Jane Austen For Dummies Read Online Free PDF Page B

the story as much as possible through dialogue, instead of just telling the events. Austen does the same thing. So why should I warn you that I’m putting Twain and Austen in the same paragraph? Twain was notorious for making disparaging remarks about Jane Austen. For example, he said, “Every time I read
Pride and Prejudice,
I want to dig her up and hit her over the head with her own shin bone.”
Every time
he reads
Pride and Prejudice
? What’s wrong with this picture? How many times has he read the book, and if he hates it so much, why does he keep reading it? I would guess that, actually, Twain liked Austen. He made those nasty Austen jokes to annoy his great friend, the novelist William Dean Howells, who praised Austen’s writing skills frequently and enthusiastically.
    Having an ear for a character’s voice
    Showing the character in action, instead of telling the reader about the character, makes that character vivid. Austen lets her characters speak for themselves. For example, look at
Pride and Prejudice.
In the drawing room at Rosings, Elizabeth Bennet and Colonel Fitzwilliam are talking as they’re seated at the pianoforte across the room from Lady Catherine. Lady Catherine abruptly interrupts them and calls out:
    What is it you are saying, Fitzwilliam? What is it you are talking of? What are you telling Miss Bennet? Let me hear what it is. [Fitzwilliam replies] We are talking of music, Madam. [Lady Catherine exclaims] Of music! Then pray, speak aloud. It is of all subjects my delight. I must have my share in the conversation, if you are speaking of music. There are few people in England, I suppose, who have a more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient. (PP 2:8)
    Even if you’ve never opened
Pride and Prejudice,
you know what Lady Catherine is like from this brief excerpt of her speech: rude, arrogant, selfish, controlling, egocentric. You know all that without Austen saying “Lady Catherine is rude, arrogant, selfish, controlling, and egocentric.” Austen shows Lady Catherine’s personality through the action of the character.
    Having an eye for details
    Austen’s observational skills and her eye for details give the readers characters who are as multifaceted as any of you are today. Here are a few examples:
    Within a page or two of
Emma,
the heroine can be helpful, conniving, and snide.
    In writing the jealous and ignorant Lucy Steele in
Sense and Sensibility,
Austen slips grammatical errors into her speech — not a lot, just enough to remind the reader that Lucy is no lady.
    Austen mentions Lucy’s eyes several times, in order to suggest to the reader how closely and uncomfortably Lucy is scrutinizing Elinor.

    Going onstage with Austen
    Austen is everywhere — even off-Broadway. Chapter 15 provides details about the many screen and stage adaptations of Austen’s novels, but at the time of this writing, a musical, “I Love You Because,” very loosely based on
Pride and Prejudice,
is playing off-Broadway. The hero’s name is Austin Bennet; his new girlfriend is Marcy Fitzwilliams (in the novel, the hero’s full name is Fitzwilliam Darcy), and the girlfriend’s best friend is Diana Bingley. The point of the show is advertised as “how to love someone because of his or her differences.”
    Tracing Austen’s Popularity
    Austen is now so popular that even non-novel readers recognize the name from seeing it in various, unexpected places like tea mugs and dating guides. Her immediate Regency siblings and her future Victorian collateral descendants would faint at seeing their sister and aunt depicted like this. For they presented her as a near saint. But Austen has also stepped off the pedestal into the trenches of World War I and classrooms ranging from high school to post-doctoral school seminars.
    Starting the Saint Jane myth
    When Henry