And so it’s the Autumn Equinox – as unbelievable as it seems to think we’ve reached the point in the year when there are equal hours of light and dark.

Another way of looking at it is, of course, that it’s head down now into the tunnel of darkness that comprises winter in the northern hemisphere – until we emerge again come late March …

And after ten days or so of blissfully warm, mild and sunny September days, it’s as if the weather itself knows how to play by the equinoctial rules and has thus given us a day or so of grey, wet conditions to set us downhill into proper autumn.

Last week, the light was positively golden. Today it has been too absent to note any colour.

But then that’s the balance of the seasons.

And balance is, after all, what most of us happily seek in our lives.

It’s also what we find in so many 19th century novels – with Jane Austen naturally leading the pack.

We only have to consider her titles of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility to acknowledge the fact. And even the novels which don’t embrace a balance in their titles are still concerned with the idea. Emma and Mansfield Park and Persuasion all concern themselves with characters who need to achieve and understand proportion – in their behaviour, their affections, their vices and their virtues.

And so her heroes and heroines gradually come to self-knowledge and begin to find the balance which will bring them happiness:

To understand, thoroughly understand her own heart, was the first endeavour.…she saw that there never had been a time when she did not consider Mr Knightley as infinitely the superior, or when his regard for her had not been infinitely the most dear.

So says Austen’s Emma in coming to realise her follies, her delusions and discover the focus of her real love.

19th century novels are slower to read than our contemporary counterpart. There is no swift skipping through the pages the way we can with a 21st century novel. And the reason for that is nothing to do with the length – it lies in the language.

The language itself has balance – it has a musicality and a rhythm- at least it does to me – and you can’t rush the phrasing and just get the gist of the meaning. Well, you can, but then you lose so much of the pleasure of reading prose so beautifully crafted and attuned to the ear.

Nowadays, there seems to be a fashion in some contemporary prose for staccato language and phrasing – as if it’s only one step away from the style of texting on a mobile phone. A kind of need for instant gratification for the reader is sensed, seeking an immediate impact with no concern or interest in the actual craft of putting words together to convey meaning and mood. Pace is all. Inevitably film and television have influenced our appetites and expectation of devouring texts rapidly and have perhaps led us to wanting constant cliffhangers and speedy resolutions.

But in Austen, even when the sentences are short, there is still balance and proportion as when Captain Wentworth in Persuasion declares to Anne that:

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul, I am half agony, half hope.

It’s almost poetry – it’s certainly one of the best declarations of love to be found in literature!

It might be fanciful to think that the proportion and order of the architecture of her times, the gracious Georgian and Regency buildings with which she would have been familiar, unconsciously influenced her style. But it’s possible.

We are all, after all, products of the eras in which we are born and live our lives and our imaginations inevitably stimulated and influenced by those environments.

But back to the Autumn Equinox.

This quarterly shift always seems more marked than its winter, spring or summer counterparts. Change is most definitely in the air this weekend as we grovel for gloves and scarves and contemplate a switch to shorter days, longer evenings.

Evenings, in fact, when there will be time to slow down and consider the merits of entertaining the hours of darkness with a slow paced, perfectly balanced 19th century novel!

Take your time – there are numerous days of increasing brevity before the winter solstice casts its spell and tips us back towards the light!