Alert Janeite Rob Hardy sent us a link to an article in the Virginia Quarterly Review in which author and Austen scholar Emily Auerbach examines whether Mark Twain really disliked Jane Austen as much as we have been told. It’s not a new article, but certainly interesting!

Here suspicion turns to surmise. Although Twain had boasted earlier in “Jane Austen” that he was doing “the first third” of Sense and Sensibility and not for the first time, he quotes here from the final third of her three-volume novel.

Was Mark Twain a closet Janeite, a fake who read and appreciated far more of Jane Austen than he admitted?

Twain shows his understanding of Austen through his apt description of Lucy Steele as “coarse, ignorant, vicious, brainless, heartless, a flatterer, and a sneak.” Despite his usual admiration for down-to-earth speech and manners, Twain clearly does not prefer the uneducated, “ignorant and illiterate” Lucy with her bad grammar and “want of real elegance” to the well-bred Dashwood sisters. Lucy’s “insincerity” and “artfulness” make her vicious—for both Austen and Twain.

Twain clearly shows an appreciation for Austen’s work–though almost in spite of himself. We know there is a school of thought that Twain was mostly tweaking his friend William Dean Howells, a dedicated Janeite; but if he set out to write an essay lambasting her work, there does seem to be some enmity there–but as Prof. Auerbach points out, it doesn’t quite work out.

Twain and Austen would have been hard pressed to decide who was the more irreverent of the two. Both took on clergymen, aristocrats, and “superiors” of all sorts, skewering them in just a few ironic words. Austen observed of some tedious neighbors, “I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow” and pronounced her clergyman Mr. Collins “favoured” with stupidity. Twain noted of a clergyman, “He charged nothing for his preaching, and it was worth it too,” and he quipped that doctors need but two things: ignorance and confidence.

Despite their pose as “mere” comic writers, both believed deeply in the power of their humor to reveal deeper truths about human behavior. Austen argued in Northanger Abbey that a work dismissed as “only a novel” was in fact “only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

Do read the whole article, it’s very good.

Jane on a rock!

Just in time for Christmas…or Halloween, if Charlie Brown lives on your block. “I got Jane Austen on a rock.”

Thanks to Alert Janeite Laurel Ann for sending this link!

Quite a bit, as our Gentle Readers already know!

The Gonzaga University student newspaper reported on the double lecture on Jane Austen recently held at the university.

Fowler said the Austen myth is everywhere, from films like Bollywood’s “Bride and Prejudice” to Wishbone to “I love Mr. Darcy” sweatshirts. Austen even has her own jokes, including “You might be an Austen redneck if you don’t think it’s weird that everyone seems to marry their cousin.”

Well, that’s funny!

Although Austen’s books are romances, she has been criticized for the lack of sexuality in her novels. The recent movie about Austen, “Becoming Jane,” addresses how she was incapable of having a sexual story of her own.

“But why do we need for Austen to have had a passionate romance?” Fowler asked. “Do we need to believe she wrote from experience about romance and disappointed desires?”

Austen’s books shouldn’t be put on a romantic pedestal. They must, instead, be examined on all levels, Fowler said.

Very true! And one can enjoy the novels on different levels at different points in one’s life.

Austen’s books are all about how people become attached and what leads to marriage, Kries said. Austen believed happiness was bound up in marriage.

However, the connection between the two people must not be merely romantic or only about wealth, as shown in “Pride and Prejudice” by Lydia’s and Charlotte’s unhappiness, Kries said.

But–was Charlotte unhappy?

When some authors of Jane Austen’s time needed their characters to fall ill for the sake of fiction, they usually endowed them with some sort of unidentifiable “fever” or other illness that either killed them or gave them the opportunity for deathbed confessions of murder or love. However, Jane Austen’s own characters usually have somewhat explainable illnesses, despite the fact that medicine in her time was not what one would call advanced, and she didn’t have the Internet to do research, let alone weekly episodes of CSI.

The BBC has taken a look at three fictional heroines–Marianne Dashwood; Catherine Earnshaw Linton of Wuthering Heights; and Lady Dedlock of Bleak House–and consulted physicians in an attempt to identify their fatal (or in Marianne’s case, near-fatal) illnesses.

Marianne is ill twice.

In the first half of the book, it is an episode of general swooning and not eating but in the second half, it is a life threatening fever - and you may guess what caused it. Yes, tripping through wet grass. Austen tells us only that the illness was an infection of “putrid tendency”.

Dr Jane Leese, infectious disease specialist at the Department of Health, thinks that this might suggest typhus, which was also known as putrid fever.

And Marianne had just returned in a coach from London where it was rife.

However Dr Leese plumps instead for a streptococcal sore throat, followed by septicaemia.

On the other hand, Dr Neil Vickers, reader in literature and medicine at King’s College London, thinks Marianne’s illness is simply a plot device.

Spoilsport!

He claims Austen needs a life threatening illness in order to return the previously overexcitable Marianne to the “sense” of the book’s title.

Well, of course she did, but just relax and have a little fun with it! Thanks to Alert Janeites Sue and Lisa for sending us this link.

Speaking of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, a new edition of her History of England has been published along with an edited version of Charles Dickens’ History of England.

“It is the work of an exceptionally bright, if jaundiced, teenager imbued with the egoism and flippancy to be expected of such provenance,” says the introduction by David Starkey, a prize-winning historian from Britain’s Cambridge University. “In fact perhaps the most valuable thing about her history is the glimpse it gives us of a highly talented adolescent on her way to greatness.”

If you haven’t read Jane Austen’s History of England, we recommend it highly.

Steve Johnson of The Chicago Tribune decided to try reading e-books on his BlackBerry, and what better book to start with than Pride and Prejudice?

It is a truth too rarely acknowledged, that a commuter in possession of a sophisticated electronic device, must be in want of a good book.

Put another way, free of the influence of Jane Austen’s famous first sentence, I just read “Pride and Prejudice” on my BlackBerry.

And, reader, I liked it. Against all my own prejudices, all my own pride in the history and tradition of the printed word, I liked it.

I liked holding it in one hand, having it always with me, and customizing my fonts and screen color. I liked reading it on the train without advertising my tastes; I could have been reading “Tropic of Cancer” or “The Firm.”

I really liked reading it in bed without the encumbrance of a book light.

I liked it all so much, I’ve moved on to Austen’s “Persuasion” and am, frankly, halfway annoyed at having to take time away from that to write this. What comeuppance will the vain spendthrift Sir Walter receive, and will his deserving daughter Anne find satisfaction?

We read e-books on our Treo all the time, mostly classics. Jane Austen’s novels and some of the minor works actually live on the hard drive of the device, along with J.E. Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of his aunt, and Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters by R.A. and William Austen-Leigh. They are with us at all times, in case of literary emergency. We also keep a rotating selection of other e-books on a removable Secure Digital card. (The photo at left shows Fanny Burney’s Cecilia on our Treo, Enrico.) All of these e-books are free to download in a large selection of e-book formats at the links above. We love being able to highlight and take notes in the e-book and then export the notes to a memo, which is handy for group discussions, all in a handheld device. Readers are available for nearly every mobile phone and/or PDA. Give it a try! We’re happy to answer any questions about e-books. Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link.

Novelist Josephine Cox fears that women take novels, including hers and Jane Austen’s, so seriously that their romantic relationships suffer for it.

Fewer than one in three women in their late 20s in Britain are married, compared to 85 per cent in the 1970s. If married, they become convinced that some grand passion has passed them by.

Many will point out that Jane Austen was writing romances more than 200 years ago.

Did she lead her readers astray by giving false hope and expectations? The answer, of course, is no.

In Jane Austen’s day, women had many fewer choices and less control over their lives.

Women of the 1790s were more concerned about status, stability and suitability of a possible partner.

So what is important in a marriage? Trust, followed by sharing and tolerance. I think good looks — and having oodles of money — are of far lesser importance.

That last sentence could be right out of one of Jane Austen’s novels. It is important to not get so wrapped up in a certain hero *coughDarcycough* that one overlooks the fact that Darcy is not so much Mr. Right as he is Mr. Right For Elizabeth Bennet. There is a difference, you know.

For those looking for something new and Austen-related to read, we heard from one Edward JB, who has published two alliteratively titled stories via lulu.com.

“The Shades of Udolpho,” Chapter Ten of the Editrix’s novella There Must Be Murder, has been published by the Jane Austen Centre at Bath online magazine. Other new articles at the magazine include a recipe for French pottage, the Regency layette, a review of The Jane Austen Book Club film, an article about Mary Shelley, and directions to make an heirloom baby bonnet.

That’s it for Friday Monday Weekend Bookblogging, and always remember, Gentle Readers: Books Are Nice!