Jane Austen

Mr. Darcy vs. Mr. Rochester

~ Flynn ~ 5 Comments

darcy firth

orson rochester

No one today seeking to write about love, a group I must, however reluctantly, class myself with, can escape the towering shadows of two 19th-century romantic heroes: Jane Austen’s Darcy and Charlotte Bronte’s Rochester.

What has brought this to mind was rereading “Jane Eyre,” a work I had avoided for years; I think I feared it. I recalled from last reading a vague sense of its force, closely connected to the powerful first-person narrator, who grabs the reader by the throat, relates uncomfortable truths, refuses to shut up. The initial account of the cruelty of her life with Mrs. Reed and the early days at Lowood is even more ghastly than I remembered. Continue reading →

Hot Under the Fichu

~ Flynn ~ Leave a comment

The blogosphere has been all aflutter with the news that Clandestine Classics proposes to “spice up” the classics by adding erotic passages to works of literature including”Pride and Prejudice,” “Jane Eyre,” and oddly enough “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” (Actually, I’ve never read that; maybe there is a lot of suppressed erotic tension, though?)

How are we to understand this development? One thing to keep in mind is that Clandestine Classics gets no points for originality. One need only think of “Pride and Promiscuity: the Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen” or “Sense & Sensuality: Erotic Fantasies of Jane Austen,” to name but a few. The idea that sex is missing from Jane Austen (and Charlotte Bronte, etc) is apparently one people cannot get rid of, any more than they can stop themselves from rewriting “Pride and Prejudice” from Darcy’s point of view. But does it reveal any thing about the characters that we didn’t know already? I would tend to think not. If you cannot figure out just from reading “Persuasion” that Anne Elliot wants to have sex with Captain Wentworth, you are an idiot. Your library card should be revoked.

Another idea that occurred to me is there might be an untapped market for writing sex scenes into less likely 19th-century classics. “Middlemarch”? There’s a great well of repressed passion there. And the Rosamund-Lydgate marriage only makes sense if you understand it through the prism of sexual attraction. “Anna Karenina” would truly benefit from a little more in the way of heaving bosoms and warm loins. The reader is left to imagine that sex with Vronsky was amazing and this is why Anna K left her respectable life and son she loved very much to become a fallen woman — but Tolstoy never even gets to hint that. (He gets much closer to the bone in the deeply disturbing Kreuzter Sonata, which was promptly censored by the Russian authorities.)

“A Tale of Two Cities”? “Little Dorrit”??! The mind reels.

Further Reading: Ivanhoe

~ Flynn ~ Leave a comment

Near the beginning of my current draft of “The Jane Austen Project” there is an allusion to “Ivanhoe.” As a matter of principle I have tried to read the books my characters read, and while I long doubted there was much to be gained from reading “Ivanhoe,” I downloaded the free Kindle version onto my phone anyway, just to have something to read in case I accidentally found myself on the subway between library books. This happened, and I started reading it.

I am perhaps a third of the way through, and it’s astonishing. Continue reading →

Further Reading: Second Impressions

~ Flynn ~ 3 Comments

Knowing little of the person but what I read in The New York Times, Sandy Lerner, as an idea, has long fascinated me, to the extent that she inspired a minor character in The Jane Austen Project, an ancient Ph.D. mathematician and tech billionaire with an obsession with literature, thought to be bankrolling the Jane Austen Project. When it turned out that Ms. Lerner (who for the record is neither ancient nor a Ph.D.) was giving a talk at my own local Jane Austen Society chapter, on a night that I already had off, no less, that I would be going to hear her was obvious.

I don’t know what I expected, except that it was certain to be interesting. It was that, and much more. Ms. Lerner, it turns out, has written a novel, having spent 26 years researching a historically accurate sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Continue reading →

What Are Chapters For?

~ Flynn ~ 1 Comment

In the long time that I have been away from this blog, I have not been entirely unproductive. Among other things, I’ve been revising The Jane Austen Project and am now through Chapter 6. In honor of that, I have decided to post Chapter 2 here.

I’ve also been thinking about a lot of things, like Downton Abbey, which deserves a post of its own, only I don’t know where to start, and also, not completely unrelated, about chapters. For one thing that intrigues me about Downton Abbey is the issues it raises about the different ways there are of telling a story, and chapters have something to do with that. How do we decide where they begin and end, and what do they have to do with the architecture of a novel? Continue reading →

Further Reading, Part II

~ Flynn ~ 4 Comments

Whose Jane Austen?

It’s a question I’ve often asked myself while researching and writing The Jane Austen Project, but never more insistently than when considering the works that make up the short story anthology “Jane Austen Made Me Do It, Original Stories Inspired by Literature’s Most Astute Observer of the Human Heart.” I use the subtitle advisedly, for this is one way of viewing Jane Austen, and perhaps a message from its editor, Laurel Ann Nattress of Austenprose, of how she, at least, does.

JAMMDI is on one hand a brilliant marketing idea, combining the brand recognition of Jane Austen with some of the biggest names in Austen and Austenesque fan fiction. But ideally it is more than that, being also an effort to wrestle with the question of what Jane Austen means to people living today, nearly 200 years after her death. Continue reading →