Word: austen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...said Britain's Home Secretary and Lord Privy Seal, "that my destiny lies in the field of social reform-and I am happy in it." To those who know the cool and acid-tongued Richard Austen Butler well, the philosophic tone of the first part of that remark must have seemed odd; Rab Butler has shown not the slightest sign that he has given up hope of one day living at 10 Downing Street. But no one could have taken issue with the straightness of the second part. Probably not since Wilberforce has Britain had a more dedicated reformer...
...lies in the bone-dry wit and intelligence with which Novelist Austen ordered and fixed this stately marital bear garden; no novelist, before or since, ever trod more precisely the thin borderlines that divide the heart from the purse, the ambitions from the conventions, the rigid rules of the game from the fibbing, cheating gambits of the desperate players. The game is tough often to the point of grimness, but it is always comedy, never tragedy. "Let other pens," wrote plain Jane coolly, "dwell on guilt and misery...
Timely Blushes. Devoted Janeites cherish even the unfinished fragments of Jane Austen's novels. Chief of these is The Watsons-six chapters of a novel that she began around 1803 and then (for no known reason) abandoned. Published for the first time in 1871, The Watsons was twice snatched up in the 19205 by authors (one of them Jane Austen's great-grandniece) who tried to complete it in a faithfully Janeish style. Now Novelist Coates has taken another stab at the job. What Coates had to start with was a typically Austenish setup: a poor widower with...
...joke on Coates is that he knows his Austen far too well. He keeps trying to steer the characters in The Watsons in "original" directions, for fear they will grow too like the characters in other Austen novels-until honest imitation melts into irresistible parody. It all goes to show the difficulties confronting an author who has been raised in the world of Thurber, Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett and must yet deal deadpan with ploys (such as swoons and blushes) of which he has had no experience...
...Watsons has two virtues. One is purely malicious: bits of it can be read aloud to fanatical Janeites to see if they can guess the true author. The other virtue is that Author Coates has managed to recapture much of the attitude to love and life that Jane Austen once expressed in a single short query: "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn...