It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a
good fortune must be in want of a self-help manual.
The latest to take the US by storm, and heading any moment to these shores,
has as its premise not Martians versus Venusians, or playing by The Rules,
but the dating doctrines of Regency England. With chapters entitled “Don’t
Play Games”, and “Be Witty… but Not Cruel”, Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating
encourages the reader to quash her inner Lydia or Marianne and find love as
an Elizabeth Bennet. Albeit that the Brads and the Joes at which these
latter-day Lizzies set their caps appear rather less compelling than
Fitzwilliam Darcy.
This exhortation to trade Wonderbras for empire lines is, appropriately
enough, the brainchild of a Brit. On the face of it, novelist Lauren
Henderson is an unlikely candidate to be calling for a return to romance,
hailed as she has been as “the dominatrix of the British crime scene”, as
founder of the “tart noir” detection genre with her heroine, Sam Jones.
But, then, Henderson, 38, may have lived in New York long enough to have taken
up the obligatory trampolining class featured in Sex and the City, but she
remains English to the bone, spattering her conversation with fruity
boarding-schoolisms such as “awfully”, “yummy” and “darling”. “I’ve tried
terribly hard to hang on to my accent,” she admits in a plummy purr, “fully
aware that it is really rather strategic in New York.”
A precocious child, with her nose in Gone with the Wind at the age of five,
Henderson grew up in London and studied English at Cambridge, where she
penned an undergraduate thesis on courtship rituals in Jane Austen. After
five years as a jobbing journalist on everything from indie music magazines
to Marxism Today, our heroine eloped to Italy to write her first novel. It
was a canny move. In ten years she has published ten books, be it feisty
chick lit (or “romantic comedies of modern love and manners” as the Austen
jacket favours) or Sam Jones misadventures.
Her fans adore her (witness the rapturous reader reviews on Amazon), sales are
robust, and now the Austen manual has gone through the roof.
I ask her to repress British modesty for a moment and tell me quite how well
the guide has fared. She writhes unhappily: “I can’t not be English about
it. I’m sooo bad at showing off. I’d far prefer to tell you about my
intimate sexual history.”
Sexual history undelved, I can reveal that the book has sold 60,000 copies. A
further index of its success can be found in its having been optioned as a
movie by writer Kiwi “Legally Blonde” Smith; an accolade which cannot be
claimed by many dating manuals. Shooting begins this year.
The book’s appearance at the same time as the new film version of Pride and
Prejudice has done nothing to damage sales. As a girl, Henderson put on
puppet shows with its director, Joe Wright. “The movie’s a coincidence, but
it is insanely good timing,” she concedes.
The guide started life as an article for a British newspaper, a more
intriguing take on that perennial chestnut, the perils of the dating scene.
We tend to think of the Regency milieu as comprising a set of elaborately
encoded social rituals, but our own raises equally as many etiquette quirks.
Where to meet someone, how best to ask them out, when to have intercourse,
how best to transform a romance into a relationship? On the face of it,
women’s lives should be easier, what with the vote, the Pill, and the
ability to establish one’s independence away from intolerable relatives such
as Mrs Bennet.
Why is it, then, that many of them are still finding their emotional lives so
difficult?
“Of course, our lives are easier in many ways,” agrees Henderson, “and you get
to sow your wild oats, which is important. But in Austen’s time everyone
knew what the rules were.
You couldn’t receive a letter from a man unless you were engaged to him. Even
Marianne Dashwood’s jumping up to see who was ringing the doorbell was
considered dubious. We can look at that and say ‘how suffocating’. But
everyone knew exactly where they were.
Nowadays, we know that there are some rules, but no one really knows what they
are or which, if any, the other person is applying.”
The New York dating scene is particularly notorious, subject of more
conspiracy theories than the Kennedy assassination.
In the Eighties, we were told that a woman was more likely to be slaughtered
in a terrorist attack than marry over the age of 40 (and this pre 9/11); a
statistic roundly disproved.
Sex and the City simultaneously celebrated and denigrated the choices that
women might feel available to them. And even British misanthrope Toby Young
piled in with a male perspective on the impossibility of Big Apple romance.
Today, even thirtysomething New Yorkers are made to feel like so many Anne
Elliots (the stoical heroine of Persuasion), relegated to the shelf should
they be sans solitaire by the age of 28.
The Rules, authored by mighty-tressed double act, Sherrie Schneider and Ellen
Fein, marked the apotheosis of such paranoia. In many ways, the pair offered
a Nineties spin on the Fifties ethos of not putting out until securing the
ring. Recommendations that women avoid appearing too interested by
restricting calls with an egg timer and never accepting a Saturday night
date later than Wednesday were key. Followers were to avoid intimidating
suitors by never saying anything too clever, amusing or even vaguely
interesting.
The Stepford act was to be continued after the goal of marriage had been
achieved. Wily wives were encouraged to remain aloof, to the point where
they could even hint that they might be having affairs. One of its authors
has since divorced, which has not prevented The Rules spawning a flourishing
sub-genre of imitators: how to bend The Rules, buck The Rules, how to make
Rules girls sleep with you regardless.
In many ways, Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating is a bitch-slap to Fein and
Schneider, albeit one delivered with a Janeite gloved hand. Its central
recommendations may sound uncontentious – ditch the power games, make your
interest clear, don’t go overboard, look for someone who can bring out your
best qualities – but for the post-Rules dating scene they are radical in the
extreme.
Henderson did her homework and immersed herself in the alternate reality that
is the self-help world. “I went out and bought The Rules and Mars and Venus.
The weird thing is that there’s quite a lot of sense in them and then
there’s some absolute insanity. The good thing about The Rules is that it
tells you to pace yourself and not go crazy about somebody by the third
date. The rest is Fifties madness.”
In the matter of marriage, she draws a distinction between the gold-digging
marital mania prevalent in Manhattan, and British women’s less obsessive,
less materialistic response. “They know the different cuts, the women here,
the carats, their ring sizes. They’re like: how big, what style? Blah, blah,
blah.”
Henderson’s attitude is that the city makes a great place to seek romance –
the number and calibre of potential people “out there”, the assertive
date-making attitude – but not a terrific place to be in a relationship.
“People don’t have dinner parties, it’s more difficult to nest”; which is
why she will be bringing her New York boyfriend, soon to be husband, home to
the UK.
Enter Mr Greg Stroud, a 40-year-old film video editor, whom Lauren met most
unAusten-like on the net after finishing the manual’s first draft (a year
and two months ago, as they are both able to tell me; one senses that they
could also reveal the number of days).
“He is The One. He is very much The One,” beams Henderson. The two are utterly
charming together: palpably in love, while being sufficiently witty to allay
nausea. Greg is that winning combination, the chivalrous new man.
With his pink-striped shirt, admiration for my accessories and deft
sushi-ordering abilities, he is, in his own words, impeccably “metrosexual”,
or, in his girlfriend’s, “fabulously gay vague”. At the same time, he is
also a consummately chivalrous filler of glasses and hailer of taxicabs.
“I am a little bit old-fashioned,” he reveals. “I open doors and help Lauren
on with her cardie.” The two are yet to move in (incompatible felines), but
will marry shortly. Meanwhile, they are caught in an entirely unvicious
circle of soppiness, followed by apologies for soppiness, followed by yet
more sop.
“I could tell he was a Henry almost before I met him,” reflects Lauren
contentedly, referring to Henry Tilney, hero of Northanger Abbey, and
thereby introducing us to one of the guide’s central themes: that everyone
can be categorised according to a Jane Austen character.
Women have their pick of Anne Elliot, Jane, Lydia or Elizabeth Bennet, Mary
Crawford or Marianne Dashwood; while chaps can be Edward Ferrers, a Colonel
Brandon/Mr Knightley/ Edmund Bertram fusion, a Captain Wentworth/Henry
Tilney/Mr Bingley type, Mr Darcy, a Frank Churchill/Willoughby, or an
incorrigible Mr Wickham/Henry Crawford.
The device is introduced by means of a pair of pop quizzes, together with
novel and character breakdowns (not all of Henderson’s readers are Austen
conversant). Their creator believes herself to be a Mary Crawford, Mansfield
Park’s bitchy cynic, her Maryness softened by Stroud’s Tilneyesque niceness.
(She sells herself short.) Ten years ago, she confesses, she might have
picked a Willoughby, the flirt who destroys the happiness of Sense and
Sensibility’s daffily romantic Marianne.
It is a diverting motif, and one that genuinely allows the reader to think
outside the relationship box (Tony Blair, I decide, is Lizzy’s loathed Mr
Collins; Jude Law a pure Crawford/Wickham blend). “Without wanting to go too
psycho about it,” explains Henderson, “you only meet the right person when
you’re in the right emotional place.
The reason the quiz is there is that I know how hard it is being honest with
yourself. There’s no point looking for Mr Right when all you want is Mr
Right Now. If you are Lydia, then go out and have a wonderful time, and
perhaps in five years you will have become an Elizabeth.”
She has tested and re-tested the questionnaires, determining them failsafe. I
wonder, but then I am still smarting from being outed as a Marianne, despite
striving for Elizabeth; my partner, a Knightley, rather than my beloved
Wentworth.
Is Henderson’s elevation of pre-Victorian romance an indication that she feels
that feminism might have done the heart some damage? “Hell, no, but I do
think girls have taken to behaving too laddishly.” She cites, by way of
example, women’s reluctance to let men pick up the tab. “America has taught
me that it is quite nice being courted. Every single man who ever put
himself out a bit for me has been a solid keeper. And, goodness, I’m an
English girl, I don’t make them jump through hoops.”
Greg, in a moment of chivalrous unchivalry, literally elbowed her out of the
way when she merely endeavoured to pay for coffee after their first date,
becoming “seriously grumpy”.
Grumpiness is no less a quality that one associates with Janeites, protective,
as they are, of their bonneted idol. In fact, Austen’s most ardent
enthusiasts have been extremely welcoming, respecting that the guide’s
author knows her source. Can we take it that, trampoline and tart noir
notwithstanding, Henderson is a frustrated Regency heroine? Does she
secretly wish herself in Emma or Elinor’s dancing shoes? “I love the era in
theory; in practice I could not have borne it. To take a three-mile walk and
cause a scandal by having mud on your skirt! That’s why everyone rode so
much. They had to escape.” She rises to her theme. “And, of course, everyone
married so young – gosh, that’s the other thing. I mean, I’m really enjoying
myself right now. My life would have been over in any kind of meaningful,
romantic way ten years ago, at least.”
We both succumb to a shiver over what, or whom, might have been in such
circumstances; particularly without any means of literary profiling.
Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating, by Lauren Henderson is published by Headline on
September 5 and is available from Books First priced £9.49 (RRP £9.99) free p&p
on 0870 160 8080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy.
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