Period details
March 19, 2007 (11:46 PM) ( link )

I love this New York Times article -- "You've Read the Novels (Now Read the Footnotes)," by William Grimes -- for a number of reasons. First, it begins with a discussion of furze, as that word was invoked in Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native, which turns out to be exactly the place where I first encountered that word. (My dictionary's memorable definition: "furze (n.) gorse." The Internet hasn't improved things.)

Second, the article raises a question that has always fascinated me: how a book survives its time. Referring to the annotations on a version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the article notes:

Any reader who sticks with the program and absorbs the wealth of material that Mr. Shapard offers will, insofar as such a thing as possible, read "Pride and Prejudice" as it was read and understood at the time of its publication, with all the period details in place and correctly interpreted. But the novel, in most respects, remains the same. The reader who does not know a farthing from a guinea, it's safe to say, will nonetheless grasp the great drama of attraction and repulsion that plays out between Darcy and Elizabeth. The cut and thrust of their conversation is timeless. Generations of young women who do not know the first thing about an entailed estate or a quadrille will recognize in Austen's heroine a kindred spirit, a contemporary, a valued ally in the eternal war between the sexes.

How can this be? Austen was a stickler for accuracy. Like most of the great 19th-century novelists, she reported on her surroundings with loving attention to detail, creating her world fact by closely observed fact. Yet with time, details lose their meaning. Who, a century from now, will understand what a yuppie was, or text-messaging, or the meaning of an Armani suit?