Why has it taken so long for the press to figure this out?

Both in the film Becoming Jane and the TV movie Miss Austen Regrets, Austen was depicted as a waspish cynical tomboy, clever with words if not so clever with men: a sort of Regency Sue Perkins. In the TV movie, there was a greater stab at complexity, as the character grew bitter with age - an Elizabeth Bennett who never nabs Mr Darcy - but in both there was, I would hazard, an incipient underlying sexism, based on the notion that Austen’s work was underpinned by her own failures in love.

Because here’s the thing about Jane Austen. She was a very great genius. She is possibly the greatest genius in the history of English literature, arguably greater than Shakespeare. And her achievement is not that much to do with love, although that was her subject matter. It’s to do with technique. Before her there are three strands in English fiction: the somewhat mental, directly-reader-addressing semi-oral romps of Nashe and Sterne and Fielding; the sensationalist Gothic work of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe; and the romances of Eliza Haywood and Fanny Burney.

However great these writers are, none could be read now and considered modern. When Austen gets into her stride, which she does very quickly with Sense and Sensibility, suddenly, you have all the key modern realist devices: ironic narration; controlled point of view; structural unity; transparency of focus; ensemble characterisation; fixed arenas of time and place; and, most importantly, the giving-up of the fantastical in favour of a notion that art should represent life as it is actually lived in all its wonderful ordinariness. She is the first person, as John Updike put it: “to give the mundane its beautiful due”, and her work leads to Updike as much as it does to George Eliot.

I have no idea how a mainly home-educated rector’s daughter came by all that, but I know that imagining her as a kind of acerbic spinster flattens out this genius. It becomes all about the subject matter and not at all about the huge creative advance her work represents.

*stands and applauds*

Go read the whole thing, it’s quite brilliant and we don’t want to violate copyright anymore outrageously than we already have by copying it all.

And hasn’t Dr. Who visited Jane Austen at some point? Not the current incarnation, but we seem to recall hearing something to that effect about one of the former Doctors.

The Austen 2008 campaign continues as Jane collects superdelegates.

Alert Janeite Patrice was in Bath recently and heard a rumor that 4 Sydney Place, the house in which Jane Austen lived the longest in Bath, was for sale. A bit of investigation showed that two flats are (or once were) available for sale.

The third-floor flat is probably where the servants slept; it’s the top floor with the dormer windows, and seems surprisingly airy for all that.

The second-floor flat is the humdinger: not only is it quite beautifully appointed (we love the kitchen), but check this out from the description:

The great novelist Jane Austen (1775 - 1817) stayed at various houses in Bath, but longest at 4 Sydney Place, to which her family moved when her father retired from his Hampshire parish.

This fine second floor apartment has some retained period features and gas fired central heating. The bedroom was believed to have been used by Jane Austen and her sister.

DOROTHY! Start checking the sofa cushions for spare change again!!! Oh, how we would love to use this for our Bath pied-a-terre!

Alert Janeite Lucy has been watching the television listings for us, and she’s spotted some upcoming titles on ABC1 in Australia: Emma (Kate Beckinsale) on June 1 and Persuasion (2007) on June 8, both at 8:30 p.m. Though the TV Guide won’t let us search any further Sundays yet, this article about Sally Hawkins says that NA will air on June 15 and MP on June 22. Will you get more than that in Oz? It remains to be seen.

Speaking of the article about Sally Hawkins:

Hawkins had just re-read Northanger Abbey, the closest thing in Austen’s repertoire to a brooding Bronte novel,

WHAT? *falls over laughing*

Don’t worry, it gets better. We mean that. No snark.

… (she) started to re-read the more conventionally romantic Persuasion with mixed feelings. Unexpectedly, she was drawn into it and embarked on a journey through Austen’s entire library, including letters and other surviving fragments of her life.

“I completely reformed my view of her,” Hawkins says. “I had been slightly dismissive and the fact that I was dismissive is shameful to me now. It’s like being dismissive of Dickens or Beckett. Her work had never really come into my world before and I’m so glad it has.”

Yay!

It is particularly poignant, she adds, when you realise Austen wrote the novel as she was dying. “That made it all the more remarkable,” Hawkins says. “I think she’s phenomenal.”

We agree. And Sanditon even more so.

We’ve been busy celebrating Memorial Day this weekend at AustenBlog World Headquarters. Dorothy grilled up some burgers and made her “special” iced tea, and next thing we knew we woke up and it was Monday night. Very special indeed. We’ve got a great lineup of articles about books featuring Jane Austen’s characters and articles about Jane Austen’s books, so let’s get started.

Jonathan Gotschall opines that a better way to study literature would be to get away from all that subjective stuff and approach the subject from a scientific standpoint.

Or consider this shibboleth of modern literary theory: the author is dead. Roughly speaking, this statement means that authors have no power over their readers. When we read stories we do not so much yield to the author’s creation as create it anew ourselves - manufacturing our own highly idiosyncratic meanings as we go along. This idea has radical implications: If it is true, there can be no shared understanding of what literary works mean. But like so much else that passes for knowledge in contemporary literary studies, this assertion has its basis only in the swaggering authority of its asserter - in this case, Roland Barthes, one of the founding giants of poststructuralist literary theory.

Is this one of those squishy, unfalsifiable literary claims? No, it is also testable. Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were. Did reactions to characters vary profoundly from reader to reader? As we write in “Graphing Jane Austen,” a book undergoing peer review, there were variations in what our readers thought and felt about literary characters, but it was expertly contained by the authors within narrow ranges. Our conclusion: rumors of the author’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Being a reader interested in the historical context of novels, we never subscribed to the dead-author thing anyway, but we can see that this approach has its good points and its bad points. Good points: interesting discussion about, for instance, the contrast of Jane Austen’s opinions of Bath while writing Northanger Abbey and while writing Persuasion some years later. Bad points: Becoming Jane and all the new genre of poor-Jane-Austen-never-found-her-Mr.-Darcy-so-let’s-give-her-one books and films. We expect our Gentle Readers to have more to say on this subject.

We found references to several new books mentioning Jane Austen and her characters. (more…)

Alert Janeite Baja Janeite found an upcoming event that sounds quite interesting for our British Gentle Readers: Jane Austen Weekend at Basildon Park in Reading on Saturday and Sunday, June 7-8.

Find out more about life in Jane Austen’s time. Themes will include flowers, food, live music and living history displays in the sumptuous surroundings of Basildon Park.

If you go, send us a report!