#this ended up being very pride and prejudice and northanger abbey heavy

[starsuncounted]

Let us hear your opinions on the Jane Austen ‘fandom’ for the blorbo asks. 🙃

cracks knuckles

I’m going to make this as unhinged as I can because it’s what these words deserve.

blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most): Mr. Tilney, my beloved, champion of novels and muslin and grand master of sass. RIP to Catherine, but I would have locked him down immediately (don’t take this seriously; I love Catherine).

scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped): Mr. Bingley, who can’t string two words together in Jane’s presence and is a little Too Influenced by his sister, but it’s all right because character development happens, and he learns from his mistakes and goes back to worshiping the ground at Jane’s feet.

scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave): Mr. Tilney is the most underrated Austen love interest, even though he’s the most unproblematic (as voted by the Tumblrina tribunal), and it makes no sense! A man who understands the intricate differences of different bolts of muslin (and can speak knowledgeably on the topic without mansplaining) is the dream.

glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week): Donald Sutherland’s performance of Mr. Bennet is iconic, and I quote his lines regularly and replay every scene of his at least three times. “Good heavens, people” is always a mood.

poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave): I feel like Emma fits the bill for "problematic," and I'm not ashamed to say that I enjoy every bit of her chaos.

horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason): Mr. Collins is the only correct answer.

eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell): JOHN THORPE. The worst specimen of the male species. Ms. Austen knew what she was doing when she wrote him because yes, Wickham is terrible, but the Thorpes outnumber the Wickhams by scads in the real world (and we all know a Thorpe, or many Thorpes because they're just. everywhere.), and Thorpe-y Nice Guys are the worst form of everyday sexism.

[send me blorbo asks]

[copperbadge]

So I re-read Jane Austen’s Persuasion this weekend, because I’d been discussing it with some people and the last time I read it was in high school and I really was just...not enamored of it. I didn’t hate it, I was indifferent to it, and I thought she’d done much better work. (I’m a fan of Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and with some contextual caveats, Northanger Abbey.) But I couldn’t remember why, and books do bear re-reading sometimes, so I took another swing. 

I did enjoy it more, because I can appreciate more of the nuance that went over my head when I was a teenager. Though appreciating more of the nuance also helps me to vocalize why I was so indifferent to it, because while it is Anne’s story it’s also not Anne’s story, it’s not anyone’s story. It often feels like Anne is just the vehicle for Jane Austen to drag some motherfuckers. Which I respect, but....

I like Anne, I think she’s a well-drawn portrait of a woman who is trapped and frustrated and not even aware, a lot of the time, how frustrated she is, but she’s also somewhat...vague. She’s like Fanny Price with the edges rounded off, or if we had to read Pride and Prejudice from Jane Bennett’s point of view. She wants to be among intelligent, kindly, perceptive people, and eventually she wants to be loved by the man she loved before, but beyond that she hasn’t got much in the way of a driving force. She feels very flat somehow, in a way the other heroines don’t -- she’s such a silent witness so much of the time. And when she is internally disrupted, it’s really brilliant and it pops more because of the flatness, but that’s still a lot of flatness to be putting up with for five or six truly great scenes (also I have never longed more, while reading Austen, to shake her and yell WHY DO YOU ALWAYS GLOSS OVER THE ENDING THAT’S THE GODDAMN BEST PART).  

Without knowing a ton about Austen’s life (I know the generalities, just not many specifics) it feels like this is a catharsis for some heavy real-life frustrations. Which, don’t get me wrong, the brilliance of Persuasion to me is in the hardcore subtextual bitching she manages in nearly every scene. It’s like she took all her practice in sketching and then skewering subtly horrible people (and her loathing of Bath) and poured it into this book.

So I am still pretty indifferent to Anne, though I like the book a little better than I used to, if only for being the angriest possible screed Austen could write and still maintain the expected genteel tone. But watching an author I really like go on a fuckin’ rampage is fun for maybe 20 or 30 pages, not for 200. So it’s a wonderfully written book, technically speaking, but not very compelling, at least not to me. 

[aquamarineheaven]

Book review

Author: Jane Austen

Book: Persuasion

So I re-read Jane Austen’s Persuasion this weekend, because I’d been discussing it with some people and the last time I read it was in high school and I really was just…not enamored of it. I didn’t hate it, I was indifferent to it, and I thought she’d done much better work. (I’m a fan of Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and with some contextual caveats, Northanger Abbey.) But I couldn’t remember why, and books do bear re-reading sometimes, so I took another swing.

I did enjoy it more, because I can appreciate more of the nuance that went over my head when I was a teenager. Though appreciating more of the nuance also helps me to vocalize why I was so indifferent to it, because while it is Anne’s story it’s also not Anne’s story, it’s not anyone’s story. It often feels like Anne is just the vehicle for Jane Austen to drag some motherfuckers. Which I respect, but….

I like Anne, I think she’s a well-drawn portrait of a woman who is trapped and frustrated and not even aware, a lot of the time, how frustrated she is, but she’s also somewhat…vague. She’s like Fanny Price with the edges rounded off, or if we had to read Pride and Prejudice from Jane Bennett’s point of view. She wants to be among intelligent, kindly, perceptive people, and eventually she wants to be loved by the man she loved before, but beyond that she hasn’t got much in the way of a driving force. She feels very flat somehow, in a way the other heroines don’t – she’s such a silent witness so much of the time. And when she is internally disrupted, it’s really brilliant and it pops more because of the flatness, but that’s still a lot of flatness to be putting up with for five or six truly great scenes (also I have never longed more, while reading Austen, to shake her and yell WHY DO YOU ALWAYS GLOSS OVER THE ENDING THAT’S THE GODDAMN BEST PART).

Without knowing a ton about Austen’s life (I know the generalities, just not many specifics) it feels like this is a catharsis for some heavy real-life frustrations. Which, don’t get me wrong, the brilliance of Persuasion to me is in the hardcore subtextual bitching she manages in nearly every scene. It’s like she took all her practice in sketching and then skewering subtly horrible people (and her loathing of Bath) and poured it into this book.

So I am still pretty indifferent to Anne, though I like the book a little better than I used to, if only for being the angriest possible screed Austen could write and still maintain the expected genteel tone. But watching an author I really like go on a fuckin’ rampage is fun for maybe 20 or 30 pages, not for 200. So it’s a wonderfully written book, technically speaking, but not very compelling, at least not to me.