What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan Review
What Matters in Jane Austen is a fantastic piece of literary criticism that reveals a lot of new angles on Jane Austen. It's entertaining, it'southward approachable, and it's incredibly helpful if you want to understand the nuances of Austen that are either very subtle or which would have been obvious to her contemporaries just not and then much to modern readers.
Critic John Mullan divides his book into xx short chapters. They don't need to be read in any particular guild – y'all tin pick and cull from the ones that interest you most, although I read the book straight through and enjoyed it greatly. Examples include:
- Why Is It Risky To Go to the Seaside?
- How Much Money is Enough?
- Do Nosotros Always Encounter the Lower Classes?
- Is There Whatsoever Sex in Jane Austen?
- How Experimental a Novelist is Jane Austen?
Everyone volition come away with a unlike highlight from the volume, based on where your interest lies. I found the chapter virtually "The Lower Classes" to be incredibly helpful and insightful, too as the chapter on "What Do Characters Look Similar," because both chapters pointed out the difference betwixt what mod readers know and what Regency readers knew.
[NB: in this review, I use the term "gimmicky readers" to mean "Austen'south contemporaries," i.e., readers who were alive during the time she was writing and publishing, and thus reading her books in the fourth dimension period in which they were written. ]
For instance, when Austen described characters as being in mourning, contemporary audiences reading knew that meant that the characters were wearing diverse levels of blackness clothing. Sometimes the characters aren't even described as beingness in mourning, but considering we know someone died, Austen's contemporaries would have automatically known which characters would be seen wearing blackness from that point on.
Then at that place are scenes in which Austen's gimmicky readers caught a level of intentional dissonance in scenes in which a character is acting happy or romantic while dressed entirely in black — for instance, Frank Churchill describing his happy prospects at the cease of Emma. Well-nigh readers today miss this nuance considering Austen doesn't say, "He was in mourning then he was wearing black, and this is symbolic and either ominous, funny, or both."
The fun thing nigh Austen is that the books appear to be very unproblematic just they are so full of complexity that you can talk almost them for years and never run out of new things to discuss.
Await at the plot of Pride and Prejudice, for example: Rich Boy meets Poor Daughter, they hate each other on sight, then they autumn in love and become married, THE END. Inside this framework, readers can find cloth well-nigh course, money, sex, spousal relationship, sibling relationships, family, sense of humour, pathos, illness, death, the importance of babies, inheritance law, mode, manners, economic science and race, and writing technique. Every Austen volume is like a TARDIS – an infinitely expandable series of rooms containing infinite treasure.
I loved that this book completely avoided being pedantic and yet it was original, insightful, and helpful to me as a reader and a writer. There's nothing dumbed down about this book, only it's not pompous in the way that literary criticism can be pompous (and I say this affectionately, every bit an English major who read a shit ton of highly academic literary criticism back in The Day:
Instead, this writer offers passages similar this one, from the chapter, "How Much Does Age Affair?"
In the 1940 Hollywood moving picture the function was taken by British character histrion Melville Cooper, and then aged forty-four. The trend was set. In Andrew Davies's 1995 BBC adaptation Mr. Collins was played by David Bamber, then in his mid-forties. In the 2005 film the part was taken by a slightly more youthful Tom Hollander, aged thirty-eight. Nonetheless Mr. Collins is introduced to us equally a "tall, heavy-looking young man of five and twenty' (I.13). Adaptors miss something past getting his age wrong. His solemnity and sententiousness are much ameliorate coming from someone so 'immature'. Heart-aged is what he would like to sound, rather than what he is.
Not only does the writer signal out that modern readers are probable to see Mr. Collins differently than Austen's peers, but he also shows how this change happened, and in the procedure lets us in on a joke that I somehow always missed.
Other chapters talk nigh the technical aspects of Austen's writing that make her and then important as a literary figure. Information technology's all just terrific – so go find yourself a copy. This book is both a not bad resource and a not bad diversion!
Source: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/matters-jane-austen-john-mullan/
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