While I think of it: I did get around to reading Pride & Prejudice. Finished it about a month ago and meant to blog on the subject but just didn’t remember. A few comments, then:
- Yes, I enjoyed it plenty this time out.
- Elizabeth, the reader identification character, is hugely entertaining to realise. She’s a total creature of wish-fulfillment; sprightly, unflappable, equal to every situation, and with her only real flaw her dislike of a guy who basically insulted her to her face the first time they met. I’ve heard it said that Mr Darcy is a fantasy type, and perhaps he is, but Elizabeth stretched my credulity further.
- Man, those Regency girls basically didn’t do anything with their time. They would have a sew, then go out for a walk, and then write a letter, and then retire, and that was about it apparently. I remember now one of my teenage responses: incredulity at the fact that no-one did anything the whole way through.
- The pompous Mr Collins is much funnier at 31 than he was at 17.
A lovely light read. I’m glad I went back to it.
Extra: over on LJ I gathered some information about that habit of the era’s writers to refer to “_____shire” and “Mr _____”.
I noticed something like that in ‘Lord Jim’, though it’s Modernist rather than Regency. The foul-mouthed Brown keeps using the adjective “d____d”, except at some point he says “damned”. I’m wondering if “d____d” covered something more offensive by 20th-century standards than “damned” 😉
I hate Jane Austen. We should burn them all!
Mostly, I just haven’t had exposure to the romances she “burlesques”, so her actual work ends up pretty well identical to that in my mind. Which makes it, just not my thing. At least she’s less depressing than the Brontes
mashugenah: “Burlesques”? Are you sure you’re thinking of Jane Austen? She was not a parodist.
I also don’t get how you could equate her books that you have read, with books you haven’t read. How exactly does THAT work?
mr collins is funnier every time i read it! and darcy handsomer….
Pearce: possibly Northhanger Abbey.
Maybe the word wanted is something like “critique” rather than “burlesque”. She is often an ironist.
And I can sort of see the logic of the book-read/unread equation once one passes from blunt-instrument terms like “parody”.
eg: if you’ve never read a book in the “sea yarn” genre, you’d probably still work out what Swift was taking the piss of in the ‘nautical jargon’ chapter of Gulliver’s Travels. However, you might struggle to see the ways in which Conrad holds the conventions of the genre up to scrutiny in his story ‘Typhoon’, and only see a sea yarn. Noting that Conrad is probably the more probing than Swift, at least to that genre.