This article is published in issue 22 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 7, 2022
Among the many overflowing meetings of readers at the last Turin Book Fair, I was struck by the
success, not to be taken for granted, of the presentation of the first volume of the Meridiano on Jane Austen
edited by Liliana Rampello with the translation by Susanna Basso: there was no free place. Do not
it happens often, for the classics, but it happened for Jane Austen.
The Meridiani Mondadori are the historical collection of blue volumes founded by Vittorio Sereni, directed
long by Renata Colorni and now by Alessandro Piperno, complete works of great Italian classics
and foreigners edited by the greatest contemporary scholars of literature: not really beach books. So what about the full house?
It is true that Liliana Rampello and Susanna Basso are a guarantee of excellence and charm, but how
it’s possible that hundreds of readers flock to hear about it on a Saturday morning at ten o’clock
of a writer born at the end of the eighteenth century, who lived without ever marrying in an obscure rectorate e
died at 42? It is true that the great Samuel Beckett called her “the divine Jane”, it is true that
the great Virginia Woolf compared her to Shakespeare because “she wrote without hatred, without
bitterness, without fear, without protesting, without preaching. The same condition in which
wrote Shakespeare ». But where is the secret that made Jane Austen become
a pop icon read by millions of people in every corner of the world? Wrong answer: it’s not the dances, the weddings, the happy ending. I understood this on Saturday listening to Liliana Rampello, a great essayist and
literary criticism, to tell an adoring audience of men and women of all ages about the modernity of
Jane Austen, witty and light writer as only some great ones can be, but very lucid
materialistic in speaking of money (assets, rents), of sex (the sexual contract at the base
of the marriage contract) and of something absolutely revolutionary in its time: research
feminine happiness in a world that conceded nothing to women.
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Source: Vanity Fair
