SWEET, SWEET JANE

I've been reading about JA's juvenilia. I really want to read this one (as described on Wikipedia):

Love and Freindship is a juvenile story by Jane Austen, dated 1790, when Austen was 14 years old. Written in epistolary form, like her later unpublished novella, Lady Susan, it is likely one of the tales she wrote for the amusement of her family. The installments, written as letters from the heroine Laura, to Marianne, the daughter of her friend, Isabel, "La Comtesse de Feullide," may have come about as nightly readings by the young Jane in the Austen home. Love and Freindship (the misspelling is one of many in the story) is clearly a parody of romantic novels Austen read as a child. This is clear even from the subtitle, "Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love," which totally undercuts the title. In form, it resembles a fairy tale as much as anything else, featuring wild coincidences and turns of fortune, but Austen is determined to lampoon the conventions of romantic stories, right down to the utter failure of romantic fainting spells, which always turn out badly for the female characters. In this story we can see the development of Austen's sharp wit and distain for romantic sensibility, so characteristic of her later novels.

AUSTEN'S REALISM

I thought this passage at the end of the last chapter was really well done. It has a feel of Realism that seems way ahead of its time. What do you think?

Willoughby could not hear of her marriage without a pang; and his punishment was soon afterwards complete, in the voluntary forgiveness of Mrs. Smith, who, by stating his marriage with a woman of character as the source of her clemency, gave him reason for believing that had he behaved with honour towards Marianne he might at once have been happy and rich. That his repentance of misconduct, which thus brought its own punishment, was sincere, need not be doubted; nor that he long thought of Colonel Brandon with envy, and of Marianne with regret. But that he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on- for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.

For Marianne, however, in spite of his incivility in surviving her loss, he always retained that decided regard which interested him in every thing that befell her, and made her his secret standard of perfection in woman; and many a rising beauty would be slighted by him in after-days as bearing no comparison with Mrs. Brandon.

MRS. JENNINGS AGAIN

What do you make of Mrs. Jennings and the role she plays in the narrative? The narrator is constantly making fun of her and pointing out her foibles, particularly her blindness to the true nature of Lucy Steele, and yet she is held up as a model of good-heartedness and sincerity. Of all the husbandless matriarchs in the book, she is the one — rather than Mrs. Dashwood herself and Mrs. Ferrars and even Willoughby's rich aunt — who seems like JA's model of maternal love to me. And JA endows her with a wacky kind of prescience that makes her correctly predict at the VERY beginning of the book — as soon as we meet her — that Marianne will marry Col. Brandon (In Chapter 8: "She was perfectly convinced of it."). At the end of the book, when Marianne is sick, Elinor comes to truly love Mrs. Jennings, which is the narrator's signal to the reader, in case the reader didn't get it before, that she really is a woman of note — and not just some caricature of a silly society matron.

I think JA's favoring of Mrs. Jennings, the girls' de facto mother through most of the book, is also a sign of her democratic impulse. Mrs. Jennings' husband made his fortune in trade, and that sets her apart from the landed gentry who have all lived idly and forever off the incomes of their estates. She lacks refinement, but she compensates with a generous heart and a liberal spirit.

I love how she is introduced: "Mrs. Jennings, Lady Middleton's mother, was a good-humoured, merry, fat, elderly woman, who talked a great deal, seemed very happy, and rather vulgar. She was full of jokes and laughter, and before dinner was over, had said many witty things on the subject of lovers and husbands."

Compare the introduction of Mrs. Ferrars: "Mrs. Ferrars was a little, thin woman, upright, even to formality, in her figure, and serious, even to sourness, in her aspect. Her complexion was sallow; and her features small, without beauty, and naturally without expression; but a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity, by giving it the strong characters of pride and ill-nature. She was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas."

Geraldine Brooks

So if Ms. Brooks were to imagine a novel told from the point of view of one of the male characters, whose story would you be most interested to hear: Willoughby, Brandon or Edward?

NARRATIVE VOICE

What, if anything, did you think of the narrative voice? Did it seem antiquated? It seems to have poked fun at everyone from time to time, except maybe at Elinor.

One curious thing about it: Did anyone notice the sudden use of the first person by the narrator? In Chapter 36, about three pages in, there's this: "I come now to the relation of a misfortune which about this time befell Mrs. John Dashwood." Where did this "I" come from? I found it really jarring. I wonder whether it's in every edition. I have the Bantam Classic paperback reissue April 2006. It doesn't say what original text it's based on, if there's more than one.

MRS. JENNINGS AND MRS. FERRARS

These two struck me as the matriarchal pillars of the novel. In many ways, they were the most powerul people in the book — like Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice — and yet they were very different. JA's books seem to be peopled with anti-patriarchs, i.e., most of the men except for the main love interest seem to be sidelined and ineffectual, and it's really the women calling most of the shots. I found this very striking. I don't know whether anyone else noticed this ... or maybe it's what Christy was getting at with her "mean girls" comment ... especially in terms of when JA was writing, early 1800s, as compared with, say, the Bronte sisters' books, written in mid-1800s, which are very male-centered, even "Jane Eyre," good grief, is really about a man, as is "Wuthering Heights"..... although I can't help but see a very compelling resemblance between Cathy in "Wuthering Heights" and Marianne in S&S. (I guess Charlotte Bronte disliked JA — thought she was overrated, lacked cajones. I wonder what Emily thought...) Anyway, this is not a question, so much as a rambling, but if anyone has any thoughts on this, I'd like to hear them.

WILLOUGHBY AND MARIANNE

Did you see the revelation of Willoughby's real character coming? Did JA set him up as something too good to be true? Or were you totally surprised like Marianne? Was Marianne's abandon and lack of propriety with regard to him (in the eyes of the Age and of Elinor) something that was bound to be punished, in this case by losing him?

Potential spoiler

(Don't read if you aren't finished ....)

You'll have to have read more than one of Jane Austen's books to compare, but did you think she skimped a little on the ending in terms of intimacy, impassioned dialogue and all the perks of a romantic happy ending? Particularly with Marianne? I can't remember too well with P&P, but I think in "Emma" the author was more willing to stay with the characters as they admitted their love, committed to marriage, etc.

I felt a little cheated -- as a sentimental slob -- at how much narrative she uses to gloss over the ending at "Sense" after putting me through all that stress, damn it!

Meow!

I don't know that "Mean Girls" quite stacks up to the underhanded scheming, passive-aggressive insults and blatant snobbery from the women of "Sense and Sensibility." I had trouble even finding a sympathetic adult female character besides Elinor and Marianne.

Any thoughts on what Miss Austen had to say about her sex? Would you credit any behavior to the limited and cutthroat role for women of the day -- marriage for their own (and family's) prosperity and reputation?

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, QUESTION 1

Elinor or Marianne?

Round two

My second pick, to be discussed starting around October 15, is Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr.

More on schedule and pacing

As of yesterday, I hadn't started our next selection, and I was hoping to have it done by about September 15, when we're planning to start discussing it (as I understand our calendar). So I checked out a copy of Sense & Sensibility from the WSU library, noted that it has 335 pages and I had 11 days to read it in, so I gave myself the goal of reading about 30 pages a day. I'm just letting y'all know this in case you want to try a similar idea yourself.

Also, as I understand it, we're planning to do about one book per month, and to announce the selections early so people can procure the book and get a head start if necessary. With that in mind, I'll plan to name my selection around September 15, at the same time that we start discussing Sense and Sensibility. Then you'll have a month to procure it and read it, while we discuss Sense and Sensibility. We usually don't spend a whole month discussing (unless we're really dragging it out without a lot of comments), so even if you don't like to overlap books, it should work. We can discuss a book in the second half of the month and you can read a book in the first half. If you prefer to read slower and don't mind discussing one book while reading another, then you'll have a whole month to read each one. (We may have to change this schedule if it turns out to be too quick. Or we could change it temporarily if someone picks an especially long book.)

Let me know whether this sounds okay. Otherwise, I'll just plan to name my pick around September 15 and begin the discussion around October 15.

C is for Chuck and Creative, too

Though I've criticized some parts of the book, I still would give "Haunted" a high score for originality. There were some intriguing characters, too. I can't say that I ever could anticipate what would happen next (save for, after a while, the fact that characters would die). If 10's the best score you could give this novel sheerly for ingenuinity, what would you rate it?

Author's agenda

There was an aspect to this novel, which I think was well-written and interesting overall, that turned me off from working on it for a while. (This is no insult to the great G-Force, who chose it.) Part of it was how these stories followed each other so closely: One was Whittier's taking advantage of the suburban volunteer mom type, and the other was the journalist who'd commit murder for a Pulitzer. While I appreciate that Palahniuk works with absurdity, as both of those stories reflected (nobody would issue a Pulitzer for a celebrity profile), he still has this agenda he's working for his male, anti-Establishment type audience.

One, take the so-called "soccer moms," who are not as inane or mediocre as people relentlessly portray them. I think Salon has or had a category once called "Soccer Moms Who Think," and it really pissed me off. Starting with choosing to stay home with your kids doesn't mean you're an intellectual lightweight. Or that you would fall prey to the seductive charms of some dying man-kid.

Two, his portrayal of journalists equally offended. I understand these were supposed to be depraved characters, but the absurdity of setting up a man as a pornographer and murderer is obviously a jab at a profession that, within my limited viewpoint, is full of people with a great deal of conscience as a rule.

So yes, both stories develop the characters, but I think it's similar to "Fight Club." That first idea has made Palahniuk a literary legend -- you can still find Web sites of guys who think Fight Club is some kind of religion. So he comes up with other people to target, who are easy to hate, like moms and the media, that his fan base loves to believe are just the way he portrays them.

IS THIS CLUB DEAD?

I like this book club. I like reading books and discussing them with people. I'll be kind of sad if this club peters out right now, but if that is what is happening, maybe we should just be honest about it, huh?