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Jane Austen Society of Australia Austen citing:
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Winston Churchill (1874-1965), as leader of Britain during World War II inspired its people during dark times to resolution and sacrifice. His love of the English language and mastery of it in oratory and prose was legendary. He said that he learnt a thorough respect for English prose when, as a schoolboy at Harrow, he was relegated to the English Only class because he was considered not good enough to study the classics. One has to take this version of events with a pinch of salt, while recognising that he thought English a better study for a modern education than Latin and Greek. His most accessible writings, best sellers in their time, were the four volumes of A History of the English Speaking Peoples. The publisher’s comment on the dust jacket of Volume I says ‘As always, Sir Winston is both wise and witty; a single phrase which may make the reader laugh will be seen on examination to strike to the heart of a historical problem.’
It is no wonder that he sometimes found solace in the wisdom and wit of Jane Austen’s novels when the burdens of making history became too much. He was forced to bed with pneumonia some time in the middle of the war and according to his 1952 account of this, reading Jane helped his recovery by going well with the new antibiotic, called then May and Baker. The following comment is quoted from Maggie Lane and David Selwyn’s collection Jane Austen: A Celebration.
Yvette Field‘I decided to read a novel. I had long ago read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and now I thought I would have Pride and Prejudice. [My daughter] Sarah read it to me beautifully from the foot of the bed…What calm lives they had, those people! No worries about the French Revolution or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion as far as they could, together with cultural explanations of any mischances.’
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29 April 2004
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