An excuse to use my new icon for real...
Jan. 26th, 2008 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mniI give you more from Persuasion (YAY! I spelled it with an 's' instead of a 't' on the very first go!).
This passage comes at the very end of the book, so I'm sorry if it comes as a spoiler (But, hey: it's a Jane Austen romance novel. Doesn't everyone know at the outset that all six of her heroines end up with their right matches, at the end? The suspense is in the how). But this bit had me saying "Yesyesindeedso-justso. Yes!" as I was reading it:
This bit reminds me a bit of Sandra Bullock's character in While You Were Sleeping: The heroine doesn't just fall in love with her "love interest," but with his entire circle of friends and family.
And as someone with no brothers and sisters, and whose youngest and closest cousin (in terms of genes, if not acquaintance and distance) is ten years older than I, I read this passage with a pang, and felt pretty close to the heroine in more than just a one-letter difference in our names...
A circle of friends, and welcoming family, is important. Just as important as any romantic connection brought on by the metaphoric shot of Cupid's arrow through the heart.
It's a point that Austen makes throughout the book. Not only does Austen tell us how unhappy Anne is, trapped in a house with her father and older sister, but she quickly moves Anne out of that house into another, where Austen can contrast the petty neuroses of Anne's sister Mary with the healthier family of the Musgroves. The Musgroves have their own prides and foolishness, but it's also clear that they love and support each other. And gradually, even without saying a single word directly, Austen shows us how her heroine is gradually regaining her boldness and feelings of self-worth (even while she reports the self-doubts that play through Anne's head through the sheer force of habit), absorbing healthier feelings about herself as though through osmosis. So when the accident happens, it's not at all surprising when she takes charge of the situation and everyone listens to her and respects her intelligence.
(As I'm writing this paragraph, I'm thinking about how thoroughly modern Jane Austen is, as a writer, in terms of psychological complexity and realism in her characters [at least in this novel]. I think she's even more modern than Dickens, in this regard, and she was writing her works about fifty years earlier than Dickens. Perhaps the fact that she was a woman, and therefore forced to write anonymously, gave her more creative freedom, even as it restricted profits from her labors.)
Austen wrote six novels; I've now read half of them. So far, Persuasion is my favorite. Mansfield Park will be dramatized on TV tomorrow night (with Billie Piper in the heroine's role). After reading the synopsis on Wikipedia, I'm not particularly looking forward to it -- it sounds prudish and puritanical, and tangled, plot-wise, and melodramatic. I'm am intrigued by Emma, though; apparently, the protagonist in that story is a manipulative and cunning anti-heroine (I've got to give kudos to Austen for writing a very different story, each time she published a novel. Writing only six books in your lifetime may seem paltry, by today's standards. But today's authors seem to hit on one winning formula, and write that one thing over and over. Austen was in the middle of writing a seventh book, when she died, and I think it was going to be a book that focused on brothers. Too bad she never got to finish that. That would have been interesting).
*Anne came from a noble family, but by the time she married, her father had squandered her inheritance to a fraction of ten thousand pounds. Captain Wentworth had a fortune of twenty-five thousand pounds -- and he had earned it.
This passage comes at the very end of the book, so I'm sorry if it comes as a spoiler (But, hey: it's a Jane Austen romance novel. Doesn't everyone know at the outset that all six of her heroines end up with their right matches, at the end? The suspense is in the how). But this bit had me saying "Yesyesindeedso-justso. Yes!" as I was reading it:
... The disproportion in their fortune was nothing*; it did not give her a moment's regret; but to have no family to receive and estimate him properly, nothing of respectability, of harmony, of good will to offer in return for all the worth and all the prompt welcome which met her in his brothers and sisters, was a source of as lively pain as her mind could well be sensible of under circumstances of otherwise strong felicity. ...
This bit reminds me a bit of Sandra Bullock's character in While You Were Sleeping: The heroine doesn't just fall in love with her "love interest," but with his entire circle of friends and family.
And as someone with no brothers and sisters, and whose youngest and closest cousin (in terms of genes, if not acquaintance and distance) is ten years older than I, I read this passage with a pang, and felt pretty close to the heroine in more than just a one-letter difference in our names...
A circle of friends, and welcoming family, is important. Just as important as any romantic connection brought on by the metaphoric shot of Cupid's arrow through the heart.
It's a point that Austen makes throughout the book. Not only does Austen tell us how unhappy Anne is, trapped in a house with her father and older sister, but she quickly moves Anne out of that house into another, where Austen can contrast the petty neuroses of Anne's sister Mary with the healthier family of the Musgroves. The Musgroves have their own prides and foolishness, but it's also clear that they love and support each other. And gradually, even without saying a single word directly, Austen shows us how her heroine is gradually regaining her boldness and feelings of self-worth (even while she reports the self-doubts that play through Anne's head through the sheer force of habit), absorbing healthier feelings about herself as though through osmosis. So when the accident happens, it's not at all surprising when she takes charge of the situation and everyone listens to her and respects her intelligence.
(As I'm writing this paragraph, I'm thinking about how thoroughly modern Jane Austen is, as a writer, in terms of psychological complexity and realism in her characters [at least in this novel]. I think she's even more modern than Dickens, in this regard, and she was writing her works about fifty years earlier than Dickens. Perhaps the fact that she was a woman, and therefore forced to write anonymously, gave her more creative freedom, even as it restricted profits from her labors.)
Austen wrote six novels; I've now read half of them. So far, Persuasion is my favorite. Mansfield Park will be dramatized on TV tomorrow night (with Billie Piper in the heroine's role). After reading the synopsis on Wikipedia, I'm not particularly looking forward to it -- it sounds prudish and puritanical, and tangled, plot-wise, and melodramatic. I'm am intrigued by Emma, though; apparently, the protagonist in that story is a manipulative and cunning anti-heroine (I've got to give kudos to Austen for writing a very different story, each time she published a novel. Writing only six books in your lifetime may seem paltry, by today's standards. But today's authors seem to hit on one winning formula, and write that one thing over and over. Austen was in the middle of writing a seventh book, when she died, and I think it was going to be a book that focused on brothers. Too bad she never got to finish that. That would have been interesting).
*Anne came from a noble family, but by the time she married, her father had squandered her inheritance to a fraction of ten thousand pounds. Captain Wentworth had a fortune of twenty-five thousand pounds -- and he had earned it.
