Bentley emphasized the inexpensive nature of his handsomely produced compact volumes, ornamented with elegant frontispiece illustrations and title-page vignettes: “price only 6s.” and “Cheap Edition.” He was an early adopter of publisher-issued bindings in cloth, and his prices reflected not only the paper savings of his three-in-one-volume format but also the sudden freedom from traditional leather bindings.
Scholars have amply recorded and praised Bentley’s reprintings of Austen as “Standard Novels,” stressing their authority (that is, he paid for proper copyrights) and importance as Austen’s reputational turnkey. As a result of this attention, Bentley’s sedate volumes are now highly sought after. However, Bentley’s influence upon Austen’s reception may be greatly overplayed, for his books were quickly joined by far cheaper versions with a wider impact. The role of these less-princely reprints has been largely ignored in the dominant fairy-tale version of Austen’s reception.
Scientists and theologians can debate whether the first spark of life on our planet sprang from thermal vents on the ocean floor or divine inspiration (or both), but most everyone who believes in science recognizes that around 3.8 billion years ago the first single-cell organisms emerged. These microorganisms would have died after one generation if they couldn’t find a way to reproduce. But life found a way, and the microbes that started dividing were the ones able to keep their little microbial families going. If each division of these early cells had been an exact copy of the parent, our world would still be occupied solely by these single-cell creatures.
But that’s not what happened.
It’s a tragic fact of life that most of us will experience the loss of a loved one. Approximately 50 to 55 million people die worldwide each year, and it is estimated that each death leaves an average of five bereaved individuals. The experience of loss usually causes a range of psychosocial reactions, such as withdrawal from social activities, deep sadness, confusion about one’s role in life, and bursts of loneliness. In the acute phase of bereavement, these types of grief reactions are often all-consuming, excruciatingly painful, and highly impairing. It can feel as if the love directed towards the deceased person suddenly loses its tangible object, leaving the bereaved individual with an intense emptiness.
Thankfully, over the longer term, most people, most of the time, have sufficient resources to adjust to their new life without the person they’ve lost. They don’t necessarily ‘get over’ their loss, but they learn to cope. Sadly though, this isn’t true for everyone. Accumulating research within psychiatry and psychology has shown that a significant minority of people – approximately one in 10 – do not recover from grief. Instead, the acute reaction persists over the longer term, leading to trouble thriving socially, mentally and physically.
There were only four of us in the room that first day. Three students (two old, as in over 50, and one young, as in under 20) and Filippo Pelacchi, the teacher (who was very young himself, although not in dancer years—he had just turned 28). If I cannot recreate every one of the 75 minutes of that first adult beginner class I took in the summer of 2017, it’s because by now I’ve spent approximately 84,000 more minutes in that studio—that is, 1,400 hours, something like 950 dance classes plus rehearsals for performances, and those minutes run together in my mind. But I do know this—that in that very first class, long before I had any idea what I was doing, long before I was part of the community of devoted adult beginners that would form at Filippo and his husband Russell Lepley’s studio, I had a moment of what seemed like perfect clarity: My body and my mind were working as one.
Adults is a tale rich in keenly observed relationships – between mothers and daughters, best friends and boyfriends, idols and rivals – yet its central, inseparable pairing is that of thirtysomething heroine Jenny and her phone. Theirs is a supremely dysfunctional affair. At one point, it even gives her a black eye when she falls asleep while gazing up at it, though its sabotaging influence on her life is generally both more insidious and more damaging.
Chasing intangible chemical highs ultimately ends up a proxy for the strange business of writing itself, as a quest not merely for experience, but its re-creation. As Rob says, almost poignantly: “It wasn’t enough, somehow, just to be.”