I've spent the past three months not only rereading all Austen's novels and manuscripts for the first time in almost twenty years, but watching all the adaptations I never got around to, and reading a pile of books about her work. She was really important to me as a teen, and apparently my brain decided 2018 is the year for a deep dive into the MOST RELIABLE COMFORT READING IN MY ARSENAL. Heh. So.
Pride and Prejudice really is the best place to start. it's brisk and vigorous, funny as hell, and the love story is perfect.
Depending on your preferences and other pockets of knowledge, the rest might be fun for different reasons.
Northanger Abbey is funny and spoofy, a parody of 18th C Gothic romances as well as a startlingly on-the-nose test of Lockean ideas about innocence and education.
Sense and Sensibility is viciously satirical, and not only a remix of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, but Paradise Lost.
Mansfield Park incredibly rich, but slower and darker, with a timid, angelic heroine whom, tbh, I only learnt to appreciate after reading up on Austen's context for her. The undercurrents in this one are religion and the slave trade, and Austen's fury at the church's complicity in the latter.
Emma stars "a heroine no one but myself could like," according to her author, but guess what, I love her. It's a Midsummer Night's Dream spree, with Emma the disastrous matchmaker. It's also much more conscious of village life as a whole than the other novels, with high- and low-born members interacting and impacting each other for good and ill.
Persuasion is elegiac and triumphant. It's short, but the pacing still tested my patience until I got to the end and realized how deliberately experimental Austen was being: form follows content. That plus the dazzling use of the free indirect style she famously invented make this incredibly romantic novel fascinating for any writer interested in craft.
If you want to scoop up some cool talking points, especially about P&P, I've been posting bits of meta in my jane austen tag on Dreamwidth and Tumblr. There's more on Tumblr, because it includes art and other people's meta, but I'd love to stir up more chatter on DW.
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Date: 2018-12-01 03:39 pm (UTC)Pride and Prejudice really is the best place to start. it's brisk and vigorous, funny as hell, and the love story is perfect.
Depending on your preferences and other pockets of knowledge, the rest might be fun for different reasons.
Northanger Abbey is funny and spoofy, a parody of 18th C Gothic romances as well as a startlingly on-the-nose test of Lockean ideas about innocence and education.
Sense and Sensibility is viciously satirical, and not only a remix of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, but Paradise Lost.
Mansfield Park incredibly rich, but slower and darker, with a timid, angelic heroine whom, tbh, I only learnt to appreciate after reading up on Austen's context for her. The undercurrents in this one are religion and the slave trade, and Austen's fury at the church's complicity in the latter.
Emma stars "a heroine no one but myself could like," according to her author, but guess what, I love her. It's a Midsummer Night's Dream spree, with Emma the disastrous matchmaker. It's also much more conscious of village life as a whole than the other novels, with high- and low-born members interacting and impacting each other for good and ill.
Persuasion is elegiac and triumphant. It's short, but the pacing still tested my patience until I got to the end and realized how deliberately experimental Austen was being: form follows content. That plus the dazzling use of the free indirect style she famously invented make this incredibly romantic novel fascinating for any writer interested in craft.
If you want to scoop up some cool talking points, especially about P&P, I've been posting bits of meta in my jane austen tag on Dreamwidth and Tumblr. There's more on Tumblr, because it includes art and other people's meta, but I'd love to stir up more chatter on DW.