Word: austen
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There's a special exhibit on Jane Austen at the Morgan Library in New York, if you're heading down there for the weekend. I almost was, but I have these two hourlies next week...
...real. "Readers will find here a refreshing change from the violence and general gloom that pervades so much modern fiction." Sanditon's inside leaf tells us indeed they will--Sanditon is certainly entertaining and has the great virtue of ending happily. But they will not find Jane Austen...
...typical Austen characters, tirelessly wrapped up in their own worlds, are there from the start. Mr. Parker is preoccupied with the financial success of Sanditon. Lady Denham, his collaborator in the resorts development, is obsessed with avoiding her numerous poor relations who, she is sure, are out to get her money. Sir Edward Denham, one of these poor relations, recites poetry, inaccurately and inappropriately, trying to turn the head of every young lady around. There is an officious and hypochondriacal set of Parker relatives; there is the beautiful and aloof Clara Brereton: there is the morose and mysterious young...
...CHARACTERS are always the meat of an Austen novel, and Sanditon starts off with an ample and promising cast. Arthur Parker, to all appearances a hardy young man, is first encountered huddled by the fire. "We should not have had one at home," he apologizes to Charlotte, "but the sea air is always damp. I am not afraid of anything so much as damp." But "Another Lady," unfortunately, cannot sustain the kind of dialogue in which the characters betray their own follies. Midway through the book, extensive descriptions of Charlotte's growing feelings for her Prince Charming, and a plot...
...loss is immeasurable, for with the characters and their dialogue go the essential vitality that is the mark of the real Jane Austen. The immediacy of the people and the situations is something that can't be replaced by the Other Lady's obviously thorough knowledge of late 18th century carriages, clothing and architecture, a knowledge that is a little too ostentatiously displayed. Austen's world--the slow-moving life of the English country gentry--as the only world she knew, is utterly genuine, even universal. "Every neighborhood should have a great lady," she writes early on in Sanditon...