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.