wait - you dropped your phony dog poo | what phony dog poo?
Gah! I'm cleaning and cleaning (I have attention deficit, at least when something doesn't interest me, so I do it in short bursts), and though my room is a disaster, it occurred to me that my dvds are always perfectly organised, in alphabetical order and everything. I think lemur was right: I am a guy
( Read more... )
Now that the mouse is "fixed" for the computer in my room, I can watch the rest of those Jane Austen recordings you sent. (it was fixed by putting a piece of paper underneath it... it seemed that the sheen of the desk was making the laser beams bounce all over the place.
I have seen Mansfield Park, and liked it much better than the horrible movie version in which they made Fanny into some sort of flirty tomboy. Billie Piper actually seemed to pull off the meek and principled Fanny tolerably well, even if her features are more coarse than how I imagined the character to look. I do regret that Mrs Norris's character was diminished from the vile piece of work she is in the book, and that Fanny's impoverished family in Portsmouth (showing the consequences of marrying impulsively for love rather than marrying intelligently for material security) is barely mentioned, let alone visited! What surprised me the most was how my attitude to the story has changed. I read it when I was about 17 or 18 and hated it! I saw Fanny as a doormat and had so much resentment toward her. Now I can see that I was angry with those aspects of myself, and that her behaviour was perfectly normal, given the time, her situation, and her temperament. I don't know why Anne Eliot never bothered me, given that she has many similarities... maybe it's because she had a quiet sort of vicious inner sarcasm to go with her outward dignity and resignation.
Also, you asked a while ago why the Bennetts' property was entailed while Lady Catherine de Bourgh's was not. Anyway, entailment (I think) was, by the time of the Regency, something purposely entered into by succeeding landowners mainly to ensure that a property would not be split amongst various heirs. It was important the estate remain intact to ensure that the family's status did not suffer. The Bennetts likely assumed they would have at least one son and so ensured that the property would pass to the next male heir, but they did not, and so the estate passed to Mr Collins. Entailment also functioned a bit like a will; it could require the male heir to provide for the widow and any other surviving heirs. Also, some portion of the property could be left out of the entail, so that the wife and children might have somewhere to live and a means of generating income (one thinks of the impoverishment of the Mrs Dashwood and her daughters in Sense and Sensibility. It could have been prevented had some of the estate been entailed so that there was a reasonable provision for the widow and daughters rather than merely a deathbed promise by a weak-willed son). Perhaps the Bennetts were not that wealthy, though it was generally expected that each successor add to the value of the estate (I'm remembering his comment that he never expected to have five daughters, so perhaps he didn't see the need to add to it excessively. They were provided for in the entail, just not lavishly). Without the entailment, I believe a woman (i.e. Mrs Bennett) might have inherited Longbourn, though I'm not entirely sure (the 1884 Marriage Act gave women more rights in this regard). There is also a big difference between inheriting property and inheriting titles, and it gets complicated when the property and title are... you know... intertwined. Lady Catherine would have remained Lady no matter what, I think, because that was her title from birth. Her husband, I believe, was a knight, and as his wife she should have been known as "Lady de Bourgh". Her father was an earl, though, which might explain her use of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Earl trumps knight, of course, but what effect, if any, does marriage have on this? Oh, now I'm confused. Titles and inheritance amongst the nobility can get a bit iffy. Exceptions are often made so that daughters may inherit and thus keep the estate and title in the family, and things like that.
All I really know, anyway, is that entailment and inheritance were rather complicated. Could you guess?! :)
<3
tinkernoonoo, QC
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