Jane Austin

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blue_doona32
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Jane Austin

Post by blue_doona32 »

Ok, so Pride and Prejudice has got to be one of the greatest all time chick flicks for novels, right? (and coincidentally, its been turned into a chick flick)

I read on the "Most Overrated Authors" post that someone thought Austin's writing was "shallow female drabble", but I do like the thought that sometimes, its not as simple as "love at first sight" (whatever that means)

What do you think? Has she offered us an innovative and altered love story, or is it the same as every other romance that just took longer to develope and is the same in the end as every other chick flick novel?
the difference between the right word and the almost right is really a large matter. It is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning ~Mark Twain
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Biblioklept
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Post by Biblioklept »

I think she is the original Chick Lit author. All the others were perhaps inspired by, and oftentimes not as good as, her.
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blue_doona32
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Post by blue_doona32 »

Thank you. You know, I think I like her stuff more than any others (and I can't stand chick lit) because not all of the characters get the happily ever after that they want, or they have to really fight for what they want (unlike the girls who just have problems getting to the party or have mean family members).

Maybe I just like old time romance because it just seemed so honest and true. Not like today where people get married after 2 hours in Vegas. But that's just me...
the difference between the right word and the almost right is really a large matter. It is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning ~Mark Twain
Wordsgood

Post by Wordsgood »

I think what keeps her writing so interesting even after two centuries in print, is that the romances she describes are so unlike real life. First there is the whole mystery thing, like boy meets girl, but they do so in a roomful of people in a society that frowned upon free interaction between the sexes. Imagination is needed to both write what would otherwise be boring situations, and to read and completely grasp what the writer is trying to say. Back then, if one wanted to show interest in a stranger of the opposite sex, the most they could do in "polite" society would be to sneak a glance at each other, or perhaps comment on the weather to the room in general - while glancing his/her way. After that most of the romancing continued to be supervised until they married, if they got to choose their own spouses, that is.

Whereas nowadays, you just plug in your computer or stop at the local club. People today think it's perfectly ok to not only to approach you, but to walk up and bluntly ask the most personal things as though you are A) a couple and B) alone in your own home!

Do I think Austen is over-rated? No, any writer that can not just maintain her popularity for hundreds of years, but actually get more popular with each generation, is nothing less than amazing. I think she deserves all the post-mortem accolades there is!
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sleepydumpling
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Post by sleepydumpling »

Do you know what I love about Jane Austen? It's her brilliant dialogue. The wit in her dialogue just makes me glow. Not to mention that she captures the absolute desperation in the dilemmas women faced in those times.

She is definitely not over-rated, she is one of the best there ever was, and "chick-lit" pales in comparison. The intelligence, humour and sheer observation of her society is far and above much of what is produced today.
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blue_doona32
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Post by blue_doona32 »

I enjoy the dialogue as well :) I love Lizzie Bennett's witty and educated responses to the men she talks to, especially Mr. Collins and Mr. Darcy.
the difference between the right word and the almost right is really a large matter. It is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning ~Mark Twain
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sleepydumpling
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Post by sleepydumpling »

Yes, particularly when Mr Collins has absolutely no idea that she is being witty at him!
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saethwr
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Post by saethwr »

sleepydumpling wrote:Do you know what I love about Jane Austen? It's her brilliant dialogue. The wit in her dialogue just makes me glow. Not to mention that she captures the absolute desperation in the dilemmas women faced in those times.

She is definitely not over-rated, she is one of the best there ever was, and "chick-lit" pales in comparison. The intelligence, humour and sheer observation of her society is far and above much of what is produced today.
I agree that she is definitely not over-rated. She is one of my favourite authors and also one of the first authors that hooked me.

She writes about life and situations as she found them. I think it is brilliant that she writes about "nothing more exciting" than everyday life and still she keeps our attention and interest alive. Her wit is the best part of it all...

And to use chick lit and Jane Austen in the same sentence makes me want to burry myself deep deep down and :cry:
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Post by thisislissa »

saethwr wrote:She writes about life and situations as she found them. I think it is brilliant that she writes about "nothing more exciting" than everyday life and still she keeps our attention and interest alive. Her wit is the best part of it all...

And to use chick lit and Jane Austen in the same sentence makes me want to burry myself deep deep down and :cry:
Jane Austen qualifies for and possibly invented the chick-lit genre. She puts single women and their problems at the front of her novels which focus on the relationships of these women. None of her heroines have spiritual or philosophical struggles; their goals in life are to find and secure a good mate. I’m not criticizing Jane Austen, she wrote excellent chick-lit (which is not a contradiction!).

Jane Austen’s characters are quite engaging and memorable, however they were essentially flat. They don’t transform as the story progresses, instead their static personalities are slowly revealed over the course of each story. Elizabeth and Darcy are good examples. While the reader’s perceptions of them and their perceptions of each other change throughout the novel, they never undergo any deep changes themselves; they are the same people at the beginning of the novel as they are at the end. Elizabeth a witty young woman who is determined to avoid her father’s fate of being married to someone he whom does not respect at the beginning of the novel. At the end she marries someone she respects and who presumably appreciates her wit. Darcy appears to transform, but really we just learn more about him. At first he appears cold and conceited. In the end we find that he is only cold and conceited towards those whom he does not respect (thanks to Darcy’s excellent judgment these people invariably don’t deserve respect). Luckily he has found that he does respect and love Elizabeth so we get to see his kinder side. Compare Elizabeth Bennet with Dorothea Brooke (Middlemarch). Poor Elizabeth, engaging though she may be is not a real person; however we could almost believe that Dorothea Brooke is.
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sleepydumpling
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Post by sleepydumpling »

thisislissa I totally disagree with you that Elizabeth Bennet is not real or is in any way flat.

I don't agree that she or Darcy are the same person at the end of the book that they are at the beginning. Elizabeth learns not to take people at face value however charming and engaging they are (Wickham), or however cold and distant they seem (Darcy). She also clearly is troubled with the decision Charlotte makes to marry Mr Collins but in time and observation becomes understanding of why Charlotte has done so.

Darcy learns that his high handed prejudice needs to be tempered with the facts, not just his assumptions (the business with Jane and Mr Bingley) and that sometimes his prejudices against a person because of their family or association are not enough to earn the individual disrespect.

And there is more for both of them throughout the story.

And if the above aren't philosophical struggles for people of their society and backgrounds, I am not sure what is! Society was EVERYTHING for the people of their time and standing.
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thisislissa
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Post by thisislissa »

Hi Sleepydumpling :D

I agree with you that the characters learn lessons. I just think that the lessons they learn are pretty obvious compared with those learned by other great literary characters. Learning “not to take people at face value” and that “highhanded prejudice needs to be tempered with facts”, is important, but these epiphanies hardly test the limits of the human spirit. Elizabeth and Darcy start out the novel as basically good people who have a few misconceptions, through the course of the novel their misconceptions are rectified and they can live happily ever after. Their core values do not change, they just gain a better understanding of how to express these values in the real world.
sleepydumpling wrote:And if the above aren't philosophical struggles for people of their society and backgrounds, I am not sure what is! Society was EVERYTHING for the people of their time and standing.
Perhaps in 300 years people will look back and say that Facebook was EVERYTHING to people of our time and standing. That doesn’t mean that writing about peoples relationships on Facebook = writing about philosophical struggles.

I like Jane Austen’s books a lot; I just finished Persuasion, I was cracking up the whole time. I’m just saying that her books are very narrow. They don’t really make the reader think very deeply. In other words Elizabeth Bennet will never be as great as Dorthea Brook or Anna Karenina.
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sleepydumpling
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Post by sleepydumpling »

Oh come on! Tell me that you haven't had an epiphany that was embarrassing in it's simplicity?

I really think that many readers underestimate simplicity. The art of keeping a message or moral simple, focussed and realistic is much more complex than all the high and lofty (and often overblown) prose that is touted as great genius.

And who's to say that magnificent writing can't come from a story about a set of Facebook relationships? While they're perhaps not as pivotal to our time as the kind of society that Jane Austin writes about, they ARE valid to people who live their lives in that way.

Why the assumption that "greatness" equals grandiosity?
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thisislissa
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Post by thisislissa »

Yes, I have had embarrassingly simple epiphanies, but they were embarrassing enough when they were mine, I don’t want to read about other peoples. When I read I want to learn something I didn’t already know about humanity. I don’t learn anything new from Jane Austen.

I’m not a writer, so I can’t judge on how difficult it is to tell a simple story, but I’ll take it on faith that it may be very difficult. Maybe this is why Jane Austen’s work is still so vital, she does a wonderful job telling simple stories. For me though, a simple story always feels insubstantial, like a snack. My taste in books is like my taste in food, I want the seven coarse meal with appetizers and dessert (don’t get me started on the wine). I like a book that takes months to read, that gets all these memories attached to it about where I was while reading it. I like a book where there is underline worthy writing and ideas. It is a matter of taste for sure. Perhaps you prefer a light perfectly executed salad, but it doesn’t fill me up. You call it high, lofty, and overblown prose (please say you are not talking about Tolstoy here), perhaps it is, but I like the act of searching though all that jungle of words for the grain of spectacular insight. Maybe that insight couldn’t exist in a simple story, it would be too naked, maybe it has to be buried in, protected by, all these words which you find excessive.

I wasn’t saying it would be impossible to write magnificently about facebook. I was just saying that just because facebook is important in our time it doesn’t mean that someone writing about facebook will necessarily produce good writing or meaningful writing.
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sleepydumpling
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Post by sleepydumpling »

I think you might be a bit of a book snob m'dear.

Because one doesn't need to always gorge oneself on seven course gourmet dinners for every meal. Takes the person from being a gourmet, to a gourmand.

Sometimes a salad, or a cheeseburger and fries, or a chocolate bar is just lovely. And just as worthy, satisfying and intricate in it's simplicity as that elaborate gourmet meal.

To use your metaphors.

I don't feel the need to prove myself with every single book I read being touted as "worthy" by whomever out there is supposedly an "expert" on these things. Give me a balanced diet of the simple, the frivolous, the hearty and the rich across the board, to suit my tastebuds at each moment.

And you're right, a book about Facebook doesn't guarantee a great work of art, but neither does a book on philosophy or politics or any other subject out there. Subject choice isn't what makes a book art, it's how it speaks to it's audience and connects with people. So I think Jane Austen may be a perfect example of art, she's still topping the greatest books of all time lists despite her "simplicity of subject". She's still connecting with her readers.

Again, greatness does not mean grandiosity.
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thisislissa
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Post by thisislissa »

I don’t feel the need to prove myself with every book I read either. The last book I finished was Twilight for god’s sake. I enjoy junk and/or simplicity as much as the next person. But to say that junk is just as good and satisfying as truly great writing is silly.

Perhaps we have run into our core disagreement here. I believe that books have intrinsic value which is independent of weather I enjoy them or not; actually independent of weather anyone enjoys them or understands them or even reads them. It makes me happy to try and figure out how great a given book is. I find it interesting even though I’ll never know for sure. In other words, I enjoyed it does not equal it was good for me. I think you might believe the opposite. I’ve seen your posts around the forum and you have several which tell people not to judge themselves, not to feel guilty. I think we should judge ourselves, we should feel guilty. I don’t mean we should let our guilt stop us from enjoying junk, just that we should always be aware when we are reading junk so that we don’t overdo it. I believe that we should always try to improve ourselves. To do so we must judge ourselves, our books, and everything else. You call that being a snob, maybe so, just another flaw for me to work on.

Obviously I agree with you that greatness does not equal grandiosity. Sorry, I have to drag out another metaphor here: Olympic gymnastics. You get the A score for how difficult your routine is, and the B score for how flawlessly you pulled it off. So while I agree you that Jane Austen deserved a 10 for execution, I don’t think her routine was really that difficult. Someone like Proust though, his writing has a lot of flaws, but what he tried to capture was so complex and deep that his difficulty score should be through the roof.

You say that subject choice doesn’t make a book art. On one level you are right, a person could write a bad book about anything. Still, I wonder if a person could write a good book about anything. Sure it could be any topic, any setting, but to be a really good book I think it would have to deal with some deeper issues, go below the surface. Twilight is a good example. It brings up all these interesting ideas about the nature of love, the meaning of vampire myths, parent child relationships, and friendship, but it barely addresses any of them. Someone could have written a really great Twilight book, but Stephanie Mayer didn’t.

(Thanks for the discussion by the way :D , its nice to find a forum where one can discuss rather than argue)
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