Ten facts

[anghraine]

[reposted from wordpress]

. . . about Jane Austen, of course.
 

(10) Jane Austen did not write romances. She did not write proto-chick lit. She wrote, for lack of a better word, novels. (See Northanger Abbey for a better explanation.)

(9) Jane Austen did not use ‘old English.’ Jane Austen did not even speak Old English.

(8) Jane Austen was not a Victorian. She died before Queen Victoria was born.

(7) Jane Austen’s characters are not always proper and restrained and decorous. (For the really, really obvious example, see Pride and Prejudice, Ch 34.)

(6) Jane Austen was a master of free indirect style. In other words, good luck on discovering where the narrator ends and a character begins.

(5) ‘Everybody back then did/didn’t do X’ is not a cogent argument. Neither are bland assertions about human nature that are only really relevant to late twentieth-century Westerners.

(4) Jane Austen knew perfectly well that people don’t change other people. People have experiences, which may or may not involve other people, and either learn from them or don’t. It is not, for instance, Fanny’s fault that Henry Crawford is a cad and chooses to remain one. 

(3) A fault that is reasonable, justifiable, and excusable is not a fault. For instance: ‘Darcy is only unfriendly because he’s shy’ or ‘Elizabeth’s only mistake was believing Wickham, which doesn’t matter anyway because everyone else did.’

(2) Whether writing fanfic, professional criticism, or just rambles, get the facts right. If you go north from Hertfordshire, you don’t end up in London. Georgiana Darcy is not thirteen years younger than Darcy and two older than Lydia (think about this with the understanding that Darcy is twenty-eight by the end of P&P). Henry Crawford isn’t handsome and Anne Elliot isn’t plain and ‘light’ is not some obscure code for ‘voluptuous.’

(1) And my personal soapbox: Actor X is not either Character Y. No adaptation, no interpretation, no actor, no book ever takes the place of the original.