Does anyone have a favourite Jane Austen Villain.

[florentina1]

I am torn between Fanny Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility and Mrs Elton from Emma.

Also, while we are idling away a gloomy Monday, which Austen character do you most want to live with. I want to be adopted by the Musgroves.

But that's the thing - Fanny and Edmund are perfect together! You'd sigh if you had to invite them to dinner but Austen gives them a powerful love story even though they are difficult to spend time with.

Oh yes, it's the Crofts I'd love to be adopted by.

@DameAlyson

But then some of her heroes are not terribly heroic .. Gawd... Edmund Bertram.. what a pompous twit.. I certainly wouldn't want to live with him . ..

I did Mansfield Park for A Level. The girls in the class were unanimous in preferring Tom to Edmund. We all thought Fanny was a drip, too.

Have you read Joan Aiken’s sequel Mansfield Revisited? She sends drippy Edmund and Fanny abroad, rehabilitates the Crawfords, and has a romance between Tom and Susan (Price, Fanny’s sister who comes to live at Mansfield). And turns a married Julia Bertram into pretty much Mrs Norris #2. It’s very effective and cleverly done.

" That will make your ladyship's situation at present more pitiable; but it will have no effect on me."

I say this sternly in my head on occasion, when dealing with emotional blackmailers. It's wonderfully stiffening to one's resolve.

@PerkingFaintly

" That will make your ladyship's situation at present more pitiable; but it will have no effect on me."

I say this sternly in my head on occasion, when dealing with emotional blackmailers. It's wonderfully stiffening to one's resolve.

Though it invites the riposte 'I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet. I send no compliments to your mother.'

'You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.'

This I say to myself often because I can be a terrible dweller on stuff ( trivial and not so) that happened years ago and there's no changing any of it now , and neither was it at all important in the big scheme of things, nor should really be dwelt on now ..

Lady Catherine de Burgh and the actress who played her in the Colin Firth version of P&P.
Tremendous.

@PerkingFaintly

Oh yes, it's the Crofts I'd love to be adopted by.

I have an awful feeling that the Crofts, while lovely, would think nothing of departing in a frigate the second war was declared, and being themselves entirely immune to seasickness, claustrophobia, fear of being broadsided by the French, would simply think you were a bit niminy piminy and wet if you failed to thrive in your teeny cabin living on biscuit.

Thought I’d just leave this link here if anyone is in need of a new jumper/t-shirt

www.bookishly.co.uk/collections/literary-clothing/

Facts are such horrid things.

@CaveMum I SO want a Pemberley sweatshirt...it's one of those things that if you know it, you know it and if you don't, you wouldn't give it a second look

And I have been known to mutter under my breath "I send no compliments to your mother" after a tetchy phone call...

It’s a shame those items of clothing spell Lizzy Bennett’s name incorrectly though!

[quote CaveMum]Thought I’d just leave this link here if anyone is in need of a new jumper/t-shirt

www.bookishly.co.uk/collections/literary-clothing/[/quote]
Some of those are lovely, but not so sure about the Jane Eyre quotation about preferring to be happy rather than dignified, given that its context is Jane running after the insufferable St John Rivers to make up with him, despite the fact that it’s him sulking when she refused to marry him, after the worst proposal (‘You’re plain but useful, and I promise I’d shag you solemnly in India, anyway’) in literary history.

@AmazingBouncingFerret

It’s a shame those items of clothing spell Lizzy Bennett’s name incorrectly though!

She’s Lizzy Bennet…? How are they spelling it?

Wentworth. He’s essentially a pirate isn’t he?

No, not at all. He's a captain in the Royal Navy.

Prize money was awarded to Royal Naval crews as incentive to capture enemy ships and bring them in, whereupon the Admiralty sold them.

It's a tradition extending at least until WWI (I've seen it on naval personnel records), and I think more recently.

That is, some prize ships were sold; others were given a swift change of name to become ships of the Royal Navy.

The Eltons for me. But then Emma is in every respect my favourite Austen.

I love the tender descriptions of Mr Woodhouse's annoying foibles, and my thought processes always go...

Aw, the poor old sod would be dead by now.
Aw, sprightly young Emma would be dead at least 100 year by now.
Aw SHIT, none of them ever existed.

Part of the establishment yes, but I’ve always felt that the job description was a licensed pirate, he seemed to be on a commission for how much loot he brought home.

@Laska2Meryls

Mrs Elton though was really well written.. .and ww mustn't forget Elizabeth Eliot .I think JA must have known of some dreadful characters to imagine her villains.

I just love the way she portrays her contemporary society and its foibles

One of her best characters has to be Mr Collins.. Oh, and Henry Lucas .. both so deliciously funny..

Who s Henry Lucas.?t. Thename escapes me.

Daft me, Florentina.. Sir William Lucas, I meant...
...muddling him up with other Henrys

Thank you

Charlotte Lucas is one of my favourites. She really makes the best she can of her life. I have read a couple of ‘Austen , what happened next’ type books. Terri Fleming and Elizabeth Aston. They are not brilliant but one about the daughters of the Collins is ok.

I love Charles Musgrove, i always think that Austen must have modelled him on one of her brothers. When he is waffling on about the gun he is going to look at, his character just leaps off the page to me.