Predictor of greatness
Zoë Heller’s foreward to a new edition of Jane Austen’s Lesley Castle has been printed in the Guardian. Ms. Heller relates the silly humor of these lighthearted stories to the more sophisticated humor of the adult novelist.
Charlotte, with her culinary monomania - her insistence on the loss of victuals being of greater import than the loss of a fiancé - is quite surreal in her dottiness. Twenty-five years later, Austen would take Charlotte’s eccentricity and loquaciousness and innocence, and transmute these qualities into the comic pathos of Miss Bates; here, she is content to give us a kind of pantomime spinster.
