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The PBS broadcast yesterday (to be repeated again today) is a real treat for Austen enthusiasts as we are given a slightly gritty rendition of her world that allows us to feel the characters’ situations with some piquancy. Fortunately the two Dashwood girls, Elinor and Marianne, are played by actresses who could, very easily, actually be around the age of 20 (Marianne is not yet 17 at the start of the story). While Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet did a splendid job in their freely re-written big screen version, one could never really feel that they were still under 21. At least I couldn’t. In this new version we feel the women’s fragility, their vulnerability, their lack of worldly experience in a way that it’s too easy to forget in glitzier renditions.

What we see in both women is that their fight is the Warrior-Lover’s quiet fight of forbearance, and that includes peeping into the pit of despair. Marianne does it by falling ill, by nearly giving up on life after she’s been deserted by Willoughby. Elinor comes to the same place by giving up on happiness with Edward and accepting that her life might well be one of quiet non-entity in a remote corner of Devon. In each case it is a version of that shattering sense that even though we may do our very best, play our cards impeccably, work hard, and have faith, yet still we may have no reward, no lasting happiness, no future. It’s the feeling that the world is unjust and there’s no recourse.

There is a recourse, however. The only thing stronger than the fear of death (or death itself) is love. When the sisters realize the love they have for each other - brought out as a result of their disappointments - when they feel each other’s despair, they reconnect with the bedrock of loving attachment they’ve been too busy to acknowledge in all the fluster of their lives to that point. Barton Cottage may be drafty and cold, but it’s warmed by real familial love.

It’s an important rediscovery of themselves. Without it they cannot rebuild their world.

Think of it this way. Anyone can leave home with nary a backward glance, relieved to get away. That’s one way to do things. A psychically better way is to leave one’s home in love, and in gratitude, for all it has been and all it will continue to be, with the sense that it contributed something to one’s life. That’s what the Dashwood girls have to learn. They’ve been removed from one home, and each is hoping to marry and move to a new space, but they have not yet fully valued what it is they would be leaving in human terms. Returning to Barton Cottage in their disappointment they begin to re-assess what they have, all four women, in each other, and that it has little to do with the size of the house. That’s what lies behind Jane Austen’s repeated references to characters having several homes, places in London, places in Bath, of desiring to live in a cottage or at Norland. “Home’ is more than a mansion; it’s place that allows love to grow or it is nothing.

Norland stops being a home not because the Dashwoods are forced to leave it, but because John and Fanny don’t love them and have no notion of what a loving home might be. They see only fine houses.

Jane Austen may have drawn a distinction between Marianne’s ‘romantic’ love and Elinor’s more ’sensible’ love, but this novel is a far wider-ranging examination of love than just that contrast. For without Barton Cottage and its home atmosphere neither could recover their sense of centered-ness, and for all Sir John Middleton’s raillery about sweet-hearts and his relentless sociability he knows nothing about real attachment.

There are so many characters in this novel who assess love and home in such different ways - ways that seem trivial and materialistic to an extreme - that is with relief that we see the establishment of two homes based in real affection; tested, deep affection.

I’m reading Suzanne’s book just now - her year long pilgrimage to a different church every Sunday, taking in some very weird and wonderful (by my standards) religious houses as she searches for something to compare with, to replace, perhaps, her own Catholic faith, shaken by the clergy sex-abuse scandals.

I’m truly smitten by ‘Sundays’ and the main challenge seems to be that I want to read fast for the joy of the words (her voice is so appealing, reassuring, intelligent) and I know that the best way to savor this book is by going slowly. So I’ve been forced to ration myself.

As I’ve read I’ve recalled my own various church and chapel experiences. There was the trip to the ruined chapel on one of the deserted outer isles of Scilly, off the west coast of England, for one. The church of St Nicholas on the neighboring isle of Tresco had organized the boat trip and loaded up a couple of open-decked, wooden whalers-worth of us. Quite a few of us were interested just in the outing, since this isle has a tremendous steep drop of a cliff on the Atlantic side with all the attendant majesty a windy, clear, hard-blowing British day could provide. When we finished our walking and exploring and came back to the ruined chapel nestling amid the heather and gorse to settle ourselves for the service, the sermon was more like a cross examination on Bible studies. The pastor (a shriveled C of E veteran in a mothy black cassock, more like a drill sargeant than priest) let us know in no muted terms what he thought of us as Christians. We couldn’t leave until he’d told us what he thought of our biblical ignorance. After all, he was in charge of the boats. The Captain of our souls, one might say.

On another occasion I went to the Sherbourn (MA) Peace Abbey. Perhaps you know it? Non-denominational. I went there on a trip organized by some friends of mine with the Mass Council for Prison Education, and we asked along a few of the upper level Prison Administration - all hardened Prison admin, in their sixties or more, mostly Irish, faces like ax blades. At the Peace Abbey there is a school for the developmentally disabled. Part of the day involved joining these children, most of whom were from countries other than the US, and most of whom were not white, for their morning assembly of prayer and meditation. So we all sat in a largish room around a table, some kids in wheelchairs, and between each kid an adult, more or less. The light was dimmed. Soft music from the man on the acoustic guitar. Then the ‘teacher’ brought in the bowl and the towel. She held it for the first person; when it came to your turn you held the bowl for the person next to you. This person put his or her hands forward, and the person next to him/her took that person’s hands and washed them, then dried them. When dried, the newly washed person got to hold the bowl of water for the next person, and so on around the circle, until everyone had done all the three actions.

I recall watching the Security Director, A— D—-, with his hard whisky drinker’s face, gazing wide eyed as an undersized girl from Bolivia washed and then dried his hands, very slowly, in the absolute focus of a nine year old’s intent engagement in what she was doing. I don’t think he’d ever experienced anything like it. I know I hadn’t. I can’t be sure what he thought, though, because as I watched I found it unaccountably difficult to see clearly, and I needed to rub my eyes for some reason….

I do know that about an hour later I saw A–D– standing beside his car, hands in his pockets, gazing at a tree, unable to make up his mind to get in it and drive to work.

But back to Suzanne. It’s a truly marvelous book. Part of the task of excellent writing is to open up discussion, memory, and response. It involves a link from what we read to what we know. It helps to remind us of what we know and see it anew. Harold Bloom says that we read to encounter greatness. I’d say he was right, and that this book is not a bad place to find such greatness.

No, not Harry’s maiden aunt, but Beatrix Potter the author of Peter Rabbit and other charming tales. I rented this movie after a lady called Doris suggested at one of my readings that it fitted the six archetypes rather well. I’d been intending to keep up on John Adams after having invested so much time on two 90 minute episodes late on Sunday nights, only to discover that the lords of programing have relegated him to odd one-hour slots here and there, with far less advertising than was given to him erstwhile. This means I’ve now missed at least one episode. I’m sure that the lords of TV know that the best way to ensure viewer loyalty is to have programs at regular timeslots on specified nights. But they haven’t cared to do that here. Connect the dots.

So I viewed “Miss Potter” instead, which tells the story of the very shy Beatrix who found a champion in the equally shy Mr Warne, wrote books at a time period when women of her class were expected to do nothing at all, and broke free of her family.

Renee Zellweger played the lead looking about as quirky and unattractive as any repressed Edwardian lady could. While this may seem like a criticism it in fact helped us not to identify with or glamorize her role, but rather to see her as a real eccentric, who spoke to her drawings and who had constructed this world of animals as an escape from her parents’ tyranny (this was played down in the movie: read her biography to get a more brutal view). Again, this is not a criticism, but it’s hard to beat the British film makers and actors when creating any movie that has to do with class in Britain. They know it so well. I wonder if a British actress might have been more subtly tortured, and perhaps a little more interior?

What we saw was excellent, even so. We viewed a Beatrix who was truly an Innocent, who finds an ally and a lover in Mr Warne, who is an sort of Orphan in his family, and as two Orphans working together they do very well. But when Warne dies shortly before their planned wedding Beatrix is propelled into despair and rebellion. She finally leaves her parents’ home and buys a farm in the Lake District. Once there she sees that farms are being broken up to be developed for holiday homes. So she sets out to save the landscape she loves, one farm at a time, with the help of Mr Heelis. By the time of her death she had 4000 acres of farmland to bequeath to the National Parks Commission to be preserved forever, with the farms as working farms that helped support and strengthen the communities of the area.

After starting this work she gave up her painting and children’s books entirely.

We see her, therefore, as someone who was moved out of comfortable Orphanhood by twin forces - love and loss - and that when she began her pilgrimage she found a cause waiting directly in front of her. Her rebellion against the class system her parents endorsed led her to champion those of the very lowest classes. And as she became a Warrior-Lover and gathered more support she became a Monarch. The magic? Well, take a walk through the Lake District today and you’ll be wrapped in plenty of that, I promise you. And you’ll give profound thanks it wasn’t turned into row upon row of Edwardian villas.

It’s what we should be thinking of here in New England, as Macmansions gobble up every last piece of nature around us.

Thank you for this, Doris. Thank you.