So I’m sure by now y’all have heard about the new book A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, edited by Susannah Carson. There has been a review in The Economist and an excerpt in The Wall Street Journal, of all places. I haven’t read the book yet—have any of you? I’m kind of torn between wanting it for Christmas [hint hint], and feeling just a mite rebellious about it. For one thing, my friends will tell you that I’m a little contrary, and I can’t help but think of the pamphlet 100 Authors Against Einstein, who were all denying his General Theory of Relativity, and his response: “Why 100 authors? If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!” But I guess this does not hold in reverse: 33 reasons to read Jane Austen doesn’t mean one reason not to read Jane Austen would be enough if you never have.
Also, the excerpt in The Wall Street Journal, by James Collins, is, as alert reader Rosemary pointed out, stuffy and patronizing. Oh please, like no one but James has used Jane Austen as a moral compass in his, or, thank you very much, HER, life! When we’ve all been discussing this very thing for months. OK, not “moral” sometimes, but thanks very much, the Austen fan base is not just a bunch of drooling romantics! OK, maybe we drool sometimes (you know what I mean), but we appreciate subtleties too, you know! Mr. Collins (LOL) is just like Lady Catherine, all affability and condescension. Pooh!
Then, once nicely annoyed at being patronized at, my hackles got raised by Robert Fulford, writing in The National Post. He really does seem to read Jane Austen without any eye to what she’s talking about, and calls her just “a vicious gossip.” Now, many of my friends would take that as a compliment, and maybe Miss Austen would too, but he seems also to take pleasure in patronizing the fans, assuming we can’t see and enjoy her sharp side as much as her romantic side. Julie Ponzi at No Left Turns has an interesting reaction to Mr. Fulford (though this link isn’t working for me now, so good luck . . .). She points out the “pen envy” and contradictions in his article.
So what do we think about all this? I think, yay, at least they’re (good old “they”) talking about her. As Harriet Evans says over at The Guardian, female authors often don’t get talked about. I think, people underestimate us, and underestimate her. Somehow, Miss Austen’s reputation as a serious author is still on the line. Almost 200 years after her death, do people still see her as an early chick-lit figure? Heck, maybe she was chick-lit because she just wrote about ordinary women and men doing ordinary things. Depends on what you think about chick-lit, I guess. 
At least they’re talking about her? That makes me so mad! But then, it’s always hard for comedy to get much respect.
Maybe the 33 would be better, would be spiced up in a truly Austen way, if there was some dissension among their ranks, or if they weren’t universally praising. Only Jane Bennet gets to be so sweet and still be interesting.
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Happy Thanksgiving, readers! Have some pie, on us!
Now that that’s over with, let’s be serious. The holidays are coming, and you know what that means: joy, wonder, and sparkly lights? No. (Well, yes, but…no.) Think shopping. Think six a.m. crowds. Think finding the perfect gifts for your loved ones, unless you’d rather bless them with a mounted faux fish that sings “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” every hour on the hour. Fun for the whole family!
We at Austenacious are here to help, whether you’re making up your own wish list or shopping for the Austenite in your life. We’ve scoured Etsy—land of the vintage, the handmade, and the vintage handmade—for the coolest, prettiest, funniest Janely goods out there, and we think you’ll like what we found.
Happy shopping!
Do Not Faint Jane Austen Moleskine journal, $16 at yardia
Paper and pen! How quaint! Give the writer in your life a bit of Janely advice and a cool place to record Important Thoughts. This medium-sized Moleskine has 96 pages (80 plain, 16 detachable); the cover features an original illustration of a Regency-era dress and a quotation from Jane’s early novel Love and Freindship (sic). Jane would have loved it; we certainly do.
Wallet made from print of a P&P first edition, $19 at bookity
Calm down: It’s not a real page. (We checked.) But it is a reproduction of the title page from a first edition of Pride and Prejudice, printed on 100% cotton, lined with striped pink fabric, and made into a wallet/card-holder, and it’s also a pretty awesome gift for your favorite P&P fan, especially if he or she tends towards disorganization or likes giving heart attacks to fellow book-lovers. Not that we know anybody who needs this. Ahem.
P&P Christmas ornaments, $7 at Brookish
To be honest, practically everything from Brookish would be a great gift for the Austen-fan set, but we think these Christmas ornaments filled with nearly two sliced-up pages from Pride and Prejudice (again, copies—we hope) are especially elegant. Did we say Christmas ornaments? Nothing here is red or green: keep them out all year long for a shot of literary decor whenever you need it.
Mr. Darcy proposal dish towel, $10 at Brookish
Need a little romance in your life? What about your kitchen? This dish towel screen-printed with Mr. Darcy’s proposal (in pretty handwriting, no less) to Elizabeth Bennet is just the thing to put you in the mood…what for, we don’t really want to know. Just promise us you won’t swoon with anything hot in your hand, okay? Safety first.
Eight letterpress cards with Jane quotations, $16.95 (or $4 each) at letterarypress
Words escaping you? Really need to get your point across, but not looking forward to catalyzing epic drama over the holidays? Maybe Jane can help. Say what you really mean with these eight beautiful and beautifully snarky Jane-quotation greeting cards by letterarypress–after all, Jane says it best, and she’s not around to get in trouble!
Regency couple suitcase, $52 at BrightWall Studios
Carry your baggage—emotional and otherwise—in style with this vintage suitcase hand-illustrated with the silhouettes of a Regency couple. Lined in red, with amenities of the luggage of yesteryear (movable compartments!), the suitcase measures 18″ x 21″ x 8.5″—perfect weekend size—and trust us, you’ll never lose your stuff on the airport baggage carousel again!
Jane Austen finger puppet greeting cards, $3.25 at DearDeerDesigns
Looking for a gift that doesn’t require extra postage? This gift is the card: a double-sided Jane Austen finger puppet greeting card! Make a cut-out or leave her whole; if you think a paper finger puppet isn’t hours of entertainment for the likes of Jane’s fans, well, we must have just met. Nice to meet you.
You Have Delighted Us Long Enough switchplate, $10 at alamodestuff
For the reluctant, impatient, or charmingly sarcastic host in your life, Mr. Bennet comes through…as always. Guests staying too long at the piano? Guests staying too long, period? This switchplate comes in a variety of styles (to accomodate all your lighting-control needs) and is certain to make your friends laugh…as the door shuts behind them. See? Form and function: together at last.
Now, get out there, people! Shop! Find cool handmade stuff for the people you love!
Oh, and one more thing:
Happy holidays.
Dear Jane,
One of the consultants my company works with is super hot, and all of my colleagues know I think so. I don’t want to date him and have no plans to pursue him; I just like looking at him. However, my colleagues continue to imply that all I really want is a “private meeting” with this guy. How can I get them to see that I’m not the office slut?
Sincerely,
I Don’t Even Want to Do It on my Desk
My dear madam,
There is nothing wrong with liking to look at a well-set-up man, especially one who dresses the part. Does this gentleman wear a blue coat? Or a great coat (those do enhance the breadth of the shoulders, you know)? Why some among us—I’m looking at you, Sir Walter, put the mirror down!—think that looks are simply everything. Does this gentleman parade the halls of your workplace in a well-fitting suit? Does he talk condescendingly of his fondness for cottages in the country? These are good signs that he is a mere popinjay, and can be ignored out of hand, even if he is cute.
Of course, your question did not concern the eligibility of the gentleman; in fact you expressed desire for other people to stop speculating on his eligibility and character. Miss Austen apologizes (and turns a blind eye on your more explicit references, even if as much of that does go on in the country as in the town!). I doubt very much that your coworkers really do think you are the office slut, if this is all they have attacked you with. But the rampant desire to speculate about any possible relationship for any young lady has not changed in 1,000 years or more, and is not likely too, either. This gentleman is provoking exactly the reaction in your neighborhood that Mr. Bingley did when he turned up (It is a truth universally acknowledged, etc, etc). You recall how much Miss Bennet enjoyed being teased about him and how tactless, nay, oblivious, most of her relations were in this regard. It is indeed a friend of great delicacy and discernment who can repress his or her natural instincts and treat your feelings with respect. Cherish these people. Regarding the others, I advise philosophy: they will never change. Though a biting remark is tempting it does tend to, uh, come back and bite you. You might also attempt to divert their interest into other channels. Miss Austen leaves it to you as to how scrupulous or honest you wish to be in this endeavor.
For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?
Mrs. Fitzpatrick
pp Jane Austen, signed in her absence
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It’s a quiet weekend night at Austenacious HQ (East). Miss Ball sits in silence, embroidering her Mr. Darcy Che Guevara chair seat covers and dreaming of men in top boots with well-stocked trout ponds and a passion for the working man.
And then.
Blurp!
F1rthygdness129: I’m so annoyed right now! I’m finally almost finished re-reading Sense & Sensibility, and the ending is ridiculous!
LadyCatherinedeBlerg: How so?
F1rthygdness129: They’re all totally pimping out Marianne to Colonel Brandon!
F1rthygdness129: “They each felt his sorrows and their own obligations, and Marianne, by general consent, was to be the reward of all.” The freakin’ REWARD of all. They all want Marianne to marry Brandon, and he deserves to have the girl he wants; therefore, of course she should marry him. WTF, mate?
LadyCatherinedeBlerg: Yeah, somehow my entire memory of the end stops with Elinor’s freak-out. Is that really how it goes down? Way to mentally fanfic a happier ending for Marianne, self.
F1rthygdness129: And it goes on: “With such a confederacy against her—with a knowledge so intimate of his goodness—with a conviction of his fond attachment to herself, which at last, though long after it was observable to everyone else, burst on her—what could she do?”
F1rthygdness129: WHAT COULD SHE DO? She could make up her own mind and heart and think for herself!
LadyCatherinedeBlerg: Somehow I think that if somebody had said that to Jane herself, there would have been words.
F1rthygdness129: (Totally unrelated, I just took a ginger cake out of the oven, and I’m dying for it to cool down so I can eat some. Mrs. F is going to be lucky if there’s any left for her when she comes over tomorrow night.)
LadyCatherinedeBlerg: This is like the world’s worst diet. “There’s cake…three thousand miles away. If you want it, WALK FOR IT.” Heh.
F1rthygdness129: Eventually, she really does fall in love with him, so it’s not like it’s TOTAL crap. “Marianne could never love by halves; and her whole heart became, in time, as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby.” But still…this wasn’t how I remembered the ending.
LadyCatherinedeBlerg: Me, neither, but I…kind of like it? I mean, not the practically arranged marriage part, but the part where she learns the subtleties of love through a slow-burn relationship. Especially if Colonel Brandon doesn’t suddenly take off his unsexy glasses, shake out his hair, and become somebody he clearly isn’t.
F1rthygdness129: Heh. Did you ever watch Smallville? I was all about Michael Rosenbaum as Lex Luthor. But mostly I watched because the TWoP reviews were HI-larious! But I digress. At least Austen reminds us that Willoughby is still a big douchebag.
LadyCatherinedeBlerg: …Apparently the great Internet spell-checker in the sky doesn’t think “douchebag” is a word.
F1rthygdness129: When he shows up and talks to Elinor (as Marianne is on her death-flu-bed), Elinor finds herself feeling sorry for Willoughby. And eventually everyone sort of softens toward him. But on the last page of the book, we’re told that Willoughby—despite knowing that he screwed it all up—still finds plenty of enjoyment in his activities, marriage, and life in general. So despite his sort-of redemption, Austen takes him down a peg. Yay for that!
LadyCatherinedeBlerg: And that’s really all we need: to rightfully hate the douchey guy.
F1rthygdness129: That, and cake.
LadyCatherinedeBlerg: And cake.
F1rthygdness129: Speaking of which…
LadyCatherinedeBlerg: …Yeah. Priorities. I’ll see you later.
All I can say is, we here at Austenacious are currently on the prowl for a good photo of a disco ball to add to our header. We’ve long felt that the combination of Jane and the 20th/21st century needs a little fun, a little surrealism. Clearly, That Mitchell and Webb Look agrees!
Come one, come all, to the Jane Austen Fight Club, where the very best from Jane’s world and the very best from…well, everywhere else…duke it out for all to see! The prizes: pride, honor, and the adoration of Jane fans everywhere, or a “Mr. Darcy Fights Like a Girl” t-shirt and some quality Regency-era medical care!
Today’s contestants: John “Yes, I Really Am This Much of a Tool”
Willoughby, dashing and dastardly bad boy from Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and Edward “Sparklepuss” Cullen, Twilight teen heartthrob/kindly vampire/stalker. They’re handsome! They’re flattering! They like teenaged girls lacking in common sense! Whose sensitive yet lustful stare will prevail? Only time and raging hormones will tell!
In their corners:
John Willoughby is handsome and lively and beloved by young girls and income-scouting mothers alike. He gives horses as gifts; he cheats at cards, but only for his girl; he rescues young ladies from tumbles down hills, and doesn’t track mud all over the house when he’s done. Salient quotation: “It’s okay; I’ve never done this before, either…”
Edward Cullen is a sparkly vampire, the blood-sucking monster of the Lisa Frank universe. He’s prone to rescuing fair damsels (from werewolves, so suck it, Mr. “Let me save you from the rain and your weak joints“). He likes baseball, though he only ever wants to play when it’s a rain-out. He has never, as far as we know, had an affair with or a child by a fifteen-year-old (…he waits until they’re eighteen. AT LEAST!). Salient quotation: “You take a nap. I’ll just sit here and listen to the Police and, you know, keep an eye on you.”
Handicaps:
Willoughby is…how do we put this? Oh: a skeevy, on-leading, non-responsibility-taking, child-abandoning bastard. Is that a problem?
Edward has the ability, with an unfortunate slip of the mouth, to turn the lady in question into an immortal (yet undeniably sexy, because really, she’d better be, after all this) creature destined to suck the blood of living organisms for all eternity. Apparently.
Decision:
Edward, obviously. He’s a vampire. Does Willoughby carry Marianne Dashwood home with his super strength? Does he sparkle in the sun during long, romantic walks on the downs? Does he eventually raise up an army of like-minded bad guys and father a half-vampire baby named after his and Marianne’s dead mothers?
I didn’t think so.
He may be a) ridiculous and b) a stalker, but c) your argument is invalid.
Knockout for Mr. Cullen! Ding ding ding ding ding!
I took up my pen tonight intending to tell you all that “Jane Austen Loves Emoticons.” It would be a steep leap, I knew. She was not the girl for happy faces lying down beside her words. But—she was the woman for dashes—! Dashes of all kinds, & all sorts of other slapdash grammar by our standards;—Miss Osborne is going to go crazy when she sees this post. — She usually cleans up our punctuation. (That’s what you get for reading the blog-child of a writer, an editor, & a copyeditor.) But—Miss O—I’m saying lay off this one!—This is the homage to Miss A’s own crazy punctuation.
When I first read Lady Susan, The Watsons, & Sanditon as a teenager I was struck, by the plots, by the rawer picture they present as compared to the polish of the finished, longer works;—but also, by the punctuation. As a good little student, it had simply never occurred to me that punctuation could be a means of expression!—Not to mention the charming, erratic Capitals. Punctuation, until then, was a list of rules, not a playground.—So, I started Wildly Varying the style of my grammar, and even of my spelling. I used punctuation in my writing to indicate the Quality of different Types of Silences. . . the questioning silence —? . . . the shocked silence —! . . . the “I can’t believe my ears; how could you suppose I’d be so stupid” silence —?! . . . or —!? I even, you can see it coming, started drawing little happy faces beside my notes to indicate that I was being sarcastic (who, me?) . Though I never liked the winky face or the sad face; they seemed to me insincere at the time. Mind you, this was in the dark ages, back when I wrote LETTERS to people, and they wrote letters back to me. Now, everyone understands what those little faces mean.
It was Jane who taught me to play with punctuation, to make sentences read the way they sound in your head. Why then, am I not telling you that Jane Austen loves emoticons? — Two reasons: one, I have a feeling she’d think they were lazy (though maybe space-saving in letters); and two, flipping through my copies of the aforementioned works and the complete letters, I noticed that she uses dashes after almost, if not every sentence. — This is in addition to using them mid-sentence, and to using other ending punctuation after phrases and sentences.
What’s up with this? Was it a convention of the age, a stylistic peculiarity all her own, a device to make it easier to read cross-hatched letters, or what?—I sincerely hope some scholar of the age can enlighten the grammar geeks of Austenacious on this point, or we may be drowning in our own dashes. Though I have noticed scholars seem to fight passionately about editing Austen’s punctuation, so they may not have time for a simple question from the likes of me.
In the meantime, though I may edit other people’s work with the sparingness of modern punctuation, I reserve the right to be as profligate as I like with my own.
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One of the things I love about reading a book or watching a movie for the twentieth time is noticing something that didn’t strike me in previous encounters. I’m currently re-reading Sense and Sensibility, and there are two things that keep jumping out at me: Elinor’s emotions and long sentences.
My movie-watching-to-book-reading ratio is decidedly tilted toward the Emma Thompson movie, making my mental image of Elinor Dashwood significantly older, more reserved, and less giddy and/or painfully in love than how I imagine her when I’m reading. Then again, I don’t think the recent portrayal by Hattie Morahan was any less austere, so perhaps not having the benefit of reading Elinor’s inner thoughts makes all the difference. I enjoy hearing those inner thoughts. It makes her outward self that much more thoughtful. Elinor is as emotional as Marianne. She just has the amazing fortitude to contain her innermost feelings and not count her chickens before they hatch. Couldn’t we all use a little more of that? I’m not suggesting that emotions aren’t healthy, wonderful, and enjoyable to behold; I simply find it a relief to know that there are some cautious (while still lovable and loving) people out in the world.
A friend of Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s recently commented that she was like Marianne in her youth, but has become more like Elinor as she’s gotten older. This suggests that there’s hope out there for our confessional culture! Also, it may be another reason why I think of Elinor as being so much older than Marianne—most people learn Elinor’s kind of fortitude as they get older, and don’t have it when they’re 20!
Now for the long sentences. I confess that I can only quote books or films in short bursts. (We’re talking things like, “I greatly esteem . . . I like him” and “No one wants your concertos here!” and not soliloquies.) So it’s no wonder that when Edward Ferrars is talking about his search for a profession, I remember the lines, “I always preferred the church . . . but that was not smart enough for my family. They recommended the army. That was a great deal too smart for me.” Pure, snarky Austen! But Edward continues:
“As for the navy, it had fashion on its side, but I was too old when the subject was first started to enter it, and, at length as there was no necessity for my having any profession at all, as I might be as dashing and expensive without a red coat on my back as with one, idleness was pronounced on the whole to be the most advantageous and honourable, and a young man of eighteen is not in general so earnestly bent on being busy as to resist the solicitations of his friends to do nothing.”
My friends, that is a sentence of epic proportions! And still filled with Austenian goodness. My bold plan was to diagram the sentence, but I failed miserably and am too embarrassed to share my work. (Though if you want to put on your grammar hat and give it a whirl, you will receive a gold star or perhaps a congratulatory haiku from Miss Ball.) Some movies and even audio books distill dialog and exposition to the essence of the situation at hand. Emma Thompson’s Academy Award–winning script certainly did that, and I appreciate it. As much as I love Hugh Grant, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t want to sit through that entire speech. Mostly, I’m amazed at the idea that Austen’s dialog is typical of her own speech patterns and those of her circle. Is it, or was book dialog fancier in the day? Anyway, no executive summary for that gang! They clearly had enough time on their hands to get into the nitty gritty. But I don’t find that Austen’s long sentences make her hard to read. Do you?
~~~
On a completely unrelated note, I have to share one annoying thing:
I never write in books. I treat them with respect. (Yes, that’s right. I never highlighted a single page of a textbook in college.) But I was so irked to see this typo that I marked it. Perhaps it’s time to move the colored pencils and Post-It notes away from my nightstand.
Let’s begin with a story.
Once upon a time, a young man (we’ll call him Shmitzwilliam Farcy) and a young woman (Belizabeth Shmennet) hated one another. Only, over the course of time, they actually came to love each other—go figure—and to overcome the personal barriers standing between them and a life of deep mutual respect and affection. Wonderful! Too bad poor Shmitzwilliam was obligated to marry his sickly cousin and too much of a weenie to stand up to his crazy rich aunt! He ditched Belizabeth, and they both died unloved and unfulfilled.
The End.
I love a good love story. Don’t you?
I’ve been reading lately about Jane’s happy endings. Verdict: there are a lot of them. As far as her star couples (I’m tempted to say “ships”; thanks for that, Miss Osborne) are concerned, Jane deals exclusively in true and lasting love between the people that deserve it most; any hints of final sadness are relegated to side-dish relationships (Mr. Collins/Charlotte Lucas, for example; possibly also Lydia/Wickham) and not much mentioned in the first place. How does this consistent promise of happiness play in our postmodern culture, where we often doubt the depth of stories where everything works out well? Can we trust the truth of all this happily ever after?
I’m currently re-reading Persuasion (because it’s wonderful, and because there’s nothing like running an Austen website to remind you of all the Austen you don’t remember), and let me be clear: Persuasion requires a happy ending. The expectation of Anne and Captain Wentworth’s love resuming after all these years gives the novel shape; without it, there can be no passage of time or change of cirumstance, only chapter after chapter after chapter of resigned pining, forever and ever, amen. In that case, it’s not so much a story as a meditation on grief and on unmet needs—we have to believe that Anne would continue to soldier on, but this is a woman still mourning (at heart, if not publicly) after eight years. Something has to change; the sadness and the tedium of all that pining, without the relief of a happy ending, would kill the reader if not the characters. Certainly people do write novels meditating on lost love, on loves that are never found, but even they have more going on than Persuasion minus the final, happy reunion.
It’s unclear whether any of Jane’s other novels would do any better with a sad or ambiguous ending—if Emma Woodhouse were required to work further to earn Mr. Knightley’s love, for example, or if Bingley and Jane never quite got their timing straight. Perhaps, after all, none of Jane’s novels can have ambiguous endings. Perhaps there’s no such thing as an ambiguous ending with Jane—considering the emotional and sometimes practical stakes that her heroines face, maybe anything less than a happy ending must be considered a tragedy. (In Jane’s time, anyway, ambiguity was not a popular choice for endings—emotionally mixed finales wouldn’t come into vogue until the advent of the Modernists and their fragmented, topsy-turvy ways. Until then, the choices are pretty much Austen happy or Hardy crushing.)
In any case, happy endings aren’t totally the point for Jane—her best work is not in the end (delightful though it may be), but in the means. She’s an observer and a cataloguer of love and its power to change people, and happy endings provide some security for that study—a safe place from which to examine the psychology of love. (She could, of course, have written about the psychology of sorrow instead—of loss and permanent loneliness. After all, Jane herself never married. But would this have shown more depth than a consistent observation of success in love? Doubtful; also, far less fun to read.) If Jane’s heroines don’t end up with the “right” guy, the entire tone of her work–of all her works, collectively—changes; if Anne, for example, finally recovers from her original attachment to Wentworth and learns to love herself for the capable and independent woman she is, then it’s not a study in love and strength of character anymore. It’s a coming-of-age story. If Mr. Knightley moves on, unable to handle Emma’s consistent brattery, that‘s a cautionary tale, not a meditation on love and personal change. They might be fine stories, and they might appeal to our modern sense that everything shouldn’t wrap up so neatly, but they lack the basic frame for observing the human heart, as Jane does.
Now, if you’ll excuse me…I’m going to go read the end of Pride and Prejudice, just to make myself feel better.
In The Divine Jane, Fran Lebowitz says, “Any artist who has that quality of timelessness has that quality because they tell the truth. Obviously, details change. . . . Her perceptions don’t date because they are correct. And they will remain that way until human beings improve themselves intrinsically; and this will not happen.”
Witness Sir Walter and Miss Elliot confronting their financial situation at the beginning of Persuasion: “. . . he had gone so far even as to say, ‘Can we retrench? does it occur to you that there is any one article in which we can retrench?’—and Elizabeth, to do her justice, had, in the first ardor of female alarm, set seriously to think what could be done, and had finally proposed these two branches of economy: to cut off some unnecessary charities, and to refrain from new-furnishing the drawing-room; to which expedients she afterwards added the happy thought of their taking no present down to Anne, as had been the usual yearly custom.”
Oh yes, Jane knew what happens when people who have a lot have to face having less.
Do our times make us hunger for truth? Escaping the truth? Both? Lately I’ve read some interesting articles on desire for truth: truth in the bodies of models who walk the catwalk, the eroding and perhaps gone-forever truth of our photographs, the uncanny valley of avatars who look so like the humans (or monkeys) that they are not. Escapism is thriving too, of course—”reality shows,” alcohol sales, zombies, Mafia Wars, and Farmville, to name a few.
I like reading fiction because it’s easier than non-fiction. In non-fiction, you have to always be evaluating what the author says: is this true? Or does the author have some agenda? But in fiction, you just know whether it’s true: if it isn’t, something cracks, and you put the book down. Or did Jane actually teach me what is true in human relationships? This is possible. And in fiction there is of course the element of escapism: the characters seem to have so much time, and servants, and barouche-landaus. Their problems do not affect your life (except in certain modern adaptations.) The problems of non-fiction are all too depressingly real.
Do you read Jane Austen to find truth or to escape reality? Or both?
Photo credit: ©2009 Heather Dever. All rights reserved.
