by Robert Rodi
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9781469922652
Publication Date: January 1, 2011
Pages: 409
Genre: Books and Reading
Publisher: Createspace
Novelist Rodi launches a broadside against the depiction of Jane Austen as a “a woman’s writer…quaint and darling, doe-eyed and demure, parochial if not pastoral, and dizzily, swooningly romantic — the inventor and mother goddess of ‘chick lit.’”
Instead he sees her as “a sly subversive, a clear-eyed social Darwinist, and the most unsparing satirist of her century… She takes sharp, swift swipes at the social structure and leaves it, not lethally wounded, but shorn of it prettifying garb, its flabby flesh exposed in all its naked grossness. And then she laughs.”
In this volume, which collects and amplifies two-and-a-half years’ worth of blog entries, he combs through the first three novels in Austen’s canon — Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park — with the aim of charting her growth as both a novelist and a humorist, and of shattering the notion that she’s a romantic of any kind (“Weddings bore her, and the unrelenting vulgarity of our modern wedding industry — which strives to turn each marriage ceremony into the kind of blockbuster apotheosis that makes grand opera look like a campfire sing along — would appall her into derisive laughter”).
Volume 1 gets 1 star less than volume 2. The entertainment is no less raucous, and wit no less scathing, it just comes down to my thoughts about his analysis. I’m with him on Sense and Sensibility, but I felt like his analysis/thoughts about Jane in Pride and Prejudice rather shallow, although the rest was spot-on.
Where he lost me completely was Mansfield Park. I recognise that Fanny is a problematic heroine, and that MP is not revered by most, but his scorched earth analysis suffered from a too-narrow, current century cultural bias and an assumption of Austen’s motives that nobody but nobody can possibly know. I know that these entires are based on his personal readings, interpretations, feelings, etc. but his use of plurality (‘we’, etc.) throughout the text assumes his reader is going to agree with him, and I don’t. Mansfield Park isn’t my favourite, but it’s not my least favourite either (It ranks 4th, if you’re curious).
Still a very worthy read, and an excellent exercise in getting back to the core of Austen’s writing.