People never say that about things that are, like, convenient. Oh, that's completely in line with my plans! The heart wants what it wants!
I have acquired a lot of books -- in my life, yes, but more specifically, in the last four months or so, and they have been arranged into a perfectly logical priority order. There are some awesome-looking books in that stack, and of course I have a staggering amount of professional reading I should be working through.
But man. I just have not wanted to read any of those things. Just about the only thing I have wanted to read is Aubrey/Maturin books.
The only illustration anyone needs for this topic
It's gone exactly according to script. Maybe two months of not reading anything at all, then finally, I give in and suddenly I'm reading all the time, in all those situations when I was so frustratingly stuck before: just not what I was so stubbornly focused on making myself read. So that's where I'm at: I have nothing to report except comfort reading: many books about ships.
It's so good, though. O'Brian has an almost Wodehousian ear for language, I think; both authors have those perfect turns of phrase that make me stop and laugh out loud in sheer appreciation. Much more importantly -- and I'm only just putting my finger on this -- O'Brian is like Jane Austen in that he generates humor as well as character by slyly slipping into a character's own perspective (if not his or her own voice) as part of the narration without giving any particular explicit indication that he's doing so. He also does the Austenian thing of reporting conversations telegraphically which just always tickles my funny bone. I probably mentioned these things the last time I wrote about these books? It's all still true.
So in short: I hope you are also reading things you enjoy this summer.
It's a major pet peeve of mine when Jane Austen gets referred to as a "Victorian" novelist. It's one of those line-in-the-sand things, like referring to Obama as a "socialist": either you know what those words mean or you don't. (Oooh, edgy!)
Jane (reporting from this rad mug) and I are unimpressed by poor periodization skills
But, y'know, I can sort of understand the inclination. Austen is not only super-famous, she sort of stands apart, time-wise. It's been ages since I've taken an English Lit class, so maybe I'm off base, but who else from the early nineteenth century do we still really read, eh? Scott, maybe. Burney's earlier and only nerds know about her. Radcliffe if you're a suicidal nerd. There are the Romantic poets, but they're poets. Mary Shelley gets treated as a genre author. For all the Austen family's novel-reading it doesn't seem like there are a whole lot of survivals from the period.
Well, here's a book to help round out that picture: Marriage, by Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, published in 1818. I downloaded this for freeeee through Manybooks.com. This is the Project Gutenberg edition, which obviously gets the job done but is slightly annoying in various ways. There's a fairly extensive Victorian introduction that has all kinds of background about Ferrier and the novel, but the lack of formatting obliterates the footnotes and block quotes and makes it sort of a headache. So I skipped it, although probably I would enjoy it if I made an effort. (Bah, effort.)
This is clearly a didactic novel, meant to illustrate good and bad approaches to girls' education and how these lead to success or misery in marriage. At the center are twin baby girls and their three mother-figures. Their birth mother, Lady Juliana, is a spoiled, air-headed London beauty who elopes with her Scottish suitor in the name of love; she keeps one of the twin girls with her when she returns to London from Scotland. The other twin girl is adopted by a saintly aunt by marriage (mother figure #2), Alicia Douglas, who is also English but thoroughly intelligent and virtuous. The third potential mother figure is Aunt Jacky, a spinster aunt who represents the other end of the bad mothering spectrum, being completely small-minded and ultimately almost as empty-headed as the birth mother despite being more useful around the house. Ferrier is pretty scathing about Miss Jacky and her brand of "sensible woman":
Miss Jacky, the senior of the trio, was what is reckoned a very sensible woman--which generally means, a very disagreeable, obstinate, illiberal director of all men, women and children--a sort of superintendent of all actions, time, and place--with unquestioned authority to arraign judge, and condemn upon the statutes of her own supposed sense... At home her supremacy in all matters of sense was perfectly established; and thence the infection, like other superstitions, had spread over the whole neighbourhood. As sensible woman she regulated the family, which she took care to let everybody see; she was conductor of her nieces' education, which she took care to let everybody hear; she was a sort of postmistress general--a detector of all abuses and impositions; and deemed it her prerogative to be consulted about all the useful and useless things which everybody else could have done as well. She was liberal of her advice to the poor, always enforcing on them the iniquity of idleness, but doing nothing for them in the way of employment--strict economy being one of the many points in which she was particularly sensible. The consequence was, while she was lecturing half the poor women in the parish for their idleness, the bread was kept out of their mouths by the incessant carding of wool and knitting of stockings, and spinning, and reeling, and winding, and pirning, that went on amongst the ladies themselves. And, by-the-bye, Miss Jacky is not the only sensible woman who thinks she is acting a meritorious part when she converts what ought to be the portion of the poor into the employment of the affluent.
I thought that economic point was rather interesting. The contrast is that Alicia pays the boys and girls of her neighborhood to take care of her garden rather than doing it herself.
Ferrier is an entertaining writer, and so even though most of her characters represent some precisely mapped combination of [good/bad] nature and [good/bad] nurture, they're still interesting personalities. Plus it's just fascinating to see what she saw as plausible "types" of her day. For instance, saintly aunt Alicia, we are told, was a poor cousin raised in a well-bred family, and when she and her titled cousin fell in love -- you know the fall out here, right? The two are separated, forbidden to marry, etc etc. But! Alicia, though heart-broken, accepts that this is totally reasonable, that her high-born aunt has every right to forbid her son to marry a poor cousin, and steels herself to get over him. When he's super-persistent, she marries the nicest of her suitors and goes to live with him in Scotland, and is very happy with this. Contrast this with her sister-in-law Lady Juliana, and you get the feeling that Ferrier has some doubts about this whole "love match" business.
Aside from historical perspectives on education and marriage, Marriage also paints a delightfully nineteenth century picture of Scotland. The contrast between the Scottish highlands and London's highlife (eh, eh? see what I did there?) provides a geographical contrast as background to the moral/intellectual contrasts in the book. Plus it offers lots of colorful scenery and characters.
"It's impossible the bagpipe could frighten anybody," said Miss Jacky, in a high key; "nobody with common sense could be frightened at a bagpipe."
On descending to the dining-parlour he found his father seated at the window, carefully perusing a pamphlet written to illustrate the principle, Let nothing be lost, and containing many sage and erudite directions for the composition and dimensions of that ornament to a gentleman's farmyard, and a cottager's front door, ycleped, in the language of the country a midden--with the signification of which we would not, for the world, shock the more refined feelings of our southern readers.
If you like historical fashions, this book is worth looking at: there are plenty of intriguingly detailed descriptions of the Scottish women's practical clothing as compared to Lady Juliana's finery. For instance, one highland lady arrives at the house with her skirt "carefully drawn through the pocket-holes" and wearing "a faded red cloth jacket, which bore evident marks of having been severed from its native skirts, [and] now acted in the capacity of a spencer."
In re education, "true religion" seems to be the magic bullet. Here is Alicia summing up the take-home lesson:
"Oh, what an awful responsibility do those parents incur," she would mentally exclaim, "who thus neglect or corrupt the noble deposit of an immortal soul! And who, alas! can tell where the mischief may end? This unfortunate will herself become a mother; yet wholly ignorant of the duties, incapable of the self-denial of that sacred office, she will bring into the world creatures to whom she can only transmit her errors and her weaknesses!"
I'm only halfway through; the twin raised by Alicia has just arrived in London to meet her sister and her mother, and that's going about as well as you could expect. I'm considering not finishing, just because I'm a little frustrated with how long I've been reading this already. It's not the book's fault; I no longer have a daily commute which means I have to figure out some other way to get reading time into my day. So I rate this: Worthwhile, if you like old books.
(There's no reason for that to be there, but I think you'll agree, it had to go somewhere.)
Books are obviously proprietary (probably using this word wrong); authors have rights over their text, and publishers have rights over their editions. We all know about copyright and royalties and so forth, and yet it's pretty easy, for me anyway, to slip out of thinking of a book as the property of a corporation. Most formally, at some point the book will almost certainly go into the public domain, but once a book starts to become "a classic" I expect to see it published by different houses and made available in different forms. I guess at the most basic level the activity of reading and the form of a book seem so obviously part of our common property that a particular individual or company having ownership of some sliver of the enterprise seems inherently short-lived.
I am subjecting you to that paragraph because this post is not so much about a book as it is about the format of the book, which is apparently a copyrighted format. What am I talking about? Mansfield Park in "Flipback" format. Here is a picture of it in my hand in my bedroom, because I forgot to take a picture of it on the train platform:
Just imagine I'm waiting for a train. Next to the bed.
The main features of the Flipback are:
The text is rotated 90ยบ to the ... right? ... so that the spine runs parallel, between lines of text
The text is printed in a modern, sans-serif, easy-to-read typeface
The paper is thin
The bound part of the book is only glued to the back cover, and the spine and front covers are hinged on
Generally, the idea is that the entire content of a book has been compressed into a pocket-sized thing without losing any readability. Except for interference from wind, this compact layout does, actually, make it pretty easy to hold the book and read with one hand. Like the Kindle, it's sort of stripped out some of the distractions of white space and so on, so that the actual words on the page are the main focus. And after all the space-saving, it actually is pocket sized. It's adorable and tactile and functional, and I liked it. I've seen these in several stores over here (Waterstones, the British Library shop, and the indie store at Kew) so it seems like maybe they'll catch on. The thin paper is the only slightly worrisome feature, but in practice I didn't tear any pages or even cause any egregious creasing, so I guess I can't whine too much about it. After a week or so of being carried around in my coat pocket and read on windy train platforms, my copy is in darn good shape.
Tangent: You know that 1950s Leave it to Beaver-type trope about little boys always having their pockets full of all kinds of random things? That's so me. Give me a pocket and I will have it crammed full of keys, transit pass, tissues/handkerchief, lipbalm, coin purse, gloves and/or hat, and tiny book before I'm halfway down the street.
Unfortunately for Flipback, their list of published books doesn't currently include anything I'm really all that interested to read, and their "classics" series only includes Austen. While I have enjoyed all my Austen multilection, I don't know that I'm willing to spend £10 for the privilege of reading another. (No, I'm not willing to spend that much on more Jane. Sorry, Miss Austen, but I already own all your books multiple times over, and you're dead so it's not like it helps you any.) The format seems like a worthy thing, though, and I hope it does well enough to have more titles added to the list.
Oh, and what is there to say about Mansfield Park? This is a long overdue multilection on my part; I remember as I finished it the last/first time having a feeling like I was passing over something interesting. Certainly the book is less "fun" than the others. Fanny isn't the most engaging heroine, and the plotting is less than thrilling -- for example most of the dramatic events of the ending take place "off stage". (Plotting? More like plodding, amirite? Sorry.) But I still found it interesting and rewarding. First of all, because the book has a great deal to say, quite explicitly, about Austen's views on religion, and secondly (and relatedly) because the book is so much focused on good conduct and propriety. Even if you don't agree with Austen that this action or that attitude is the best, it's still a pleasure to enter into and consider what a thoughtful woman of her time thought these things looked like. Overall, on this read, I thought the book was much more about a family and family dynamics than about the romantic couples; the marriages and pairings are the tests that the children undergo in becoming adults. Anyhow, multilection continues to be one of my more brilliant discoveries, the end.
PS, just in case: this post was not sponsored or solicited in any way. Are you kidding me? No.
More on what I was reading by that pool in the next post.
I, like all other 25 year old women, am trying to save money and also lose weight, so I went to the airport thinking in a self-congratulatory way that I was very smart to have eaten a sandwich and packed a library book before I left home. Of course by the time I reached my gate I was carrying a McDonald's value meal and the latest issues of Allure and -- oh, the irony -- Cooking Light.
Best laid plans, etc. If there's a better way to pass a short flight than by reading about makeup and listening to danceypop I don't know about it. It all turned out for the best, though, since there in the middle of Allure was a fairly long article about Jane Austen. As they say at AustenBlog, she's everywhere!
Get ready for some literature.
To be honest, I do not expect good things from an Austen article that has a big picture of Keira &$*%ing Knightley at its top and appears in a magazine with "Rock & Roll Hair!" as a major headline. The little teaser subheading is also pretty cringey with its "Jane Austen expertly dissected the social networks of her era" and its "she's more relevant than ever". But! Many apologies and kudos to essay author Liesl Schillinger, because this was actually quite good. And, for the record, she does not start out with the "truth universally acknowledged" business but rather like so:
Have you ever asked yourself what Jane Austen might have thought of you if she'd known you? It's tempting to think you would number among her heroes and heroines... But what must it have been like for the English women and men of her era who read her novels and guessed that they were caricatured in her pages--perhaps as a naive country girl (Harriet in Emma), a calculating social climber (Mrs. Clay in Persuasion), or a deceitful frenemy (Isabella in Northanger Abbey)?
Setting aside the use of the word "frenemy", which I do not condone, this is exactly what I like to see. It's all too easy to focus on the love stories, but the real accomplishment in Austen's novels is that she gets all these various characters, good, evil, and silly, just exactly right.
Schillinger says she first read Austen at age nine, and every time she's read (and re-read) the books she's marked the initials of friends and family in the margins next to passages that remind her of them. This isn't something I'd ever think of doing, but it sounds really sweet, particularly when she describes re-reading a book and being reminded of what her life was like the last time she read it.
Of course, we know that Schillinger is Good People when she says that Persuasion is her favorite. Persuasion is my favorite too -- arguably it's the favorite of anyone who's read all six (she says snootily). It's hard to resist the idea that all your wishes will come true in the end, that your regrets can be undone with time. And even though that aspect of the story might seem too "fairy-tale" to be realistic, Persuasion still might be the best example of how "rooted" Austen's romances are. For Austen, people are part of a society; they have real circumstances and connections and limitations. There's no riding off into the sunset, and while love can conquer many things it can't necessarily conquer all. Of course, my own interpretation of Persuasion is that Anne wasn't wrong in refusing Wentworth, and while she regrets it from the heart and with hindsight can see that it would have worked out, rejecting him was, at the time, the only sensible thing to do. But that's me.
Anyway, I will be back on Monday to tell you about my new pal, Anthony Trollope.
