AustenBlog . . . she’s everywhere » 2004 » September

26 September 2004

“There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place”

Filed under: Jane in the News — Mags @ 11:08 pm

(That quote is from Rudyard Kipling’s story “The Janeites,” by the way.)

The Miami Herald has some suggestions for entertaining bored kids during a hurricane, including reading a book together.

Do as they did in the Dark Ages (pre-1990s) and read a book together. Some titles on summer reading lists the world over: Kidnapped, Treasure Island, The Call of the Wild, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Hobbit, or, if you’ve got preteen girls, introduce them to the hilarity of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. For the thespian in you, pass around the book and let different family members read different characters. Heck, act out the whole thing as a play. You’ve got plenty of chances for rehearsal.

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Article on Edward Said discusses his view of “Mansfield Park”

Filed under: Jane in the News — Mags @ 11:04 pm

The Guardian has an article on the late literary critic Edward Said that touches on his controversial views of Mansfield Park.

When Culture and Imperialism was published in 1993, the chapter on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park aroused anger among some critics, because of his discussion of the “dead silence” (Austen’s phrase) that occurs when its heroine, Fanny Price, asks her uncle about the slave trade. The family owns a sugar plantation on Antigua, and Fanny is troubled by this, though to no real narrative purpose (the film in which Harold Pinter plays Fanny’s uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, draws on Said’s discussion to make the point more sharply).

Discussing the novel, Said argues that it is silly “to expect Jane Austen to treat slavery with anything like the passion of an abolitionist or a newly liberated slave”. Said refused to engage in what he termed “the rhetoric of blame”, and attack Austen retrospectively for being “white, insensitive, complicit”. Rather, he criticised card-carrying postcolonial critics for such attacks, and insisted that Austen’s novel is a “rich work” whose “aesthetic intellectual complexity” requires a longer and slower analysis. Austen belonged to a slave-owning society, but we should not therefore jettison her novels as “aesthetic frumpery”.

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