Tag: Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility

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Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. Everyman’s Library, 1992.

Reason read: Read in honor of Sense and Sensibility being published in October.

Marianne, rejected by John Willoughby, is impetuous and needs sense. Her sister, Elinor, is the sensible one who will not let on that she is crushed when Edward Ferras plans to marry another. Sense and Sensibility tells the story of two very different romances. Although both are rejected they deal with it in different ways. To utter the words extinction of the individuality is to imply that the price of marriage is a loss of one’s sense of self. Threaded through the story of romance is another, more societal, theme of male dominated lineage. Austen was extremely observant about the world around her. She chose to write abut the country gentry because they stayed in her head, sometimes for years. Like other women authors of her time, Austen published Sense and Sensibility anonymously.
As an aside, I have read a lot of critical reviews of Sense and Sensibility and I have to wonder if Jane’s ghost laughs at the critics who took their task too seriously. Is Jane a psychiatric radical? She is a philosophical conservative? How deep can one delve into the ideology of sense and sensibility? Did she fashion Fanny after the Shakespearean character of Iago?

Author fact: Jane Austen had Elinor and Marianne on her mind when she was twenty years old. She was thirty-six when Sense and Sensibility was finally published. That is a long time for characters to be floating around one’s head.

Book trivia: My version of Sense and Sensibility (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) has an introduction by Peter Conrad.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “An Anglophile’s Literary Pilgrimage” (p 20).

Jane Austen Had a Life

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Rutherford, V.S. Jane Austen Had a Life!: a guide to Jane Austen’s Juvenilia. Arcana Press, 2020.

Reason read: this is a selection from the Early Review Program with LibraryThing.

Disclaimer: the book came with a sticky note asking me to email the author my review. That was a first.

On my first reading of Jane Austen Had a Life I came away thinking it was very dense with interesting information from a variety of sources including biographers such as Virginia Woolf, John Halperin, and E. M. Forster. In addition to Jane’s life Rutherford includes small biographies of people to whom Austen dedicated her stories: Miss Lloyd, Francis William Austin, and the beautifull Cassandra, to name just a few. On my second reading I was distracted by repetitive information, the format being strange with choppy paragraphs, and frequent little one-line quotes everywhere. Maybe this is Australian, but style is also very different with italics and unusual spellings.
The biggest draw of Jane Austen Had a Life was not to discover secret love affairs or an exciting social life of Ms. Austen, but rather the summaries of Austen’s juvenilia. Having never read any of it, Rutherford’s compilation was thorough and well researched. This is not for the casual reader.

Author fact: Rutherford calls her own work “interesting and scholarly.”

Book trivia: Jane Austen Had a Life! was previously published in August 2020 by Arcana Press so not exactly an “early” review on my part. The cover photograph of a castle was taken by the author.

Persuasion

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Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Read by Michael Page. Blackstone Audio, 2016.

Reason read: Persuasion was published in December 1817. Jane Austen was born in December. I also needed a one-word title for the Portland Public Library 2022 Reading Challenge.

As you probably remember from your high school literature class, there is not a whole lot of excitement happening in Persuasion. This is a character driven story based on personality, dialogue and society. Austen’s keen sense of observation was not in what people did, but how they did them.
Confessional: sometimes the characters drove me crazy. Maybe it was a Victorian societal thing, but I was annoyed with one character who was disagreeable to be in the confidences of other residents, especially when they constantly bitched to her about others. Mary is annoying with her fashionable hysterics, ailments and imaginary agitations. I liked the more clever persuasions, like when Anne was persuaded to think the engagement an indiscreet and improper mistake. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Anne as isolated and unloved as she was.
Jane Austen had a tongue-in-cheek humor. My favorite line was something like, “He took out a gun but never killed. Such a gentleman.”

Author fact: Austen was only 41 years old when she died. One of her aunts was named Philadelphia. I have never heard of a person being named Philadelphia before. What a cool name!

Book trivia: Persuasion was unfinished at the time of Austen’s death. Her brother found the manuscript and was able to publish it as Austen’s last novel. I ended up reading an anniversay edition of Persuasion which included exhausting and exhaustive footnotes and some photography that was out of context or referred to other Austen stories. To compliment the anniversary edition I listened to an audio version by Blackstone Audio.

Nancy said: Pearl said Austen’s writing is lighter in tone.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “An Anglophile’s Literary Pilgrimage” (p 19) and again in “Lyme Regis” (p 134). True story: somehow I missed cataloging this entire chapter on my Challenge spreadsheet. Woops.

Mansfield Park

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Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004.

Reason read: Austen published her first work in the month of October. Read in honor of that accomplishment.

My copy of Mansfield Park contained a biography of Austen, a timeline of what was happening during Austen’s short life, and an introduction.
I have to admit, Mansfield Park is not my favorite Austen novel. All the characters seem sniveling and persnickety. Fanny Price is a victim, first of poverty; then a victim of her family’s snobbery as they take her in and abuse her for the sake of morality. Her cousin, Edmund, is the only decent chap. One could argue that Austen was only commenting on the life she keenly observed.

Author fact: Austen died way too young.

Book trivia: Mansfield Park was first published in three volumes and was her third novel.

Nancy said: Pearl said “much lighter in view and tone” when referring to the house Austen wrote Mansfield Park, but nothing specific about the novel.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “An Anglophile’s Literary Pilgrimage” (p 20).