Jezebel 
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New York, 6:33 AM
Mon Dec 21
18 posts in the last 24 hours
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12/11/09
12/11/09
Authors tend to make the dis-likable characters just that, dislike-able. How boring would a book be that all the villains were treated in an 'eh' fashion. Drip venom from that quill if you want, make them interesting and your reader want to read more.
12/10/09
Then again, there was this one time I was browsing at Barnes & Noble and there was a huge table display of "sequels" and not one was up to par. I wouldn't be surprised if most of those were written by people who'd never thumbed through an Austen novel in their lives.
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Austen wrote characters who could be unlikeable and compelling at the same time. Who thought Emma needed a good spanking? Or that Darcy was insufferably rude? Or Marianne needed to seriously calm down and Elinor needed to quit being so calm? And yet loved them all the same? How many authors have that wonderful talent to create flawed characters who are memorable and compelling?
Austen haters can shut it. All I read from their criticism is jealousy.
12/11/09
Oh, so there's no room for criticism anymore if it's the almighty Austen? You know, fandom behavior does not become any less annoying just because the author is dead.
12/10/09
I don't know how you can read Austen and think she was a gossip. She constantly and consistently skewers gossips in her work.
12/11/09
And so what if some the supporting characters are silly people that she takes delight in depicting as silly? The woman helped invent the novel in the form as we know it!
12/11/09
I also find the idea that she's "boring" kind of funny. If you go into them expecting explosions or Bronte like drama, yeah, okay. But if you want rich characters and wit? Not boring.
12/10/09
Trust me Sadie, hating Jane Austen knows no gender: both my high-school lit classes despised her books across the board. Even putting aside the 19th century language barrier, it turns out girls can find Austen's work just as agonizingly slow and thinly plotted as us inferior males.
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12/10/09
Anything like warmth or enthusiasm, anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré or extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well. There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy, in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood ... What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study: but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death--this Miss Austen ignores....Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless woman), if this is heresy--I cannot help it.
She and her sisters wrote novels that did deal with what the blood rushes through. They acknowledged Austen as being a fantastic writer; they just felt that the novel had other places to go as an art form dealing with human experience, especially women's experiences.
12/10/09
Litcrit fail. The woman has been dead for ages, how the fuck would he know what she thought or felt about these characters? If I remember anything about the letters and such I've read, she actually cared deeply about all her characters, even the mean ones.
Also, how long does a woman have to be dead before men stop tearing her accomplishments to shreads?
12/10/09
ouch. thats a rather nasty gendered generalization.
also, ive got a vagina and hate Austen. where do we go from here?
12/11/09
12/11/09
and what i was responding to was the statement that men hate women so much that they're going to shit on their accomplishments ("how long does a woman have to be dead before men stop tearing her accomplishments to shreads?"), even centuries after they're dead, implying that these critics were only attacking her because she was a successful woman. i was merely asking, since i have a sacred vagina, do criticism from me still stand? or am i a misogynist-by-association because i agree with a man who critiques austen?
12/10/09
I still need to find that person and wash their mouth out with soap.
12/10/09
stephanie meyer loosely based twilight (the first book of the series) on p&p. edward was based on darcy. whether we like it or not, it was the authors intent and its not completely absurd to draw the parallels.
12/11/09
12/11/09
[www.jasna.org]
"In Pride and Prejudice, the first time Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet meet, Mr. Darcy is rude and unforgivable. Elizabeth walks away with slightly hurt feelings, but is able to laugh it off with her friend Charlotte Lucas. Bella Swan, Twilight’s female protagonist, is a bit more fragile emotionally, and when Edward is rude (and slightly scary) at their first meeting, a hurt Bella walks away with no one to console her. What she doesn’t realize—and here you must suspend your disbelief and get into the spirit of the novel—is that Edward is rude because of his strong attraction to her; specifically, he wants desperately to drink her blood. He comes from a family of self-proclaimed "vegetarian" vampires. If he were to drink human blood, not only would he feel a huge amount of guilt but he would also endanger his family."
One of these things is not like the other. . .
[pointedmeanderings.blogspot.com]
(I also don't really care that much for authorial intent--it may be an interesting side note, but it's execution that counts.)
12/11/09
I agree. The author is dead, this is the age of the reader, blah blah, all that fun lit crit stuff. I just get annoyed when people, from a rather snobby p.o.v. in my opinion, completely blow off the relationship that other people have with these characters or the parallels they draw between the two novels because one is "good" and the other is "bad." by mentioning author intent, i only hope to "legitimize" the comparison a little, so that people cannot be so quick to dismiss the readings that others have. there is no one "right" way to read a novel and i hate when people imply that to read it differently than they do is to read it "wrong."
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They are entertaining if cheap-- but they are in no way sequels to the real thing. I actually had to cleanse my palate by reading P & P right after finishing it.
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12/11/09
Eureka! You hit the nail on the head. I just realized the only reason I could read that book and get over my icky feeling was because I stopped thinking of the characters as themselves. Darcy was no longer actually Darcy, he was just a man who happened to have the same name. It's much easier to read when everything is just a strange coincidence.
Also, I was 15 and horny. I didn't discriminate :-D
12/11/09
The night of their first party? After they have sex in the bath, then they have sex again and he doesn't want her to clean up because he likes the idea of his semen basically running down her leg? And she feels it trickling all night? Shudder.
In my own weird way, I loved the book, but I also kind of hate it for making sex a wee bit creepy.
12/11/09
oh my god. i kind of want to read it for that part alone.
more awesome spoilers, please!
12/11/09
12/12/09
12/10/09
So if Austen is a "vicious gossip" for "chopping up" characters she doesn't like where does that leave Chaucer, Dickens, or Swift? Or Chekhov for that matter? I could go on. This criticism is overly broad since it could be applied to virtually any novelist with a sharp social wit...
Also, I'm not sure it even holds up here. Mrs. Bennet isn't mentioned in Fulford's article but is also traditionally regarded as vile. However, in recent years feminist critics have pointed out that although Mrs. Bennet may seem mercenary she simply preps her daughters to successfully compete in the marriage market, a neccesity to their livelyhood and hers.
12/10/09
12/10/09
I've just finished Persuasion, and found the father character Sir Walter Elliot to be hilarious and unusually written, especially for the time period. So many male characters of the era were either villains or heroes. Sir Elliot is just wonderfully flawed and vain, which is refreshing, because vanity is purported to be the province of women. I fail to see how Elliot is "chopped to pieces" (unless by that Fulford means "fleshed out" or "described").
12/10/09
12/10/09
Whether you like her work or not, what she did was not only unusual, but still resonates today. She writes about the "mundane" in a way few writers manage, and from a completely female perspective. She was not a gossip.
I can see why her work is "boring" to some people, but that was sort of what she was going for. She was actually avoiding the more "gothic" novels of the time.
And really, the point is that a lot of the criticism is gendered. "Gossipy" is heavily, heavily, gendered as a critique of her work. We'll laud other works, but Austen will get criticized for basically a woman writer who wrote about women.
12/10/09
12/10/09
Regarding Colin Firth... Mr. McAvoy didn't help, either. We should fire them both permanently, and then comfort them repeatedly and often for their loss of jobs.
12/10/09