Jane Austen

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Rule of Threes in effect.

― anthony, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I thought I was the only punter who remembered the rule of three.

Well, you all know I hate Austen. Did very funny piece of coursework for A-Level on Mansfield Park though. The reaction of the various characters being told that Price had been commisioned and ITV sitcom. Ho Ho.

― Pete, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

"being told that Price had been commisioned and ITV sitcom": A-level ENGLISH that would be, then, Pete? Ho ho...

― mark s, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Austen: so very, very slight. But I always keep myself from entirely blaming her for it, because it seems on certain levels that the slightness and conventionality of her work were completely a function of being a woman writing in that era. She's essentially deliberately submerging all of her actual thought beneath these ridiculously formal novelistic concerns ... and while that's crap to read, it's not as if she really had the opportunity to be bold and dashing.

So ... possibly a talent wasted by patriarchy. But I sort of doubt it.

― Nitsuh, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

well, i quite like ol' JA. she can actually be quite bitchy and cutting about the very social concerns you all seem to think she's weighted under. for example the bit in Mansfield Park where she's taking the piss out of contemporary landscaping conventions.

i have just made ricky t bellow with larffter. you see? grate isn't it!!

― katie, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

contemporary landscapes have piss in them?

― Mike Hanle y, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

she can actually be quite bitchy and cutting about the very social concerns you all seem to think she's weighted under

Well, obviously; it's not as if I haven't noticed this. I'm just noting that this sort of content, in her writing, comes across as the equivalent of a person muttering bitchily under his breath -- she has things to say, but slips them in edgewise, frequently sarcastically. Like I said, I don't blame her; it's just difficult not to want her to speak clearly and openly instead of burying her barbs everywhere.

― Nitsuh, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

But if she just said look, look at the shallowness of meaningless social convention she'd be a crashing bore (not that she might not be already) - I think her style is a better reflection of how people actually related and relate to the social than that: conformity and envy and irritation and perception all mixed in. But I've not read much of her.

The unfortunate thing perhaps is how prevalent JA seems to be as a model of 'how women [should] write'.

― Tom, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

May I apologise for my post above and the error rightly pointed out by Sinker. Yes - it was A-Level English and despite my poor typing skills I did get an A.

― Pete, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

you can all just bugger off with yr anti-JA rants. i notice that if it's a *man* writing then "bitchiness" and "barbs" are magically transformed into "satire"... also, Will, you should know better than to criticise JA on the strength of her supposed bourgeois tendencies. i don't see anyone cricising Byron for being a toff, or Wordsworth (creator of some of the most patronisingly-conceived and clumsily- executed writing ever in the form of 'lyrical ballads') for being an arch-tory.

― katie, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Score several points for Katie there. ;-) Wordsworth lived far too long (indeed, some suggest he should never have been born).

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

There is no greater writer of the traditional novel than Jane Austen. End of. The fact that her style of writing has been satirised on numerous occasions bears testament to that.

― Trevor, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Oh i am ready to criticize wordsworth for being more then a reactionary arch tory, i hate wordsworth and i know the difference between satire and social climbing shit. And it does not matter that austen has a cunt , she writes shit. If you want clever satire and need a woamn get thee to Aphra Ben or the Brontes

― anthony, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Hey, I brought up the Rule of Threes recently, but ah well.

This is very difficult for me, as the Jane Austen vs. Bronte Sisters thread nearly split the Lollies and their list in two.

But I'll say here as I said before, it's Jane Austen for me. She's subtler, her characters are delightful (even when they're two dimensional, as her protagonists seldom if never are) and her barbs are all the more sharper and to the point for being so carefully hidden under her sweet icing.

I love reading Jane Austen, it's like slipping into a fantasy world, a perfectly oiled clockwork society where the only major social concern facing a girl is which gentleman to marry. Is it really so terrible to slip into that as into an ether bubble? Because I can always come back to my real, confusing, terrifyingly complex life any time.

― Kate the Saint, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I think this is why i have problems w. Austen . She seems escapist. The kind of author who is gossipping under her breath in the corner of a room . Haughty and CLever .

― anthony, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Jane Austen was the Maureen Dowd of the nineteenth century. That is to say, well-written and sassy piffle. Like being invited to the White House or Parliament, and instead of commenting upon what the big wigs were planning or talking about turning one's attention to the curtains or the food or making jokes about the VIP's clothes. I guess someone must like it, but not me.

Jane Austen -- the yammering yenta of English Literature.

― Tadeusz Suchodolski, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Tad's argument is the classic oh-she-didnt-mention-the-Napoleonic- Wars anti-Austen argument. But while warfare and politics are eternal, so also is social maneouvering and the use of etiquette as a weapon - both of which as I understand it are what Austen made her own as subjects.

I'm finding this thread very illuminating. Do opponents of Austen also disdain love songs I wonder?

― Tom, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

everything that Tom said.

― katie, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

austen and shakespeare bore me shiteless, love songs are much of a much ness, hate songs can be ofetn more entertaining.

― Geoff, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Hey, I'm a proponent of Austen and I disdain love songs. (says the girl who's about to release a single featuring two of them!)

― Kate the Saint, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Austen is complete boring garbage.

― Sam-at-home, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i did mansfield park for a level english and first time we went through it (never did my own reading) thought it was fucking awful boring nonsense. then read it again, and for some reason thought it was well good! im gonna try some of the other stuff...

― ambrose, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

She's a hell of a better writer than I am. And she's better than Jay- Z and Nas put together.

― Frank Kogan, Wednesday, 3 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

She hung around with slave traders and wasn't very critical. Yeah she was 'ironic' and 'barbed' but I don't think that would cut much ice to the millions in pain and misery that her industrialist-landowner characters shafted so savagely in the 1700s.

― Will McKenzie, Thursday, 4 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I wuv love songs too. Actually I think you'll find that liking Jane Austen is a good introduction into disliking love songs. After all her books are not about love, they are about marriage and status. She may well be witty, but wit boils into a nasty kind of misanthropic cynicism if you look closely.

― Pete, Thursday, 4 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Oh come on Will, you can't expect everyone throughout history to have transcended their cultural upbringings and have held unimpeachable modern liberal values.

― Nick, Thursday, 4 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

She may well be witty, but wit boils into a nasty kind of misanthropic cynicism if you look closely.

Yes, I hate funny people.

― Nick, Thursday, 4 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I don't mind funny peculiar people. Its the funny ha-ha's I can't stand.

― Pete, Thursday, 4 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Are you some kind of comedian?

― Nick, Thursday, 4 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

once again Will, i refer you to the countless authors whose connections or actions may not have been very savoury - Wordsworth, Byron, Milton, Chaucer - the last two were in the pay of the government, for Chrissake, and must have seen some pretty corrupt behaviour. picking on Austen for this reason alone isn't big or clever - if, like anthony, you think her writing is shit then just come out and say it. i won't think any the less of you :)

― katie, Friday, 5 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

But the slave thing is interesting because at that time there was huge abolotionistmovement w. no small amount of power , So it was not just a "modern Liberal Value" like feeling shocked by the Anti Semitism in Tamburine or Taming of The Shrew . MArlowe and Shakespeare never knew any jews and there was no one saying hey maybe its a good idea to let these folks back in england.

and i do think her writing is dogs bollocks

― anthony, Friday, 5 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

dogs bollocks good or dogs bollocks bad?

― mark s, Friday, 5 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Anthony, in England Dogs Bollocks means good. i think you meant it in yer actual testicular sense (ooh that reminds me, i have a thread to start)

and you don't *know* that Shakespeare and Marlowe didn't know any Jews.

― katie, Friday, 5 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I think it would depend on whether the dog has been neutered or not.

Jane Austen, meh.

― Nicole, Friday, 5 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I do know that neither of those fine fellows knew any jews becasue there were no jews in elizabethan england at the time, they having been sent packing under a paticularly nasty putsch a few years early and no one felt any need to let them back . My history is sketchy but what i was saying that unlike Austens time there was not a huge movement to outlaw and pervent jewish persuction

― anthony, Friday, 5 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i bet there were some left. and i bet Kit Marlowe would have hung out with them.

― katie, Friday, 5 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

anyway, what's wrong with the idea of writing purely for other people's pleasure and escapism? not everything has to be politically motivated. there are plenty of popular and acclaimed writers who never touch/touched politics with a shitty stick, they just wanted to make people happy. presumably austen thought that literary politics was a job for the journalists and pamphleteers and there's nothing inherently wrong with that idea. if she didn't *want* to write about something that was her business - she never tried to set herself up as a political writer, only as a lady novelist. given that definition and the time that it came from, she would probably have been condemned for any discussion of politics.

― katie, Friday, 5 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

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