Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?

[BeaAndBen]

I’ve been enjoying P&P yet again, and reached the absolute delight of Chapter 56.

Lady Catherine’s visit to Longbourn is something I look forward to each time. She’s so utterly ghastly, and Elizabeth so resolute and devastating in her replies, that I grin through the entire section.

Are there bits of favourite books that particularly stand out to people?

Miss Pettigrew getting her makeover -“England expects….” makes me laugh every time - or maybe Anne Elliot reading Captain Wentworth’s letter?
The concept of Angels as explained to Moist von Lipwig?

She studied classics at Bennington, though her degree was in philosophy in the end. Lots of inspiration for The Secret History there— both people and place.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a27434009/bennington-college-oral-history-bret-easton-ellis/

My favourite part of TSH is the whole ghastly funeral part.

This is a bit niche but I thought the best bit of TSH was the migraine description.

The funeral is brilliantly written tho so so grim.

The migraines are well described too.

But this passage:
“In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home. It was why I admired Julian, and Henry in particular.”

And this, a few paras later:
“Ancient Greek is a difficult language, a very difficult language indeed, and it is eminently possible to study it all one's life and never be able to speak a word; but it makes me smile, even today, to think of Henry's calculated, formal English, the English of a well-educated foreigner, as compared with the marvellous fluency and self-assurance of his Greek — quick, eloquent, remarkably witty.”

I should add that I studied Ancient Greek at school and certainly could not, after five years of study, speak a single word beyond declining a verb :)

In Bath Tangle, was Serena a widow who wore a wonderful outfit of black and white when she had come out of all black, and the hero, who already knew her, asked her if she was setting up as a magpie?

"I am quite in the way of running off to France with Rupert."

These Old Shades?

I think Devils Cub? Referencing the time in These Old Shades where she had been thought to run off to France with Rupert (but hadn't!)

Serena was the daughter, not the widow. The widow was extremely young. But yes to the magpie!

It was a completely unnecessary scene, I've always thought.

You have now qualified to be my new best friend 😉

Is The Secret History worth sticking with then? I loved The Goldfinch but I gave up after a chapter or so with TSH.

I adore it so maybe don’t ask me haha. But in general it is highly rated. Not if you hate it tho

I read TSH too old I think. I remember it being a big thing when I was in my teens but I never got round to it. By my 40s, when I finally read it, it felt a bit overblown to me.

I didn't hate what I read. It just didn't grip me

I am in my 40s so I might have missed the boat!

Oh I am very old and just rereading for the fifth time! I did read it first aged about 28 tho (I am the OG acc DD!)

You're definitely making it sound like I need to read it!

I love it, and have reread it often (when I was a graduate student, some friends were also fans, to the point where would distract one another from what we were supposed to be doing by emailing one another pop quizzes (‘What is Bunny’s football number?’ ‘What does Judy Poovey lend Richard?’ ‘Name all the Corcoran brothers in order’) ), but a lot will depend on your tolerance for awkward, suburban Californian Richard’s fetishisation of his Greek class coterie as eccentric, original, old money types, and the fact that Tartt sometimes shares his sense that they’re unfathomably cool.

It kick-started ‘dark academia’ as a cult thing. You can see links back to Great Expectations and Brideshead Revisited, Dead Poets Society etc and forward to Saltburn etc.

I both enjoy it shamelessly and also feel a great desire to kick all of the main characters and point out that stalking around campus in a monocle talking about Greek philosophy is not terribly different from being a costume major with an ‘intensely aerobicised midriff’.

And I thought both The Little Friend and The Goldfinch were over-long and unengaging. She’s a one-novel author for me.

I hated it - they were all utterly ghastly and I hated spending my time with them.

I was in my early 30s when I read it, way too old to be impressed by posh juvenile poseurs, whether undergraduates or otherwise. I'd enjoyed Whit Stillman's movie Metropolitan a few years earlier, with a not dissimilar social background, thought his next, Barcelona, was better, and from then on just wished he's turn his talents to making a film about grown-ups. The fact that his Jane Austen film was based on a juvenile work was symptomatic. There seemed to be a bit of a rash of that sort of thing in America then - have all the wars and horrors since stopped it?

I started watching Damsels in Distress recently, and decided it was just too fey, much though I like Greta Gerwig in her earlier kooky roles. I quite liked Love and Friendship, though I wished he'd called it Love and Freindship.

I don't think you have to be impressed by posh, juvenile poseurs, to like TSH, you just have to be someone who can derive pleasure not only from ghastly Richard's delusions about equally ghastly Henry, Frances, Camilla and co. but from the fact that Donna Tartt sometimes gets caught up in the delusion, too. I mean, when it comes down to it, these people Richard glamourises really aren't glamorous. Henry is a rich, rude St Louis trust fund kid who thinks he's Thucydides, Francis is a tiresome trust fund hypochondriac sex pest, Charles is an alcoholic waster, Camilla has no definable personality other than being The Girl in an all-male group, and Bunny is a brash, rude, leech with an even more awful family. Apart from the bacchanal, they all lead the dullest possible lives -- they never see anyone else or do anything other than drink and do their Greek homework or have their Greek professor for dinner.

But Tartt sometimes gets carried away with the whole Greek cohort mythos, despite the fact that these kids are really ordinary.

Ahhhhh @GlacialLook I love Francis and I love Henry more. Camilla is a boy really lol according to Richard anyway :)

At the end of the Real Charlotte, Francie’s last ride with Hawkins and Charlotte’s final revenge against Roddy Lambert.

The opening pages of The Death of the Heart when Anna tells St.Quentin Portia’s story - how she came to be born and why she came to live with them. Absolutely masterful writing.

The Goldfinch when Theo is refused entrance to Kitsy’s flat and shortly afterwards realises what Kitsy has been doing.

The description in Sybille Bedford’s Quicksands of her mother’s descent into morphine addiction and alcoholism isn’t exactly enjoyable but it is brilliantly written

Angela Thirkell wrote a book called 'August Folly'. I read it when I was a teenager. Mrs. Tebben is an academic with two grown up children, Richard and Margaret. She isn't a domestic goddess. One day she's absent at tea time and Margaret makes her father, and maybe others, hot fresh tea and a pile of buttered toast. It's a simple luxury for him.
There's a donkey in the field, I think Modestine, and there's a cat called Gunnar. They talk to one another in the night about what the people have been doing. It conjures a picture of a moonlit grassfield in middle-class, 1920s England.

@Velvian
There are a few mentions of ‘man’s long agony’ in the Pursuit of Love. Here are a couple:

There was always some joke being run to death at Alconleigh and just now it was headlines from the Daily Express which the children had made into a chant and intoned to each other all day.
Jassy: ‘Man’s long agony in a lift-shaft.’ Victoria: ‘Slowly crushed to death in a lift.’ Aunt Sadie became very cross about this, said they were really too old to be so heartless, that it wasn’t a bit funny, only dull and disgusting, and absolutely forbade them to sing it any more. After this they tapped it out to each other, on doors, under the dining-room table, clicking with their tongues or blinking with their eyelids, and all the time in fits of naughty giggles.

They dragged themselves out of the room as slowly as they dared and went upstairs, stamping out ‘Man’s long agony’ on the bare boards of the nursery passage so that nobody in the whole house could fail to hear them.