Daily BirthdaysJane Austen Forum
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| by RonPrice English teachers in recent decades, if not in previous decades, have had trouble persuaded their students of the literary and social significance of many of the greats of English literature like Shakespeare and Austen among others. My mother-in-law, a woman in her late eighties, finds watching movies adapted from Jane Austen’s novels boring. Her attitude mirrors, somewhat, the reaction of novelist Henry James who saw the characters in Austen’s novels as having “small and second-rate minds,” Philistines one and all. Emerson found Austen to be imprisoned in a wretched and smothering conventionality with an excessive concern for “marriageableness.”1 Not everyone has reacted this way to Austen, not now nor in the nearly two centuries since her death in 1817. Some saw her writing as “a prose Shakespeare,”2 a writer who exposed with her mildly acidic, satirical solution of words the brittle, indeed, empty foundations of social and personal morality in a violent and repressive age in English society. It was this world that sought violent release in the next century and found that release when it was blown apart in WW1. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Lee Siegel, “A Writer Who Is Good For You,” The Atlantic Online, January 1998; and 2William B. MacAuley in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 2, B.C. Southam, editor, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1987. There is nothing to equal your smallness in a small town---the commonplace has never found a master finer than your divine chit- chat some have said, Jane. Petty inconsistencies, parochial vanities, familiar everydayisms, vulgarity and pride, delineated as entertainment and amusement, tissues of character in speech, gently undulating life-surface, triviality laid on intense relations, satire’s world without bitterness, hermetically sealed with supreme moments quite inarticulate giving you: coolness, patience, poise and leisure obtained so you could write and me too, Jane!----and me too! Your wholly secular and narrow world with people you disliked, tolerated but accepted in the only society you knew where nothing was too little for your little world and happiness=simple pleasures.1 Balance, moderation, courtesy: recipe for survival in two worlds— yours and ours—inner landscapes— the triumph of the ordinarily ordinary and the inherited order over change:2 but we can’t triumph with that recipe and order can we Jane? Can we Jane? Nor could you---would you, Jane?3 1 Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, editor, Ian Watt, Prentice-Hall Inc., Inglewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963, p. 172. 2 Adena Rosmarin, “Misreading Emma: The Powers and Perfidies of Interpretive History, English Literary History, Vol. 51, pp. 315-42. 3 What would Austen have written, if she had lived beyond the age of 41? Ron Price 4 June 2008 Comment on this... |
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| by Jo Hi, We have just launched a new Classic Book website, the address is www.classicbookclub.co.uk Our very first 'Book of the month' is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen You can discuss your favourite book; describe why you feel passionately about it; recommend it to others; and get other people's opinion about their favourite books. You can chat to like-minded people about books, and exchange views and opinions. We will have a 'Book of the Month' which you can join in with reading, and then take part in the discussions of it at the end of the month, and put forward your point of view, and see how other people have interpreted the book. This site is like an on-line community where you can submit your reviews of books, or suggest topics for discussion. You can vote in polls about favourite authors, favourite books, etc. Basically if you love classic books, and want to discuss them with like-minded people then this is the place. Thanks Jo x Comment on this... |
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| by iris what does jane austen's father do? what are some of characteristics of the gothic novel??? Comment on this... |