Salon post: November 30

[jenett]

Happy Friday!


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Topic of the week
There is a comment by Janet's father, in pameladean's Tam Lin that one can be entirely ignorant of three periods in one's field, and still be a perfectly reasonable sort of professor.

I am, in fact, generally a lot more lousy about the period between 1780 and about 1910 than other points in Western history or literature.

Which leads me to a question...

For reasons tangentially related to my work (seriously, my job), I have been invited to a tea party celebrating Jane Austen's birth in mid-December. It has been a long time since I've read any Austen. (I'm pretty sure I went through Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Emma at various points around high school.)

Clearly, I should read or reread at least one book before this party, so as to make appropriate conversation. Tell me, oh, inestimable commenters, if you have a recommendation, or how you'd approach this question if you don't have a rec.

Or, y'know, talk about periods of history you have mostly ignored in favour of others, what you're up to, the amusements of your pets, and/or whatever else intrigues you at the moment.

What I've been up to
I won Nano! Go me. (Go everyone else who's made the attempt!) I still have too-much-heat issues in my apartment (boo).


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Comments

[brithistorian]

For the Austen party, I'd recommend either Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. Each of her books has its champions, but I'd say those two are the foundation of her writing.

I think your period of weakness in history lends credence to the idea of the Long 19th Century - the dates match up really nicely.

In Western history I'm exceedingly weak on the ancient world, the period from the fall of Rome to the Norman Conquest, and the century from 1688 to 1789.

I went to the local science museum with my museum studies class last night. It was fun to get to geek out about exhibit design with my classmates.

[rmc28]

The books are not actually very long; the main issue I find is a little adjustment to the language of the time, and then I'm away.

My favourite is Pride & Prejudice but I'm also very fond of Sense & Sensibility, and of Persuasion. Also you could cheat and watch the Ang Lee S&S film (bonus Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman!) and the P&P 2005 film with Keira Knightley. The former in particular I think captures a lot of the *feel* of the book even if it's not always strictly accurate. The latter is pretty good but the ending is weird.

I have an especial fondness for the 1995 BBC TV adaptation with Colin Firth & Jennifer Ehle, because it sucked me into the story, the book and the rest of Austen's books, but it is about 5-6 hours long.

[julian]

_Northanger Abbey_ is fun, but it's enhanced if you know the gothics it's parodying. (So you could read some of, say, _The Mysteries of Udolpho_, and be able to talk about *that*, too.)

I avoided reading _Pride & Prejudice_ for yonks, and when I finally did, discovered that, in fact, everyone is right and it *is* all that and a bag of chips. (And, also, extremely funny.)

I keep meaning to read more about the (US) Revolutionary War, and haring off in other directions instead. Must get to that, eventually. (I have a Barbara Tuchman book about it. So my intentions are good!)

[lapin_agile]

As a 16th-/17th-century literature prof, I heartily agree with Janet's father.

I'm best on the periods before 1700. I'm competent on everything else. (I can teach a reasonably engaging survey course on literature from the Romantics onwards.) However, I've never had much fondness for the 18th century and have made no great effort to hold its content in my brain. If I ever need to know more than I do, I know where it lives!

[batrachian]

I'm very fuzzy on anything before High Middle Ages, and what I know from then to, oh, early 20th stems from "placing SCA garb in context" and "figuring out what the history should have been in these Paradox Interactive games" (the actual game going...ahistoric very quickly, but the mechanics are based on Real Stuff) rather than anything in my formal education.

Am also quietly pondering how much that framework of "missing era" applies to the stuff I am trained in (EE/CS). And there's probably history soup tied in there as well, but also fields of specialization? I know very little about Large Scale Power, to take a nontrivial example.

[cadenzamuse]

I am largely uninterested in history as a field of study? I know, I know, but I feel like the way it was presented to me in high school classes sucked all the fun out of it. But then I married a person who would have gone into history as a field if they hadn't been a better engineer, so I've started to tentatively dip my toe into some historical periods. (Spouse also used to reenact famous historical battles for me with food, which made them both hilarious and easier to understand.) So, a sort of reverse to the question, histories which I know anything about: queer history from the last 125-ish years, fandom history from the last 25 years, Richard Nixon, history of mental health treatment and poverty solutions in the United States, history of some of the other people's in the fertile crescent when the Torah was being written.

[jazzyjj]

I'm also a bit fuzzy on a lot of world history, although reading/listening to audio books is awesome for that. I'm currently nearing the end of a book about our current US President. But I'm also fairly good on the history of assistive technology, primarily from being a long-time user of said technology. I'm also pretty good on the history of disability rights in general in this country. But I would honestly like to know more history of mental illness, because I happen to have some neighbors with various forms of this. I recently completed a crash course from Open University dealing with CBT and how this treatment approach relates to depression and anxiety. It was a good course, but I didn't have enough bucks to upgrade for full access.

[rosefox]

Listen to an audio book of Persuasion or watch the Amanda Root/Ciarán Hinds 1995 adaptation (NOT the one that was made in the mid-aughts, it's AWFUL).

[stultiloquentia]

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.