Welcome to readers of the Hartford Courant
Alert Janeite Laura’s mum spotted this one and passed on the word. The Hartford Courant has a feature article about all the Jane Austen media going on these days, including the current and upcoming films and books; and Web sites were not forgotten, including AustenBlog!
Mark Twain was not Jane Austen’s biggest fan. Twain found her writing tedious, her characters dull and her stories offensively sentimental, complaints he also lobbed at the novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper.
“I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin,” he wrote in a letter to Hartford minister Joseph Twichell in 1898. “Every time I read `Pride and Prejudice” I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
And in “Following the Equator”:
“Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.”
Rarely, with the possible exception of his ill-fated investment in the Paige Compositor typesetting machine, did the Sage of Farmington Avenue exhibit worse literary judgment.
Hee. We’re always up for some good-natured Twain bashing. (Though sometimes we suspect he was only winding up his friend who was a Janeite, rather than truly anti-Austen.)
Oh, and we think we’ve discovered the source of Miss Hathaway’s corset/digestion issues: even the relatively comfortable late Georgian long stays aren’t meant to be worn while sitting with one’s knees up in that unladylike posture. No wonder she was having trouble breathing, and the edge of the bottom of the stays were probably digging into her solar plexus. Sit up straight like a lady and there’s no problem.
