Austen

[poliphilo]

I'm re-reading Pride and Prejudice. It's been a long long time. And my perceptions had become terribly distorted.

Austen is deceptive. She'll write these seemingly naive sentences and you'll think how charming, how quaint, how just like Daisy Ashford and then right at the end there'll be a little flick, like the stab of a scorpion's tail. One of the things the dramatizations tend to miss is that these people of hers are all young and inexperienced- even Darcy. His aloofness is less to do with him being Lord Byron and more because he's awkward and earnest and unsure of himself.

I'd like to see P & P done with really young actors. Kids in their late teens and early 20s. I know the characters are supposed to be older than that, but I
think the rules of early 19th century polite society were designed to delay maturity, so that a 28 year old woman or man in Austenland is no smarter than an 18 year old now.

I love the purity of her style. Short sentences, plain words. An 18th century
style- and vastly preferable to that of any English fiction writer for the next 100 years or more.

Comments

[ibid.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I have to disagree as I love victorian novelists. I agree with Charlotte Bronte when she wrote that Austen was a neatly walled garden with no wild country beyond.

However I am beginning to appreciate her more now. Her wonderful acidity belieing the outward cosiness for one thing!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Bronte has a point. And it's hard to imagine Austen's crisp, classic style being up to coping with the subject matter of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights.

I love Dickens. His prose can be glorious, but it can also be turgid and pompous and affected. Austen never attempted anything like- say- the opening of Bleak House, but on the other hand she was never less than sharp and zingy.

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

But that's what I love about Austen. She's precise, detailed, and pointed. Bronte felt too wide, too dramatic, too much. I couldn't love her characters and couldn't invite them over for dinner. Elizabeth Bennet feels like a friend at this point. The stories are of a small scale, but like a miniature painting, it makes the precision of the artistry so much more impressive. Austen can put an amazing amount into a few delicately twisted sentences.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Austen had a deep understanding of human psychology. The lightness is deceptive.

And she could do things that Bronte and Dickens couldn't.

Hey, we need them all!

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Here's an interesting quote I found on Jane Austen:

Charlotte Brontë and E.B. Browning found her limited, and Elizabeth Hardwick said: "I don't think her superb intelligence brought her happiness."</>

I had something brilliant to say, but I lost it in a fit of coughing.

So many young women today dismiss Austen as "Chick Lit". One hopes their perception will change as they get older.

If they bother to read the book.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Limited? I can see why the women writers who followed shortly after her might have thought so. They were battling hard to extend the range of women's fiction and gain respect equal to that of their male counterparts. but I believe it's a superficial judgement. She may not have had a very wide experience of society, but her knowledge of human nature was profound.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

Indeed and she was very wise for not going into what she did not know. And there is a good deal of drama in daily life, which Woolf took to an extreme in her novels.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I first read Dickens in high school (A Tale of Two Cities) and first discovered how a writer's style could produce an atmosphere that entirely colored my day. I found I could read a couple of hours of Dickens and have a "Dickens hum" in my head that colored my conversation and certainly influenced my writing.

As I recall, I'd dip into Dickens before writing a theme.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think Dickens is the greatest English novelist and the only English writer (in any genre) to come within arm's length of Shakespeare.

I read most of his books before I was twenty and and they remain vivid in my memory even though I haven't re-read them.

Note to self: it's time to reread Dickens.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

Except Mansfield park!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Mansfield Park is the next Austen I want to re-read. I remember it as being quite gloomy, and painful.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

It's very unlike Austen. It looks forward and I think it is quite Victorian in feel.

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

I love Austen and her views of her society. She was such an elegant craftsman with words. I re-read most of the books (well, P&P, Sense and Sensibility, Emma) quite often.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to re-read the others when I finish P & P.

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

I just bought that earlier this week, with the intention of making it my recreational reading now that I've finished Life of Pi. Thank God for Dover Thrift Editions - I love being able to pick up the classics for $4 or less.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

I LOVED the Life of Pi. Let me know your opinion. It was one of those hard to get into but then I couldn't put it down books.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

Wasn't it!

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I have never read Austen. I suppose I should place P&P on top of Holzer and just begin. Surely her "purity of...style" will be superior to the plodding efforts of Hanz H.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Austen is fun.

I know I misled you on Willis, but trust me on this.....

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

You didn't mislead me on Willis--you just said you'd like to discuss her book, and it was an interesting premise, actually.

And likable characters, and I even liked the way she wrote, but--perhaps because I have spent my life trying to not to be impatient--her endless chases after an elusive (and ultimately anticlimatic) truth got me wound up tight!

P&P it is: a shiny new paperback. This afternoon. Just right for carrying around while I walk in the park (it will be 55 and sunny today!)

And Holzer to bed with me, to tell me ghost stories until I'm sleepy.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Excellent.

And we can discuss Elizabeth and Darcy

And the wisdom of allowing impressionable young ladies to consort with officers.

I should enjoy that.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Is that the production with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth? I saw that a month or two back and thought it was remarkably good.

Chick Lit? You couldn't possibly say that of Mansfield Park.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

It is indeed the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle production. It was good, and I went back and read the book again after I saw it.

No, I don't think Austin is Chick Lit. Marie, the 26 year old I know everything office mate is the one who said that. She's working on her Masters Degree and she knows EVERYTHING. However, she made the comment to the wrong person. He turned and looked at me and winked.

Mansfield Park...I may have to go revisit that one as well.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The problem (a minor problem) with filmed versions of Austen is that they weigh down the action with frocks and uniforms and beautiful country houses. Austen is emphatically not about such things. Her descriptions are very sparce and rarely go beyond telling us that a coat is blue or red.

[butterscotch711.livejournal.com]

Have you seen Clueless? From 1995 (I think), staring Alicia Silverstone. An updated adaptation of Emma, not P&P - but your comment on wanting to see P&P with young actors made me think of it, since it re-tells Emma in the world of Beverly Hills teens.

I love Austen for her cultural precision, but what also surprises me is how culturally transportable she is. Wuthering Heights is transportable, but because it uses broad juxtapositions (Wuthering Heights/Thrushcross Grange). Things like P&P and Emma are so concerned with miniutiae, and express miniutiae so well, and yet - they exist precisely on the cusp of the moment for me, even as an early 21st century reader.

In a tutorial on Austen once a girl complained that she was having trouble reading her 'Because all the gossip was a bit too much to take'. Very pretentious, I thought, but it also made me realise - of everything I've read, Austen best describes certain parts of my life, of what it is like to be a young gay guy in a country town in Australia at the beginning of the 21st century.

I think I will re-read her again (or read something of hers I haven't encountered yet for the first time) soon, now that I won't be worrying about dealing with it academically - it will be relaxing.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen Clueless. I must.

I think Austen has universal truth. Being young and unsure of yourself feels the same in any culture.

Like you I can so identify with her heroines- especially (perhaps) poor, mousey, downtrodden Fanny in Mansfield Park.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Did I imagine that Ang Lee said his Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon was a retelling of...one of Austen's books? I could be halucinating (oxygen deprivation...) but I thought I saw that in an interview someplace.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

He might have done. The delicacy of the relationship between the older couple in Crouching Tiger is very Austenesque.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

Ang Lee directed Sense and Sensibility, you could be thinking of that.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

No, I know it isn't that. I did love his version of S&S (though I loved the book more...).

The one I've not been able to get my hands on is Persuasion. I saw a production of it on A&E, I think...with Ciaran Hinds.