I'm over 50 Always loved Jane Austen , but now on re-reading ..

I find the lack of assertiveness in Austen's women excruciating. Am I the only person that wants to just shake them out of their modesty? I find it impossible to read and care - is that wrong?

And surely the point of Fanny is that she's been bullied and treated as worthless throughout her childhood, and the fact that she can stand up to her family at all (and see through HC) shows real strength of character.

I'm going to stand up for Fanny, too. And as for marrying HC, he's the sort of bloke that if she described him on MN everyone would be saying 'Red Flags' right left and centre - basically he just wants all the women to be in love with him, and is piqued because Fanny sees right through him.

You all MUST READ lady susan. It's amazing!

I love JA's juvenilia, she is hugely vicious and funny. Especially the heroines alternately fainting and running mad. I think she is very well aware just how slapable some of her characters are, in fact I suspect that her writing gave her the chance to give a virtual slap to some of the people she met in RL.

I think JA rather enjoyed writing about Mary Crawford and the unfortunate Fanny was her self-imposed penance for daring to write MC.

Hackman your not alone, i like emma

Trills: "That's one of the few things that I dislike about the 1995 Pride and Prejudice TV series - Lydia does not seem 15. If she feels 15 then you can understand her behaviour much better - she's just a spoilt dippy teenager."

That's true. I've mentioned this before, but last year the Regent's Park theatre did P&PE, and Lydia was played by an actress who was 16, and it made such a difference. She really did just seem like a lively, silly girl, and it made Wickham's pursuit of her all the more revolting.

By the way, I think I'm the only person who likes Emma as a character. I think she has a lot of good qualities, despite her obvious flaws.

I liked Thomas Hardy as a teenager but can't abide him now. And I detest Dickens. For me, Austen Rules.

I'm ploughing through both volumes of, 'Bitch in a Bonnet' on my Kindle at the moment. Absolutely loving it, although he has re-used the same jokes several times. It'd maybe be less noticeable in a blog, which would be written/read over a prolonged period, unlike my current, greedy schlurping of it.

Thomas Hardy takes far too much glee in saying if Tess has just done THIS, everything would have been better, but instead she quite reasonably chooses to do THAT, and now her life is going to get EVEN WORSE for my taste.

Oh I am very much enjoying the Bitch in a Bonnet blog.

I could never get Jane Austen, lots of privileged pontificating for very little purpose. All very sad and claustrophobic. I have great sympathy for women of the time and their plight, but they never seemed to put up a fight, not a real fight anyway, just a bit plucky sometimes.

Much rather a Dickens or a Thomas Hardy.

Fanny should have married Crawford. He was great fun, and would have poked her into some kind of fun.

Tom Bertram too, he was a great gun.

Everyone's a prat at 17.

That's one of the few things that I dislike about the 1995 Pride and Prejudice TV series - Lydia does not seem 15. If she feels 15 then you can understand her behaviour much better - she's just a spoilt dippy teenager.

Oh very well put groupie.

That's exactly the reason I hate Fanny tbh. She doesn't learn anything, doesn't develop in any way at all and has precisely no self-awareness. She starts the novel po-faced and priggish, ends it even more po-faced and priggish, and her 'reward' is an at best uncomfortable for the reader and at worst positively incestuous relationship with her po-faced and priggish cousin. All of the other heroines have to change, have to learn and reflect, have often to even admit that they have been absolute idiots, but not Fanny.

I agree with MrsHenry that Austen is poking fun at Gothic romances. Northanger Abbey and poor Catherine Morland with her head full of Radcliffe - Austen brings her back to reality with a bump. Marianne is treated to a more genteel and less explicit bit of mockery, but along the same vein.

I'll defend Fanny Price too. She was an outsider within her own family and shows more resilience and strength of character than any of the other heroines. Granted, she is annoyingly feeble, but, I think, is the only young heroine who doesn't have to discover that she is a plonker before she gets her happy ending.

God Emma is hugely irritating, and appallingly arrogant, trying to arrange the lives of everyone around her because she is the local queen bee. A classic example of both spoilt and neglected.

I think Fanny Price compares badly to other goody-goodies like Jane Bennet because she has to be all humble about being genuinely poor. Not genteel poor like the Dashwoods but proper poor.

With marianne austen seems to be poking fun at the overblown romances in the likes of ann Radcliffe s 'gothic' novels. I do feel sorry for her though, the bit where she is waiting day after day for a letter and is then humiliated at a party-we have all been a tennager with a broken heart at some stage!

I didn't mind the Dashwoods. But I loathed that pathetic wimp Fanny. Emma is a bit of a know-all and irritating but not that bad.

Exactly - that's why she needs it!

I think fanny is pregnant at the end of Mansfield park, there is a mention of herself and Edmund needing a larger income-so they probably did get up to some icky cousin sex

But fanny wouldnt snog anyone, i cant even imagine her doing anything, not even after marriage

There's nothing wrong with Fanny Price that a breathless snog in the shrubbery with Henry Crawford wouldn't sort out.

What irritates me about Austen is that she has been branded-or rebranded-as romantic fiction, when (imho at least) she's anything but.

Agreed. She is merciless with her characters. You are not meant to think "ooh Marianne, how wonderful" you are meant, as finally she does herself, to compare her to Elinor. Marianne affects all the show of great romantic love and tricks herself into imaging it to be something quite different from what it is - at least as far as Austen is concerned. Austen writes about relationships - all of them - and does it without romanticism of any kind.

The age gap is unsettling, although I'm sure quite usual at the time. Seems odd the men weren't under more pressure to get on with producing heirs, there aren't many of them (any of them?) whose fathers are still alive at the time of the marriage.

Fanny isn't insipid! She has strong moral values and is in a very very precarious situation. I will defend Fanny!

I do think Austen likes Marianne, yes, I agree with you. In the way we smile fondly at teens who think they're the first people to discover whatever it is that they feel passionately about. Fanny on the other hand is genuinely strong willed. She's just much quieter about it, and vulnerable.

I agree about Edmund though. He is desperately dull. All her clergy apart from Henry Tilney are.