16 December 2009 2 Comments

Bibliophile: Down with Jane Austin

Normally I reserve my Bibliophile posts for book reviews. However, today’s Forgotten English Desk Calendar had the following as it’s daily entry:

do-withall

I cannot do-withall, I cannot help it. This phrase is not uncommon in early writers.

~ James Halliwell’s
A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century

Birthday of Jane Austin (1775-1817)

English novelist. Despite her current place in the pantheon of Western writers, Austin was sometimes condemned, even by other female writers such as Charlotte Brontë, who wrote, “Anything like warmth or enthusiasm, anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these works. All such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, and would have calmly scorned [them] as ‘outré’ or extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well…She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her…Jane Austin was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman. If this is heresy, I cannot help it.” Mark Twain was even less forgiving: “Any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austin—even if it contains no other book.”

Now, I pride myself on my personal library. And I’ll have you know that if there is one authoress that I despise more than any it’s Jane Austin. I loathe her writing with every fiber of my very being. There isn’t a single sentence in Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility that my thoughts linger on. I did everything I could to get out of reading such “trash” in high school. And now as an adult, they’re classics that I would prefer to never revive.  Sometimes I think the best thing that happened to Jane Austin came in the form of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

I knew that there was some reason why I loved Mark Twain (other than the obvious Tom Sawyer / Huck Finn reasons)… and bless that man for denouncing Jane Austin. I am proud and happy to say that the entire MyNeChimKi Library doesn’t contain a single volume penned by that horrific woman. So I suppose by Mark Twain’s standards, my library is a “good” library. Don’t believe me? Here’s a link to the “As” on my shelves. I guarantee that you won’t find an Austin among them.

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2 Responses to “Bibliophile: Down with Jane Austin”

  1. Sophia 30 January 2010 at 15:48 #

    I whole-heartedly agree, Jane Austin is terrible. Jane Austen, on the other hand, is a great author. I know of no true bibliophile who cannot even spell the woman’s name.

  2. Whitney 30 January 2010 at 16:17 #

    @Sophia Touché!! I suppose that I just loathe her so much that I can’t even have the decency to spell her name right. However, I argue that my status of a bibliophile should be tied to my love/ability to spell Jane AustEn’s name correctly. I simply have different tastes than you as far as literature is concerned!!