Word: austen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DIETIES TO THE contrary notwithstanding, great writers are mortal: this is perhaps their greatest failing. When you've finished that last major Hardy novel, dug out the most forgotten Tolstoy short story, there is no more to look forward to. So it is with Jane Austen, the ultimate literary narcotic for the true believer. Six short novels to be read again and again, outings and conversations to be relived endlessly, the same people and families to be encountered over and over. But, frustratingly, no more...
...have done, is like terming Mrs. Dalloway and Pride and Prejudice similar works because each portrays a female as she relates to the people around her. Just as the stylistic innovations of Virginia Woolf's study make it part of a different century and a different sensibility from Jane Austen's traditional novel, so Tanner's film, with its ubiquitous symbolism and its disruption of the conventional rules of narrative, occupies a cinematic universe distinct from Bergman's. Scenes from a Marriage is a classical work. It derives its dramatic power from the potency of its dialogue, the emotive force...
This new version of Sanditon offers one solution. The original fragment has been completed by "Another Lady,"* her anonymity coyly echoing the signature ("by a lady") on Austen's first novel, Sense and Sensibility. Austen, this Other Lady suggests, might have chosen to follow Charlotte Heywood, a shrewd country girl on a visit to Sanditon. Charlotte falls in love with a fellow from London named Sidney Parker and, after a minuet of polite rivalries, surreptitious coach journeys and misdirected letters, happily snares and is snared by him. In other words, most of the complexity, satire and social implications suggested...
Well, maybe. On the other hand, maybe Austen has once again fallen victim to her own cult, the Janeites. The Janeites take their author like warm milk at bedtime, cozily oblivious to the ground glass of her ironies and tough-mindedness. Perhaps only a Janeite would be capable of completing Sanditon-and this version is certainly a skillful pastiche-but at the same time, perhaps only a Janeite could so invert its value. In an afterword, the Other Lady praises Austen for the elegant escapism she provides from "the shoddy values and cheap garishness...
...surely the Austen of Emma and Persuasion provides very little escapism from anything-including the shoddy values and cheap garishness of her own age as well as ours. Non-Janeites who agree may find the new Sanditon watery milk indeed. ∎Christopher Porterfield