u/My_Poor_Nerves

The little Bantam Classic edition was the first Austen book I ever purchased, so you'd think I'd have been familiar enough with it after all this time to notice it shares the same cover as the Oxford World's Classics, which I've had for five years.

I’ve abridged this intro as it is sixteen pages long with small print – I ain’t got time to retype all of that.  

I’ll give this one credit in that it’s not as egregiously terrible as the other two, but it’s trite.  Very trite.  And occasionally has the tone of a high school biographical essay.  I found it interesting that this intro repeatedly emphasizes the Austen family as poor and their community as small, in contrast to the Persuasion intro which leaned into the idea that Jane Austen was a carriage-traveling societal sweetheart who lived to yuk it up with all the “right people.”

I also think this one is most successful in that it attempts next to no literary analysis.  You can’t misname a character if you don’t mention them!  Anyway, for your reading pleasure, excerpts from an intro:

Jane Austen was probably the single most unlikely literature figure in the history of the English language.

This is pretty amazing (this phrasing is so bad, Microsoft Word recommended I change it), when you realize all the strikes Jane had against her.  She lived with her parents for the whole of her short life, generally in villages so small as to be nearly nonexistent by modern standards.  In an era when matrimony was a woman’s only respectable profession (all the governesses of the Regency world fall to their knees), she never married…She lived in a time when women were considered to be incapable of serious though, worthless except for homemaking and producing children.  She wrote novels, a literary form that even some members of her own family felt was beneath notice.  From a life so restricted that it was nearly a prison (this metaphor was a choice), with little or no first-hand exposure to the world at large, in a time when women were undervalued at best, Jane Austen wrote masterpieces.

Jane Austen was born in 1775, and died in 1817.  She was a consummate observer, and she lived in the perfect time for someone interested in human behavior.

There were sound reasons for British society’s extreme preoccupation with manners, morals, and rational behavior during Jane Austen’s life.  The upper echelons of society thought that good behavior was their only hope (shades of Obi-Wan).

The need for respectability blossomed into the nineteenth century absurd prudishness that was the hallmark of Victorian England.  During the Regency, it was considered improper to refer to legs (even on furniture – tables, chairs, and pianos had limbs) or clothing below the waist (women often referred to men’s pants and their own undergarments as “inexpressibles” and “unmentionables”).  Jane’s books, dealing as they did with the effect on society of minute gradations of behavior, are a thoroughly accurate reflection of the concerns of her time.

There was one thing even more important to Jane Austen than the world events.  Jane adored her family – they were the very largest part of her life.  Her father and mother, brothers and sister, and a whole network of extended relatives, including aunts and uncles, first cousins, and cousins many times removed (you see, a family is made up of a variety of relations!  I am surprised great-aunts and nephews were excluded from this comprehensive list) were the people who went out and experienced life, then brought it home to Jane Austen.  

He started taking in students, boys who needed schooling and coaching in the classics.  The Austen children responded to this influx of new children by closing ranks.  They were perfectly friendly, but they were so tightly bonded to each other that they rarely looked outside of the family for soulmates (this phrasing has just a touch of incest to it, right?).

Even though money was tight, Jame and Henry went up to St. John’s College, Oxford…They had a lovely time.

[Jane and Cassandra] pursued their chores, and quiet hobbies…and went on long walks through the countryside to visit friends.  Some of these friends were their age, others were not (okay?).

Another strong influence on Jane’s life was a woman named Anne Lefroy…Anne was strong-minded, opinionated, and she cared very little about what the world thought of her.  She was a human whirlwind of personality, and said what she thought about whatever subject came up in discussion…In quiet, observant Jane, she discovered a kindred soul (the missing text here does not, as one would expect, explain how a human whirlwind would find quiet Jane a kindred soul).

Another good friend and close companion of Jane’s moved into the area at about this time.  Martha Lloyd took lease on the Deane cottage from Mr. Austen from 1789-1792.  She was merry, charming, and down-to-earth.  She was also fondly tolerable of Jane’s oddities (11 pages into this intro and this is the first mention of Jane having oddities, so I cannot even guess as what was meant here and I don’t think what comes next explains it very well).  By this time in her life, thanks to her large and varied family, Jane was stuffed full of literature and domestic politics (courtesy of James and Henry), European current affairs (Eliza), French and the classics (her father).  As sixteen, Jane had turned into that most problematic sort of female.  She was an intellectual, a “bluestocking.”  (In all the biographical pieces I’ve ever read about Austen, I think this marks the only time I saw her referred to as a bluestocking.)

But her observations of society made a central fact clear to her.  Love and marriage followed land and money.  As the undowered second daughter of a family with little in the way of either, she had almost no chance at a respectable match (I don’t think this is correct either).

In 1793, when Jane was nearly eighteen, she determined that the amusing pieces she wrote for her family should be something more than a pleasant hobby.  Jane Austen made a revolutionary choice.  She decided it was time to write for money.  It was a good time for that decision.

In 1795, Jane hand an unfortunate affair of the heart.  Her dear friend Ann (now without an e!) Lefroy’s nephew came to Steventon for a visit.  Tom Lefroy was handsome, charming, well-bred—in short, everything a young woman could ask for in a suitor.  He and Jane were strongly attracted to one another.  Before long, they were an item.  Mrs. Lefroy was not amused (her poor nerves!).  Her family had larger plans for the young man.  A young, penniless woman, no matter how bright and attractive, had no place in those plans.  Tom was hustled back home.  Many years later, when Tom was an old man, he admitted he had loved Jane, but he hadn’t had the strength to fight his family for her.  Jane only knew that he left her alone after leading her on.  She had had enough.  Escaping into the controlled and demanding world of her fiction, she found a universe safe from the grim place the world was becoming (a truly masterful extrapolation, is it not?).

[After Cassandra’s fiancé died] Jane devoted herself to her sister until Cassandra was able to fend for herself emotionally.  Then, in 1800, Mr. Austen retired and moved his family to Bath.  Jane nearly keeled over when she was told of the move.  

…Later the same year, when Jane and Cassandra went to visit Catherine and Althea Bigg in Manydown, Harris Bigg Wither proposed to Jane.  Tempted by the idea of security, though not in love, she said yes.  Then she went to bed for a long, sleepless night.  She retracted her acceptance the next morning.  Marriage without a sincere emotional attachment was not for her.  

These affairs of the heart didn’t interfere with Jane’s writing…She finally got up the nerve to submit her work, and mailed Susan to her brother Henry in 1803.   Henry forwarded the book to his man of business in London, and it sold for the princely sum of ten pounds to Richard Crosby and Co.  They never published it, but Jane couldn’t see into the future.   She only knew that she was a professional writer.  She had been paid for her work by someone who was not related to her.

[Mrs. Lefroy and her father died].  All of this was upsetting for obvious reasons (an obvious statement)…

Mrs. Austen moved with Jane and Cassandra to Stoneleigh, the great house that was her family’s seat.  All three ladies were ready to be coddled a bit, and the place was a marvelous old home, complete with hundreds of years of tradition, family ghosts, and reams of rooms connected by mazes of passageways.

…They moved in on Easter.  Jane’s response to having a settled home was the reaction of a born author.  She pulled out her pen and started a new round of revisions on Sense and Sensibility…This time she was ready to show her work to the world…The wild (wild?), unprecedented decision Jane had made to write for a living in 1793 was, twenty years later, finally a reality…

She started Sanditon in January 1817, but never finished it.  In late May, thinking that a change of scenery and access to better doctors might help her, her family hauled Jane off to the town of Winchester.  It was in vain (perhaps it was the hauling that did it).  She died on July 18, 1817, at the age of forty-one.

I'm back with the second of three Tor Classics intros to Austen, this time bringing you their edifying remarks on Persuasion (as well as the knuckle-biting drama of the cover). While not as overtly awful as what we saw with Sense and Sensibility (what could top that theatrical rogue Holloway, after all?), it's still...not great.

Jane Austen was born in the English town of Steventon on December 16, 1775.  She was the second youngest of eight children, so growing up she was not only surrounded by her brothers and one sister, but also by their children (did she “grow up” surrounded by her brothers’ children?).  It was an upper-middle-class milieu, and Jane had a comfortable, happy, and very social childhood.  The favorite activities of the Austen children were reading, writing plays, and performing homespun dramas for each other (the plays and homespun drama ought to be the same thing, right?).  They were just short works, but the ones Jane wrote revealed a sense of satire, an understanding of the romance novel genre, and a tendency to create feisty female protagonists.

The first full-length work Austen wrote was called Lady Susan, an epistolary novel that she completed before the age of twenty.  In 1796, at the age of twenty-one, she wrote another novel entitled Elinor and Marianne, an early incarnation of Sense and Sensibility which was published years later.  During her years as a young woman in the affluent society of Hampshire, she had a leisurely, fun-filled existence.  It was the good life:  She had her own horses and carriage, and she mixed with all the right people (this is strictly accurate, but also not really accurate).

When Austen’s father moved the family to Bath after his retirement in 1801, she moved with them.  As a single woman, she had no choice, for the social conventions of the time dictated that a woman must live at home until married.  Of course, there was also the practical reason the she [sic] had no means of income (this sentence gave my brain a stutter).  A woman of her position did not work.  Unhappy for the eight years she spent in Bath, she was overjoyed when her wealthy brother offered to set her up in a cottage back in her native region of Hampshire.  There she wrote all of her later novels and revised her early ones, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park  (1814), Emma (1815), Persuasion (1816), and Northanger Abbey (1816), all of which were published anonymously (some of these years are incorrect).

Austen’s last novel, Persuasion deals with the topic of marriage from an eighteenth-century woman’s point of view.  How should a woman choose a husband?  On the basis of wealth and class?  Or on the basis of love?  Until and throughout Austen’s time, it had been taken for granted by the English upper-middle class that love had little to do with marriage (we would love to see the source for this).  A woman responded to her suitor based on his wealth and position in the society – end of story.  In Persuasion, she satirized this bleak aspect of her world, exploring the devastating effects of a woman’s passivity in this social structure (this is certainly an interpretation of the text!).

Anne Elliot is an upper-class young woman of a soft-spoken, self-effacing nature – in other words, perfect wife material for some boring old count or baron (what a conclusion!), or so her family thinks (ah, yes, this is from Persuasion, chapter 15: “Sir Walter turned to Anne and said, “I have been thinking, dearest Anne, that with your soft-spoken ways, self-effacing nature, and judicious use of Gowland’s, you would be the perfect wife material for some boring old count or baron.”).  Anne, seemingly the only character in possession of a heart (this is Croft erasure and we will not stand for it).  She falls in love with Captain Wentworth, a handsome young naval officer – much to the consternation of the Elliots’ family friend and personal advisor, Lady Russell.  She persuades young Anne to be more sensible, and to avoid marrying beneath her, as Wentworth’s lack of status in society could only bring her down.  And, adds Lady Russell, he doesn’t make enough money (such a summary pulled from: “Anne Elliot, so young; known to so few, to be snatched off by a stranger without alliance or fortune; or rather sunk by him into a state of most wearing, anxious, youth-killing dependence!”).  Anne, being an obedient young lady, follows this advice, turning him away.  Just her luck, he gets a huge raise (he’s upper middle management now!) – only the first indication that Lady Russell might have been wrong.  

Unlike some of Austen’s earlier novels, in which her intentions are more obscure and open to debate, Persuasion is clearly satirizing the stiff, constrictive, male-dominated society in which she lived (this is not open to debate, apparently).  On the surface, it is just a romantic comedy of manners (is that so?), in which women are married off to the highest bidders (I do not recall this bidding process).  Embedded in this comedy (Anne’s life is hilarious!  A laugh a moment!), however, is an implicit critique of a world in which women can never act but only react to men.  This theme, present in all her novels, accounts for why Austen has often been hailed as the proto-feminist English writer.

Jane Austen never married (Boom!  Conclusion! Is it a little ironical that after hailing Austen as a porto-feminist, the author of this piece makes her marriage status the standalone conclusion?).

I was sitting around folding laundry, staring idly at my bookshelf, when I laid eyes on this copy of "What Matters in Jane Austen?" by John Mullan. And my thought was, "Kudos to the people at Bloomsbury for making a scholarly book about Austen that's really pretty!" because a lot of them aren't. Most of my serious/non-fiction Austen books are plonked on my basement shelf because they are just a leeetle bit ugly.

The catch, though? I opened it up and found that at least this particular copy is slightly crooked. Does anyone else have this edition? Are they all crooked?

(Edited to note that "Foreword" was mistyped in the title and can't be fixed - sorry!)

The three Tor Classics editions of Austen's works have been, I think, semi-famous for a while for their remarkably awful covers. I finally cracked my copy of Sense and Sensibility open this morning and discovered they might also become famous for their remarkably awful introductions. Here is the intro for Sense and Sensibility in its entirety. I would have pulled an Elinor and agreed to it all, but, well, I didn't - my own comments are in bold.

Times change, societies evolve, roles reverse, but the pursuit of love is a constant. Equally constant are the personality attributes we find attractive, the pain of loves lost, the sweet heartaches of loves won, and the excitement that attends the entirety of the process.

Sense and Sensibility is about exactly that process of finding love. It is the story of two sisters, of ripe marrying age -- in their late teens (what?). The eldest wants a staid, solid relationship with a stead man, one of whom she can be certain, one who will provide rock-sure footing for her future. The younger sister is attracted to the rogue (spoiler alert!), the hearty sportsman, the handsome flirt that will be owned by no one (weird choice of phrase considering Willoughby more or less sells himself to a wealthy heiress).

Through this book, we get a very personal glimpse of the times and the societal strategies of the early 1800s. These two young women of wealth (I thought one of the major plot points was there lack of wealth - must of misread half the novel) and leisure have only themselves to amuse, with their social activities and their families (the plural is confusing). Therefore, they are free to dwell upon their prospective mates and their potential futures, sharing all with their closest of friends in rural England (if this hadn't been published in 1995, I would have sworn this was ChatGPT).

Elinor, the eldest sister, is engaged to be married to conservative Edward Ferrars (as of chapter 49 out of 50), a man of impeccable breeding and reputation.

Marianne, the younger sister, is smitten with Holloway (yes, friends, you read that right - Holloway!), a man of dubious linage and questionable activities, but with a theatrical flair that steals her heart.

Elinor craves the calm, tasteful life; Marianne thrives on the wild emotional roller coaster - not unlike most pairs of sisters with diverse tastes. Their attempts at understanding each other are humorous and to the point (at this point, I'm not convinced the author of this actually, ya know, read the book). Each sister's attempt to alter the other's viewpoint is poignant and heartwarming (I thought we just established it was humorous and to the point), and their affection of each other is indisputable.

Of course, not all is well in the realm of love. Nothing goes as planned, nothing is as it first seems, the ebb and flow of relationships was as curious then as it is today.

What the two girls find is, of course, the stuff of maturity; staid is not always sure, and excitement eventually wears thin.

This book, written by the masterful hand of Jane Austen, shows us the classic, timeless themes of love, family conflicts, insecurity, pride, jealousy, and the unpredictable, fickle nature of personal taste (this last being, "of course," the major theme of the novel. I'll point out as well that the first sentence of this piece posited that the personality attributes we find attractive are apparently constant).

The very definition of "classic" infers timelessness. The subjects of love, of sisters, of giddy friends (poor Mrs. Jennings to be referred thusly) and their well-intentioned intrusions, of heartache and expectations....No one captures the sentiment as well as Mrs. Austen.

I will omit the author's name as a kindness to them.

Who else has a neat-o adaptation tie-in edition? These two are from Everyman's Library. I think Modern Library did one for the '95 P&P, and there's also a paperback with Gwyneth Paltrow's Emma sipping tea floating around.

I bought my Persuasion copy by accident (used seller's stock image not matching the actual edition strikes again!) and then had to get the S&S to complete the set. Outside of the dust jackets and pretty embossed covers, there isn't a difference between these and the standard Everyman's which seems like a missed opportunity to have included some interesting material related to the adaptations they were promoting.

26/52 read so off to a good start with the amount of reading I've done, but until last week, I've felt slumpy. Outside of a handful of rereads, I hadn't really loved anything I'd read so far this year, but that changed when my hold for Dungeon Crawler Carl came through. Gosh, I'm loving that series! I also think I'm going to get into the Master and Commander series as well, but Carl comes first. ​

COMPLETED

1. The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy - a reread; this is Nobel Prize literature for a reason

2. Excellent Women by Barbara Pym - enjoyed enough to read more by the same author

3. Jane & Prudence by Barbara Pym - too many annoying characters, diminishing returns

4. Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym - didn't really care for

5. The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer - an old favorite

6. Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green - interesting look into a topic I didn't know much about, narration a bit distracting at times

7. Sylvester by Georgette Heyer - another old favorite

8. His at Night by Sherry Thomas - DNF - too contrived, characterization too generic

9. Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones - another old favorite

10. Tempting the Bride by Sherry Thomas - only read to complete a series, by far my least favorite of the bunch

11. The Chosen by Chaim Potok (bookclub selection) - I had read this a couple of decades ago, it was good to revisit it as an adult

12. Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson - didn't seem to be enough information about Isaac to fill the book, a lot of speculation, easily my least favorite of what I've read of Larson's

13. Lady of Quality by Georgette Heyer - a quick reread as a palate cleanser

14. Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer - same as above

15. The Virginian by Owen Wister - my first Western novel, seems excellent for its type, fun to see a Jane Austen fallout in it, and the book is dedicated to Teddy Roosevelt

16. The Hinchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (bookclub selection) - I have mixed feelings on this one: great story, incredible insight into the idea of architecture as recorded history, but still quite sloggy in parts

17. The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen - horrific topic but good writing

18. Fear Stalks the Village by Ethel Lina White - DNF - pretty meh, skipped to the end to find a good amount of plot points weren't wrapped up which is a huge pet peeve of mine

19. Twice Around the Clock by Billie Houston - DNF - spoiler alert! - I don't do mysteries when part of the solution is merely "Dude be crazy"

20. Anne of a Different Island by Virginia Kantra - finished it in spite of myself, should have been a winner, fell apart in details and in having an off-putting heroine

21. Middlemarch by George Eliot - didn't love it like I expected to but can't deny the writing is incredible and I highlighted something every other page

22. Silas Marner by George Eliot - liked it more than Middlemarch, fairly quick read

23. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - expected to love it but didn't, the narrative tone was off for me and the flashbacks/amnesia recovery seemed a little hamfisted

24. The Unselected Journals of Emma M Lion Vol. 1 by Beth Bower - another expected to love but didn't. Tone problems

25. Look Me in the Eyes by John Elder Robison - fascinating look into living with autism

26. The African Queen by C.S. Forester - it was fine, wouldn't revisit. Heard the movie is good

27. Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman - SO FREAKING GOOD!

28. Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman - more of the same

29. The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman - even more of the same

READS IN PROGRESS

1. Purgatario by Dante - takes a lot of focus, hope to finish by the end of the month

2. Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding - should be a quick, enjoyable read but it's waiting for me to finish other books I'm liking better

3. Much Ado about Nada by Uzma Jalauddin - if I hadn't bought it, I doubt I'd finish it

4. Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien - if it wasn't for Dungeon Crawler Carl, I think I'd be well into this series by now

5. The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman - SO FREAKING GOOD!