Jane Austen Horror Writer

[sartorias]

My friend and BVC colleague Nancy Jane Moore has her say, over at the BVC blog.

Naturally I had to respond!

This entry was originally posted at https://sartorias.dreamwidth.org/1013972.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Comments

[whswhs]

I don't think that, in terms of genre theory, I would call anything by Jane Austen "horror" (though Northanger Abbey seems to be a sendup of Gothic, which is somewhat ancestral to horror). It's possible to have horrific content without being in the horror genre; neither The Jungle nor 1984 is horror, for example. Horror is defined by conventions and themes that are more specific than that.

The world Jane Austen wrote in was grim in many ways; Austen's death might be a symbol of some of them. Some of its grimness comes from great convulsive events such as wars and revolutions and natural disasters. But a lot of it is simply a matter of restricted choices, and that's what the essay you point to seems to focus on. That restriction seems to be a matter partly of lack of knowledge, limited technology, widespread poverty, and lack of mobility confining people to narrow social circles. But at the same time, what strikes me about it is that it was a time when those restrictions were starting to weaken, thanks to things such as mass production-for example, the printing industry that gave Austen and other novelists a way to find readers.

But also, for me at least, one of the rewards of reading about people in hard times is being reminded that people can survive such hard times, and struggle to face them bravely; and that's an example all of us can use, when we have our own hard times. Houseman wrote about this in "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff"/Epilogue and I think he had it right.

[sartorias]

Excellent points.