In Colorado Springs the other day, my daughter, who is 13, suggested we go to see a movie called "The Jane Austen Book Club." "It's a chick flick, Daddy, but I think you will like it."

So we drove for an hour all the way across town to one of those giant, flawlessly clean metroplexes set on the edge of a faux town square thrown up over night in the middle of nowhere, with a campanile clock tower in the middle of the "village green," ticking out the message, "shop, shop, shop, eat, drink and open a Macy's card, for tomorrow you shall die." At one end was a Red Robin and at the other a Macaroni Grill, and there were high-end scrapbooking and designer bread shops on every faux street. (And this is what Fargo aspires to be?)

I tried to explain to my daughter that I have no problem with chick flicks. I secretly enjoy them so long as there are no green tomatoes or Debra Winger stricken with an incurable disease. Chick flicks are always more satisfying to me than car-over-cliff-exploding-on-impact films, or general mayhem revenge films. Chick flicks are about character, the labyrinth (and land mines) of family dynamics, nuanced dreams and doubts, and about soul-mating rather than sexual opportunism.

That's why we men don't like them. If nobody gets punched out in a fistfight, if nobody wakes up with a perfect stranger, we men regard chick flicks as an unfair test of devotion rather than entertainment.

"The Jane Austen Book Club" was just marvelous. I loved every minute of it, as did my daughter, who knows the BBC's 1995 production of "Pride and Prejudice," starring Colin Firth as Darcy, virtually by heart. Directed by Robin Swicord and based on a fine novel by Karen Joy Fowler, it's about five women and one man, all at loose ends in their lives, ages ranging from 20-something to 60-something, who form an improbable book club whose sole purpose is to read all the novels of Jane Austen.

The film stars Kathy Baker, Maria Bello, Emily Blunt, Amy Brenneman, Maggie Grace, and Hugh Dancy. John Toon's cinematography is so beautiful that I found myself gazing at the sheer beauty of six actors who are beautiful in six distinct ways, some of them nontraditional.

Like an Austen novel, the film moves rather predictably toward marriages and marital reconciliations. For Austen (1775-1818) believed that marriage was humanity's supreme expression of economic and social order and of sexual and romantic stability, though what makes her novels so great is that she looks upon marriage with delicious irony and realism. Her satirical voice seldom withdraws from the prose.

Naturally enough, each of the club's participants reads Austen's novels through the lens of their own circumstances and sensibilities, but each in turn provides insights that the others could not bring to the table. Inevitably they all "read" their own lives through the artistry of Austen. That's one of the foundations of the humanities: we look at our own lives through the words of those who have devoted their souls to the exploration of the human condition.

After the movie ended, we drove as fast as we could to the nearby Borders bookstore and did the only intelligent thing. We bought Jane Austen novels. I knew full well that I have a large collection of Austen in my library in Bismarck, but I couldn't wait to wade into "Persuasion," which is the book that puts things right for all six protagonists. Jane would be disappointed in me.

The advantage of liking Jane Austen's novels is that you can actually read all of them in a short space of time: in a month if you really rush things, certainly in a year. Austen is one of the only authors (in point of fact, the only author) about whom I can say, "Oh yeah, I've read everything she wrote."

Austen published just six novels: "Sense and Sensibility" (1811), "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), "Mansfield Park" (1814), "Emma"(1816), "Northanger Abbey" (1818), and "Persuasion" (1818). I've read some of them many times and all of them a couple of times, and probably no year goes by in which I don't at least read "Pride and Prejudice." Austen is not my favorite novelist, but she is somewhere in the top 10.

I had the great good fortune to spend a few years studying at Oxford University in England. When I first arrived in the fabled, spired city at the confluence of the Thames and Cherwell rivers, I was a curious mixture of over-confidence and raw and abject fear. I was pretty sure I was not Oxford material, and I knew already that while by University of Minnesota standards I was a fairly well-educated young man, by Oxford standards I was just a pitiful barbarian from the windswept lands described in Willa Cather and O.E. Rolvaag novels. Just in case this lesson did not sink into my dull consciousness, my tutors of Oxford reminded me again and again that I was nothing more than an American, with all the condemnation that term signifies. Oxford is where Americans go to learn humility - right in the teeth.

I had arrived at Oxford a couple of weeks before the fall (Michaelmas) term began, to get settled. One day I was loitering in the 17th century gateway of my college (Hertford) reading the notices put up for students of each study area. Suddenly a portly distinguished man in a wool suit jacket and a sweater vest moved toward me in a flat-footed way and said, "You must be young Jenkinson from America." Indeed I was.

He invited me up to his rooms in the college and poured me the first glass of sherry of my life. He asked me about my special interests in English language and literature. I stammered out nervous and self-conscious answers.

Then he sat far back into an overstuffed ottoman and tilted his head up to the ceiling, cocked an eye at me, and said, "Well, Mr. Jenkinson, which Jane Austen novel do you especially fancy?"

A very long stage pause here.

Idiot that I was, I told the whole truth and nothing but the truth. "Mr. Cockshut, I'm afraid I have to admit that I have never read a Jane Austen novel."

Pause.

A.O.J. Cockshut said, "I find that I can always tell a very great deal about someone by asking that question. Good day."

I slipped out of the room like a terrified and humiliated boy in a Dickens novel, walked straight to Blackwells bookstore, bought all six Austen novels, and read them all during the next week.

But it was too late.

Welcome to Oxford.

This morning, as I began to think about this column, I went down in my basement and found the exact copy of "Sense and Sensibility" that I began to read that afternoon. I spent half an hour examining the Penguin book, with its coffee stains, markings in the margins, and my inane comments at the top of some of the pages.

A wave of the deepest nostalgia and sadness swept through me - the wind of Willa Cather not Jane Austen.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State Univesity. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)