‘It is the human way to exert oneself, every now and again, in eccentric enterprises,” wrote William F. Buckley Jr. in a column explaining to his readers that he would be absent for a month, sailing across the Pacific Ocean. The voyage, manned by Buckley, a crew of his friends, and his son, Christopher, is recounted in the third of his sailing books, Racing through Paradise: A Pacific Passage, a new edition of which is forthcoming from Lyons Press (360 pp., $24.95). (The first two chronicles, Airborne and Atlantic High, were reissued last year.) The fourth and final one, Windfall: The End of the Affair (Lyons, 320 pp., $24.95), also forthcoming in a new edition, is, as Lance Morrow notes in his introduction, different from the earlier volumes. It follows Buckley and his companions on a voyage tracing Christopher Columbus’s first journey from the Old to the New World. At the time of the trip, in 1990, Buckley had just turned 65 and had, in a surprise move, retired as full-time editor of National Review. He was, writes Morrow, “in a valedictory and autumnal mood.” He was aware that this transatlantic voyage was likely to be his last. But the note of melancholy is leavened throughout by gratitude. “My life, on the whole,” Buckley concludes in an epilogue, “has been joyful.”
In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness (Hopkins Press, 320 pp., $27.95), Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey, an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, treats Austen as a moral philosopher whose form was the novel. Brodey notes that a widespread view of Austen today — created by the many film adaptations, retellings, and spin-offs of her novels — is mistaken. She is often seen as the queen of idealized romance, a purveyor of fairy-tale endings for her (mostly female) audience to luxuriate in. In reality, as Brodey argues in her perceptive analysis, while Austen’s six novels conform to the demands of the marriage plot — with its Shakespearean elements of consummated courtship and the restoration of communal bonds — her endings are always characterized by an “odd mixture of happiness and sadness, celebration and restraint, romance and cold showers of reason.” Austen’s heroines arrive at their relatively happy endings only after significant moral and intellectual growth — after acquiring the resources to withstand trials and disappointment without giving in to despair or cynicism. (Austen, who remained single, died young, and suffered through financial instability and ill health, had need of such resources.) Her novels make clear that her characters’ fortunate matches are contingent, not inevitable, and are secondary to their moral education. She is, Brodey writes, “teaching the reader about the nature of happiness.”
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