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Jane Austen triage

  • Writer: Deborah Yaffe
    Deborah Yaffe
  • Aug 25, 2022
  • 2 min read

The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice turns up everywhere, most commonly


a) when a journalist who doesn’t know much about Jane Austen has to produce a story about her and thinks, “Hey! Wouldn’t it be clever to start this piece with a reference to her most famous line?”

or

b) when a journalist who wants to add a touch of class to a story that has nothing to do with Jane Austen thinks, “Hey! Wouldn’t it be clever to start this piece by riffing on the famous opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice?”


But earlier this month, that deathless sentence turned up in a radically new context: as the means by which a woman convinced medical professionals inclined to misunderstand her health concerns that she was, in fact, having a stroke.


As London high school teacher Tabitha McIntosh recounted on Twitter last week, she was eating a sandwich early this month when she experienced a mysterious episode: a visual whiteout followed by a low-grade migraine headache that continued for days. The local emergency room found nothing wrong. McIntosh chalked it up to the hormonal changes of impending menopause.


But three days later, finding herself increasingly unable to coordinate the movements of the right and left sides of her body, she was sure something more was going on. She went back to the hospital, and this time she took a piece of paper on which she had repeatedly attempted to type those twenty-three famous words: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” The garbling was so obvious that the nurse immediately ordered a brain scan.


And a few days later, McIntosh’s tweets about the incident (“Tldr: your stroke may be silent. Part of your brain may die, and the indicators will be entirely elusive to non stroke-specialist doctors while it dies”) was retweeted more than sixteen thousand times.


Which just goes to show that it’s a truth universally acknowledged that there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place.

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2 commentaires


Andrea Carosi
Andrea Carosi
05 juin

Very interesting article on the merits of the neurological processes of a mind during a stroke. Perhaps it might be equally interesting to know something about the neurological processes of a creative and brilliant mind like that of Jane Austen shortly before her illness - Addison's disease - left her unable to continue writing another chapter of Sanditon. It is known that the mind, faced with the unconscious awareness of an impending end, clings to what is most valuable and, just as in the case of Mrs. Tabitha McIntosh, Jane Austen in March 1817 wrote her last aphorism, of the hundreds she had included in her books: "If Charlotte had not been the taller of the two, Miss Brereton's white ribbons would…

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Deborah Yaffe
Deborah Yaffe
05 juin
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