To celebrate Dandelion Revolution Press’s fifth anniversary, we’re running the essay series “In Her Words: Celebrating Women in Literature” throughout 2025. We’re seeking personal essays recognizing women authors and/or characters that have impacted your life. To submit your personal essay, please read our full submission guidelines.
Today, we’re thrilled to bring you Anu Mahadev, a New Jersey-based poet, and a 2016 MFA in Poetry graduate from Drew University. In this essay, Anu highlights a beloved author who has inspired countless writers and readers through her stories, talent, and extraordinary character. Enjoy!
On this 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, there is nobody else I could think more befitting to pay a tribute to than this peerless author whose works have withstood the test of time. Especially now that I have returned fresh from my visit to her well-preserved cottage in Hampshire, where she wrote and published her best works before her breath was snuffed away so treacherously at the tender age of forty-one, due to ill health.
Dissonance. This is not a word you will find in a Regency era story, but it is exactly what I felt about myself when I was reading English literature in India—or whatever meagre books we had access to while in school. We all know the “right place, right time” winning combination. How about the opposite? I, for one, have always felt that I grew up at the wrong time in the wrong place—a square peg in a round hole—that’s the image that stayed with me.
I spoke four languages by the time I was four and found myself gravitating towards the English language with a much stronger intensity than the others. I read more than anyone I knew, remembered little details and foibles with alarming clarity, quoted proverbs on every occasion and consumed every contemporary fast-paced and slick crime thriller and mystery I could get my hands on. That is until, my mother—who I give full credit to for this essay and my love for anything Austen—handed me her worn and well-read copy of Pride & Prejudice when I was sixteen.
I had heard of neither the author nor the book and was probably engrossed in some Nancy Drew at the time, but my mother’s eyes and voice brightened noticeably when she spoke about the universally loved heroine, Miss Elizabeth Bennett. I was intrigued and started right away. But…these are not books to be inhaled quickly and thrown away. These are not whodunits or page-turners or plots that you figure out and promptly forget the next day. These take the luxury of time. I found myself having to slow down my pace, pay attention to passages, re-read some pages to fully appreciate what was going on, and why Ms. Austen chose to express herself in such a manner.
Her stories involve holistic character studies, focusing primarily on the women involved which I found was a refreshing change from the plethora of male protagonists. I was also further intrigued for two reasons. At the time, women of that class were accomplished ladies, but were not allowed to work or pursue further studies, nor could they inherit from their father’s estate. So basically, their chance of a fortune and good life depended wholly on the match they made, at the right age. Secondly, women writers were virtually unheard of at the time Ms. Austen chose to make a living with her pen. The women who wrote did so under male pen names or gave credit to an existing male author so their words could even have a chance of making it into the hands of readers. With such impossible odds to face, how is it that Jane Austen still chose to persevere and not get tired and simply give in? And how much different would her life have been if she had been transported to a more modern era where her freedom and choices were basic rights, and not things she had to keep fighting for?
I suppose in some ways, I connected with her from this angle. Of not belonging or fitting in. Her stories come alive not despite the challenges she faced, but precisely due to them. She pushed the envelope each time, making sure that her heroines not only secured happy and prosperous marriages, but also chose love first—over and above convenience or wealth. She breathed life into them and crafted their characters so distinctly and delicately, that readers—men and women alike—found themselves rooting for them, for their victories, at a time when women were treated like chattel in trade based on the value of their purses, or as receptacles for bearing future sons. Elizabeth with her fearless wit and spunk stood out in that sea of beautiful women not due to her looks, but due to her personality and intellect. Her sharp mind, and equally sharp tongue would only be satisfied with a well-matched dashing man with his own set of flaws—the flaws that kept them apart, and which over time would smoothen their rough edges and bring them together. The stuff of fairytales, but in a very real world.
Emma, the matchmaker or Anne, the girl with regrets, or Elinor & Marianne, the two very different sisters seeking similar things—these women are as real to me as my own flesh and blood, and my heart wept for Jane and her sister Cassandra, who shared such an incredibly close bond, but were not as fortunate as these fictional ladies. Quite the contrary, they stayed single to the end, adjusting to their life of hardship and penury. Which is why Ms. Austen only had happy endings to all her books. These to me served as a beacon of hope for so many—not to be delusional, but to drive the point home that one need not value the opinions of others over their own, or care so much about being pretty with silly airs over nurturing a strong and resilient mind, or be afraid to stand out for their thoughts and decisions as opposed to taking the path of least resistance to merely fit in. Her heroines are all a study in contradictions, and not one person is one-dimensional. They have their strengths, their flaws, their successes and failures, and that’s what makes them human, what makes them who they are as individuals in a society that did not care much for individuality as much as what the neighbor thought.
These similarities in their lives in cold, faraway England in an era long gone and those of the women in a judgmental, cookie-cutter existence in 80s/90s India is probably what bewitched this serious, nerdy, deep-thinking girl into believing that someday there could be a life that awaited her, perhaps in a land far away where her choices would not be questioned and examined under a microscope, where she would bloom, albeit late into who she was really meant to be, and where she could break out of the carefully constructed mold that all women her age were supposed to fit into. Where she too would marry only for love, to a person who would be her best friend first, over and above all else.
In this way, Jane Austen lives on in the lives of countless readers and writers who have been influenced by her stories, her talents and most of all, her character—her simplicity, her integrity and her determination to live her life according to her own choices. That is what I would like to believe, as I sit in the parlor on the same chair she once sat, perusing over an old copy of Pride and Prejudice, my hands trembling, head bowed in reverence to this gentle, free-spirited soul whose presence pervades every corner of her beloved cottage, and also in every fiber of my being, as an omnipresent reminder of all that is good and honest in this world.
An amalgam of a left-brained ex-engineer and a right-brained creative writer would be the best way to describe a lyrical storyteller like Anu Mahadev. Originally from India by way of Bahrain, Anu is a New Jersey-based poet, and a 2016 MFA in Poetry graduate from Drew University. At present, Anu is Poetry Editor for The Platform Review. Previously she was Poetry Editor for The Wild Word, Editor-in-Chief for Jaggery Lit, and a Senior Editor for The Woman Inc. Her latest collection of poetry, A Mouthful of Sky was released in April 2022 by Get Fresh Books LLC. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, and she is an alumna of the Kenyon Writers’ Workshop and the Juniper Writers’ Workshop. She can be found at anumahadevpoet.com.
What a beautiful and compelling write-up!
Beautiful piece. I loved visiting her cottage, and surroundings too. There was an amazing BBC documentary about her life this year, you may be able to find, if you haven't seen it.