![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Anyone who has seriously read Austen knows that’s bunk, and that she was a very smart woman who wrote with care to her craft, and who packed a wallop of a biting undertone if you were really paying attention. It’s one of the reasons people who haven’t read Austen seriously (close-reading with thought and care) often think she was just a woman who wrote small stories set in houses about romances, and write her off in much the same way male literary authors write off “chick-lit” today (I’m not even going to start on the name of that genre, it makes my blood boil). ![]() Misinterpretation, or reading our modern sensibilities and modern knowledge onto Jane, is very common. That word has a negative association now that isn’t really meant here.) But what we really get is a pretty thorough breakdown of the most relevant social and historical context that Jane’s contemporary readers would have understood implicitly, but we either miss entirely or misinterpret. ( Radical, by the way, has a bit of a different usage here, in that it mostly means someone who is open to new ideas, and to rejecting the old if that is the right thing to do. I was just sort of expecting a fun book where the author points out passages in Austen’s work that adds credibility to the idea that Jane Austen was a radical thinker for her time. ![]()
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