What Matters in Jane Austen?

By -
What Matters in Jane Austen?  Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved, by John Mullan

There is a whole Jane Austen industry, with sequels, prequels, biographies, craft books, novels whose authors realized that just putting the words "Jane Austen" in the title would guarantee a best-seller, zombie spinoffs, and meditations about life.  Amidst all this debris, how do we pick worthwhile Jane Austen-themed books without wading through a sea of junk?  I don't quite know, and so I have mostly not read them, or been disappointed when I did.

But this book is different!  This is a truly insightful, valuable, and lovely book about Miss Austen's novels, and I promise that if you are a Janeite, you will adore this book.  John Mullan is an English professor of English, and here, in twenty essays, he asks questions and discusses each novel in that light.  He is quietly saying, "Here, try paying attention to this."  Some of the puzzles:

Do sisters sleep in the same bedroom?
Why is it risky to go to the seaside?
Do we ever see the lower classes?
How much money is enough?
What makes characters blush?
What do characters say when the heroine is not there?

In each case, the discussion is illuminating.  Before long I wanted to read each and every Austen novel again, to observe all these nuances developing.  Mullan shows us Austen's skill and artistry, and also her development of the novel form.  She was doing things that no one had done before, and in some cases she was doing them long before anybody else picked up on the ideas.

You will come away from this book with a new appreciation and enthusiasm for Austen's work.  Don't miss it.



Comments

  1. Anne@HeadFullofBooksJuly 17, 2015 at 9:44 AM

    Thanks. I am adding this to my TBR pile and hoping over to the library webpage to see if they have the book so I won't have to buy it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJuly 17, 2015 at 10:41 AM

    You introduced this so perfectly! Because I was indeed thinking that it sounded like one of a million Jane Austen books out there, but -- yes, okay! I will get it from the library!

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanJuly 17, 2015 at 12:05 PM

    Oh good! :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. EvaJuly 18, 2015 at 6:21 PM

    This sounds so good! I read a surprisingly excellent book called Jane Austen, Game Theorist; I expected it to be gimmicky but it was instead very satisfying. I'd recommend it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. LoryJuly 28, 2015 at 7:40 AM

    This sounds like a great read for Austen in August. Heading over to the library catalog to see if they have it...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more