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?

I kind of agree with both sides here. Whilst in many ways they are very time specific, you only have to look at the thread in Chat on what it means to be upper middle class, to see that those issues are still very relevant today!

And looking around the average rural village, it might not be hard to find:

• previously wealthy spinster or widow with very little left to live on
• outwardly 'comfortable' family but no cash for a rainy day
• family made money from a party business (!) now living a very comfortable lifestyle, might hope their daughters marry up
• genuinely loaded person, talks very little about money and thinks it's rather crass to do so

D

And annuities are apparently doing so badly at the moment that we will shortly have Cranford Resurgent.

Yes, senua, I do partly agree with you as well as disagree. One thing that is persistingly true about relationships is the lack of fit between realities on the one hand and polite or wishful perceptions on the other, that lack of fit that Austen reveals so deliciously with her ironic stance.

re Cranford, I was going to mention 'genteel poverty'.

[Aside] I work in Knutsford, where Cranford was supposedly set, and where Gaskell lived etc. and so everything's Cranford round here (the Cranford Cafe & Sandwich Bar etc.).

D