Authors Electric

National Portrait Museum I was a teenager when I first read Jane Austen. But how much funnier the books are when seen from an adult perspective, and how different they all are. Born in 1775, Austen is a product of her times although not blind to the inequalities in society. Although from a relatively modest background, Jane’s own brother was adopted by a wealthy childless family, which made her an acute observer of the advantages conferred by money and breeding. In those days, heroines were traditionally faultless wimps without wit; in Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet breaks the mould and is the most modern in outlook. One of five daughters, the family home will be inherited by a male cousin, leaving the girls in a difficult position. Jane Austen was very objective about the position of women, and how important it was to marry well or, in fact, at all. So, taking a cursory look at the books one by one and focusing on the central female characters we get a good idea of a fairly wid...

I have fellow Electric Author Allison Symes to thank for my ruminations this month. Her post a couple of weeks ago on her dislike of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park unleashed a lively debate on Jane Austen’s heroines, and why we love some more than others. It struck me then that the fact we can argue about this at all is down to Austen’s genius in creating six romantic heroines, all struggling within the confines of the same social framework, and all so different from each other.    Not what Jane Austen does. Photo by Dmitrii Fursov Ah yes, that social framework. Let’s get one thing out of the way first. I have no time for anyone who holds the extremely-unoriginal-but-frequently-voiced-with-Great-Smugness-by-persons-who-think-they-are-the-first-to-do-so-opinion that Jane Austen is not worth considering because she didn’t set her novels on the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars. That point of view simply cannot grasp that Austen’s greatness lies, not in recounting military cam...

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.   I loathe Fanny Price from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park -- always have done and always will. She is too insipid a character for my liking.  It has struck me she is too reliant on rotten things happening to other characters rather than trying to make her own happiness. Yes, those other characters deserve their comeuppance but come on, Miss Price, do something positive for yourself, will you?    I know I can’t judge by the standards of our time, right? Fanny Price reflects a different era, right? Okay, but by contrast, I love Elizabeth Bennet, who knows her own mind, is flawed, and holds out for what she wants. Same author, same era, two well known creations, one of whom is significantly better than the other! I guess this proves no writer gets it right all the time. I take some comfort from that. Characters for me make or break a story. I have to get behind them even if I don’t like them or want them t...

Joy Margetts’s post on 23 July, A Tale Most Tragical , set me thinking. Anne of Green Gables by L M Montgomery I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read Anne of Green Gables ; but I’ve listened to the audiobook, which I hope counts, and watched a delightful BBC dramatisation about 30 years ago, and loved both. Even if I hadn’t, I’d back Joy to the hilt about interfering with another writer’s work; but loving the story as I do, I was aghast at what Joy revealed the makers of Anne with an E on Netflix have done with it. Not happy with the storyline as written by L M Montgomery in 1908, which lacked the modern required exploration of racism, colonialism and homophobia, the creators of Anne with an E have cheerfully added several new characters and storylines to make up for this. Joy kindly gives the screen writers the widest possible benefit of the doubt, judging that perhaps only this way could the series attract a modern audience.  Really? Anne of Green Gables is a timeless classic...

Some years ago, a friend defended a film version of Mansfield Park that portrayed sexual abuse within Fanny Price’s birth family by saying, ‘Oh come on, don’t think that kind of thing didn’t go on in the nineteenth century just as much as today.’ It didn’t matter that the film showed something that never appeared in the book; according to my friend, if Jane Austen could have written it in, she would have done, and that was good enough for her. Jane Austen; gagged by 19th C taboos While this made no sense at all to me, what I found shocking was that this person was by profession a historian; someone who deals in fact, not fiction. Yet here she was, happy to discount the integrity of a classic novel because it didn’t fit her historical view. Perhaps that was her point: Mansfield Park is fiction, not history, so it really doesn’t matter what you do with it. For her, ‘would have,’ in Jane Austen’s case, glided easily into ‘did’. It is difficult for historians. Novelists can ...