It is a truth universally acknowledged that the only thing Pride and Prejudice needs to be completely charming is…pirates. We learned this simple truth while watching AUSTENTATIOUS, a musical staged by the 11th Hour Theatre company for the Philly Fringe Festival.

Pride and Prejudice is just a play within a play in this show, as it is really about the social dynamics of a community theatre group that is staging P&P as adapted by one of its members, Emily. She, like so many other misguided souls, attempts to “improve” the story, in this case by sinking Kitty and Mary and adding pirates and tap dancing; but she gets to play Elizabeth Bennet, dancing crazily about the stage and intoning deathless prose such as “Goodbye, my sisters twain!” Other roles in the play are taken by a hilarious assortment of characters: Blake, a pothead doing community service with the group, plays Bingley; Lauren, the diva, plays Lydia Bennet as a cross between Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche du Bois; her boyfriend David, who accompanied her to the audition, is roped into playing Darcy and turns out to be the best actor of the bunch; Jessica, who loves to act, is doomed to a career as second fiddle–and naturally she plays Jane; Dominic, the director, is all New Age bonding exercises and no actual direction, and Sam, the stage manager, pulls it all together and even dons a pirate costume for the big performance. This is inspired by Jane Austen after all, so there is romantic tension, loads of laughter, and spot-on character archetypes. The songs are great–we would love to have a recording of the soundtrack–the cast is talented, and the group of Janeites with whom we attended all enjoyed the play tremendously. There are tons of in-jokes both for Janeites and theatre geeks, and the audience roared with laughter throughout.

There are still a few days to catch this in Philadelphia, and we hope that this very smart and funny play gets to go on the road to much deserved acclaim.

(The Editrix is showing her age with the title reference…she saw that particular show when it was broadcast live and remembers the silly skit very well.)

Alert Janeite Carmen sent a link to a post from about a year ago from Abigail Nussbaum’s weblog, Asking the Wrong Questions, in which she discusses popular misconceptions about Pride and Prejudice, including the constant claim that it is a shallow sort of romance novel. Carmen thought that the post was quite thought-provoking, and we agree.

But these are only the most recent examples–it seems that every few months some journalist with more free time than sense dredges Pride and Prejudice up as a prop to a theory that has absolutely nothing to do with the book itself. The burden of enduring popularity, I suppose, but to a devoted Austen reader since the age of 12, it’s getting a little tiring.

Hear, hear!

Look, I feel for the authors and readers of chick-lit. The amount of crap they put up with is completely out of proportion to the cheesiness of their genre. When books like The Da Vinci Code and the Left Behind series get treated seriously in major newspapers, and Michael Crichton testifies before Congress on environmental issues, it really does seem churlish to dump on this new evolution of the romance novel

Hear, hear! (Sorry for repetitiveness, but there’s really nothing more to say here)

In light of some recent discussions on this very blog, we thought this bit was quite interesting:

Elizabeth Bennet is a ‘modern’ woman

Why? Because she refuses to marry an odious man simply for the comfort of financial security? Because she won’t degrade herself by accepting Darcy’s parsimonious and grudging first marriage proposal? Because she’s intelligent and strong-willed? All of these qualities make Elizabeth a remarkable woman, but no more in Austen’s era than she would be today. As far as her desires and dreams are concerned, Elizabeth is firmly and steadfastly a woman of her own time. She wants to marry a good, honorable man, hopefully for love, but at the very least out of mutual respect. Her refusal of the obsequious Mr. Collins is anything but modern–it is the only correct action, Austen tells us, for an intelligent woman when faced with the prospect of being ruled, her entire life, by a fool. Elizabeth is dismayed by her friend Charlotte’s decision to accept Mr. Collins not because she has romantic notions of marrying for love, but because she has a clear-eyed image of what their marriage would be like.

Yes–going back to our question of a few days ago about whether Elizabeth Bennet would let a man tell her what to do–the thing about Darcy is, he won’t do it, any more than Mr. Bennet did, and for the same reasons. He’ll trust Elizabeth to make good decisions. He respects his wife, and she respects her husband.

Mr. Darcy is a reformed rake

I came across this one in an especially insipid article in the Guardian a few years ago, which trotted Darcy out as an example of how women like to fix men. Which is true, but not about Darcy. It’s what makes Pride and Prejudice such a singular novel–for maybe the only time in the history of the romance, the guy fixes himself.

Because he respected her enough to make himself attractive as husband material. He loved Elizabeth and nothing less would do. Now THAT’S romantic.

The commenters in the original post make excellent counterpoints as well. Do go read it.

We are noticing a theme lately that is running through many of our posts (and there is at least one more to come): the different ways that readers perceive and receive Jane Austen’s novels, and the Common Wisdom that they are simple romantic stories with a brooding, smoldering hero and a happy-ever-after ending. How delightful, then, to receive a note from Alert Janeite Jennifer, who found a fun reference to Jane Austen in a lighthearted novel called Summer in the City by Robyn Sisman.

Several people had warned her off so crowded an area of literary study. Betsy knew better. Previous critics had been so captivated by the superficial romanticism of the texts that they had completely missed the profundities. Betsy felt it was her mission to reinstate Jane Austen as a champion of women’s rights and a serious commentator on social equality, particularly after Hollywood’s crass attempt to claim her as the hot new scriptwriter of light romantic comedy. Personally, Betsy found nothing to laugh at in the novels. For three years she had labored to show that they dealt not with the trivialities of who married whom, but with the great iniquities of society; ageism (Persuasion), the exploitation of the Afro-Caribbean community (Mansfield Park), the gender bias of inheritance law (Pride and Prejudice), and anorexia nervosa (Northanger Abbey). This last analysis, drawing heavily on Freudian case studies, Betsy believed to be a genuine coup of original research.

Oh, what we wouldn’t pay to read that.

Now she had reached Emma (fascism), and was in mid-expose of the totalitarian state of Highbury. . . .

Jennifer added:

Tellingly, throughout the story, the Betsy character means well but always entirely misses the point.

Well, there’s a shocker!

While we do occasionally rant righteous when the stubborn refuse to take a closer, deeper look at Jane Austen’s work, there always is danger of going too far in the other direction. We depend upon our Gentle Readers to talk us down off the ledge if that should happen.

An article in The Independent discusses whether men can write romantic fiction. First, there’s a bit about Jane Austen that is not really germane to the subject except as deep background, but it’s quite good so here ’tis:

Later, in its Gothic form, romance discovered the windswept moors and gloomy castles where it still in many places thrives. But when an undisputed genius turned to these much-loved conventions - as Jane Austen did in Northanger Abbey - she sent them up something rotten. A proud author of romances, Sir Walter Scott felt dismayed that Austen (whom he admired) should poke fun at the form. Already, the notion of a rigid gender distinction in fiction that sets romance-minded women against blundering, insensitive males is looking pretty fragile. Austen’s own inspirations, by the way, included the deeply anti-romantic prose of Samuel Johnson, the equally hard-edged poetry of William Cowper, and the wonderfully crisp, clever diarist and novelist Fanny Burney, who should be much more widely read by everyone, regardless of their physical endowments.

The article goes on to talk about various heroines created by men (Becky Sharp, Sophie Aubrey (!), Bathsheba Everdene (!!), etc. We’ll never know what Jane Austen would have said on the matter (though it is fun to speculate) but we do know what her most delightful hero had to say about it.

“I should no more lay it down as a general rule that women write better letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw better landscapes. In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.”

From an article about The Pain of Modern Technology:

Whenever I see a handwritten manuscript of one of the great novels, Jane Austen’s for instance, or Ernest Hemingway’s manuscript rapped out on a manual typewriter, I imagine what a different world they inhabited.

Annnnnnnd….what handwritten manuscript of a Jane Austen novel would that be, now? Unless you count the canceled chapters of Persuasion, on display at the British Library, none exists.

Alert Janeite AmandaJ sent us a link to a blog post at The Age in which the author claims that women are so busy looking for Mr. Darcy that they are overlooking the more average blokes.

Yet you’re probably wondering who the heck this Mr. Darcy character is.

Well, no, not really.

Well for a start, he’s Jane Austen’s fictional 1812 character from Pride and Prejudice; he’s tall, dark, handsome and charismatic. Yet he’s also known to be moody, arrogant, haughty and above all, unattainable. (When he first meets the gorgeous Elizabeth Bennet - think Keira Knightly

We’ll think Elizabeth Bennet, thank you very much; and how do you know she’s gorgeous?

- he refuses to dance with her at the ball, noting that “she is not handsome enough to tempt me” within her hearing. Is he blind?)

No, just cranky. We can sympathize.

Yet out on the weekend, it seemed increasingly clear that women everywhere were inflicted by the syndrome. At chic pubs across town cries of “Where is my Mr. Darcy?” could be heard as women sipped on their vodkas and ticked off the names of all the toxic relationships they’d recently endured. One friend rattled off her horrific list to me: “Fred was gay, Pete was a workaholic and Clive was married. So, how do I find my Mr. Darcy?”

AHA! There’s a clue. They list what they DON’T want…and then what they DO want. My Mr. Darcy. In other words, the fellow who complements us, who completes us. Our soul mate. And what’s so wrong with that?

(Besides, some of us are actually looking for our Henry Tilney. And he’s taking his sweet bally time about it, let us tell you.)

What do you think, O Gentle Readers?

We are a trifle cranky today, and articles such as this one from The McGill Tribune do not help.

This episode disturbed me at first, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Would this girl have passed up The Undomestic Goddess to read Pride and Prejudice if it had not borne Keira on the cover? And why was the thought of Pride and Prejudice as light summer reading so shocking to begin with? It is a romance novel, after all.

We do think it’s lovely that those who enjoyed the film are picking up the book, and encourage them to do so; but let’s not get insulting!

How else would lazy high school English teachers interest their kids in Romeo & Juliet without showing Westside Story - excuse me, I stand corrected, rather Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet?

The use of the adjective “lazy” spared this writer from a smack with the Clue Trout. Our freshman English teacher interested us in Romeo and Juliet by just letting us read it. We fell in love with the poetry and meter, and while in our crusty spinster dotage we think R&J are a couple of spoiled brats in need of a good swift kick, at fourteen we thought it the most romantical thing ever.

Seriously, kids…just read the book.