i think one of my favorite things about the secret history is the impact that the story - and the characters - have on people.
everyone i know who has read the book said that reading it made them want to learn latin, study greek, wake up earlier and read/study philosophy. they all felt the urge to adopt the academic style of the characters.
and i wonder, how many other novels have had this kind of impact on people?
there’s something rare about a story that doesn’t just entertain you, but alters the texture of your daily life. after finishing it, you don’t simply close the book and move on (you can’t lol) but you look at the world a little differently. like, even a moodboard on pinterest about dark academia is enough to inspire you because it reminds you of tsh.
i’ve seen so many people online changing their routines because of it; the way they study more diligently, the way they decorate their rooms, even the books they begin to read are different because they want more knowledge, they want to be close to what donna tartt wrote about her characters being.
and to me, maybe that’s the most fascinating part ; the way fiction can awaken a longing. not just for knowledge, but for depth, for discipline and specially for the kind of beauty that feels intellectual and slightly unattainable. it makes you crave something different, something profound.
it makes me think that the true power of certain novels isn’t in their plot twists or shocking moments, but in the atmosphere they create. some books build entire worlds and others build identities. they give readers a version of themselves to aspire to; maybe more cultured, more curious, more deliberate.
and when a book can do that, when it inspires people to wake up earlier just to read philosophy or attempt a new language, it stops being just a story. it becomes a catalyst, it becomes a quiet revolution in someone’s inner life.
There is no fire to laziness. Even the ugliest of struggles painted in layers of fading gouache has a fire to it that begs the audience to stare. But there is no fire to lazy resistance; it is not a fight of drive or desire, just thick, lumpy heaviness like a boulder that has lodged itself to a riverbank — not so completely as to make the water swell, but just enough to filter the gushing into a slow, meek trickle.
It’s Jane Austen’s 250th birthday today and I just want to yell about how much modern writing (in the English language) owes to this woman.
Jane Austen did things with stories and characters that had simply never been done before. Do you like flawed characters who grow over the course of the story? Jane Austen pioneered the art of doing that in novels. Do you like it when a story is filtered through a character’s perspective, so you can hear their voice in the narration? Say thank you to Jane Austen.
I’m going to very, very generally summarise what novels looked like when Austen started writing. The first important thing is: they were an incredibly young genre. The first English book that everyone agrees ‘this is definitely a novel, not a collection of short stories, or an allegorical fable, or a political commentary’ is Robinson Crusoe, published 1719. Austen’s first book was published in 1811. That’s less than a hundred years!
I’ve read some early English novels, and… from a modern point of view, they are messy. Plot events are often random. Characters are generally stock archetypes. Realism wasn’t much of a concern; characters get abducted, imprisoned, etc, on a regular basis.
Slowly, from about 1770 onwards, you started to get the ‘novel of manners’ – more realistic stories set in the social world of the time. Jane Austen was absolutely not the first to write books centred on young women coming of age and finding ‘Mr Right’. (Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth are probably the best remembered of Austen's predecessors.)
And I’ve read some of these novels, and they’re… fine? I’m generalising hugely, but the characters are still very flat. The women are usually perfect, well-behaved, virtuous, etc; the only character flaw they might have is being naïve. Here’s a passage from one of Burney’s novels, describing the heroine:
Her form was elegant, her heart was liberal, her countenance announced the intelligence of her mind, her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul, and her eyes, the heralds of her speech, now beamed with understanding...
It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? And of course it is! Novels were only just starting to solidify as a genre. The idea of making the characters flawed, realistic human beings had barely occurred to anyone. But Austen decided she didn’t want to write flawless protagonists. ‘Pictures of perfection you know make me sick and wicked,’ she once wrote in a letter to her niece.
It would be ludicrous to say that flawed characters or character-driven plots didn’t exist; of course they did. What are Shakespeare’s tragedies except stories driven by their protagonists fatal flaws? What makes Austen so remarkable is that she was pretty much the first person to take those themes from plays and put them into a novel instead. And so we have Emma Woodhouse, who gets the plot rolling by being self-deluding, meddlesome and conceited (I love her so much). We get Lizzy Bennet, who makes snap judgements that confirm her own biases and has to relearn how she sees everyone around her.
And then there’s Austen’s fucking groundbreaking way of filtering the narrative through a character’s perspective.
Austen was the first writer to consistently narrate in third person, while still filtering the narrative through one person’s point of view. If the protagonist makes a mistake, the narration sometimes just… doesn’t correct it. Take this bit of Emma. All the context you need is this: Emma thinks her friend Harriet is in love with someone, and they’ve just received news that the guy’s controlling aunt is dead, which would make it a lot easier for Harriet to marry him. Harriet is, in fact, not in love with said guy, so the news means nothing to her. But the narration says:
Harriet behaved extremely well on the occasion, with great self-command. Whatever she might feel of brighter hope, she betrayed nothing.
Harriet isn’t behaving with great self-command! She isn’t affected by this news at all! But what Emma thinks is reported as if it were fact. We don’t get to know what Emma doesn’t; her opinion controls the narration. I cannot stress how much this had never been done before.
Or take this part of Persuasion, where the protagonist, Anne, encounters the man she was briefly engaged to eight years ago:
Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary; said all that was right […] the room seemed full – full of persons and voices – but a few minutes ended it.
Look at how closely we are in Anne’s perspective here. She can hardly process what’s going on, so we barely see it. We don’t hear Wentworth’s speech. Time speeds up, the narration becomes a blur, just like the moment is a blur for Anne. No one had done this before!
We all love the Locked Tomb books here, right? You know how closely the narration sticks in each protagonist’s head; how the narration sounds and feels like their voice, how we don’t get to know anything they don’t know? Jane Austen pioneered that technique. What I’m saying is: we don’t get Gideon the Ninth without Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen was a phenomenal writer, who came up with entirely new writing techniques that authors still use, hundreds of years later. So many of the techniques we now hold up as ‘good writing’ were things she did for the first time.
Happy 250th birthday, Jane Austen. Thanks for giving us books as we know them.
__
(The examples here come from What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan, which is an incredible book I can't recommend enough to anyone who wants to know more about the social context around her novels.)
every single day i think about how horribly rumi’s poems have been translated from persian into english & how they’ve been turned from gorgeous poems abt islamic spirituality into these… pithy vapid little quotes that white people post as instagram captions. white scholars & translators straight-up falsified and misrepresented the essential themes of and islamic mysticism inherent to his work in favor of turning it into easy-to-consume love poetry & it never fails to make me angry
still, the grief eats away. the blackness in my stomach never goes away, and I try to put my hand to my throat when i speak, hoping it won't stain my words. still, i feel everyone can see my words dipped and dripping in grief as i force them out like removing a cow's intestines—i have developed into a lens that captures without seeing, sees without knowing, stores it all for later, for it to come flooding out; later is for people who can afford the time.
all the hate just turned inwards, didn't it? every time they called the name that wasn't yours, every time they passed by you without a word, every compliment that went to someone else and it pushed so deep into you, so deep, you don't know why it did and why it should but it was ever so deep and deeper than anything you could possibly get out of. this isn't the first time but it's the worst time and that realization probably did more damage than the hate did. all that you have built coming crumbling down and in that process someone else is standing at the porch of your building smiling and they're collecting pieces of your wall to display in their bedroom. it felt like losing. it felt like losing.
Slipping into this comfortable rhythm felt like the brush of old pyjamas on a frost-filled evening. You propped yourself up on the ledge of some cracked flowerbed and nestled silently into the angled nook of stone by your side. The lake bloomed with silence. All was well.
It was such a strange phrase—all was well—that seemed to imply a sort of dissociation from all that wasn't. Of course, there were some things that were not well that were also simply untouchable. Only by climbing half a mile of prickly weed-laden paths could you untangle yourself from them, dig your head into welcoming walls of stone, and breathe.
A quiet tension seemed to form in the water as you pinched two fingers together. Mesmerizing, it was. Your own pulse, the up-and-down pitch of your breath, oscillating in a thin melody that nevertheless echoed with exuberance.
A dragonfly bristled onto the flowerbed. You've made a friend.
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