It's a
very slow news day in Brontëland today.
Scholars & Rogues discusses Jane Austen:
One accepts (or should accept) that Austen writes to a formula – indeed, as I may argue in a future review (P&P and Sense and Sensibility are both on the 2014 reading list about which more come January), Austen has more in common with genre fictioneers (I am indebted to a fellow writer, the immensely talented Teresa Milbrodt, for that delightful epithet) like Stephenson and Gaiman and the late lamented Messrs. Vonnegut and Leonard than with the major 19th century novelists she is often associated with: Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, even those Brontë sisters. That latter group move from story to story, some purely imagined, some with roots in their biographies or in historical fact. Austen tells stories of one social group (the landed English gentry of the early 19th century) engaged in one social activity (finding suitable marriage partners). Her famous comment about working on her “…little bit (two inches wide) of ivory…” is her own wittily modest explanation of her “genre” – the romance novel. (Jim Booth)
And that's about it for today.
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