Last night, I took a night off from the work (man, so much of the work) and watched the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice. A few weeks ago, we watched Becoming Jane which is about Jane Austen’s conjectured true love story*. It’s all been a bit Jane Austen lately.
Which is good, actually. I enjoy the screen adaptations of her work much more than I enjoyed slogging through P&P itself as a 17-year old**, or Northanger Abbey as a 16-year old. I was really expecting to enjoy them both, but I didn’t. Maybe with a decade-and-a-half of distance I’d find them more enjoyable? Perhaps. In any case, the movies make for good watching.
Salon has a great article about the whole Austen revival (which, it claims, is a resurgent ‘second wave’ after the initial wet-Colin-Firth revival of the mid-90s, although poor old Colin does appear to be the central figure in this revival as well). It’s a neat little piece which tries to draw connections between the frocks and true love fantasies of the current wave and the sometimes-acidic cynicism of Miss Austen herself. I would have you peruse it for yourself.
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Washington Post in doing journalism shock! A four-part investigative series exposing Dick Cheney’s hidden coup of the US government. Absolutely incredible stuff. For a taster, check out these ten things you should know from parts one and two.
This is seriously big-deal stuff. Check it out.
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That was your friday linky.
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* Watched at the Lighthouse. The camera got tangled just as the film was coming to an end. The cinema plied us with free wine and chocolate for fifteen minutes while they fixed it, then the lights darkened, and the film continued – to show a single reaction shot of Anne Hathaway. Then, credits. Heh.
** In my single-sex boys school, extending an invitation to walk with the words “shall we take a turn about the room” was all the rage. (Not really.)
8 thoughts on “Friday Linky”
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I didn’t read Jane Austen at all until I was in my 20s. When I was 12, the teacher made me read an abridged version of pride and prejudice which put me off for the longest time – p&p has the sort of plot that isn’t going to be at all interesting for a 12 year old, and ummm…isn’t the point of Jane Austen in the detail, so abridging doesn’t seem that smart either. I really liked the books in my 20s when I dared to come back to them, but suspect that I probably wouldn’t have liked them so much as a teenager. I did like Wuthering Heights as a 16 year old though, haven’t read it again since, but have this suspicion that if I tried to read it now it would seem horribly teenage to me.
Funny, I’ve been on an Austen-movie kick thanks to flatting with (yet another) Austen fan – she convinced me to overcome my prejudice against Knightley and watch that version of P&P. Surprise: it was good. Of course, I liked the Paltrow version of Emma, so it shouldn’t have been too surprising.
Yet to see Becoming Jane – interestingly, the flatmate has a prejudice against Hathaway.
I also didn’t read Jane Austen till my 20s, in any form. The author I had to unlearn in order to read was Katherine Mansfield – since we had to read that when I was 10. I wonder if the Irish force their 10-year-olds to read Joyce? I suppose that’s what Bloomsday is all about – honouring the legacy by doing everything you can to efface what it actually is.
Andrew: I too really enjoyed the Knightley P&P. Can you elaborate on the Bloomsday thing? I marked Bloomsday this year by saying to myself “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan” and feeling self-congratulatory for having read and enjoyed (if not understood) ‘Ulysses’.
My totally dismissive summary would be that it’s more a celebration of Irish chauvanism than of Joyce, and passed off by subsuming Joyce and his criticism/satire of Irish chauvanism within it (as if, for example, Ulysses were a bardic tract) – much as I think the celebration of Mansfield in NZ has often reflected the values of Mansfield’s father rather than those of Mansfield.
I may have a lower tolerance for all that manufactured Oirish craic than others though.
Meanwhile, I’d wondered who among us has actually read Ulysses… 🙂 I’ve got about as far as the library episode and taken a break, but that’s not ’cause I’m not enjoying it.
I really hate Jane Austen.
In terms of Ulysses, my hat is off to you sir, if you can tell me which character actually was Ulysses. Most people get that wrong. 🙂 For myself, I read little, enjoyed less, and understood none at all.
Do yourself a favour and have another crack at it. I surprised myself last summer by vooming throught P&P and Sense and Sensibility and greatly enjoying them. They were witty and arch and subversive.
Read them as tracts on the wretched dependency of the 18th century gentlewoman on men.
Or as Auden put it, “the amorous effects of brass” (explaining why Austen was actually more shocking than Byron, a typical “notorious” writer).
All right, then. Both Stephen and Mash have prompted me to put P&P back on the reading agenda – I certainly don’t hate Austen, but I didn’t find it witty, arch and subversive either. Time to reevaluate. Sometime or other. 🙂
Which character was Ulysses? I always assumed without much reflection that it was Bloom. And now, checking out a Ulysses analysis site I read a month ago (can’t remember how I stumbled upon it) they explicitly claim Leopold = Ulysses and Stephen = Telemachus, so… I am all ears to hear more of this.