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

[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.