“Austen’s clear eyes and sharp nib make the predictable miraculous,” Francesca Segal says of Persuasion, which she names as one of the books on her “ultimate literary comfort reading list.” I like the distinction she makes between “solace” and “escape”: she says she doesn’t want a “temporary palliative,” but “a more convincing consolation, grounded in real life.”

“The best books,” Segal writes, “rebuild our strength so we can face reality, and maybe even fight to change it.” As Sheila Johnson Kindred and I argued in an essay on Mansfield Park several years ago, reading Austen may be both unsettling and comforting. We wrote that it is “possible to read Jane Austen just for fun, just for an escape from the stresses, and the terrors, of our own twenty-first century world. But when we read the novels attentively, we can see what Austen has to say about confronting, rather than escaping, misery. Hilary Mantel is wrong when she says that ‘No one who read it closely was ever comforted by an Austen novel.’ Reading Austen’s novels closely may well offer more comfort.”

Segal’s list appeared in The Guardian last fall: “‘It will renew your faith in humanity’: books to bring comfort in dark times.”

The essay Sheila and I wrote was based on the talk we gave at the 2014 JASNA AGM in Montreal, “Among the Proto-Janeites: Reading Mansfield Park for Consolation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1815.” Lady Sherbrooke, wife of Sir John Coape Sherbrooke, Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, read Mansfield Park aloud to her friend Mary Wodehouse after the death of Mary’s first child.

I’m looking forward to next week’s installment of “Unexpectedly Austen,” the series of tributes I’m co-editing with Liz Philosophos Cooper. It will be posted on the JASNA website on Tuesday, and I’ll share excerpts here in next Friday’s blog post.

I took the photos that accompany this post on another of “my winter walks” in Point Pleasant Park.

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Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:

“My winter walk” (Mr. Woodhouse, Cowper, Point Pleasant Park in winter)

“That sea of wonders” (Edith Wharton’s birthday)

Read more about my books, including St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, and Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, here.

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.