Jane Austen has been making me think about why we read.

Not because of the undeniable greatness of Pride and Prejudice (unless you chat to my Dearest Partner of Greatness, who hates Austen).

Nor because of her incomparable wit, or her eye for the comedy that social embarrassment creates. She IS the midwife who delivers The Office, and Fleabag, amongst others.

Because of Northanger Abbey.

Catherine Morland is one of literature’s memorable readers. Spirited, kind, and imaginative, she has devoured Gothic fiction. I don’t blame her. But faced with an unfamiliar world, she naturally reaches for the only interpretative framework she possesses.

Her imagination is rich; her intellectual kitbag is not.

General Tilney rebukes her:

“Remember the country and the age in which we live.”

But I wonder whether he is really any better off.

Catherine sees everything through the lens of Gothic fiction. General Tilney sees everything through the assumptions of his own age. Neither realises they are looking through a prism at all, let alone different ones.

Neither of them has read widely enough.

You might expect me to say this with my English Tutor hat on, but bear with me.

That isn’t a criticism of Gothic fiction. I love it.

It’s a reminder that no single genre, no single period, no single author is enough. Every book illuminates something, but leaves something else in shadow.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve gradually come to dwell on a line from my favourite poem, Tennyson‘s Ulysses, one that troubled me for years:

“I am a part of all that I have met.”

When I was younger, it sounded like hubris.

Now? It feels like gratitude.

Every worthwhile book quietly shifts the prism through which we’ll read the next one.

This isn’t about book-snobbery. Don’t get me wrong. They aren’t always new books. Or old books.

Just books which change you.

That’s why rereading is such a joy. The words on the page haven’t changed; we have. 

Every conversation, every journey, every disappointment, every discovery – and every book – has subtly rotated the prism.

So today, on Jane Austen’s anniversary, don’t begin by rereading Austen.

Read something she never could have imagined.

Then come back.

I suspect you’ll find that neither of you is quite the same.

You would expect me to say, ‘read more’. 

Yes … but I’d much rather you ‘read different’.

Join the conversation: tell me about a text where you can see both sides of an argument …