Word: austen
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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...
...true believers--a modern writer who prefers to remain anonymous--has tried to rectify this sorry situation by finishing the novel Austen was working on when she died in 1817. Although less than a quarter of Sanditon is the real stuff, the characters and plot set forth in it were enough tc give the rest of the story a veritable Austen contour. Charlotte Heywood is a sensible and clearsighted it quiet country girl staying with Mr. and Mrs. Parker at Sanditon, a new seaside resort on the Sussex coast that Mr. Parker is most anxious to promote. There she falls...
...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...
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