📚📖Jane's novels are celebrated for the new meanings you pick up each time you reread them.📖📚
Pride and Prejudice (1995) episode 4
Bridgerton (2020-) 2.03 “A Bee in Your Bonnet”
From page 124 of Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley:
Mr. Darcy's Pemberley, Lady Catherine's Rosings Park, and even Mr. Bingley's Netherfield Park so close to home, are all much grander mansions than th house where Lizzy Bennet grew up. When she visits these places, she becomes an outsider, uncharacteristically self-conscious about her status (or lack of it). She gains self-knowledge; we gain an unfolding drama.
I first used the parallel Bridgerton/P&P 1995 gifset in my The Viscount Who Loved Me series, part 1. I loved that the Bridgerton season 2 was paralleled with the BBC miniseries. It made me so happy.
From page 150 of The Viscount Who Loved Me by Julia Quinn:
Kate had expected to be impressed by Aubrey Hall. She had not expected to be enchanted.
The house was smaller than she'd expected. Oh, it was far, far larger than anything she'd ever had the honor to call home, but the country manor was not a hulking behemoth rising out of the landscape like a misplaced medieval castle.
Rather, Aubrey Hall seemed almost cozy. It seemed a bizarre word to use to describe word to use to describe a house with surely fifty rooms, but its fanciful turrets and crenellations almost made it seem like something out of a fairy story, especially with the late afternoon sun giving the yellow stone an almost reddish glow. There was nothing austere or imposing about Aubrey Hall, and Kate liked it immediately.
From Volume II, Chapter 43, page 235 of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen:
Elizabeth’s mind was too full for conversation, but she saw and admired every remarkable spot and point of view. They gradually ascended for half-a-mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste. They were all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!
As Lucy Worsley goes on to write on page 124: "There's a notable coincidence of dates between the writing of the first draft of Pride and Prejudice and a visit Jane paid in the summer of 1796 to a smart house where life was lived on a much grander scale than at the Rectory. Rowling, in Kent, was her brother Edward's home now that he was married. He had risen into the ranks of the genuinely landed gentry; there was no longer anything 'pseudo' about him. The evidence suggests that Edward himself was nothing but kind and welcoming to his sister. But once she got home to Steventon, Jane straightaway created the snooty characters of Mr Darcy and Lady Catherine. A visit to Edward's new universe involved an adjustment of value,s and Marilyn Butler argues that Pride and Prejudice reveals Jane's 'instinctive reaction against Kentish hauteur'.
This is probably my favourite Jane Austen biography. I love how Lucy Worsley integrates Jane's writing and her novels with her life, by seamlessly inteweaving the plights and journeys of her fictional characters into the historical period at the time. I have made a resolution that everytime I finish a Jane Austen novel, I will reread Jane Austen at Home.
On page 89 of The Time Traveller's Guide to Regency Britain Ian Mortimer writes:
📚
📖
Jane Austen's books have come to be seen as epitomising the Regency period.📖
📚
On page 175 Lucy Worsley writes:
📚
📖
Jane's novels are celebrated for the new meanings you pick up each time you reread them.📖
📚
I love that line so much. I find myself almost wishing I could go back to university and just study English literature. But part of what makes making blog posts with gif and quotes so fun is that I'm not doing them for a grade, or towards research for an essay, or to study for an exam. It's really for my own interest. I can commit to making and scheduling a blog post whenever I want to. I really hated writing essays anyway. Also analyzing children's books to death kind of spoiled the innocence and wonder and magic of the stories for me.