I had a plan. I was going to finish Sense and Sensibility, the one Austen novel I hadn't read yet, and then I would be at the top of the library hold list for The Jane Austen Book Club. I had read a couple of delighted reviews and I was so looking forward to reading it myself.
I needed my ORM in a big way, though. I wanted to say, "Hey, I would have the Bertrams over for dinner, thank you very much." Kingsley Amis notwithstanding, I would make them trifle (so they'd feel at home, being in the wrong century and on the wrong continent), and we could talk about whether Maria had learned her "duty to the lessons of affliction" yet.
Plus I wanted to talk about Sense and Sensibility with someone and Austen is just too girly for my husband. At least he thinks she is. Elinor personifies sense, right, and Marianne sensibility? Austen seems to be holding Elinor up as the ideal, but doesn't she strike you as rather a cold fish? Wouldn't they both be nicer if they hybridized themselves? Or am I too much a product of my let-it-all-hang-out times and culture? That was my burning question about S&S and no one in the book club touched on it. That's the trouble with listening in on other people's imaginary conversations.
Stop here if you're planning to read The Jane Austen Book Club, but how about that ending? You can usually tell Austen's estimate of a character's merit by the match she makes in the end. The rain of this entry's silly title is not meteorological, since England has an equal-opportunity lousy climate, but figurative, as in the kind that falls on the just and the unjust. Difficult marriages, in Austen's universe, are for plain, spiteful girls who think too much about money. Why, then, does Allegra end up reunited with Corinne? And how about Bernadette and Senor Obando? Where did that come from?
Maybe I should reread Pride and Prejudice instead of looking for Austen in somebody else's book.
Recent Comments