It wasn't until I recently blogged about loving Jane Austen as a satirist that someone turned me on to Robert Rodi's hilarious blog "Bitch in a Bonnet."
Rodi's title is a tribute. He's angry that the Austen craze has defanged a novelist who's "wicked, arch, and utterly merciless. She skewers the pompous, the pious, and the libidinous with the animal glee of a natural-born sadist."
Satire really turned me on in college. Samuel Butler's The Way of all Flesh offered one of the cruelest (and quietest) put-downs I'd ever read: "If it was not such an awful thing to say of anyone, I should say that she meant well." I found lines and characters like that everywhere in my favorite authors: Fielding and Sterne, Wharton and James, Fitzgerald and Lawrence Durrell.
Austen was a special favorite because she excelled at wielding the skewer. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is an obvious example in Pride and Prejudice (and she was fun to work with in my Austen mash-up). But the book holds worse.
Lizzie's mother is a woman whose moods, narcissism, and hysterics dominate the Bennet household as if she were an alcoholic in a co-dependent family. And though her husband's genial enough on the surface, he's more destructive, insulting his own children as casually as he'd flip the page of a book. Retreating into his library lays the foundation for a good deal of the chaos that disrupts the Bennet household.
Austen makes it very plain that he's turned his back on his family and abandoned his responsibility as a father. Mr. Bennet may be fond of Lizzie, but he's blind to her common sense and totally unwilling to heed her impassioned plea for his intervention:
"I must speak plainly. If you, my dear father, will not take the trouble of checking [Lydia's] exuberant spirits, and of teaching her that her present pursuits are not to be the business of her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment. Her character will be fixed, and she will, at sixteen, be the most determined flirt that ever made herself or her family ridiculous; a flirt, too, in the worst and meanest degree of flirtation; without any attraction beyond youth and a tolerable person; and, from the ignorance and emptiness of her mind, wholly unable to ward off any portion of that universal contempt which her rage for admiration will excite . . . Vain, ignorant, idle, and absolutely uncontrolled!"
All he can do is take Lizzie's hand "affectionately" and dismiss her concerns. It's a terrible scene. One of many, and more shocking to me than all the cartoonish zombies and vampires currently rampaging through Austen's novels.
Like Rodi, I believe Austen deserves to join the grand pantheon of gadflies: Voltaire and Swift, Twain and Mencken.
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FWIW Mary Bennet would have been a lot funner to write a whole novel about, a late-blooming woman's Bildungsroman melodrama, complete with adoring jug-eared country bumpkin for the eventually winning Hero, and a Villain from the City.
"Like Rodi, I believe Austen deserves to join the grand pantheon of gadflies: Voltaire and Swift, Twain and Mencken."
Indeed, but what is not understood even by Austen scholars is that Austen knew (the satires of) Voltaire and Swift well, what is also only understood by a few Austen scholars is that Twain, despite his famous put-down of Austen, actually was paying her a covert homage in the same breath--a very fitting way for him to acknowledge HER as a master HE learned from:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/12/jane-austen-mark-twain-and-vladimir.html
Cheers, ARNIE
You never are happy when you think your favorite writer did not write enough and i dont mind someone having a go at one of her books - the problem is that most of the books that have been churned out are thinly disguised romance novels with a guy named Darcy in them. Most of them are not very good and less are authentic in their understanding of Austen.
I would make a couple exceptions - I thought Syrie James 'The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen' did a good job of combining biographical information with fiction. 'A Match for Mary Bennet' by Eucharista Ward (not to be confused with a similar title by Colleen McCollough) is among the best P&P sequels following the homely Bennet sister. My favorite was 'Lady Vernon and Her Daughter' by Jane Rubino and Caitlin Rubino Bradway which is a re interpretation of Jane Austens 'Lady Susan' - does the best job of recreating Austens 'voice'. Sad to say that i think these books that represent the best of the Austen lot (havent read yours yet Lev but i plan to order it) got a little lost in the flood of 'Mr Darcys True Bride' sort of stuff. (PS - also enjoyed Stephanie Barrons 'Jane Austen' mysteries).
Me, I'm waiting for "Jane Austen on Mars." :-)