Reading Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson: A Personal essay

Abstract

This essay critically responds to recent calls to decolonise the classics. In rejecting claims about the inherent value of certain literary works, I unravel my socially situated reading and responses, and therefore counter assumptions that literary value or acts of reading can be universalised. I reflect on personal encounters with Jane Austen’s novels and Emily Dickinson’s poetry,  demonstrating how this generated my cognitive, sensory and imaginative growth. Analysed memories of discovering and first reading particular works are connected to a critique of prescriptive decolonial discourse. The essay illustrates this by focusing on readers’ embodied encounters with certain books, affective responses and heterogeneous subject positions. These can lead to their finding emotionally satisfying, edifying and inspirational meanings – irrespective of the historical, geopolitical or cultural worlds delineated by the works’ authors.