It’s been quiet lately here at the blog, but it’s a deceptive sort of quiet. I’ve been hard at work on various other things ahead of publication, which is less than three weeks away now. (!)
Some of them will hopefully see the light soon, and one already has, a Q&A on The Editor’s Desk, the blog of Andy Bechtel, a friend from my days in North Carolina.
The internet has been all over this, a “dramatic re-appraisal,” as the headline breathlessly puts it. But we never knew just what Darcy looked like in the first place — all Jane Austen gives us is “fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance of his having ten thousand pounds a year.” But the piece by John Sutherland and Amanda Vickery is great, a thorough exploration of early 19th-century ideas about male desirability, ticking through things like the importance of cravats, knowing how to move gracefully, and having a well-turned leg. None of this was news to me, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that the first readers of Pride and Prejudice probably did not imagine him as looking like a certain English actor.
What surprised me instead was that was seen as surprising. Continue reading
At the Christmas market in Bryant Park, my favorite shop is the one with wool goods from the Himalayas. When I saw this hat there, a few Decembers ago, I was smitten. It became my new favorite, my go-to winter hat.
Pink is not a color I wear much, nor do I favor hats with ears. But I love this hat! So silly, so distinctive, it brightens the darkest winter day. Dorkily large, it does not squeeze my head and is lined with non-itchy polar fleece. The earpieces hang down like crazy Regency sideburns or those protective pieces on Viking helmets. I love my hat.
The other night I met up with a friend. “Oh, you’ve got one of those hats!” she said. I looked at her, perplexed “The pussy hats. You know. For the march.” I did not know — and yet. I was aware of the pussy bow kerfuffle. My sense, lately, that people had been looking oddly at my hat — I’d told myself I was imagining things, but maybe I hadn’t been.
“I’ve had this hat for years,” I said. When I got home, I looked it up. She was right of course. First I laughed. My dorky pink hat had become a political statement! Then I paused. Could I keep wearing it? What would Jane Austen do? Continue reading
All the time I was reading Jo Baker’s “Longbourn” I had the sensation of not being able to decide if I liked it. This is unusual; feckless and tentative as I am in most realms of human activity, I am generally confident in my literary judgments.
The story, in case anyone missed the large splash it made upon publication in 2014, is “Pride and Prejudice” from the viewpoint of the Bennets’ servants. A brilliant, can’t-miss idea. I like to imagine Ms. Baker, tormented by insomnia and casting around for her next idea for a novel, sitting up in bed.
HOLY SHIT! I’LL CALL IT ‘LONGBOURN!’ Continue reading
Seventy-five percent in, and I feel how I have misjudged it in what I wrote, for at some point since then I tipped over into the point at which fiction resembles magic. I no longer see Tolstoy’s little tricks, how he’s pulling the reader’s strings, but am simply being pulled by them. I’m utterly beguiled;
I’ve forgotten I’m reading in translation. All I feel is how it’s all becoming deeper and somehow stranger and at the same time solid and real. Continue reading
I haven’t reread it, though it’s been on my list and on my mind. I’m thinking about it today because of an interesting comment in AustenBlog’s review of Longbourn by Jo Baker:
“We think Ms. Baker was shooting for something less mercenary and more ambitious: the Wide Sargasso Sea of the Jane Austen oeuvre; by which we mean a paraliterature title that strives for literary achievement as well as, or perhaps even more than, popularity. We have long wondered why no one has written such a novel.”
This has set me to wondering: what would such a novel be like? Continue reading
The Jane Austen Project: A Novel 