Modern heroines just can’t create a stir

There’s a reason wise writers are eschewing contemporary characters in favour of historical ones

‘People love Jane Austen, even though those books are absurd to us, because we like the clarity of it; we can see very clearly what Elizabeth Bennet has to overcome, what she has to deal with.” So said a great writer this week and – as Austen herself would always graciously defer to an elder brother, so shall I – he was, of course, correct. Nick Hornby went on to say: “In this century, where actually, well-heeled people can do whatever the hell they want whenever they want, it’s more chaotic to extract a narrative.” That’s why he now enjoys writing period pieces, and believes that we, the audience, find stories from the past so satisfying.

It’s true that the very restrictions of normal life a hundred, even 50 years ago create the perfect conditions for drama, excitement and conflict. There is not much the modern heroine can do to cause a stir any more: have sex, get divorced, come out, change gender – yeah, great, good on her. Who cares?

And, there is little in these times of instant communication and convenience to create any sort of anticipation, jeopardy or wonder in everyday First World life. Some guy moves into the village – so Google him, or look him up on the Rich List. You get invited to dinner by a fanciable bloke and it’s raining: grab a brolly, hail a cab. Why get soaked, catch a cold and stay for a week? That, girls, would be frankly pathetic.

The fate of contemporary characters are never, can never, be vulnerable to the little things – the weather, the postal system, the hoof of a horse. Perhaps that explains the really quite unrepresentative presence of stalkers, serial killers and evil sadistic terrorists in modern fiction. A nutter with a weapon is about the only thing left that really lies beyond the averagely capable, intelligent and independent woman’s control.

That said, it is not every literary classic of the pre-internet, pre-feminist age that lives on in readers’ hearts. Indeed, of all her contemporaries, Austen is the only one to have made it through with her best-seller status intact, and that’s not just because her girls meet her boys without any help from Tinder.

Putting aside, for a moment, the wit, the warmth, the joy, the perfection of prose, surely Austen’s enduring appeal is precisely because she just accepted, and then ignored the realities of her world, rather than arguing with them. She understood the social conventions, respected them and saw no need for her characters to achieve heroism by tackling, then wrestling them to the ground. Preferring to marry for love is as wild and crazy as the spirited Lizzie Bennet gets, and even then she only properly lets herself fall for Darcy once she’s seen his beautiful grounds at Pemberley. But despite that, modern women still love her.

The current vogue for historical fiction comes, in part, from some modish belief that you have to throw a character into a horrendous, epoch making, geo-political nightmare in order properly to examine the nobility of the human spirit. We are shaping our own lives in the shadow of so many horrors, and have such a – natural – deep respect for the people who have lived through them that it’s somehow considered unserious to engage with ordinary domestic life (unless you throw in the nutter, of course, and the weapon).

And yet, while Austen was writing, the Napoleonic Wars were raging. She had brothers in the Navy, saw evidence aplenty of economic and emotional disaster, but did she see the need for her characters to engage with that? She did not. And would we still be reading her if she had? I very much doubt it.

Sir Walter Scott gave us the bigger picture of that time, the great epic, “the big bow wow”. His followers are loud and ardent, but – honestly now – have you ever read him? Meanwhile, there was Austen exploring and exposing the nobility of the human spirit in the small, the immediate, the local, the particular, or just on the sofa by the fireplace in the drawing room – and look at her sales. “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on”, she wrote to her niece, an aspiring novelist. And in that, as in all other things, she was correct. All Together Now’ by Gill Hornby is published by Little, Brown