J.K. realising she
has just made ANOTHER £100,000,000. (I wonder how many noughts her bank account
has these days?)
"My
favorite writer is Jane Austen, and I've read all her books so many times I've
lost count ... I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane
Austen. Being able to sit at home at the parsonage and your books would be very
famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales's secretary."
J. K. Rowling, 2003
No! no! no! A
famous writer doesn’t do that. You’ve got it all wrong J. K.
They write a popular series of books, using the same characters
each time, and persuade children, and adults alike, to read them. Of course you
must put an adult appropriate cover on the adults copy so they won’t feel
stupid on the train in the morning. Then you must jolly well get a Hollywood
studio to buy the film rites, but still allow you to have the final say, help
market, cauldron loads of merchandise and make a billion pounds.
Now that is what a famous author really does Miss Rowling.
Didn’t you know that????
SILLY!
Good old Rudyard.
Jane
lies in Winchester—blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made!
And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain,
Glory, love and honor unto England's Jane.
Rudyard Kipling, 1924
WOW!!!!!
Rousing stuff. It makes me want to stand up straight and salute
the flag. Ah!!The Empire. Do or die. I’ve got a stiff upper lip already.
"There
have been several revolutions of taste during the last century and a quarter of
English literature, and through them all perhaps only two reputations have
never been affected by the shifts of fashion: Shakespeare's and Jane
Austen's... She has compelled the amazed admiration of writers of the most
diverse kinds."
Edmund Wilson, 1944
True!!!!!!!!!
"Also
read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's very finely written
novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the
involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the
most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any
now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things
and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment
is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!"
Sir Walter Scott, 1826
Well Walter,
you liked her. But I nearly fell asleep reading this. What was your point? Oh,
and please remind me what you wrote yourself?????????
The house of Henry James, Rye, Sussex.
"The
key to Jane Austen's fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary
grace of her facility... as if she sometimes over her work basket fell... into
woolgathering, and her dropped stitches... were afterwards picked up as...
little master-strokes of imagination."
Henry James, 1905
Henry
James, although an American, lived most of his life in England.The last years
in Rye in Sussex on the South coast of England. The house he lived in is a
beautiful Georgian brick town house, of ample size, tucked away in a corner of
the town next to the church.
Henry
James must have had a bracing walk by Rye harbour, taking the sea air, a salt
marsh away these days, and breathing in the ozone to clear his brain before he
wrote this lovely perceptive metaphorical piece.
"...Jane
Austen, of course, wise in her neatness, trim in her sedateness; she never
fails, but there are few or none like her."
Edith Wharton, 1925
“Wise,”
“neat,” “trim,” “sedate.”
No
she bloody wasn’t!!!!!!!
"To
believe (Jane Austen) limited in range because she was harmonious in method is
as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a
mill-pond, it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond... Look through the
lattice-work of her neat sentences, joined together with the bright nails of
craftsmanship, painted with the gay varnish of wit, and you will see women
haggard with desire or triumphant with love."
Rebecca West, 1928
Oh yes.
“haggard with desire or triumphant with love.” That’s more like it.Lets get
some powerful feelings into these comments.Lets get the blood pumping.
"I
am inclined to say in desperation, read it yourself and kick out every sentence
that isn't as Jane Austen would have written it in prose. Which is, I admit,
impossible. But when you do get a limpid line in perfectly straight normal
order, isn't it worth any other ten?"
Ezra Pound, in a letter to Laurence Binyon, 1938
OK Ezra, I
think, I know what you mean.
Jane
Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does
not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.
, Robert Underwood Johnson
A little understanding and compassion is required
towards Robert Johnson. It takes a lot of courage to tell the word that you are
illiterate.
Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission
alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in
it.
- Following the Equator
Mr
,”Following The Equator,” if that is truly what you are doing in life, you must
at some point have got very wet walking through vast oceans, sweaty to the
touch and eye, in heated tropical forests, cracked on your skull with falling
coconuts on far flung tropical islands and got savaged by marauding lions and
perhaps bitten by venomous snakes. Your brain has anyway.
Walt Witman thinking over what he has just written about our Jane.
I haven't any right to criticise books,
and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane
Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader;
and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and
Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own
shin-bone.
She makes me detest all her people, without reserve.
Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the
reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest
of the chapters? That could be. That would
be high art. It
would be worth while, too.
Some day I will examine the other
end of her books and see.
Mark Twain
One day,” it would be worth while,” if somewhat
repulsive and repugnant, to examine your “other end,”Walt, and spank it
mercilessly with a smashed and splintered plank of wood, toothy with bent rusty
nails.
And finally:
Jane Austen, uncertain and in need of fortitude in her
bodily life, had a mind that moved swiftly, certainly, like a powerfully
launched arrow shaft, splitting imperceptibly the air around it, flying
straight to it’s bulls eye inside all our imaginations for ever and ever.
Tony Grant 2010
A few, ripe quotations from Jane herself.
[At
a ball, where being introduced is a prerequisite before a gentleman can ask a
lady with whom he is unacquainted to dance:]
"There
was one gentleman, an officer of the Cheshire, a very good-looking young man,
who, I was told, wanted very much to be introduced to me, but as he did not
want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it, we never could bring
it about." letter of
January 8 1799
"He
seems a very harmless sort of young man, nothing to like or dislike in him --
goes out shooting or hunting with the two others all the morning, and plays at whist and makes queer faces in the
evening." letter of
September 23, 1813
[On
arriving in London:] "Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and
vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted." letter of August
1796
[At
a ball:] "Mrs. B. and two young women were of the same party, except when
Mrs. B. thought herself obliged to leave them to run round the room after her
drunken husband. His avoidance, and her pursuit, with the probable intoxication
of both, was an amusing scene." letter of May
12 1801
[On
the Peninsular War:] "How horrible it is to have so many people killed!
And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!" letter of May
31, 1811
"Kill
poor Mrs. Sclater if you like it while you are at Manydown." letter of February 9 1813
"I
am sorry my mother has been suffering, and am afraid this exquisite weather is
too good to agree with her. I enjoy it all over me, from top to toe, from right
to left, longitudinally, perpendicularly, diagonally; and I cannot but
selfishly hope we are to have it last till Christmas -..."- letter of
December 2 1815
Phew!!
Who said Jane Austen couldn’t be sexy?
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