Letters to the Editor
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@Juliebird
What do you think of the Jane Austen as Mr Darcy theory?
Gol-lee, I had not considered that before.
Well, any character in a novel is to some extent the creation of the author. It seems to me that Lizzie Bennett is pretty much the young Jane. She is facing the problems of being a young woman who is intellectually smarter than everyone else around her.
I think we can assume this was true of Jane, since she is one of the greatest geniuses in history, even if she did come from an overachieving family. One brother became Admiral of the Fleet, another was an admiral, and a third brother was adopted by a very wealthy childless family as a substitute heir, so clearly the whole family was management material. Cassandra was obviously no dummy either, even if she did commit one of the greatest crimes in history by destroying so much of Jane's personal correspondence that might have revealed a lot more about the character of the novelist.
Mr. Darcy seems to me like an idealized romantic figure, possibly based on Jane's father, rather than modeled on anyone she knew. It must have been incredibly difficult for a woman as bright as Jane to find a suitable male partner, so she was probably stuck with idiots like Bigg-Wither who had no idea what he was getting, or left to fantasize about ideal men like Darcy and Knightley.
Of course, you can hardly ignore the fact that she really only started to develop feelings for Darcy when she saw his estates and his home. Who says that size did not count in Jane's day?
The David Nokes Biography is worth a read if you haven't already.
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@Juliebird
Once arrived in London, she felt her spirits soar with a kind of heady excitement. She was determined to be quite brilliant...
They did go to the exhibition at Spring Gardens...nor at Sir Joshua Reynolds' exhibition, which she visited the next day...
Money was flowing in at a most agreeable rate,and it quite shocked her to find how much she enjoyed it... On Sunday she attended fashionable services at Belgrave chapel in the morning and at St. James in the evening. She drank tea with the Tilson's, dined with Lady Drummond Smith and drove with Henry to Windsor ('a great delight')...
London was one vast exhibition, and she herself , she discovered, was a prime exhibit... "If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it, she declared. "It is not my own fault"
[Jane Austen: A Life. David Nokes pp 410-411]
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Jane Autsten-- size matters
I know this is a bit off topic, except the question of whether discussion of Jane Austen is an intellectually demanding topic, which was raised by an earlier poster.
As is well-known, Elizabeth Bennett fell in love with Darcy after a visit to his estate and home, called Pemberley.
The idea for Pemberley apparently originated in a visit to Chatworth House, one of the greatest stately homes in England--a palace really. Jane Austen is believed to have visited there in 1811.
In 1811 the 6th Duke of Devonshire inherited the title and several major houses. He was supposedly in love with a princess whom he could not marry as he was not of royal blood, and had several mistresses, but never married, and was known as the Bachelor Duke.
I propose that he may have been a model for Darcy. As far as I know this theory has never been published elsewhere.
You can still visit it today
http://www.chatsworth.org/index.htm
or see Wikipedia for a nice photo of the approach to the house that Elizabeth Bennett would have seen.
Anyway, I think this kind of supports my theory that Darcy represents an unobtainable fantasy ideal rather than an actual personality. The Duke of Devonshire was WAY out of her league.
The modern equivalent would be Bridget Jones marries Sir Paul McCartney.
Hope that helps.
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"Women can get anything they want from men..."
And evidently they want domestic violence and daily headlines about being raped and murdered.
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just poor quality
I could see that the article was facetious the first time I saw it, so I did "get it", I guess. But there was so much shrill self-hate and loathing in it that was still evident, and it lacked self-awareness to the point that it just wasn't funny.
It was like watching a drunk person puking out all their darkest and most revolting secrets, loosened up by the alcohol into saying things they wouldn't ordinarily say. The "humor" of the piece supposedly freed the author enough to do this, with chilling results.
It failed at being genuine. It failed at being satirical. It was simply really badly done.
It was poor writing.
The Times probably published it in the first place just to set off a shitstorm. If that is the case, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, so expect to see more of these "opinion" pieces in the future.
News isn't going to sell newspapers any more, but scandal will, it seems. If you have no scandal, create one with some poor slob of a woman who will hate on herslef for money.
That's all it's about.
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That article
I just reread that article a third time, and,no it isn't great writing. It reminds me of those articles you find in the American Airlines flight magazine headline "Humor" in case you did not notice and sandwiched in between the ads for expensive pimps who will find "wives" for executives who are too busy to do this themselves and have to "outsource" the job to experts. (They will make great Darcyesque husbands and always be away from home.)
But actually the article did make me laugh in a couple of places and raised some good points.
if woman, collectively, are so damn intelligent why haven't mass marketers figured this out, and how IS it that Celine Dion and Kenny G. sell so many CDs?
Take a look at the New York Times bestseller list. At the top of the paperback nonfiction chart and pitched to an exclusively female readership is Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love." Here's the book's autobiographical plot: Gilbert gets bored with her perfectly okay husband, so she has an affair behind his back. Then, when that doesn't pan out, she goes to Italy and gains 23 pounds forking pasta so she has to buy a whole new wardrobe, goes to India to meditate (that's the snooze part), and finally, at an Indonesian beach, finds fulfillment by -- get this -- picking up a Latin lover!
All these kind of stories are in one sense the descendants of the Jane Austen stories, but at least Jane Austen's heroines are more likely to marry men who love Latin and classical architecture, than to pick men based on swarthy looks, hairy chests with gold chains, and ball-hugging Speedos.
I think where she goes a bit wrong is where she says that women test pilots, brain surgeons, and astronomers are outliers. So are the men. Most men are just as stupid as the stupid women who love them, and spend their spare time watching sports on TV, swilling beer, and scratching their balls inside their baggy boxer shorts.
Now it is time to get down to the weekly task of starting the sourdough starter so I have bread for the weekend, so enough of this drivel. I am getting married soon, so will have to get used to the constant droning of telenovellas at my otherwise peaceful country estate.