I just don't get Jane Austen

[kiery]

Oh, how I've tried and I've really, really, wanted to like them: I just can't!

I fell asleep with Northanger Abbey, was bored and confused with Sense and Sensiblility (I couldn't even finish the graphic novel); the list can go on............

I think they represent a small proportion of women who led a very priviledged life at that time. The game play and social intercourse is completely alien and dull, dull, dull. I can't care for these characters at all.

What am I missing? Please help me....should I try the Zombie Jane Austens?

[Insomnia11]

In my teens I was all for the Brontes as I found JA too posh and mannered. I thought

I watched and enjoyed the 1995/96 Pride and Prejudice series and then the Sense and Sensibility film with Emma Thompson/Kate Winslet. But I've always been too busy reading other stuff and JA was never at the top of my list. Then a few months ago I found a free ebook app on my smartphone and Pride and Prejudice came free with it. I read it through in about three days and really enjoyed it, even knowing the story very well already.

Yes it does portray the lives of a certain set of fairly privileged people but it is extremely well written, funny and while people may behave differently according to the social conventions/society of the time the motivations and desires are still the same today.

[Insomnia11]

Probably because there weren't any contrasting women, Camilla.

[Katisha]

Ther are privileged in some ways and not in others. The women particularly. If you didnt manage to land a husband, or have money of your won, then you had a pretty grim life of being the spinster sister/aunt reliant on the rest of the family to take you in. And yes their lives were pretty pointless, not being allowed a profession or public life in their own right. All those hours of bloody embroidery.
I don't think she was setting out to be political, but she certainly told it how it was for women in that position.

[Deliaskis]

Camilla yes they are somewhat political in exactly the way you describe. There are very few contrasting women, because very few women would have dared to risk their actual security for a flight of fancy. There are I suppose 3 main types of women in her work:

1. Those who are lucky enough to find love and affection along with security (Lizzy & Jane Bennett, and basically the rest of the heroines)
   
   
2. Those who marry for just the security or position, and decide to make the best of it (Charlotte Lucas), or are miserable about it (probably Louisa Hurst, and also Mariah whatserface in MP before she decides to run off with Henry, Mr Willoughby)
   
   
3. Those who throw caution to the wind, go with their feelings rather than security and end up being stung (Lydia Bennet, Mariah whatserface in MP when she runs away with Henry, Fanny Price's Mother in MP, the young girl who Willoughby knocks up, to some extent Lucy Steele)
   
   I suppose the closest there is to someone really making a stand is Jane Fairfax, who begins to think she cannot/will not marry Frank Churchill if he does not truly love her, but that all ends happily.
   
   When you look at the motivations for each character, and probe a little below the surface, there is more to Austen than meets the eye.
   
   D

[CamillaSalander]

But what gets me is that she could easily include working women, or farming women for example. People who actually had some grip on reality.

[Katisha]

Who is to say whose reality is the one we should be concerned with? Being middle/upper class doesn't invalidate them.
She was writing what she knew.

[CamillaSalander]

Yes, but wouldn't a real woman have made a little whimper of protest about the vacuousness of her life?

[Pootles2010]

I HATE Austen. You'd never know from her writing that a major war was going on in her lifetime would you? She has very good prose, but nothing....there, if that makes any sense.

Probably me just being insensitive to all the nuances or something...

[DilysPrice]

But the life JA led was "real" - it certainly wasn't fictional. I don't think it was for her to write about lifestyles she didn't really know just on the grounds that they were underrepresented in the fiction of the time.

[Deliaskis]

She wrote what she knew. She never wrote a scene where a woman wasn't present (no convos between Darcy and Bingley in private for example) because she didn't know how men conversed when women were not present. She never wrote anything of conversation between married couples as she was never married, and didn't know how married people conversed in private. Her life was real.

I real woman in 2011 might protest about the vacuousness of her life, but then, she might have counted her lucky stars that she wasn't starving in the hedgerows.

D

[TeamDamon]

Camilla - people might equally read Hardy and ask why all he wrote about were working class characters/the farming community - where are the aristocrats and the urban life of the Victorian world?

A writer can't include all representations of reality in every work of fiction they produce

[CamillaSalander]

I suppose it's partly the lack of self-awareness in the characters - if any of them were described as thinking something along the lines of 'I have to do this shit or I will be starving in the hedgerows' - or even 'I have to do this shit or I'll go to Hell' - then it would make more sense to me.

Pootles sums up what I meant also about political context. Where's the war in all this?

[CamillaSalander]

There are plenty of wealthy people in Hardy.

[ExitPursuedByATroll]

Horses for courses.

Thanks - I feel an Austen reading fest coming upon me.

When we had finished at Uni, a group of friends and I hung around in our rented digs for a few weeks when everyone else had gone home. We read Austen aloud to each other and play acted the lifestyles and characters all day long. Well we enjoyed it

[TeamDamon]

But Austen is a satirist - part of what she is doing is satirising that lack of self-awareness that she observed in the women of her acquaintance.

[Deliaskis]

And I suppose someone like Lizzy Bennett was the contrast, in that she refused to marry either a 'perfectly respectable' man (Collins), or even a handsome and totally loaded one (Darcy), because she didn't love either, thus risking the security of her whole family. That's either gutsy, or selfish, but either way, she's not simpering vacuously into her embroidery. She makes Darcy become a better man, by saying 'I'm worth more than that'.

D

[motherinferior]

Austen rocks. [Unhelpful emoticon]

As do Bronte (C), Bronte (E) and - although perhaps to a bit of a lesser extent - Bronte (A).

Henry James, now, I've never got. He makes me seethe and feel faintly sick.

[DilysPrice]

People in Austen do fall through the cracks - the girl Willoughby seduces is a good example (as is her mother). Mrs and Miss Bates are desperately poor, though not quite starving or homeless, and the Bennett sisters will be pretty much destitute if they don't find husbands before their father dies - no wonder Mrs B is so furious with Lizzy when she turns down a chance of financial security.

[CalatalieSisters]

That's interesting, Delia: I hadn't observed the fact that conversations between married couples in private were absent, but now that you mention it, it seems absolutely that they were.

I think she is brilliant, lagely because she is so funny and her dialogue is exactly the sharp perfection that I would love to be able to pull off, but also because despite the absence of radicalism that others on the thread have mentioned, she is in a way radical -- thanks to the high standard she sets of a woman who is sharply knowing about the realities of her own little society, puncturing polite fictions and forcing the men around her heroines to acknowledge often that their intelligence and critical capacities are way poorer than those of the best women they know. Women in her books who fall into stupidity, despite the leisure to learn and think afforded by their wealth, are castigated and pitied by the author. You certainly get the feeling that as a woman your obligations are not only to breed and housekeep but to be culturally and intellectually alive.

[Deliaskis]

Charlotte Lucas more or less says 'I have to do this shit or I will be starving in the hedgerows'.

There's actually shedloads of self-awareness in Austen. Marianne Dashwood realises that romantic and dashing is actually less appealing in the end than a kind man who actually when you listen to him, is really interesting and dotes on you. Catherine Norland realises that she is a silly little girl and needs to grow up and stop seeing gothic drama in everything. Fanny Price even toys with going against her instinct and marrying Crawford, then realises she was right all along. Emma is all realisation of self.

But, obviously, horses for courses and all that.

D

[motherinferior]

And Anne's old schoolfriend Mrs Wotsit in Persuasion. (Which is quite fabulous. Although when I read it at 18 I too thought 'oh, poor aged 29 year old, wilting gracefully away' and now I am 48 and, as Harriet Smith would say, 'almost an old woman'...)

[motherinferior]

I have to say I do want to slap Fanny Price.

[Deliaskis]

Even Mrs B in some ways, although stupid and irritating, has perfectly rational motivations for feeling the way she does. Imagine marrying someone when you are young and in love, and then having a baby girl, when the only way to secure your future is to have a boy, so you have another, and another, and you end up with 5 girls. And still no security, so her desperation to pair them off is perfectly understandable. It would be a tremendous worry. Plus your husband goes off you, because you're always fretting about not having had a son. And he doesn't really seem to give two hoots. Would stress me out.

D

[Deliaskis]

Yeah FP is a lot sanctimonious.

[TeamDamon]

shows why Austen never did conversations of the intimate kind - thank God this was only shown in American cinemas.