What Jane Austen and Terry Pratchett Have in Common

Satire with courage, brain, and heart. (Lions, tigers, and bears not included.)

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“His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.”
—Maskerade

“She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance. A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well–informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”
—Northanger Abbey

I’ve been reading Jane Austen since I was fourteen years old and first discovered Pride and Prejudice. She’s my favorite author, hands down. Throughout twenty-five years of reading, I’ve gravitated toward the British classics: old-fashioned stories of humanity, love, relationships, families, “common life,” with just a smattering of political intrigue. Austen is, of course, the North Star of this for me, but I’ve also enjoyed Dickens, Bronte (Charlotte and Anne, that is; Emily can shove it), Forster, Gaskell, etc. Someday I’ll probably crack open an Anthony Trollope but that day is not this day.

Fantasy was always outside my realm—pun very much intended and in fact sort of muscled in there. Hope you liked it. I still haven’t read Lord of the Rings, and though I enjoyed Narnia, and the silliness of the American The Princess Bride plus a few juvenile novels of imagination and magic, I never thought I’d get into the more fantastical worldbuilding. The very concept of worldbuilding bored me! I don’t want to slog through pages and pages of who went to war with whom and how this magic system works and why everyone is named something that sounds like a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful Scrabble play.

But then my friend Stephanie all but begged me to give Terry Pratchett a try.