FLASH! Jane Austen takes her gloves off!

Posted by Greg on January 01, 1998 at 20:13:45:

The best passage(among lots of priceless ones(thanks, Michelle)) in these first chapters, to me, comes towards the end of Ch. 5. Austen embarks on a very ironic, intricate, and quite ruthless attack on gothic novels. She's given fair warning with lots of parody earlier on, but in Ch. 5 she gets down-and-dirty. That bit about "if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another" - brilliant! And it gets better in Ch. 6, when she talks about Miss Andrews, "a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them" - bloody, gory, "horrid" novels, that is. This "angel", however, we're told, is vexed with the problem of men not admiring her. A perplexing problem, indeed! Guess she'll just have to keep watching her soaps - I mean, reading her novels - until one of those dreamy hunks in the stories sweeps her off her feet. I love it!

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