AustenBlog...she's everywhere

2 April 2005

A teen reviews PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Filed under: Jane in the News — Mags @ 3:47 pm

TeenInk.com has a short but quite perceptive review of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, by a teen for teens.

For anyone who loves this type of book, this excellent novel will stay in your hands from the moment you pick it up until you reach the romantic conclusion. The plot and characters draw the reader into a world where a person’s acquaintances depend on social status and connections, and there are rare times when a person marries for true love, but that is the case in Pride and Prejudice.

Though we are usually quick to disparage reviews that compare any of Jane Austen’s novels to “chick-lit,” in this case we are willing to forgive, as the reviewer is attempting to attract readers of such books to read Jane. Rather like putting cheese sauce on broccoli, one supposes. ;-)

Alert Catherine Morland — Gothic heroines are IN!

Filed under: Jane in the News — Mags @ 3:36 pm

The Age has an article about an upcoming film festival in Melbourne featuring Gothic heroines, and of course dear Miss Morland is mentioned, though not by name.

Women were the subjects, readers and often the writers of gothic fiction, which first flourished in the 18th century. It is a genre with its share of detractors: for example, in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen satirised the novels of a popular novelist of the time. Austen created an impressionable and naive heroine whose overheated imagination conjures up sinister goings-on all around her.

Austen’s heroine finds that nothing is as terrible as she imagines it to be, but the women who inhabit the world of the female gothic - and the women of Lady Beware - discover, in general, that their fears are not exaggerations but rather apprehensions of reality.

Too bad there isn’t a good film version of NA to add to that festival for comparison purposes. *cough*

 

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