I'll put a cut for those who don't care for more Austen talk, quotes, or more writer speculation.
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D. A. Miller’s Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style is a very short book, extremely well written, dense with fascinating thought. Disquieting thought, even, as I find myself wanting to explain, excuse, make everything nice when he discusses the comfortable het world’s assumptions about Austen's books from a non-het POV. Like his analysis of the ( Read more... )

Rebecca West once said about Jane Austen ( Read more... )

School and LA and Austeniana:
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I read Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club last night--or most of it. I will confess that I skimmed some of the latter portion, so I probably shouldn't discuss it, but what the hey.
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While I was slogging another emergency substitution morning yesterday-second this week--(this means a solid nine hour day with maybe one bathroom break, and I hates them I does) misia asked people for their childhood (and maybe present day) Mary Sue characters here.. Anyone coming to that discussion late, as did I, will see patterns showing up. ( Read more... )

If I were an academic, or had a chance to go to England and do the necessary research, I’d do a good biography of Catherine Grace Frances Gore-that, and shepherd into print again the best of her novels.
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One of the things recently discussed: it’s even more difficult to define what is, and is not, good literature when our fundamental definition of the purpose of literature is radically different from another’s.

That’s not to say that I believe there is a single definition. I do not. I will only go so far as to posit that my own definition works ( Read more... )

Some correspondence re the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award finalists has come up on that list. It’s great to be talking these things with other readers-but at the same time I wish the discussion had come up when I didn’t have to force my thought processes through the fog of accumulated exhaustion ( Read more... )

Most of the time I reading and writing are two different activities, but sometimes they blend ( Read more... )