Jane Austen

proprio fan, il mio libro preferito é persuasione

Pensavo che l'uniche a cui piacesse Persuasione e il capitano Wenthworth fossimo io e mia madre *.* mi sento rincuorata! Trovo che i due protagonisti abbiano una chimica pazzesca nel romanzo 😍

Non posso credere che facesse questi scherzetti XDD ha praticamente scritto due volte il proprio nome sul registro dei matrimoni così tanto per divertirsi ?XD

ho comprato P&P e S&S in edizione inglese figa dignitosa e quando arriveranno mi accingerò a dare un’altra chance al primo

So che il film di MP (almeno la versione con Piper e Ritson) non è considerato un grande adattamento ma devo dire che Mary Crawford ha fatto una certa simpatia anche a me, persino in quel contesto che davvero non sembrava inquadrarla come una possibile “eroina per sbaglio”

Jane Austen, Political Symbol of Early Feminism
On the Appearance of a Literary Icon at the First Women's Marches

On June 13, 1908, suffragists took Jane Austen to the streets of London. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) held its Great Procession, a demonstration march and rally, in what would become known as a “new style.” It was ordered, majestic, and artistic. An estimated 10,000 women representing 42 organizations participated, marching across London for an hour and a half to Royal Albert Hall, where speeches were given by the movement’s high-profile leaders. The visual centerpiece of the march was “a thousand beautiful banners and bannerettes, each different, each wrought in gorgeous color and in rich material.” Most of the banners used in the march advertised place names, as thousands of women had arrived in special trains from Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Hull, Birmingham, and Bristol, with representatives from America, France, Hungary, South Africa, India, and many other countries taking part as well. A significant albeit smaller number of the banners depicted “famous woman leaders and pioneers.” It’s on one of these banners that Jane Austen’s name was blazoned.

Austen’s name and image were used prominently in the street activism, political stage, and issue-oriented fundraisers of the women’s movement’s first wave, yet you’d never know it from our histories of her legacy. Histories of Jane Austen’s critical legacy describe feminists of the 1970s and afterward with great care, but the political uses of Austen by suffragists have been almost entirely neglected in our Austen reception studies. A Virginia Woolf here, a Rebecca West there. There’s little sense given in our literary histories of Austen’s place among hundreds and thousands of Victorian and early 20th-century feminists—among an entire political movement across several continents. Putting Austen’s suffragist champions back into the conversation about her legacy is not only right and just; it also reorients our sense of how Austen has been used for political purposes. We can’t possibly understand political struggles over Austen in our own day without grasping just how long—and how loudly—debates over her and the political meanings of her writings have ranged.

Dating from the mid-19th century to the moment when women’s suffrage was achieved in many industrialized countries by the end of the 1920s, first-wave feminist activists sought female role models in history. Austen was, for those purposes, a perfect fit. Where the men’s club Janeites saw in Austen a safe, admirably domestic figure whose life and writings were often seen as without political intention, the suffragists’ Austen was almost always cast as a rebel. The more accurate phrase for the way many suffragists imagined and used her may be “demure rebel.” Amateur dramatizations of Austen drew on the tropes and ideas of the New Woman movement. Many of these dramatists were or would become suffragists. It’s no surprise that they’d bring a strong, independent-woman-loving version of Jane Austen with them, from the amateur theatricals to the streets of London.

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At the end of the march, the banners were placed carefully in Royal Albert Hall “in terraced ranks of raw and flaming color.” As reporter James Douglas put it in the Morning Leader, “The names wrought upon the delicate silk were the names of women whose power was the power of the intellect and whose strength was the strength of the soul.” The official program doesn’t reprint all of the names that were represented on banners, but it highlights several. After the banners of Vashti (called the first suffragist) and the “Three Great Queens” (Boadicea, Elizabeth, and Victoria), the next group advertised was the “Women Writers,” with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontës chosen as representative. Austen was prominently listed on the banners and program.


Including Austen’s name among the Great Procession’s banner honorees had everything to do with what scholars have called “an acute awareness during the period of the weight of literary history and precedent against which they were struggling. . . Significant literary and historical figures were identified and appropriated in this revisionist phase.” Austen, despite having only recently achieved the designation of “significant” to literary history and women’s history, had quickly become one of the most frequently and prominently used “great women,” chosen to serve as an “effective role model” to the women’s suffrage movement. No doubt this is because of her wide appeal, across political lines and among both men and women.

How to Misread Jane Austen
The novelist was a keen observer of her time. Now readers want to make her a mirror of our own.

By Louis Menand
“What would Jane Austen say?” is a fun game to play, but the truth is that we have no idea. For a writer of her renown, the biographical record is unusually thin. No notebooks or diaries survive. After Austen died, in 1817, her sister, Cassandra, destroyed or censored most of Jane’s letters to her, and after their brother Francis’s death his daughter destroyed all of Jane’s letters to him.

The letters that remain are not especially “Austenian,” and they can be a little hard-hearted and judgy, which does not match very well the image of Austen in the pious biographical sketch written by her brother Henry, shortly after her death, or in the memoir by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, published more than fifty years later, which is mainly family oral remembrance, and in which she is “dear Aunt Jane.”

The novels are not much help, either. Besides the usual difficulties involved in trying to extract a moral from works of literature, there is the problem of Austen’s irony. She is not just representing characters in her novels; she is representing the discursive bubble those characters inhabit, and she almost never steps outside that bubble. She is always ventriloquizing. Virginia Woolf compared her to Shakespeare: “She flatters and cajoles you with the promise of intimacy and then, at the last moment, there is the same blankness. Are those Jane Austen’s eyes or is it a glass, a mirror, a silver spoon held up in the sun?”

Instead of asking what Austen is trying to tell us, we might ask what she’s trying to show us. But the answer to that seems to be: It depends on who’s looking. In her lifetime, Austen was popular with a certain class of readers, the fashionable and well-off, who enjoyed her novels, particularly “Pride and Prejudice,” as comedies of manners. They got the jokes, and you always feel good about an author when you are in on her jokes.

But Austen was hardly a best-seller, and by the eighteen-twenties her books were often out of print. The critical line on her, even from admirers like Sir Walter Scott, was that she was a miniaturist specializing in an exceedingly narrow sector of British society, the landed gentry. Everyone agreed that she captured that world with astonishing precision; not everyone felt that it was a world worth capturing. “A carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers,” Charlotte Brontë described “Pride and Prejudice” to a friend. “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”

Queen Victoria was a fan (a taste, possibly the only one, she shared with B. B. King), and after the publication of Austen-Leigh’s memoir, in 1869, Austen enjoyed a revival. What had put off readers like Charlotte Brontë now became the basis of her appeal. Her books transported readers to a simpler time and place. They were escapist fiction. Winston Churchill had “Pride and Prejudice” read aloud to him when he was recovering from pneumonia during the Second World War. “What calm lives they had, those people!” was his thought. “No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.”

The suggestion that Austen might have had anything critical to say about those people would have spoiled the illusion. “She is absolutely at peace with her most comfortable world,” Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, explained. “She never even hints at a suspicion that squires and parsons of the English type are not an essential part of the order of things.”


Still, there were readers who detected an edge. Woolf was one. “I would rather not find myself in the room alone with her,” she wrote. The British critic D. W. Harding, in 1939, proposed that Austen’s books were enjoyed “by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked; she is a literary classic of the society which attitudes like hers, held widely enough, would undermine.” The title of his essay was “Regulated Hatred.” Lionel Trilling, in 1955, called Austen “an agent of the Terror,” meaning that she is merciless in forcing us to confront our moral weaknesses.

Today, there are two Austens, with, probably, a fair amount of overlap: the recreational reader’s Austen and the English professor’s Austen. For the recreational reader, the novels are courtship stories, and the attraction is the strong women characters who, despite the best efforts of rivals and relations to screw things up, always succeed in making the catch. “Boy meets girl, girl gets boy” is the bumper-sticker version.

This category of reader presumably makes up a big part of the audience for the movie and television adaptations, a steady stream of entertainment product that shows no signs of slowing. Since 1995, there have been at least one screen adaptation of “Northanger Abbey,” two of “Sense and Sensibility,” two of “Mansfield Park,” two of “Persuasion,” three of “Pride and Prejudice,” and four of “Emma.” “Lady Susan,” a short epistolary novel Austen wrote when she was eighteen, was made into a movie by Whit Stillman in 2016, and last year Andrew Davies adapted Austen’s last novel, “Sanditon,” into a miniseries, even though she had finished only eleven chapters of it (about a fifth) before she died.

The English professor likes the strong women, too, and watches the adaptations (with a learned and critical eye). But the professor thinks that the novels are about things that people like Churchill and Leslie Stephen thought they leave out: the French Revolution, slavery, the empire, patriarchy, the rights of women. Those subjects might not be in the foreground, but that’s because they were not inside the English gentry’s bubble. The slave trade was not something that ladies and gentlemen talked about—particularly if they had some financial connection to it, as several of Austen’s characters seem to. There are plenty of hints in the books about what is going on in the larger world. Those hints must be there for a reason.

“Emma,” for instance, is the only mature novel Austen named for a character, and that is because the entire narrative, except for one chapter, is from Emma’s point of view. The novel is therefore Emma’s story, the story of a young woman who, after considering herself rather too good for the marriage game, ends up marrying the most eligible man in town. Mr. Knightley also happens to be the brother of Emma’s sister’s husband, and, whether it was his intention or not, the marriage does further strengthen the union of their two estates. The Knightleys and the Woodhouses are now one family. The marital outcome consolidates the existing social order. No boats are being rocked.

Many readers also feel, with Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley, a sense of moral closure. For the spark is lit when he reproves her for a rather mild insult to Miss Bates, a woman who belongs to their social class but has lost almost all her income. Being called out for this breach of etiquette is what sets Emma on a path of reappraisal and makes her vow to be a better person, which turns out to be a person who falls in love with her reprover. Proper manners, behaving in a way appropriate to one’s status, is what holds the order in place.

The ending of “Emma” therefore might seem to confirm the belief that Austen is a conservative at heart: this is how she likes things to turn out. But there is another marriage plot in “Emma.” It involves a secret engagement between Jane, an orphan with no prospects, and Frank, the son of a local man (Mr. Weston) who has been adopted and raised by the Churchills, a wealthy family with houses in Yorkshire and London and its environs.


Frank stands to inherit the Churchill estate, but could be cut off if he marries a penniless woman like Jane over the objections of Mrs. Churchill. Frank and Jane both show up in Highbury, and much of the action is driven by Frank’s attempts to see Jane without raising suspicions that they are lovers. There are clues all along, but we miss or misinterpret them because Emma misses and misinterprets them. Emma thinks that Frank is courting her, but he’s only using her as a distraction.

In the end, Frank and Jane’s difficulties are overcome, and they marry. They will probably be much richer than Emma and Mr. Knightley, and they don’t have to spend the rest of their lives in provincial Highbury. It’s an outcome with a completely different spin. Jane and Frank weren’t born to their fortune, and they haven’t really earned it. They just lucked out. Meanwhile, Frank has violated all the canons of proper behavior. He is not who he pretends to be. He lies to everyone; he toys with Emma’s affections; he torments his fiancée by making a show of ignoring her. And yet he gets the girl and the houses. What’s the lesson there?

The people who read Austen for the romance and the people who read Austen for the sociology are both reading her correctly, because Austen understands courtship as an attempt to achieve the maximum point of intersection between love and money. Characters who are in the marriage game just for love, like Marianne Dashwood, in “Sense and Sensibility,” are likely to get burned. Characters in it just for the money, like Maria Bertram, in “Mansfield Park,” are likely to be unhappy.

Just like Mr. Darcy, you're probably very protective of your family and friends – maybe a little overprotective. You prefer a good book to a good party, and you need someone who can keep up with you in a conversation. If you can get over a rocky first impression, you and Mr. Darcy will bring out the best in each other.