Jane austen

So, the new tenner has been unveiled today. Two centuries after her death, Jane Austen replaces Charles Darwin, who has enjoyed a 25-year sojourn with his hummingbirds. And yet it feels like this new note has been in the air for a while, though obscured by the hazy fug of controversy. First there was the (largely vegan) stew about animal tallow remaining part of the production process. All protests about what we’re doing with the natural world are worth hearing, so long as they are proportional. Quite what percentage of society occupies the intersection of the Venn diagram where strict boycotters of plastic bags, soap and cosmetics overlap with those who shun vehicular transport (tyres), candles and latex, I’m not sure.

The 55-year-old ’flu-ridden John Charles Wallop, 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, his feet in a basin of warm water, shivered in the dock with fever but also with fear. Would the jury, assembled in 1823 in London’s jam-packed Freemason’s Hall at the end of an unpredecentally sensational two-week trial, find him eccentric, delusional, simple-minded or, instead, stark raving mad? Elizabeth Foyster, a historian and senior lecturer at Clare College, Cambridge, was alerted to this enthralling, almost unbelievable true story with the caveat that the vastness of the material in Lambeth Palace archives concerning a scarcely remembered trial of a hugely wealthy, relatively obscure aristocrat had deterred anyone else from attempting to make sense of it.

Oh, the longueurs of aristocratic Georgian leisure. What on earth did they do all day, with no domestic chores, no Wi-Fi, no television, no telephones for chatting and the slowest of transports to move their lives from the sticks to the bright lights of London or Bath? Kate Felus has written a fascinating book which tells us how the 18th-century landed gentry whiled away their summers out of doors. On winter she does not dwell, because, as she says, summer was the time when all the great landowners were likely to be at their country estates. Apart from Margaret Willes’s excellent Gardens of the British Working Class, the documented social history of gardens tends to concentrate on grand, rather than humble, establishments.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Eligible is a page-turning romantic comedy which is very funny and entirely ridiculous: each of the short chapters is as unwholesomely addictive as a Pringle coated in crack cocaine. It’s clearly influenced by writers like Tina Fey, Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers. But that isn’t the point. Because with a certain punky insouciance, Sittenfeld has closely modelled her entertainment on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

‘Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing,’ pleads Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.’ Weatherland would make Gwendolen very nervous indeed. Our observations of the sky, Alexandra Harris reveals in this extended outlook, have always meant something else. Weatherland is a literary biography of the climate. Beginning with the Fall (in the Biblical rather than the autumnal sense) and ending with Alice Oswald, Harris condenses 2,000 years of weather ‘as it is recreated in the human imagination’.

P.D. James was the Queen Mother of crime fiction. Her career as a writer stretched over half a century, and her death at the age of 94 deprives the country of an author who was cherished in person as well as for her books. She was probably best known for her crisply-written and elegantly plotted series about the poet-policeman Adam Dalgliesh. Among other things, however, she was also an occasional contributor to the Spectator, which sometimes showed an unexpected side to her. An early diary piece recalls her attempt to learn to drive in Dublin in the 1980s. The caretaker at her block of flats took one look at her Ford Fiesta and asked if she would like some holy water to sprinkle over it.

P.D. James died today at the age of 94. She was a great friend of The Spectator. Here is her diary from 27 January 2010: Our protracted family Christmas with my elder daughter, Clare, came to an end when her son, with his Australian wife and two children, returned to Melbourne. The visit has been a great success, particularly so for Clare, whose idea of a perfect Christmas is to have four generations round the table. The snow was a bonus since neither great-grandchild had ever before seen snow. The first glimpse of a totally white England spread out beneath them as the plane descended to Heathrow was a wonder, and getting close to this marvellous glittering stuff and actually playing with it never palled.

It is a truism that writers of all kinds often find inspiration and solace in their gardens, as well as protection from the outside world and its demands. After all, writing is a supremely solitary business and outside influences must be subtle and uplifting, not noisy and distracting, if writers are to flourish. The Writer’s Garden is an attempt to explore this appealing idea by describing the gardens of 20 well-loved British writers, including Jane Austen, Beatrix Potter, Walter Scott and George Bernard Shaw.

When I first read Jane Austen I had an ulterior motive. I wanted to impress a girl who read her. I didn’t get the girl, but I got the novelist: persuading myself that I was the only 16 year-old boy in Newcastle who had read Jane Austen. Not yet subtle enough to appreciate the extent of how good she was, I was happy loving her heroines, ogling the country houses, trying to emulate the cads, and weeping at the broken hearts and accepted marriage proposals. Repeat this for the films and the endless BBC mini-series. Then I discovered at university that every boy liked Austen - as did the old boys. I got the impression she was used as a beard (or a bonnet) by latently misogynistic readers who were patronising about other women writers.

Among the precursors to this breezy little book are, in form, the likes of The Story of Art, Our Island Story and A Brief History of Time and, in content, Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Other notable precursors are How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland, How to be Well Read by John Sutherland, 50 Literature Ideas You Need To Know by John Sutherland, Lives of the Novelists by John Sutherland and more in that vein. The tireless and compendious Dr Johnson — ‘the first great critic of English literature’ — deserves and receives a chapter to himself here, and it’s no great surprise that the tireless and compendious Professor Sutherland entirely sees the point of him.