Upon first reading Jane Austen, there are those who would reward her
by smiles of approbation and others who would punish her with a cudgel
(or in the words of Mark Twain, “dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone”). Some two hundred years after her death, why is it Jane Austen is still so very much loved—and so very much hated?
What is it about the slow-moving spectacle of good manners in grand
manors, in a confined and unvarying society of three or four families,
ending in a rewarding marriage to the satisfaction of all, that gets
readers all fired up? Austen’s contemporary Maria Edgeworth complained
that there was no story in it.
People can’t seem to decide who Jane Austen really is. There are as
many ways to enjoy Jane Austen as there are ways to be infuriated by
her. Was she the “narrow-gutted” spinster aunt of family legend turned naive romance writer?
Was she actually her own Elizabeth Bennet without a Darcy, as many fans
want to believe? Was she an ironic observer of life, a comedian with a well-regulated hatred, writing for those she secretly despised? Was she really “everybody’s dear Jane,” malleable to everybody’s purpose,
as Henry James complained? It’s enough to throw one into a succession
of fainting fits, though perhaps we should heed the wise words of a
young Jane: “Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint.” Of the mysterious Jane Austen herself, apart from her handful of
delicately worded novels and other surviving scribblings, we know
relatively little. All that is left is language. ... [mehr] https://daily.jstor.org/jane-austens-subtly-subversive-linguistics/
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