Word: austen
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...WATSONS (318 pp.)-Jane Austen (and John Coates)-Crowell...
...true lovers of Jane Austen are those who do not advertise their devotion, but are content to whisper 'Dear Jane' as they pause at the grave in the ancient aisle of Winchester Cathedral." This remark (from the Concise Cambridge History of English Literature) shows precisely the position Jane Austen holds in English literature, for would anyone whisper "Dear Alfred" at Tennyson's grave or "Dear Charles" at Dickens'-still less be urged to do so by an academic history? The fact is that though no two "Janeites" can ever agree on what words...
Bone-Dry Wit. Born in a Hampshire parsonage in 1775, Jane Austen grew up in the world of the French and American Revolutions, and showed no trace of interest in either. The world of her six novels is simply and finally that of genteel young women gunning for husbands (she herself died a spinster at 41). Included inevitably in this world are harassed fathers and embattled moms, superfluous daughters and choosy suitors, haughty heiresses and dashing cads, all playing their parts in an endless round of dances, tea parties and chaperoned strolls, and doing their best never...
...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...