Word: austen
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Like Jane Austen, Elizabeth Jane Howard (Mrs. Kingsley Amis) constructs her novel by pairing off her people with a series of outsiders and observing the consequences-in this case, a miscarriage, a Riviera love affair and a slow poisoning. Like Evelyn Waugh, the author believes that fate has the blind staggers. She takes peculiar delight in showing that there is no justice in the distribution of misery and joy, no allowance made for innocence or effort. Alice, for example, succeeds in escaping her father's house-but ends up unhappily married in a "luxury bungalow with Spanish-style touches...
Miss Howard's creations are not as sharply drawn as Jane Austen's, partly because their problems rise out of peculiarly modern conditions-social fluidity, moral uncertainty, the increased freedom of personal choice. Where there is no norm against which behavior or motives can be measured, the novel of manners degenerates into an attack on the world at large-as in "black humor"-or into a series of satirical character sketches. Something in Disguise leans toward the latter...
...screen debut as Myron Breckinridge, Myra's alter ego: "Raquel is a very complex girl. She is terribly, terribly interested in being taken seriously. She has elected to be a movie star, but underneath that creamy skin and those bulging blouses beats a Puritan heart. She is a Jane Austen heroine, and the conflict has made her uptight...
...questionable behavior in a colleague to warrant an urgent report. Instead, by vacillating and torturing his conscience, he manages to avoid any action until after page 300. "You're so bloody subtle, Robert," grumbles another character. But Robert, for all his interlocking scruples, is like one of Jane Austen's sensibility-struck young girls, finally a figure...
...among the shadows of their backgrounds. Since prints are designed to be reproduced and sold the artists tempted the pre-photographic public with the sentimental or the grotesque. In a lithopraph by Gelestin Nateuil, titled "Daughters of the Devil," three bonnetted damsels appear to be having a typical Jane Austen chat except that a gargoyle, silhouetted agaisnt a full moon, hovers behind a tree...