Jane Austen Class Journal

a blog for my Jane Austen literature class

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In a nutshell. 

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I don’t think I need to write words here. I just find this hilarious and unfortunately pretty accurate. Definitely my least favorite Austen hero

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Miss Austen Regrets, Perhaps A Bit Too Much For My Taste

Though in the course of fifty years I have forgotten much, I have not forgotten that Aunt Jane was the delight of all her nephews and nieces. We did not think of her as being clever, still less as …

This is an excellent review of the movie “Miss Austen Regrets” which paints Jane in a much better, less romantic light than other “biopic” movies have done in the past *cough* Becoming Jane *cough*

However, amidst the lines of her being happy with her choices we are subjected a Jane that has some doom and gloom about her. She says she’s happy, but do we really believe her? This movie deals with that question and seems to want the audience to maybe side that she might not have been as happy as she claimed.

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Move over Lizzie Bennet – let's hear it for the unsung heroine

Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, has been unfairly dismissed by readers and critics. To mark the novel's 200th anniversary, writers celebrate literary leading ladies who have been overshadowed by their showier sisters

This article talks about the less popular female leads from classic English literature. For Austen, it chooses Fanny Price as the less admirable of her counterparts, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse. It also talks about how Fanny has been portrayed in movies to seem less soft as she did in the novel, because people often have such a dislike for her character.

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Two Jane Austen characters kissed, and it took us 200 years to find out

Austen purists have long insisted that the books include no kissing. But one Austen expert found a place in 'Emma' where here's fairly certain there is.

This article comes from a website dedicated mostly to celebrity gossip and makeup tutorials and feminist articles and other general things of interest mostly to women. According to the article an English professor from London states that upon his 15th reading of Emma he has found a scene that is he believes involves Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill “going at it.” My issue is not so much with the speculation of this statement, but more with the author of the Hello Giggles article. The author takes these details as a further “reason” to swoon over Jane Austen’s novels and considers the idea a juicy detail that greatly adds to the story. The author also refers to  Jane Austen “purists” as having a problem with movie adaptations that almost always involve a kiss somewhere in the film. Whether or not the character were actually kissing or not is besides the point in this post. However, I fear that reading Austen this way may take away from the deeper analyzing of her novels as serious works of fiction, rather than 19th century romance novels.

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Arranged Vs. Love Part II

When we watch shows like “The Bachelor” and it’s counterpart “The Bachelorette” what kind of message is the culture telling us? We’ve turned romantic love, which was just starting to gain popularity as a reason for marriage in Austen’s time, into a circus show. The bachelor or bachelorette is trying to find out from a number of people who they will most likely “fall in love” with by the end of the season. Now I’m not taking anything that’s happening in these types of shows really serious, but we do watch this as “reality” television and set certain standards for how the participants should behave. Austen turns these types of culture conventions on their heads and makes fun of everything about what people think should and shouldn’t happen because she knows it will make people crazy and always come back for more. 

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Arranged vs. Love

Arranged or contrived marriages pop up all over Austen’s novels, this was still a fairly common thing to occur at this time. By “contrived” I mean marriages not necessarily sought after by the parties directly involved ( i.e. the bride and groom) or by any form of emotional attachment. Mr. Collins and Charlotte Lucas marry for convenience and they are not shown as unhappy but definitely not in love. The idea of having to be “in love” before getting married is a modern idea, and one that we’ve twisted and romanticized to no end. Not saying that arranged marriages are better lol. Just wait, more on this later. 

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Depiction of the main points of the mysteries of Udolpho. Stereotypical female heroine from Austen’s time, she contrasts Catherine with Emily the main character from this novel many times throughout Northanger Abbey. Despite Catherine’s devoted reading of this book, she is very different from Emily in everything from appearance, to upbringing, to wit.

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People are obsessed with the romantic side of Austen and popular culture often fails at seeing the serious literary side of her, or her social commentary.