I tried to read P&P, but only got half way through. I don’t like the stilted dialog. All that “I hold you in the highest esteem” crap. Good actors can pull off lines like that, and almost convince you that a human would say them, but when reading them my head just starts to hurt after a while.
I’ve read a boatload of Thirkell. It’s fascinating: All these people just talk to each other all the time. Don’t they have jobs? Don’t they have hobbies? As a half-Ausberger-ed engineer type, the concept that people might just spend their time, y’know, interacting with other people is strange and wonderful to me.
To balance Mark Twain, Rex Stout (and Nero Wolfe) was a big fan of Jane Austen. In his biography Stout is quoted as saying, “I used to think that men did everything better than women, but that was before I read Jane Austen. I don’t think any man ever wrote better than Jane Austen.”
Wolfe “resented” Jane Austen, because, in Archie’s words, “Wolfe held it against Jane Austen for forcing him to concede that a woman could write a good novel.”
Emma was Stout’s favorite Austen book.
I’m female, so my opinion doesn’t count, but Austen’s okay by me, though not a favorite.
I heard that Lethal Weapon was loosely based on Emma. Of course, I wasn’t paying real close attention to that conversation…
I’m pretty sure you mean Battlefield Earth.
You misspelled Clueless.
Ezra Pound was an admirer of Austen’s technique, as am I (I’m a guy). This from a discussion of sentence structure in Pound’s The ABC of Reading (1934):
And later in the book:
And finally, in a section on historical relevance, in which Pound examines George Crabbe’s poem The Borough, written approximately contemporaneously with Austen’s novels:
Personally, I haven’t read Austen since I was in grad school, and doubt that I ever will again, but I did love them. Not so much for the plots, though, as for her incredible use of language, pacing, rhythm, and structure.
And re. Henry James, one final quote: Oscar Wilde said of him that “Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.” (Actually there’s more to the quote that made it somewhat less damning than that sounds; the whole essay is here.)
No love for Northanger Abbey? That’s a great book, especially the Bath scenes: I swear I’ve met all those people, especially the cocky boy racer who brags about his carriage and what a hot driver he is.
Besides, how can you not love an author who wrote “She then proceeded to a Pastry-cooks where she devoured six ices, refused to pay for them, knocked down the Pastry Cook & walked away.” {The Beautifull Cassandra}
Are there no other sources of lovely prose, though? I just found Austen’s subject matter so insubstantial, and the characters interesting only to the sorts of people who are predisposed to be fascinated by English aristocrats anyway. In the end, no amount of pretty English could keep these books P&P and S&S from being a bit tedious.
I think I mentioned it earlier. It was the only book in that class that I blew through in one sitting.
I don’t think “aristocrats” is quite the right descriptor of most of her characters.
In a similar vein, has anyone read I Capture The Castle? Talk about lovely, witty prose.
Well, more in terms of their tastes and lifestyles than actual station, both of which are legitimate uses of the word. I concede it’s just confusing matters, given the rigid classism of English culture at that time, and the existence of a veritable Aristocracy with powers not available to the merely wealthy. That said, these wealthy families, even if not headed by Lords and Dukes and so forth, were still quite dynastic in their nature. It seems the things everyone obsessed over terribly in P&P, for example, were relations, connections, how much wealth, real sources of a brand of power in England, which had a caste system in all but name.
Perhaps Austen wrote about more than the sometimes rather silly romantic trials of those with true wealth, or those who wished to marry into it, but I never read those books.
cough
I don’t think “wealthy” is quite the right descriptor of most of her characters.
Big houses? Servants? No apparent occupation? The ability to even walk with 100 feet of that Darcy guy, (who I think was pretty absurdly wealthy compared to anything in my experience)? I suppose the Bennets’ being in arrears is a problem, but one that could have been circumvented had they a male heir, if memory serves. I mean, it was a country estate, was it not? You went out quail hunting or sat in your parlour most of the day, no? And everyone was obsessed with marrying well, were they not? Except Elizabeth, seemingly, though she does anyway.
Her subject matter may be insubstantial, but her thematic matter—pride, prejudice, sense vs. “sensibility,” etc.—is pretty substantial and universal, and her characters are the sorts of people who are still around today: the airheads, the snobs, the romantic, the mercenary…
Both “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” make Jane’s work seem watered down to me, and I’m a huge fan of Miss Austin. My favorite of hers is “Persuasion”, perhaps for its older, more world-weary heroine. Still the same kinds of self-absorbed, sometimes witless, narrow-minded & messy characters she is so good at portraying but much shorter and to the point than both P&P and S&S.
My b/f watched the BBC movie “Persuasion” and actually got a bit choked up at the scene where main character Anne is telling her future husband’s best friend (as FH listens in, off to one side) about how women in her time have the sad leisure to dwell and dwell and dwell on the men they love, as they simply do not have a great deal else to occupy their time as men do. Now to get him to read the novel!
And if Mark Twain hated Austin so much, why does he say “EVERY time” he reads P&P, etc.? I wonder that he bothered to pick the book up again after his initial dissatisfaction. Surely he’d have been happier re-reading “Wuthering heights”.
–Beck
Her subject is the economics of being female in a culture where a gentlewoman’s only choice was to get married. It really isn’t insubstantial at all when you realize the fates of her characters had they not had their fairy tale endings. Except for Emma, none of her characters are heiresses - they are all fairly penniless women without much to live on, who need to make “good” marriages or become governesses or dependents - or worse. Austen writes fairy tales with happy endings, but there is the hint of darkness there - Col. Brandon’s ward, Lydia Bennet, Maria Bertram.
I’m reading a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft right now, and I’m facinated by it because she and her sisters and friends were the class of people Austen is writing about - daughters of gentlemen without fortune of their own. And there aren’t a lot of happy endings for these women. Its also facinating in that some of Wollstonecraft seems to have snuck into Austen - Austen heroines - Fanny Price excepted - are much more radical (though obviously not at Wollstonecraft levels) than a lot of young women of the age.
I much perfer her to the Bronte’s - who have far too much drama and much less finesse.
Which kind of takes the edge off, no? I must concede, my memory of S&S was foggy, and it appears the Dashwood ladies fell on hard times, but they began well-off, and in the end comfort is restored rather neatly. I find it hard to describe the Bennets as “penniless”, just in danger of harder times should they not marry well.
And let’s not forget poor Harriet Smith and the stigma of illegitimacy which dooms her to marry Robert Martin. An excellent companion to Jane Austen is Fay Weldon’s short epistolary novel Letters To Alice On First Reading Jane Austen, in which the narrator explains to her uncomprehending 20th Century teenage niece the period in, for and about which Austen was writing - the harshness of life, and the realities - particularly the economic, social and physical realities - of marriage, sex and child-bearing for women: the husband-hunting in which Austen’s heroines are engaged might seem like an elegant game, but the realities were deadly serious. These are not just comedies of manners, these are about real, recognisable young women desperate to secure the only form of security they could, with the spectre of Miss Bates’ genteel poverty a reminder of what would happen if they failed.
Well jeez, true poverty and bastard children? I obviously missed the weightier Austen novels.