Books like Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen

“Truly Alice, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will – that is all, really, education is about, should be about.”Wow, just wow! Love this little book by Fay Weldon. It is a collection of short essays about Jane Austen, about Writing, about being a Writer written in the form of letters to a fictional niece, very much like Jane Austen herself had written to her niece Fanny Austen-Knight 200 years ago. It is also a very personal, I would say, almost intimate tribute to the wonderful Jane Austen.I loved Fay W's metaphor about the great "City of Invention", where authors are presented as builders, creating houses in the different districts of genres (and where, yes, there are literary McDonald's, selling books with empty calories) and then how she goes on, unwrapping this metaphor about Literature/the Writing Process in general and then always returns to Jane Austen in particular. Recommended to all Jane Austen addicts and all readers interested in history of Literature in general. "If it's approval you want, don't be a writer,"“Sometimes you’ll find quite a shoddy building so well placed and painted that it quite takes the visitor in, and the critics as well – and all cluster round, crying, ‘Lo, a masterpiece!’ and award it prizes. But the passage of time, the peeling of paint, the very lack of concerned visitors, reveals it in the end for what it is: a house of no interest or significance.”“The good builders, the really good builders, carry a vision out of the real world and transpose it into the City of Invention, and refresh and enlighten the visitor, so that on his, or her, return to reality, that reality is changed, however minutely. A book that has no base in an initial reality, written out of reason and not conviction, is a house built of – what shall we say? – bricks and no mortar? Walk into it, brush against a door frame, and the whole edifice falls down about your ears. Like the first little pig’s house of straw, when the big bad wolf huffed and puffed.”