This chapter presents a reading of Pride and Prejudice (1813). Pride and Prejudice is a much smoother text, a more polished and perfect work of art than Austen's first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811). It was the first work by a woman to be placed on the “Great Books” curriculum of St. John's University in Maryland in 1949. It was the template for the Regency romances featuring virtuous heroines who marry up. Reprinted by Bentley along with the other Austen novels in 1832, Pride and Prejudice has stayed in print ever since. With its lively dialogue and intricately linked romantic plots, its comic characters and elegant structure, the novel has been subjected to several theater and film adaptations. It also inspired films such as Bridget Jones's Diary (2001).
Courtship as power play is the subject of all Jane Austen's novels; playing with — or against — power is the substance of them. And through irony, by pointing to the limits of definitive and assertive language, Jane Austen suggests a powerful and pleasurable relation women in patriarchy may have to discursive authority. The veiling signature insists on the dignity of femininity itself as "Currer Bell," "George Eliot," "Fanny Fern," or "Mrs. Humphry Ward" do not. It implies, as if modestly, that all ladies speak in the same voice — Austen was of course not the only one to write as one —, which with pointedly feminine obliqueness will avoid such blunt signifiers as proper names, and say precisely what one might expect it appropriately to say, and no more. As A Lady, Austen seems now to represent and speak for British civility, perhaps even civilization, at its toniest.
REVIEW: OUR KIND, A NOVEL IN STORIES, BY KATE WALBERT. NEW YORK: SCRIBNER'S, 2004. 195 PAGES. In Sick Chicks, sixth of ten mordant, moving stories that make up Our Kind, Kate Walbert's dead-on novel about at end of their lives, there's a book-group meeting a hospice, Sunshine Room. Some of members are guests for life state-of-the-art facility; others are visiting Judy. Bring a different perspective. Judy says: Can you imagine if it just us sick chicks? Judy might be making that nice distinction with irony: irony mode of choice tor these women, required by their circumstances. Our Kind narrated present time, first-person-plural voice of ten (including Judy) who were married 1953. Divorced 1976. Most of us excel at racquet sports. Detritus of 1950s, they are washed up together old their rich Connecticut suburb, in same boat, ruefully rifling their memories to identify beginning of their end. (The Beginning of End title of unforgettable final story). To us, still enterprising and finally dry-drunk Canoe and her buddies, Judy's fellow hospice residents are immediately familiar, all we had ever known, their faces slipping silverplated coffee urn, sugar bowl, salad fork, butter long. Elegant outmoded accoutrements of well-born, prosperous, propertied class: nice things like themselves, if cold and hard and (some of them) pointed ones, used to unpleasantness. Viv, who running book group, among nonresidents; Mrs. Dalloway assignment of month. Viv sets up discussion by explaining it about us, that is, women of a certain age (we Americans don't of course mention class; and who invites prune minister to her party, of course English). Too brightly, Viv asks teacher's standard question, Did she peg us? How many of you identified with Clarissa? Total silence. Then, I've always been fond of name Clarissa, Barbara says. don't hear it anymore. You know just where Barbara's coming from, and so does everyone else, poor deflated Viv included: wittily or stupidly, these cling desperately to words. (Intervention, half-crazy Esther says, when she's asked to make one hrst story [called Intervention], is not a word of which I am particularly tond. In another story, Barbara remembers that when her ex-husband called to tell her that their daughter Megan committed suicide his garage, she had to stop herself from correcting him: not /IMHO but hanged.) So Viv battles depression and distraction endemic to Sunshine Room and her own regretful nostalgic memories of more focused attention to books, when she was a star student at Smith College; she soldiers on through fine points of Mrs. Dalloway. But Betsy Croninger says phrase the hour irrevocable makes her think of word cancer, then plaintively observes that she would rather not die. Stalwart, formal Mrs. William Lowell continues to insist that Virginia WoolPs novel intentionally confusing: she prefers a good story, she says, and wants them all to read Pride and Prejudice next. The agree. But Mrs. Lowell dies before next meeting, and group misses what, given her own pedigree, she would have said about Darcy and Elizabeth and their social problems (there was a First Lady her background). And as they think of her, Mrs. Lowell suddenly vivid to them, or rather her former self is-a spry Mrs. Lowell pearls and mules, carrying conversation as she no doubt once carried conversation at dinner parties. I like a good story,' she would offer. A beginning, a middle, and an end.' You gather beginnings and middles of these women's stories from painfully sharp shards: Gay Burt terrified closet on her wedding night, group excursions with daughters, a collective recollected pang for sexy nameless real estate man who our common past encounter. …
From the first publication of Pride and Prejudice to recent film versions of her life and work, Jane Austen has continued to provoke controversy and inspire fantasies of peculiar intimacy. Whether celebrated for her realism, proto-feminism, or patrician gentility, imagined as a subversive or a political conservative, Austen generates passions shaped by the ideologies and trends of her readers' time—and by her own memorable stories, characters, and elusive narrative cool. This book considers constructions of Jane Austen as a heroine, moralist, satirist, romantic, woman, and author and the changing notions of these categories. It finds echoes of Austen's insights and techniques in contemporary Jane-o-mania, the commercially driven, erotically charged popular vogue that aims paradoxically to preserve and liberate, to correct and collaborate with old Jane. The book's discussion of the distinctiveness and distinction of Austen's genius clarifies the reasons why we read the novelist—or why we should read her—and reorients the prevailing view of her work. Reclaiming the rich comedy of Austen while constructing a new narrative of authorship, the book unpacks the author's fascinating entanglement with readers and other admirers.
This chapter discusses Jane Austen as a writer. In a linguistically poorer time, Austen's insistence on care with language is easily misread as school-marmish stress on correctness for its own sake, or as an equally old-fashioned emphasis on mannerliness and lack of profanity. But her care for language is neither only aesthetic nor merely moral, in the contemporary sense that signifies high-minded opposition to blasphemous or sexually explicit language. Writing as a perfect lady liberated Austen from the constraints of being one. Her language is principled and precise, respectful of the fact that both thought and feeling are intrinsic to their expression: she is a moral writer, but she does not moralize. Her novels insist on the importance of details, and she usefully reminds one to pay attention to both the details of living and the words one use.
'%3e%3cpath fill='%23012169' d='M0 0v30h60V0z'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23fff' stroke-width='6' d='m0 0 60 30m0-30L0 30'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23C8102E' stroke-width='4' d='m0 0 60 30m0-30L0 30' clip-path='url(%23b)'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23fff' stroke-width='10' d='M30 0v30M0 15h60'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23C8102E' stroke-width='6' d='M30 0v30M0 15h60'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)