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Category: Jane Austen

Austen vs Brontë

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Two_women_are_arguing_in_the_street_watched_by_a_crowd._Etch_Wellcome_V0040755How better to start 2016 at Risky Regencies than with a cat fight? Not a real one, of course, but a literary one pitting Jane Austen against Charlotte Brontë.

I just read Why Charlotte Brontë Hated Jane Austen by Susan Ostrov Weisser (Daily Beast, 10/19/2013) and, intrigued, looked around and found The Austen vs Brontë Smackdown on the blog Austen Pride (5/16/2009). I also found a long discussion of Austen vs the Brontës on Goodreads, which I skimmed, but did not read.

Apparently Charlotte Brontë had never read Jane Austen until a critic suggested she do so after she’d written Jane Eyre. She studied Pride and Prejudice and, among other things had this to say:

She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood…

Austen Pride makes the point that Austen, who had passed away a year after Charlotte Brontë was born, could not rebut this accusation. In Northanger Abbey, Austen did, however, parody the emotional excesses of gothic tales, of which the Brontës’ books could be included.

Of course, those of us who love Austen would also argue that there is plenty of passion in Austen’s work, although it is brimming beneath the surface. How could you not think so of Persuasion?

Austen Pride concluded that the two authors were writing from different perspectives. Austen was writing about her keen observations of the world in which she lived; Charlotte and her sisters, on the other hand, wrote what was in their imagination.

Me, I was never a huge fan of Jane Eyre. I loved the beginning when she was in the orphanage, but I never believed in the romance between Jane and Rochester. And the coincidences of falling in a ditch and being found by her long-lost cousin didn’t work for me. I also hated how Rochester treated Jane. And don’t get me started on Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff and Cathy have to die to be together? And who would want Heathcliff anyway? I preferred Edgar to Heathcliff.

I think I hold my fictional heroes to very high standards, ones that the Rochester and Heathcliff don’t quite meet. I understand the forces driving the Brontë heroes, but I much prefer heroes I can admire and even fall in love with. Heroes like Austen creates.

I also love all the finely drawn characters in Austen’s books. Their actions and feelings are much more believable to me and that gives me the sense that I’m in a real place, among real people.

But that is me, thinking on the surface of the stories, which is mostly how I read books.

What about you? Do you prefer Austen or the Brontës? Or do you like both for different reasons?

Posted in Jane Austen, Reading, Risky Book Talk | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Replies

Darcy is a … what? Lynn Messina tells all

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I don’t know about you but I’ve become a bit jaded about Pride & Prejudice retellings. All that marital bliss, all that Darcy-Firth-wet shirt angsty goodness, but none of the wit and snarkiness of our dear Jane’s original. Until that is, I was offered, and read, an advance copy of Prejudice & Pride by Lynn Messina. Reader, I loved this book. It has style and wit and funny stuff in spades, and it’s just plain clever. As the blurb says:

PPYou know Darcy: rich, proud, standoffish, disapproving, one of the greatest romantic heroes of all time. But you don’t know this Darcy because THIS Darcy is a woman.

In Prejudice & Pride, Lynn Messina’s modern retelling with a gender-bendy twist, everything is vaguely familiar and yet wholly new. Bingley is here, in the form of Charlotte “Bingley” Bingston, an heiress staying at the Netherfield hotel on Central Park, as is Longbourn, transformed from an ancestral home into a perennially cash-strapped art museum on the edge of the city. Naturally, it employs an audacious fundraiser with an amused glint in his eye called Bennet.

And about the author:Lynn Messina is the author of 14 novels, including Fashionistas, which has been translated into 16 LM headshot 12_15languages, and The Love Takes Root series of Regency romances. Her essays have appeared in Self, American Baby and the Modern Love column of The New York Times. She’s also a regular contributor to the Times Motherlode blog. Lynn lives in New York City with her husband and sons. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Lynn, welcome to the Riskies. You’ve written Regency Romance and several other genres, but why did you take on P&P?
Because I had the idea. When I saw Bride and Prejudice, I was struck by how rude and unpleasant the Elizabeth character was. It seemed to me almost as if the writer had swapped the characters. And when I noticed how neatly their names flipped—Fitzwilliam Darcy becoming Darcy Fitzwilliam—I got really excited. I went home and immediately wrote up a pitch for my agent, who just as quickly shot it down. So I put the idea aside and honestly forgot about it. That was in 2004. Then, recently, I had a nice run with Regency romances, and remembered the idea and thought, Hold on, I can do it myself now.

Which is your favorite character in Austen’s? And in your own?
Elizabeth because she’s so clever and undaunted. As someone who’s sometimes clever and frequently daunted, I admire those traits greatly. In my version, Bingley is easily my favorite. She was an absolute delight to write—funny and frivolous yet smart and astute. In the early drafts, that was actually a problem—she was a little too likable. Obviously, she has to be more amiable than Darcy, but I couldn’t have every reader, including myself, wondering why Bennet doesn’t fall in love with her.

How have die-hard Austen purists responded?
For the most part, the response has been very positive, so I have to assume no die-hard Austen purists have weighed in yet. In 2010, I wrote a mashup of Little Women and vampires, and a woman posted on her blog that when she’d heard about the book, she wanted to chop off my fingers. So I’m prepared for the worst.

What have you learned most from Austen about writing?
Honestly, the thing I learned most was to relax a little. When Austen’s characters speak to each other, they just speak. That is, they converse back and forth without the insertion of attributions or what I like to call tasks. In my books, one character is always doing something while she’s talking—say, pouring tea—and the conversation is interspersed with descriptions of this process. I can’t tell you the hours I’ve lost trying to come up with new tasks. (This partly explains my affinity for historical romance: It’s always teatime in Regency England.)

And about relationships?
That they’re always more complex than I give them credit for and that sometimes in order to remain emotionally true to a character you have to deny yourself a little emotional satisfaction. Naturally, I’m talking about Wickham and how genteelly and calmly Elizabeth registers her disgust of him when they meet after the wedding. I want her to pop him in the nose or at the very least give him a cutting set-down, but it’s not just about her. It’s also the complex web of familial relationships.

Which is your favorite Austen?
I want to say Persuasion because I identify so much with Anne Elliot and the scene where Captain Wentworth writes her a letter while listening to her conversation is one of my most favorite moments in any book ever. But I’ve been reading and rereading Pride & Prejudice at regular intervals since I was thirteen, so clearly that’s the sentimental favorite.

Would you consider another modern interpretation?
I would never say no to anything if I got an idea. But I’m been ransacking the classics for a while now. After Little Vampire Women, there was an updated version of Dickens’s Bleak House, which replaced the court case that never ends and ruins every life it touches with a movie option that never ends and ruins every life it touches. (Um, can you tell I had a movie options that went on for almost a decade?)

What’s next for you?
Omigod, I ask myself that every day. I’m really not sure. I have an idea for something modern that rifts on Emily Post’s Etiquette book from the 1920, which I read because etiquette stuff fascinates me. But the book also gave me an idea for another Regency, so maybe I’ll work on that next. But I’ve had an idea for a screenplay kicking around in my head for a while, so maybe I’ll do that.

Lynn is giving away three digital copies (US only) and one hardback copy (worldwide) and you have various options to win a copy by participating. Easy, fun, and probably even Catherine de Bourgh, assuming she had the taste, could manage it. Please ask Lynn questions, or, since it’s (still, just) December, and we celebrated Jane’s birthday on December 16, answer the question I asked Lynn: What have you learned from Austen about writing and/or about relationships?

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Posted in Guest, Interviews, Jane Austen | Tagged , , , , | 9 Replies

Your First Historical?

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976962Do you remember the first book of historical fiction you ever read?

For me it was I Was There With Ethan Allen And The Green Mountain Boys. I don’t remember how old I was. Probably third or fourth grade and I can’t recall anything about the story except that it placed a boy about my age into the excitement of a dramatic moment in history. The whole premise of the series was placing a boy (not a girl) in a dramatic moment in history.

I tried to find something about the book, but it seems to have disappeared. If it has been re-released it lost the I Was There With part of the title. (This is not the correct book cover either)

Houghton_AC85.Aℓ194L.1869_pt.2aa_-_Little_Women,_1878_coverThe next historically set book I fell in love with was Little Women, definitely a book to win the hearts of little girls. It did not have the excitement of the Green Mountain Boys, but I cried buckets when Beth died and I wanted to throw the book against the wall when Laurie doesn’t wind up with Jo. I think I was hot-wired for Romance fiction even then.

200px-Cherryamessn1I was also a voracious reader of Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames (anyone remember Cherry Ames books?). While technically not historicals, they took place in a time period that seemed a distant past to a little bookworm like myself. I loved that Nancy Drew drove a “roadster” and that Cherry Ames traveled to exciting places. I still remember a scene in one book where Nancy and Ned get caught in quicksand and Ned lifts her out. In Cherry Ames, I remember that head nurses were always scolding her for wearing rouge, but, you see, her cheeks were just naturally rosy.

A huge appeal for me at the time in the Nancy Drew books was her relationship with Ned Nickerson. Whenever Ned showed up, I perked up. Romance, even then. Cherry Ames had the occasional romance and I liked that part of her stories as much as the other parts.

Wuthering_Heights_1920I don’t remember reading a great deal of historical books in my teen years. I read what was assigned in school and that is how I read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Both made an impression on me, because, unlike all of the above books besides Little Women, I remember the stories, but I’m not sure I can say I remember them fondly. There was cruelty in both books and I didn’t like it. And, even at a tender age, I scoffed at Jane Eyre winding up in a ditch and then getting rescued by–who else?–long lost relatives.

Somewhere in my teen years I also read Pride and Prejudice, but I only vaguely remembered the story.

Invisible_ManIn college I majored in English and I focussed on English Literature as opposed to American Literature. I am woefully unread in F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck as a result. I did take a Black Literature course (that is what it was called in those days), for which I am profoundly grateful. I was introduced to writers I never would have read – Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin. I also read a fair amount of Thomas Hardy in college and was in the midst of an independent study imagescourse on D.H. Lawrence when my college experienced its own dramatic moment in history. It closed early after the Kent State shootings.

It took me some time to discover Regency Historicals, but once I did, I knew I’d found my home!

What was your first Historical?

And speaking of Historicals, come join the Harlequin Historical Spotlight over at eHarlequin. We’ll be chatting all month.

Posted in Jane Austen, Reading | 10 Replies

Happy birthday Shakespeare

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A day late–or possibly even more, because no one really knows the date, but happily April 23 is also St. George’s Day, by a fortuitous coincidence. So I thought I’d make a stab at the huge topic of Shakespeare during the Regency, a time of both revival and suppression.

Essentially people have been tinkering with Shakespeare before his ink was barely dry, and the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were no exception. There was a great Shakespeare revival in the period, thanks in part to larger theaters, not to mention larger than life performers:

The Kembles were statuesque: the two factors, which, according to James Boaden in 1826, caused Sarah Siddons to change her style were the larger theaters and ‘her delight in statuary, which directed her attention to the antique and made a remarkable impression upon her as to simplicity of attire and severity of attitude … Hazlitt thought Kemble was ‘the very still life and statuary of the stage … an icicle upon the bust of tragedy.’ Such frigidity was especially absurd off stage: a contemporary remembered Kemble at breakfast looking as if he had eaten ‘a poached curtain rod’. Read more

siddons_katherineMrs. Siddons made the role of Queen Katherine in Henry VIII one of her signature roles. Henry VIII also plays a pivotal role in Austen’s Mansfield Park–Austen came from a family that loved the theater, performed amateur productions, and almost certainly read Shakespeare aloud to each other. The seductive Henry Crawford reads aloud from the play and Edmund becomes jealous:

Edmund watched the progress of her attention, and was amused and gratified by seeing how she gradually slackened in the needlework, which at the beginning seemed to occupy her totally: how it fell from her hand while she sat motionless over it, and at last, how the eyes which had appeared so studiously to avoid him throughout the day were turned and fixed on Crawford—fixed on him for minutes, fixed on him, in short, till the attraction drew Crawford’s upon her, and the book was closed, and the charm was broken.

Crawford elsewhere in the book states that Shakespeare “… is a is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.” Edmund agrees, saying that “No doubt, one is familiar with Shakespeare …from one’s earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by every body; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare,…”

boydellShakespeare was big business. In 1786, engraver and publisher John Boydell began an ambitious project to foster a school of English history painters and publish an illustrated edition of Shakespeare and a folio of engravings based on commissioned paintings. The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in London enjoyed enormous popularity during the 1790s.

Here’s an engraving from the collection by Robert Smirke:

smirke_sa1I have to admit I had trouble guessing what play this could possibly be. It’s an illustration of infancy (the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms) from As You Like It, beautifully translated to the late eighteenth century. A very well-dressed lady is visiting the foster family of her latest child, but I’m not sure whether it’s her child or that of the woman kneeling in the foreground. I love the details of this–the cottage loaf on the table, the poor but honest foster family, and the dog barking at the black servant outside.

I think the two examples from Mansfield Park sum up the contemporary attitude toward Shakespeare–our playwright, but also an artist who can be disturbing or unwholesome. And that brings us to the sorry case of King Lear. In 1681, Nahum Tate rewrote–or “Reviv’d with Alterations,” as he put it–the play as The History of King Lear for the sophisticated patrons of London’s theaters. Notably, he gave it a happy ending, provided Cordelia with a love interest, dropped the role of the Fool, and so on. You can read his description of the changes and the whole text here. Incredibly, this was the version in use until 1823 when Edmund Kean restored the tragic ending, although Tate’s version remained in use throughout the nineteenth century. But performance of the play was banned entirely from 1810 until after the death of George III, because the story of a failing king succumbing to madness and being the head of a very dysfunctional family was a little too close for comfort. You can read more at The Regency Redingcote and What’s It All About Shakespeare.

And then, bless his heart, there was Dr. Bowdler who found that reading Shakespeare aloud to his family could be a little icky, apparently something that didn’t bother the Austens. He censored as he went (I used to do much the same when reading the Care Bears to my toddler daughter) and then had the bright idea of publishing his cleaned up version in 1818: THE FAMILY SHAKSPEARE, in which nothing is added to the Original Text; but those Expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud.

What’s your favorite Shakespeare play or movie version? Or have you seen a particularly good production recently?

Posted in History, Jane Austen, Reading | Tagged | 2 Replies

Yes, Mr Darcy’s Fortune Was Likely Tied to Slavery

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Recently, an article about whether or not Mr. Darcy’s fortune was based on slavery set my Twitter feed alight. And I thought, well of course it was (in one form or another). This is the dark side of our wealthy, aristocratic characters that romance sweeps under the rug. It is certainly possible that the Darcy family fortune was based entirely on the profits of the mines in Derbyshire (harsh as those conditions might have been, they were NOT akin to slavery), but it’s much more likely that those profits were then put to use in ways that almost certainly have ties to slavery.hip0210043WHH%20v2

How so, let us tally up the ways …

1) Directly. Many families owned plantations in the West Indies (see this fascinating account of how the Earls of Harewood built their fortune on slavery, the products there of, and the overseeing of same).

2) Being paid off. When slavery was abolished in 1833, the British government spent a staggering amount of money to compensate the owners of slaves for their losses (good article about that here). Some families got the equivalent of millions of dollars. There were over three thousand claims, which lets you know how widespread slavery was and what its impact must have been on the fortunes of the top families.

3) Via investments. People invested in specific ships and ventures (sometimes called consortiums or syndicates). Many of those would have been involved in producing or importing some kind of product that was produced by slaves in either America, the West Indies, or India (sugar, rum, cotton, opium, tea, rice, etc.).

4) The East India Company. It’s worth noting that when Britain abolished slavery, supposedly throughout its empire, it made an exception for slavery in India. So all those fortunes made in India by younger sons, all those tea plantations, and cotton farms, and military careers, existed because of slavery (good summation on Wikipedia).

I’m sure Janet would have even more insightful things to say on this topic, but I wanted to bring it up for discussion given the timeliness of the article. I know romance is generally seen as escapist, and I don’t want to ruin that for anyone, but I do think it does history a disservice to gloss over these sorts of things to the point where they no longer seem to exist.

So what do you all think? Do you want to topics like this addressed in romances, or do you think it makes it too hard to enjoy the HEA and heavy topics are best left to those writing straight historical fiction?

 

Posted in History, Isobel Carr, Jane Austen, Rant, Research, Risky Regencies | 6 Replies