Picking favorites

When I’m asked which Jane Austen novel is my favorite—and if you write a book about Jane Austen fandom, you will be asked this question with some regularity—I have a stock reply. I say that if I were going to a desert island and could take only one Austen along, I would choose Persuasion--but then spend my days lamenting that I didn’t also have Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

Apparently, this puts me in good company, since the excellent novelist Colm Tóibín also loves Persuasion best. Or so he claims in a which-is-your-favorite-Austen feature that the Guardian published a couple of weeks ago, a month after a similar piece on favorite Jane Austen characters. (Is this now a regular series? Will we soon see pieces on “favorite Austen quotes” or “best Austen country houses”? We can hope. . .)

In the latest piece, six contemporary novelists each discuss one Austen novel, in delightful and thought-provoking mini-essays. Several of the writers recount the ways in which Austen’s novel intersected with their own lives, whether it’s Tóibín remembering an Irish schoolboy reading Captain Wentworth’s letter aloud or Rebecca Kuang recalling her Chinese immigrant father’s love of Pride and Prejudice.

Perhaps in keeping with the tenor of our times, analyses skew dark--Katherine Rundell describes Emma as “a novel that refuses to let the reader off the hook,” Neel Mukherjee calls Mansfield Park Austen’s “bleakest, most complex book,” and Sarah Moss concludes that Catherine Morland is right: “The patriarchy is out to get her after all.” More than one so-called hero is disparaged (“I suspect Brandon is just as slimy as Willoughby,” Naoise Dolan writes) and more than one allegedly happy ending is called into question.

Perhaps you disagree? Well, the Guardian wants to hear about that too. It’s invited readers to weigh in with accounts of their own favorite Austen novels. Maybe that will be April’s story.