The Summer I Read Jane Austen Out Loud to My Aunt

The summer my Aunt Bev's macular degeneration got bad enough that she couldn't read print anymore, she asked me to read to her. She was eighty one and had been a schoolteacher for forty years, and she said it the way she used to assign homework. "Start with Pride and Prejudice. We'll go in order of quality, not publication."

I came over three evenings a week from June to September. We read all six of Jane Austen's finished novels. I want to tell you what it was like, because it changed the way I read.

Reading aloud is slow, and slow is good

I am a fast reader. I skim descriptions and race through dialogue to find out what happens. You cannot do that out loud. Every word has to come out of your mouth, and Austen's sentences are long and balanced and full of small turns that I had always skated over.

Reading aloud, I started hearing the jokes. There are so many jokes. Aunt Bev would laugh at a line I'd read without noticing it was funny, and then I'd go back and read it again and laugh too. By July I was catching them on my own.

She argued with the characters

Aunt Bev did not listen quietly. She talked back to the book. She called Mr. Collins a name I won't repeat. She thought Emma was spoiled and needed a job. She defended Fanny Price in Mansfield Park against everyone, including me, for two full evenings, and I came around.

I had always read alone, and reading had always been a private thing. With her, it was a conversation. The book was the third person on the porch.

What we each heard

Some nights I'd be tired or distracted and I'd read flat, just getting through the pages. She always noticed. "You're not listening to yourself," she'd say. I learned that reading well out loud means understanding a sentence before you finish saying it, which means paying attention in a way I never had to before.

She heard things I missed, too, especially about money. She'd stop me to work out what an income of a few thousand a year meant and who had it and who didn't. Every one of those novels became, in her hands, a story about who was allowed to be secure in the world.

Persuasion, last

We saved Persuasion for September because she said it was the best and she wanted to end on it. It is about a woman who gets a second chance late, after everyone assumed her life was settled. I didn't think much of that when I picked it up. By the last chapter I understood why she had saved it, and I had to stop reading for a minute.

After

Aunt Bev lived three more years. We read other books, but never with the same intensity as that first summer. I still read Austen every couple of years, and I always read at least a chapter out loud, alone in my kitchen, just to slow myself down.

If you have someone in your life who can't read anymore, read to them. Pick something with jokes. Let them argue with it. You'll both get more than you expect.