Brush up your Feuchtwanger. And your Bronte/Austen/Auden/Byron...

[selenak]

The train route from Greifswald to Munich takes the entire day. You only have to switch once, in Berlin, but you really sit in the train from nine in the morning to seven in the evening. Consider me not just train-ed, but drained. (Why is it that travelling where one doesn't really move is that exhausting when I can walk through cities sightseeing

Comments

[elisi]

I have likewise read one of Miss Austen's works, Emma -- read it with interest and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have thought sensible and suitable
Oooooh, it BURNS! Thank you lots for these, VERY cheering. :)

[selenak]

It burns indeed. Charlotte B. had a tongue as sharp as any, which people often forget. I mean, I don't agree with her on the lack of passion in Jane Austen, but this unimpressed dissing is still fun to read. *g*

[herself_nyc]

Wonderful post, and I can't believe I didn't know that Bronte disliked Austen so; though I can't say I'm surprised. It makes perfect sense.

[selenak]

They're just diametrical opposites. Of course, we readers can enjoy both, but like you I'm not surprised Charlotte Bronte didn't.

[selenak]

It would have been great, great fun. Too bad they weren't contemporaries. (I disagree about the lack of feeling as well, but the dissing is still fun to read; nowadays Jane Austen is a classic nobody would dare to critisize at all.)

[likeadeuce]

Seems someone didn't miss Lizzie Bennet changing her mind about Darcy when getting a good look at his really nice real estate.

Lizzie makes this point herself, doesn't she? In jest, of course, but in the Austenian form of jest that wouldn't be funny if it weren't a little true. None of Austen's heroines marry for mere money, but none of them marry for true love, either. Even Anne Elliot essentially regrets that she didn't have enough faith in Wentworth's material prospects. Her sin was not in ignoring practical considerations but in underestimating the Royal Navy!

[ETA: an amendment; I should have said that none of them marry for pure love. It's not false, but it's not sufficient either.]

[selenak]

Absolutely. Austenian heroines are practical about economics and the reality of life.*g*

[shezan]

Up with Auden, down with Brontë and the insufferable George Sand, I say! Gawd these Romantic females were a pain.

And thanks for pointing me to the Jud Süss review! have friended the poster not to miss her take on Felix Krull, my all-time favourite pastiche picaresque novel. This is Thomas Mann shedding effortlessly every contrivance and having fun, not something you often associate with him. I also can't forget (it touches me very much) that he got to know Lisbon because that's the port he left from to find refuge in America. What a wonderful way to exorcise that period!

[selenak]

I still haven't read a novel of George Sand's, so I can't say anything about them, but I do adore her letters to Flaubert. She's just splendid in them (and if anyone's a pain, he is, which leaves her with the business of cheering him up), just the kind of woman I want to be when I'm old. Still mentally alert as ever, passionate about life from politics to her granddaugthers, able to enjoy herself instead of moaning about the good old days.

As for Charlotte Bronte, while I disagree with her on Jane Austen in general, if you force me to take a party as a reader (i.e. the lonely island, only a small number of books, either Bronte or Austen but not both situation), I'd go with the sisters three, as Arno Schmidt called them. Sorry

[shezan]

Nooooo you did not! Do tell!!!!

(And while the old Sand must have been interesting, the young Sand was pretty insufferable. I'll never forgive her showing up unannounced at Valençay with Chateaubriand to visit the old Talleyrand; both being exquisitely received with 18th-century manners; then coming back to Paris to write up their visit to the disgusting old monster in Le Mercure de France. Fatheads. That was after she did the dirty on poor Chopin.

I hate those of her books I've read, especially La Mare Au Diable. She's a kind of convoluted, downbeat Thomas Hardy, without the social observation.)

[selenak]

Felix Krull: So, Hilde Beech, quondam Hilde Kahn back in the day, was a young woman of 21 when Thomas Mann was working on Felix Krull. "Youth is my only excuse," she said and proceeded to tell about the one and only time TM asked her about her opinion, which was when he had just finished dictating the Madame Houpflé/ Felix encounter; he wanted to know whether she didn't consider this very erotic. Now young Hilde, not clueing in to certain tendencies in the Great Legendary Author who had just hired her, blithely replied "no; boys and middle-aged people are so not erotic to me". He never asked her again, and she was embarassed decades after