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So Odd a Mixture

So Odd a Mixture

Along the Autistic Spectrum in 'Pride and Prejudice'

Phyllis Ferguson Bottomer
Forewords by Eileen Sutherland and Tony Attwood

Paperback: £15.99 / $25.95

2007, 234mm x 156mm / 9.25in x 6in, 208pp
ISBN: 978-1-84310-499-5, BIC 2: JM

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Introduction

Austen--Autism

Autism--Austen

What can the above words possibly have in common?

Ironically, they are near neighbours in any alphabetical listing. They share four of the same letters. Both are frequently mentioned in the news but usually in quite different sections of the paper or telecast. But these are superficial coincidences - certainly no reason to write a book!

Austen lived from 1775 to 1817; autism was first labelled as such in 1943. The formal recognition of the condition may not have existed in her lifetime but people with it certainly did. Literary descriptions of puzzling characters are among the under-utilized clues that we have for the existence of people with this condition before the middle of the twentieth century. Nowhere are so many so well delineated as in Jane Austen's classic, Pride and Prejudice. In this beloved novel she created eight characters on the autistic spectrum while, in her five other major works, another dozen at least make their appearance. Austen did not and could not know what she was describing, but she did so with such precise detail that we can recognize and begin to explain what she could only observe and puzzle over.

I initially read Pride and Prejudice in the mid-1960s, while I do not recall hearing the word 'autism' until at university in the early 1970s. The fact that there might be any connection, let alone a strong one, between these two apparently unrelated topics first occurred to me one evening late in 2002 when my husband and I were relaxing watching a video of the 1995 BBC adaptation of the novel. By then I was a speech language pathologist with over 25 years' experience, including extensive involvement in the preceding decade with many students with high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome. I had learned so much from these fascinating children and had attended workshops plus immersed myself in textbooks and journal articles to learn more. Suddenly, during the televised drama of Pride and Prejudice, a statement by one character on the screen triggered a connection in my mind to something startlingly similar I had recently read in the book Thinking in Pictures, by Dr Temple Grandin, a well-regarded animal scientist responsible for the design of one-third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the United States. She is also a woman with autism.

One character fictional, the other one real. Separated by almost 200 years. Yet both people were referring to the rhythm of conversation and their difficulties with it. This challenge and many other of their characteristics made more sense if both were coping with the same fundamental problems.

This idea steeped in my mind for many months until the following summer when I had the opportunity to simultaneously re-read both Pride and Prejudice and a modern-day social sciences classic, Asperger's Syndrome, by Dr Tony Attwood. As I scribbled reams of notes from my close reading and plastered cross-referencing Post-its in the two books, my awe for the acuity of their powers of observation and for Austen's characterization skills increased by the day. As John Bayley, an essayist on Jane Austen's work has written:


"the pleasures and perceptions Jane Austen offers her reader can be of a very complex kind. Each re-reading strikes us afresh with something newly significant, and some change in the perspective of our own world in relation to hers… Our reaction to her seems intimately, even alarmingly, dependent on our own history. (1968, p.1)"


I hope that both your admiration for Miss Austen and your understanding of the often puzzling people with autistic spectrum disorders will also grow as we journey through this beloved novel together using current knowledge about the autistic spectrum as our unique guide.