The closest I have ever come for myself is amateur, in all the original best sense of the word: a lover a devotee a person drive by passion and obsession to do it – to explore the imaginary world – oneself.Īdmittedly, the word amateur has negative connotations but not so in Wells’ book.Īn amateur is simply someone who is passionate about books and pursues that passion as a hobby rather than a scholarly profession, she argues. Perhaps there is no perfect word for the kind of people I have raised my children to be: a word that encompasses obsessive scholarship, passionate curiosity, curatorial tenderness, and an irrepressible desire to join in the game, to inhabit in some manner – through writing, drawing, dressing up, or endless conversational trifling and Talmudic debate – the world for the endlessly inviting, endlessly inhabitable work of popular art. The epigraph to chapter 3 of Juliette Wells’ new book Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination is taken from Michael Chabon’s “The Amateur Family” in Manhood for Amateurs (2010) and is one of the most interesting, almost poetic, descriptions of amateurs that I have ever read (it is quite long but worth reproducing in its entirety):
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