise, I would have been sure.

On September 25th I listened again, starting at The Letter We Never Hear. (Jane’s letter, interpreted by Miss Bates.) I don’t think I would have gone back for Emma, not at first, but I was curious about what I’d notice in Jane’s world.

And realized how hard it was to focus on her. It takes conscious muscle. It’s like trying to turn a tanker that pulls hard right. A lot. Every time you take your hands off the wheel it drifts, and only muscle will straighten it out, but by then you’re off course again.

On October 4th I listened again starting with Jane’s unheard letter. I used the text more to pick her out, but still mostly lost her.

Then on October 28th I started from the beginning, and have listened to it about 15 times since then, on twenty-three out of the past forty-four days.

I actually have a very soft spot for Emma. She has charmed me. I feel about her much as Mr. Knightley does. That her conscience is solid and she is willing to learn and do better. She’s very young, and that’s most of it. She’s home alone for the first time. She’s going to be okay. She’s a very loving girl who lives for the people she cares about —she really stops and thinks about Mrs. Weston every hour the day she thinks Frank is coming!—and for that I have always been willing to forgive her foibles. The hardest moments are the first few interferences with Robert Martin. “Clownish.” It’s rough. But it’s never even been a close call. I can never stay mad at her for long and neither her interference with Harriet and Robert Martin or my more diffuse and unending frustrations at her for not letting Jane use Hartfield as a constant escape, to basically give her a room like she did with Harriet, really touch my fondness for her. In her treatment of her father and Mrs. Weston she has won my loyalty, and my frustrations with her have never been enough to threaten that. However, in my tracking Jane and Miss Bates you might be forgiven for doubting that. (I realized this last night in reading over what I had so far.) But the fact is that commentary that springs from reading the novel through Jane’s eyes necessarily sets Emma up for some very just criticism.

October 28th also seems to be when I thought to go back and see if the Reading Jane Austen Podcast had done Emma, and discovered that they were reading it now. Slowly. I don’t think they’re too into it, but the fact that—unlike with Pride and Prejudice—the podcast was still an ongoing conversation, certainly spurred my thinking on. (And often frustrated me, in turns. Because I was starting to notice things. But also, I know that my frustration when I feel like they’re missing something is probably the best thinking prompt I can get.)

On the night of Monday, November 6th I found Miss Bates’ secret.

I had put my tools and wire away, and realizing how easily I was losing Jane in the scenes she was in—or just never noticing her in the first place—the question of why I was forgetting her was forming somewhere in the recesses of my mind. But before the question had time to become fully formed I had accidentally tripped over the springs and mirrors operating Miss Bates.

It was a sleepy Kindle search

What I was looking for was scenes with Miss Bates where I didn’t remember Jane, despite her being there. Not at all thinking about it as a purposeful device, just mildly curious if any existed that I’d missed. I was searching the Kindle book on my iPhone and getting ready for bed when it opened up to me. That slight tilt of my mind towards thinking of Jane Fairfax getting lost behind Miss Bates in some scenes, and thinking I would find a few scenes with Miss Bates that I never remembered Jane being in, that’s what showed me the whole game. And once the question is formed and you know what you’re looking for, it’s absolutely wild! You can see Austen toying with us. She’s having an absolute ball. Emma becomes a treasure of something very much like inside jokes.

Miss Bates is such a cunning feat of literary engineering that I’ll never fully recover from the joy of discovering her, and it seems so obvious now, but I also know how much it was not at all obvious… until it was. And while I’ve often wondered and generally doubted that Jane Austen purposefully set up the structure of Pride and Prejudice with the “queen” as a player whom the heroine bests, I never questioned that Miss Bates was a deliberate blind. It is unquestionable. Miss Bates as a blind is almost the dictionary example of self-evident.

And as for me addressing the Reading Jane Austen podcast somewhere in most of these Austen screeds, it’s been a godsend to have two—three, actually—people who know Jane Austen far better than I ever will to sharpen my mind and give me something like a conversation about this book at the very moment I’m greedily chewing it. And although what I write now will sit here for a very long time, and people will still be reading Jane Austen in that blurry future, their Emma season has had the effect of prioritizing the expression of my thoughts as well as focusing them. Without it, my motivation for putting down my wire and forcing my concentration and time into trying to communicate thoughts about an author that almost none of my hyper-literate friends read would mostly vanish, and even though I can name no tangible benefit to me of spending all these hours writing about Austen books, it feels satisfying.

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I think I will have two big posts up tomorrow. (Oops, I mean today. After it becomes my tomorrow.)

On Miss Bates.

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