Jane Around the Web...

Was Jane Austen Edited? Does It Matter? : NPR via Numero Cinq

Iconography: Jane Austen, a Contemporary Kind of Lady: Bitch Magazine blogs (feminist consideration of Jane FTW).

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It's Never The Wrong Time for Some Feminist Readings of Jane Austen

Happy belated birthday, Jane Austen! at feministing, by Chloe Angyal, who includes these tantalizing lines:

"If Caroline Bingley is a bitch, it’s not her fault. Society made her that way...

... resist the urge to hate on Caroline Bingley. Remember: don’t hate the player. Hate the game. Jane Austen did, and it made her one of the most adored authors of all time. "

Read on...

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Literary Birthday: EBC Patron Saint #1 Jane Austen

They never made 'em like her again, as best expressed in a chat between me and my twin brother, after he had read "Emma" followed by "Ethan Frome."

Daniel: finished ethan frome

me: whatdjoo think? no "emma" right"

Daniel: no emma.

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Jane Austen and the Youth in the WSJ

Jane Austen's Popularity Grows With Young on the Web - WSJ.com

What these articles always neglect to mention is that young people love Jane not just because she's like, totally relevant to our man problems, but because she's you know, profound and a genius.

Still, the article is good and it quotes lots of friends of this blog, including folks from my local JASNA chapter and Laurie Viera Riegler, author of "Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict."

So click on through!

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Universally Acknowledged

Some of you may have read this new list of the best 100 first lines in literature. It's basically all over the place, with some excellent choices and some bad ones. Anyway, Jane came in at 2 with "it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," which is pretty much universally acknowledged to be a damn good first sentence. But it's become so overused, so shorthandish, that sometimes it's easy to forget WHY this sentence works so well. Here is what i said in its defense over at Numero Cinq:

Austen’s sentence has become a cliche, but it’s actually so perfect, so laden with irony (Her “truth” is in fact, not universally acknowledged but rather assumed to be so by her characters. So the statement that it is universal is, itself, a specific non-universal viewpoint. This is how people talk when they’re unable to justify their weird social ideas–they assume “everyone knows” x or y). It sets the tone for her playful use of free-indirect discourse, the way she never lets you stay comfortable knowing whether there’s an omniscient narrator or she’s taking the limited viewpoint of her heroine. And it also introduces he themes of her book: the flawed perspective of individuals, the absurdity of social assumptions. All in all, a job well done.
Never question Saint Jane!

And here is what Simon said, helping me formulate the above argument. As you can see, I spiced up my own argument with his brilliance.

Simon: it's a well constructed sentence that flows very nicely

me: also it's not universally acknowledged

Simon: there is a level of subtly accomplished irony

me: thats the whole point

Simon: the statement that it is universal is, itself, a specific non-universal viewpoint

irony!

1:01 PM exposes the way people talk

assert things as givens when they don't want to (or are unable to) explain their reasoning

attempt to just establish certain mores/assumptions as fact

and since clashing perspectives and mores are the major theme of the book, it sets that out quite nicely

1:02 PM but these things only become clear once you have read the book and become acquainted w the characters

hence, good sentence

me: this is in line with what I'm writing

Simon: WORD

1:03 PM the book is all about why people say certain things at certain times, and how that lines up with what they actually believe / what is actually true

Readers, why do you love this sentence, or any of Jane's first sentences (they're all gems, as far as I'm concerned, particularly Emma, Persuasion, P+P, NA)?

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Call for Austen Mash-ups!

Salon's Laura Miller has had enough. She wants our suggestions, at Open Salon, on how we can use mash-up format to bring Austen's superior understanding of relationships and human nature to liven up action and horror genres, instead of vice versa. Saith she (among many other witty quips):

Surely action movies, as well as horror films, could benefit from an injection of Austenian wit, social satire, moral insight and depth of characterization? Because, let's face it: Too much of popular entertainment relies on fight scenes to gin up "excitement," and the dirty little secret is that, for a lot of us, the never-ending parade of fisticuffs, martial arts and car chases gets pretty dull.

My suggestion? "Inception 2: Pride and Inception". Instead of dodging endless, extremely boring dream-projections with machine guns, our crack team of dream infiltrators must weasel their way past a wit and social-status bearing army of scheming Lady Catherine and insinuating Caroline Bingley types in order to reach the Darcy at the center of the subconscious.

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What can one even say about this? AUSTEN v. BRONTE WARS.

We really ought to start keeping a tally of how many mainstream news outlets start writing stories about how Bronte is the new Austen. Because they are coming in fast and furious. It's the 2010-2011 meme.

Seriously, this is a sexist way of looking at things. Do we ever get articles about how Dickens is the new Trollope? Hemingway is the new Joyce? MOVE ON OVER Faulkner, it's Fitzgerald's time to shine! Have you heard the news? MARLOWE IS IN. JONSON IS OUT.

The media needs to get over the fact that these 19th century women are really really popular. They always have been, they will be, they are.

Just my indignant two cents.

The "Charade"

That Simon figured out.

["first" and "second" are SYLLABLES--mini-words making up the word which is the answer, the "third"]

Here are the clues we were given by Arnie Perlstein: the answer has three syllables; the name of the housemaid is the same as the name of one of the housemaids in Emma; the "second" word which itself is two syllables, refers to the kind of real world event many Janeites believe was never referred to by Austen in her novels, although it was mentioned in Northanger Abbey.

Any guesses?

My first JASNA meeting

Last weekend, Simon and I went to our first Jane Austen society regional meeting right here in our neighborhood, at local Fancypants U's swanked-out faculty house.

So I pulled out a string of nice fake pearls I hadn't worn since the bar-mitzvah era, put on a pair of heels and a cardigan, and elegantly hobbled over. The day began with a scrumptious, and free, three course-lunch with wine for new members, most of whom were ahem! a bit older and more female than Simon but who were delightful. During the course of the luncheon, names like Mary Eliot and Jane Fairfax were bandied about as though they were mutual friends of all of ours, which in a way, of course, they were. These characters and their tales were the major threads that knit us together. As the wine kept coming and the Prada chocolate cake came out, things got very loose indeed as we debated whether Mary knew that Charles had proposed to Anne first.

After lunch the gentlemen retired to the library for brandy and cigars--err, that is, we all went up stairs and listened to a provocative lecture on the secret subtext of Emma, from Arnie Perlstein. Perlstein is convinced and has a stack of evidence to prove that all Jane Austen's books have secret pregnancy narratives embedded within the text. He thinks that Emma is oblivious to the fact that Jane Fairfax is knocked up throughout the nine months of her time in Highbury. While the exact details of Perlstein's counter-narrative didn't always sit well with me, I think he was picking up on the screening-effect of Emma's limited perspective, and on the fact that Jane Fairfax is the heroine of an alternate story. In fact, many people have noted that in a more typical Austen tale Jane would be the heroine and Emma her meddlesome, spoiled foil. But the way Emma hews so tightly to the almost myopic perspective of the titular lady does give the novel a mysterious feeling--a feeling of a plot unraveling. Still I think there's more of an emotional component to this: it's the mystery of how the world works being gradually revealed to a young person who has a self-centered view of things and later learns to expand her line of vision. The lecture made me appreciate the subtle genius of St. Jane all the more.

Also, we began the session by solving the "charades" or riddles from Emma. We also tackled one riddle posed long ago by Austen's brother Henry. Simon was the only person in the 70-person or so crowd to solve it off the top of his head. I am all the more convinced that I will soon be making a most fortunate alliance.

So dear readers, 'twas a success! I'm excited to be joining JASNA just as the NY chapter begins to gear up for hosting its national general conference in 2012.

Emma sought refuge in Jane

The Guardian on how Emma Thompson turned to Austen--specifically best-movie-of-all-time "Sense and Sensibility 1995"--to heal her disastrous breakup with Kenneth Branagh. Somehow I feel that Greg Wise didn't hurt either.

Anyway, author JoJo Moyes goes on to discuss the healing power of literature and mentions several heroines and anti-heroines from Jo March to Lizzy Bennet to Emma Bovary, who provide guides of how to get through tough times, and also how not to!

In a previous article on the topic, Thompson also reveals a funny tidbit about the set:

Thompson also recounted how Wise initially pursued Winslet during the filming of Sense and Sensibility, because a soothsayer had told him that he would meet his future wife on the set.

She said: "Of course I was still married, so he thought it was Winslet and courted her assiduously.

"I remember him taking her to Glastonbury, which she hated because it was all hippyish, because Greg's quite hippyish and he kept thinking 'this just isn't working, I think she's just got to be wrong'."

Much-delayed film review: The Jane Austen Book Club

Hi readers! I've been much occupied at present with my very busy spring, not to mention an unexpected ailment that utterly laid me up. One advantage of the aforementioned illness was that I was able to watch the film of the Jane Austen Book Club, whose source material I read years ago on a trip to bonnie Scotland, before there even was such a thing as a blog.* I liked the novel by Karen Joy Fowler and found it hard to put down, but thought it wasn't really that Jane-Austeny.

Well, the movie, and years of studying the subtleties of Austen, have proven me somewhat wrong. The characters' analysis of Austen is on the shallow side, yes, but I think it's more intentional than not. Because what makes the story niftily- Austenish is that the six members of the book club misread Austen's characters' intentions based on their own lives, romantic inclinations and biases, just as characters like Lizzy and Emma themselves misread the people around them. It's quite clever and meta really. I also thought the cast was great, particularly Maria Bello and Emily Blunt. One scene I enjoyed? Their discussion of Fanny Price. I guiltily admit to being in the "I'd love to re-read it and just once see Fanny end up in bed with Henry Crawford" camp. To me, he's one of the hardest of Austen's rakes to really buy as a rake. Hmmm...I think I wrote my junior paper on that.

It's really just a fluffy ensemble rom-com, but it has more vivacity and cleverness than most of the crap they're turning out these days. So anyway, I'm now in the Jane Austen Book Club fan club, if that makes sense ;)



*exaggeration.

Tsuris and Sensibility

Set in Westport, a Jewish Retelling of 'Sense and Sensibility': I interviewed The Three Weissmans of Westport author Cathleen Schine about finding the perfect Jewish last name for her characters, fighting the crowds at Manhattan’s Fairway market, and Jane Austen’s legacy, beyond “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”"

Here's a taste:

You recently wrote an essay about “Austenolatry.” Will Jane Austen mania ever die out or is it here to stay?

I don’t know if there will even be books in the future — things are changing so fast. But there’s something compelling about Jane Austen’s understanding of families: the combination of domestic life and the sense of urgency about money and financial issues and the commerce of marriage. I think people experience that in different ways in different times but there’s something that perseveres. This particular wave of Austenolatry is huge and very energetic. Like any wave it will calm down a bit, and some other literary fad will emerge.

But, do I think Jane Austen will disappear into recesses of forgotten literature? Until this type of novel disappears, I don’t think she will either. She invented it; she perfected it.

Read the full article here.

JASNA. Hells yeah.

"We have just received your name from JASNA-national as a new member. Welcome."

With this email from the Jane Austen Society of North America, I am officially a Janeite. Incidentally, it's a family membership. I joined with the betrothed one. What better gift could one grant oneself on International Women's Day?

Now back to The Three Weissmans of Westport.

Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and Austenland

Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler


Unlike my friends in the Austen-sphere I tend to avoid Jane-related fiction because it dilutes my pleasure in watching the adaptations--errr reading the books over and over.

But now that I'm twitter friends with some amazing Austen-inspired authors myself, I had no choice but to succumb to their wit and plunge in. This book in particular was a sweet, well-done time-travel piece that really explored the disadvantages to being a woman in the Regency era--oh yes, there were a plethora of those--without bursting the romantic bubble of Austen addicts everywhere (a tough tightrope to walk). Viera Rigler did a great job building a sense of mystery, and I loved the funny but not vulgar anachronistic jokes and shout-outs to feminism. I actually couldn't put this book down on the course of several subway rides. Definitely well-worth a read for those suffering from Austen withdrawal.


View all my reviews >>


As for Shannon Hale's Austenland, which I read in galley form at least a year ago but neglected to review, it's a similar premise but not as meaty. The heroine goes on some sort of Austen immersion trip and embroils herself in romantic hi-jinx therein. The fun in this one is trying to figure out just how much of what's going on is a deliberately-planned part of the program in which she's participating and how much is genuine emotion. Also there's a character named Mr. Nobley. Not quite Mr. Knightley, but kind of cute.

A Woman's Wit

I finally made it to the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan Library today with Simon and our friend Zach, and am so glad I did.

It was a lovely and definitive collection of Jane's lively witty letters written in a tiny hand to save paper, and a full original draft of Lady Susan, plus tons of goodies, like original manuscripts of writing by Walter Scott, Nabokov and Yeats discussing Austen's works, as well as old editions of her books and illustrations. The exhibit ended with a video that showed a number of writers, thinkers, and artists visiting the exhibit and interacting with Austen's letters and legacy. Cornel West called Austen a "Shakespearean novelist" and said he'd like to give her a hug, because without her there would be no Flaubert, Dickens or Tolstoy, while Siri Hustvedt explained that Austen transcends "comedy of manners" to write about the relationships between ourselves, our perceptions, and others. Fran Lebowitz said that Austen hasn't aged or dated because her observations are true.

Zach took this shot of a Frances Burney subscription list,
the only time Austen ever saw her own name in print.

Simon and I were nodding like true devotees throughout the whole thing, and there was something rather moving about all the visitors filtering through the smallish room. I heard so many animated conversations about Austen and her characters, people explaining to their friends and family why she was so awesome. I've never done any JASNA events, so it was a nice feeling of kinship with my fellow Janeites.

It any of you are in the NY area before mid-march, check it out!

Re-Liveblogging Northanger Abbey

This is what I blogged when it originally aired in '08. enjoy!

Sense and Sensibility in Connecticut

A Different Kind of Love Triangle, on the front page of the NTYBR this weekend, is a review of "The Three Weissmans of Westport" a loose take on "Sense and Sensibility,' transplanted to a very Jewy family in that WASPiest of states, Connecticut (hmm, sound like a familiar premise?):

"In Cathleen Schine’s novel, two sophisticated Manhattan sisters, one wildly emotional, one smartly sensible, come to the aid of their beloved aging mother."

Good on the Times for putting this front and center.

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True Love, Jane (Austen and Campion) Style

True Love, Jane (Austen and Campion) Style, my piece at my home base, RH Reality Check, is up for our V-day story package celebrating love. I'm always searching for ways to combine radical feminism with a love of 19th century Brit Lit. Sigh. I think I did a better job with "Bright Star" than with "Emma," perhaps because the latter is so close to my heart right now and I'm still thinking about it in a frenzy, night and day. The intro is below:

In recent months, my favorite romantic works of art, "Emma" on TV and "Bright Star" in theaters, both featured well-mannered Regency Brits in old-fashioned romances. Cultural critics love saying that women viewers' proclivity for costume drama represents a backlash against sexual liberation, a longing for a return to decorum and being treated like property. But to me, it's the opposite. Both film's visions of love achieve the goal of being enrapturing and romantic while subtly critiquing conventional conceptions of love.

#Emma_PBS. Did You Loooove It By the End?

Dear readers, it's long over, and this is a much-belated post. But did the conclusion charm you as much as it charmed me? Were you humiliated and uncomfortable on Box Hill or did you wish Knightley had said "badly done, Emma," a little less yelling-ly? Were you totally enamored of the romantic conclusion, or did you miss seeing the scene in which Knightley and Emma sit together and read Frank Churchill's letter (so perfect, and kind of perfectly snarky for our internet age)? Were you deliriously happy that Emma got to see the sea at long last or did you worry along with Professor Dumbledore/Squire Hamley on downers Mr. Woodhouse? And did you agree with my mother when she emailed me with the following words of wisdom:

Thought Emma was FABULOUS... You could really feel the love between her and Knightley!!!!

I had my quibbles, but the whole thing won me over utterly. So much so that Simon and I bought the DVD, in fact, as a mutual Valentine's Day gift. Yay!

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Which Austen hero, err, Literary Character Is Your Valentine?

What literary character have you fallen in love with?:
Kate Ward at EW's Shelf Life asks us to name "The characters in literature that we love.... Not just respect, or admire, but love." She begs the Edward Cullen adorers to keep from hijacking the thread (amen!) and who should show up on the first page of comments instead but a bunch of ferverent admirers of the one, the only, Captain Frederick "You pierce my soul" Wentworth. Nothing could please me more.

We've had this very same discussion here before, but why not throw the question out again? I for one am adding a new literary hero to my loong list of love-worthy fictional lads: Mr. George "my most beloved Emma" Knightley.

Who's on your list? And please, don't just go hetero here. This is a site for egalitarian bookworms, so feel free to declare your passion for any fictional character of any gender or persuasion below.

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