Jane Austen
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good thinking! actually I like both, that's why I was being cagey
That analogy was just off the cuff, and I would hate to have to produce a reasoned thesis tying the dog/cat thing to the Austen/Bronte!
I still think there's a serious point behind the dissimilarity of the writers though.
Young girls typically feed their imaginations on the emotional extremes of the Brontes - I know I did. Romantic excesses don't come without a price though, as Jane Austen knew. Catherine Morland and Marianne Dashwood are both studies in the dangers of that mindset.
It may or may not be relevant, but I've also seen an "early novella" of Charlotte's called "The Spell", published in 2005, that was fit to make a Christian queasy.
Feel free to take no notice
- that's just my 
I loved Kathleen's big gripe with Mr Rochester, - that he kept his wife shut up in the attic!! to be fair, he may have had some justification there at least, given that every time she escaped, she set fire to things.
Montanablue
Puritan Board Doctor
Fair point
Although, if I was shut in an attic, I might be prone to arson too... There have been a couple of novelization's of "Bertha's story," the most common of which is "The Wide Sargasso Sea," I believe. I've always found the idea of knowing what the story behind Bertha was, although I've never read any of the novelizations. Has anyone else given them a go?
For starters you might go with Northanger Abbey.
I loved Kathleen's big gripe with Mr Rochester, - that he kept his wife shut up in the attic!! to be fair, he may have had some justification there at least, given that every time she escaped, she set fire to things.
Fair point
equally fair point!!!
I've read Wide Sargasso Sea, once, years ago. I seem to recall finding it depressing and not that engaging, but that might just be me...I don't even remember it well enough to give you a proper account of it, so don't go by that.
I don't think you could go wrong with any one of Jane Austen's. Northanger Abbey is loads of fun. It's slightly a one-off, in that some aspects might seem a little mysterious unless you realise it was written with the intention of "sending up" the sensational novels of the time. Be prepared to step into a different world!
he beholds
Puritan Board Doctor
Fair point
There have been a couple of novelization's of "Bertha's story," the most common of which is "The Wide Sargasso Sea," I believe. I've always found the idea of knowing what the story behind Bertha was, although I've never read any of the novelizations. Has anyone else given them a go?
I read Wide Sargasso Sea. I wasn't a big fan, though it was neat to have a story to put with Bertha, but I didn't really accept it as true.
Off to the bookstore for me!
I think I might just have guessed that from your avatar! That is one of my very favourite films. It never fails to make me laugh my head off in the middle, but end up crying from the heart.I'm a huge Jane Austen fan as well!
I also have to put in a plug for my other favourite 19th C author Charlotte M Yonge. I bet no-one here has even heard of her....? but her novels are great, her current oblivion totally undeserved!
Jenny, isn't Charlotte M. Yonge something of a byword among later writers for the deficiencies of Victorianism? Apart from some advice to young writers I haven't read anything of hers, but I know her name has come up in book reviews/essays from around WWI, and I didn't think the references were favorable.
On the Austen/Bronte divide, Heidi had some interesting thoughts which might explain why some find that they like one OR the other, while others find that they like both:
On the Austen/Bronte divide, Heidi had some interesting thoughts which might explain why some find that they like one OR the other, while others find that they like both:
What deficiencies do you mean? She certainly has theological ones, and if a young person was going to read her I would want to spell out exactly where she departs from Biblical teaching. She was a High Church Anglican, but on the other hand it was back in the day....it didn't prevent her from being adamantly opposed to romanism, and a firm adherent of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Overall, I've found that drawback easily outweighed by the good to be got from her books.
If you mean critical deficiencies, that's a different question. I won't bother addressing that one unless I know it's what you mean.
In that case, I'm here to tell you, they're actually very good!
Experto crede. I've read every one of Charlotte Yonge's non-historical novels that I could get my hands on, the best ones multiple times too.
No, they have weaknesses, of course. I wouldn't quite put her in competition with Jane Austen; but her descent in critical estimation during the 20th C is very easily accounted for, and has not much to do with objective criteria.
How likely after all was an author to stay in fashion, in the 20th century, if her Christian faith was her main motivation, and she made no secret of the fact??
Yonge's great strength is characterisation. I don't think there's a novelist to touch her in that department, not Dickens or the Brontes, and even Jane didn't surpass her. She has enormous casts of characters - typically a family on a scale approaching kvanlaan's, whom you meet first as children but then watch grow up, true to individual personality, with all their complex alliances and family traits and rubs and interactions, utterly believably. There's lots of humour, too, but the deeper business of each novel is always to trace, -behind the outward events and appearances, the good choices and the bad choices,- the characters' spiritual histories, and journeys. That's not to say they are heavy-handedly didactic; they aren't. And the people are all so real, I would find it impossible not to be edified!
Do i sound like an enthusiast....??
I do think Christians (especially those who already have a taste for 19th C fiction) are missing a great deal if they don't know her work.
but wait _ I know an endorsement that may count for more than mine.
Americans are big on Little Women, yes?
do you remember a bit where Jo is curled up in the attic with a bag of apples and a pet rat, crying over a book?
It was The heir of Redclyffe, by Charlotte M Yonge
you wouldn't be sorry. C S Lewis was a fan too, and he was a good judge of literature.
On the other hand, in your case-
maybe you should begin with Little Women...
Oh, come. That's a bit silly. Louisa Alcott may not be as good (in my view) as Charlotte Yonge, but she's a perfectly respectable writer.
Montanablue
Puritan Board Doctor
I love Louisa May Alcott - but I really dislike Little Women. In my opinion, Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom are her best books - much less sentimental.
So I trotted off to my local bookstore and picked up Oxford World's Classics' edition of Northanger Abbey. After 3 chapters I found myself pleasantly smiling throughout. Perhaps it is the long overdue change in literature genre;- from entirely theological books to now a novel, or perhaps it is Ms. Austen's writing itself. One thing's for sure, I had to significantly slow down my reading pace to accommodate the writing.
Looks like I'll have an enjoyable week ahead, and most certainly a wonderful time with Ms. Austen or more befittingly so, Miss Catherine Morland.
Looks like I'll have an enjoyable week ahead, and most certainly a wonderful time with Ms. Austen or more befittingly so, Miss Catherine Morland.
Montanablue
Puritan Board Doctor
Glad you're enjoying it! You must keep us updated on your evolution as an Austenite.
What? Sorry I didn't really catch what you were saying because I was too busy READING JANE AUSTEN.
Just kidding.
Great that you're enjoying it! I bet everyone here envies you, reading her for the very first time, and the other novels still all ahead of you -Northanger Abbey isn't even by any means the best one.
Mind and let us know how you get on if you find time to read the rest too!
There's nothing fans love more than seeing someone new tapping into their enthusiasm...
Mind and let us know how you get on if you find time to read the rest too!
There's nothing fans love more than seeing someone new tapping into their enthusiasm...
ZackF
Puritan Board Professor
I'm Johnny-come-late, or Janey-come-late, to this thread. I've been a fan of Austen for nearly fifteen years. I read P&P for the first time about a year before the 90s miniseries aired. All of her books are near perfect to read by themselves and with others for the simple fact you can talk about the characters and stories without gossiping. It is almost a near occasion of sin. They seem so real.
They seem so real.
Laura
Puritan Board Junior
I'm Johnny-come-late, or Janey-come-late, to this thread. I've been a fan of Austen for nearly fifteen years. I read P&P for the first time about a year before the 90s miniseries aired. All of her books are near perfect to read by themselves and with others for the simple fact you can talk about the characters and stories without gossiping. It is almost a near occasion of sin.
I know. I can get really worked up about how stupid a character is being. In most cases only because I've learned the hard way why the behavior in question is so stupid. But the characters' faults are tremendously believable and consistent with their personality. Jane Austen must have done a lot of people-watching.
There you go...that's EXACTLY the pleasure to be got from Charlotte Yonge's novels too! (I won't be able to rest until I've made at least one convert)I'm Johnny-come-late, or Janey-come-late, to this thread. I've been a fan of Austen for nearly fifteen years. I read P&P for the first time about a year before the 90s miniseries aired. All of her books are near perfect to read by themselves and with others for the simple fact you can talk about the characters and stories without gossiping. It is almost a near occasion of sin.
I know. I can get really worked up about how stupid a character is being. In most cases only because I've learned the hard way why the behavior in question is so stupid. But the characters' faults are tremendously believable and consistent with their personality. Jane Austen must have done a lot of people-watching.
And just think...there are AT LEAST TEN OR TWELVE of the best ones. It's a whole world.
If you read them slowly you probably need never run out -- start again at the end, like the Forth Bridge. Bite your nails along with the eldest (orphaned) Underwood siblings while the fascinating artist brother Edgar is teaching little Lance to smoke in the kitchen every night, and also doing his utmost to persuade him into a future as a dodgy jobbing musician. Felix and his sister know better than to try and intervene, they can only pray. no spoilers, but it all turns on whether Lance will hold fast to Ps 137 v 5!
a mere housewife
Not your cup of tea
The problem with the deeply unpopular Edmund is that he spends the entire book talking to Fanny about another woman, in whose character he is unhappily and avoidably deceived. So he is a bad judge of character, and a generally boring conversationalist. I always think it's nicer for a woman to fall in love with someone who has the good sense to talk about -- if not her -- at least to talk sensibly about the weather. I have never regretted the non-reform of a villain so much as I regretted that of Henry Crawford; and this is my main impression on every re-reading of the novel. It's the only detail that I think ever went awry in Jane Austen's so perfectly competent writing -- in this one book she made the bad people more engaging than the good ones. That is an unpleasant taste for a moral novel (the 'most intensely moral of all her novels', some preface to some edition I read said) to leave. (I actually found it the most morally ambiguous of all her novels -- I kept wondering if Henry Crawford would have reformed if Fanny had met him half way, and the 'heads or tails' dilemma about whether he was internally bad or had just had bad influences would have landed face up: and finally decided that this sort of moral ramification probably didn't concern Jane Austen. I think she was concerned to write about a very bounded world of societal, rather than larger questions of truly spiritual, morality. Edmund's little weakness of character re: Miss Crawford and the play is more respectable than Henry Crawford's; thus we must rejoice that Fanny held steadfastly to, and gained, her first love and did not turn aside to save anyone from less acceptable sins. As Ruben said when I asked him what he thought about this, perhaps the real take home lesson of Jane Austen is that society is less gracious than God I think C. S. Lewis says something about the 'exquisite' families of Charlotte Yonge in his autobiography? On both your recommendations, I will check something out of the library.
I think that's a little unkind, - no way the whole book ...only after he falls for her and because of long-established habit of confiding in Fanny
certainly the first is true. I'd go so far as to say the whole plot turns on his defective judgment. Without it, no story! In fact it's all about misjudgment now I come to think... Sir Thomas's especially. Fanny is the only one who always judges rightly and does rightly, -and it's such a great touch when even she (being human) is trembling on the verge of joining in the acting, and only saved by her uncle's return in the nick of time!
I suppose you have to assume that. It happens off-camera. We are given to understand that he and Fanny have had endless literary and other discussions and he has virtually been her education. Plus he clea`rly has something, or a girl like Mary wouldn't have gone for him. I'm most unwilling to give up on the character and decide Jane A just failed with him....becasuse I think then I'd be more or less giving up on the book as a whole
Sure, he's really nice, and I've fought this out with my daughter more times than I can count!! She loves Henry. But really, J A was right about him. See her own analysis in the last chapter. He had no notion of giving up even the smallest pleasure for the sake of doing right. (Don't you love the comment re Sir Thomas "...he wished [Mr Crawford] to prove a model of constancy, and fancied the best means of effecting it would be by not trying him too long"?)
I would certainly say that it's the most morally uncompromising,- and also the most implacably at variance with modern sensibilities
He might well have, but.but but - would it have been more than on the surface?
I see it more as the testing out in the furnace of morality, with utter disregard for any othe considerations (especially likeableness) ONLY Fanny passes, and she only by the skin of her teeth, (and of course with the aid of being secretly in love - psychological truth to life) Though Edmund claws back in the end. So it's the only proper ending, to have them happy together!...and the 'heads or tails' dilemma about whether he was internally bad or had just had bad influences would have landed face up: and finally decided that this sort of moral ramification probably didn't concern Jane Austen. I think she was concerned to write about a very bounded world of societal, rather than larger questions of truly spiritual, morality. Edmund's little weakness of character re: Miss Crawford and the play is more respectable than Henry Crawford's; thus we must rejoice that Fanny held steadfastly to, and gained, her first love and did not turn aside to save anyone from less acceptable sins. As Ruben said when I asked him what he thought about this, perhaps the real take home lesson of Jane Austen is that society is less gracious than God
Yes, he did. I can't quite say "I'm sure you'll like her" in fact now I'm getting cold feet in case you really, really don't!!! She's VERY English, and that's what you might stick on, perhaps.
Tell me what you find, and I'll tell you if it sounds like a good one to start with!
Only I'd so love to share them with believers. I belong to the CMY Fellowship, but despite their deep appreciation, no-one else there seems to read her for the same things as I do.
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