#contempuary

[moonybyte]

I know this was probably a shit post, but it is very likely, yes. Jane Austen was pretty popular, both among critics and readers, during her time. Main consumers of contemporary media (instead of "classics") were often women anyway since all the way back to the middle ages. Of course, as it usually is with female history, it had it's...troubles. There were some men & women back then that claimed in letters and texts that reading doesn't become a lady since it makes them fantasize and feel strongly, that the decline of poetry and rise of contempuary novels would bring doom (lol). Not just in the west, but in places like Japan too, it was deemed inappropiate for a lady to read. It was tried to curate what women had access to, to keep their mind pure (cause oh boy, when the first novel "The Tale of Genji" came out, women on court were fighting over what happened in it). And yet look at old paintings, the one holding a book (aka who it was acceptable for unless it was a bible) is almost always a woman.

Even the very very young start of actual fandom was - as you assumed in amusement - some women sitting together over tea. Specifically, the first organised fandom were women upset about Arthur Conan Doyle's decision to kill off Sherlock Holmes (so yeah, not liking canon and possibly doing fanfiction...). That was 30 years before the next big fandom in the west emerged, this time a men-centered one with the Society of Creative Anachronism (aka the Sci-Fic fandom).

(If anyone's interested in the history of women's literacy, I can recommend  The Woman Reader, Belinda Jack)

do you think there was like…discourse about Jane Austen novels when they first came out

[sincere-me-blog]

me dancing with my bestiee