the Wednesday reading post, now actually on Wednesday

[kindkit]

Currently reading: In a sudden leap of genre and period, I'm now re-reading Jane Austen. I'm currently most of the way through Emma, which I used to love. I'm finding myself impatient this time around both with the length--about 50 pages of Miss Bates's and Mrs. Elton's dialogue longer than it needs to be--and with Emma herself. She's such a snob! And the narrative completely affirms her snobbery and only criticizes her for not being snobbish enough in certain instances. In her very strong sense of her own high position, she reminds me of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.


Just finished: Pride and Prejudice, hence my comparison of Emma to Lady Catherine. My favorite Austen, in part because Elizabeth is rewarded for her wit and intelligence. Unlike Emma, she's not shown to be in need of a man's moral tutelage, and unlike Eleanor in Sense and Sensibility, she's not an exemplar of more traditionally female virtues like patience and self-sacrifice.


What I'm reading next: Sense and Sensibility, probably. Maybe Northanger Abbey after that, although I'm not hugely keen on it. The one time I read Mansfield Park I loathed it, so that'll probably be the end of my Austen re-read.

I don't know the literature of Austen'a era very well--does anyone have recommendations for roughly contemporary (to Austen) novels? I'm especially interested in those that, like Austen's, show the culture of the time. And is there such a thing as a Jane Austen of men's lives? That is, a writer who explores men's social and domestic world, focusing on private concerns and emotions rather than on fantastic adventures? I should note that I'm only interested in literature from the period, not later reimaginings such as Wuthering Heights, and certainly not modern historical novels. (No offense to historical novels, they're just not what I want to read right now.)

Comments

[batdina]

Haven't ever read Mansfield Park or Northanger Abbey. I have this habit of picking up Austen novels in airports for cross country flights and those two haven't materialised yet. My favorite reread is Persuasion.

Of course right now, when I read things unaffiliated with school (and then feel guilty for it), they tend to be Dickens. Nicholas Nickleby and Bleak House are warring for my attention right now. I'm wondering if the big bleak book mightn't fit your needs? Not an exact fit, but perhaps ...

Trollope might also. It's been a while since I read the Barchester books but the early ones in particular were pretty domestic if memory serves.

[kindkit]

I've read a lot of Dickens, but I like him more for his social breadth than for his characterization, which I tend to find rather stereotyped. My feeling is that Dickens is best when he's angry or fanciful (like the wonderful opening paragraph of Bleak House) and at his worst when he's trying to write domesticity.

[batdina]

I can see that. And I see below someone else suggested Scott, who I never remember, but have read much of also and I agree that he's better than his reputation. I cannot, however, remember which of his books to suggest for your purposes.

All of which is to say that when I'm done with rabbi school there are a lot of novels out there I want to [re]read.

[likeadeuce]

Let me know if you get any good recs for Georgian/Regency writers... Troloppe is maybe the closest to 'male Austen' but he's much later.

I know Fanny Burney is supposed to be the closest forerunner to Austen (I haven't read her, though I have Evelina on my Kindle. . .), and Mrs. Gaskell came after her (though I've only read North & South and thought it suffered by comparison, some of her other novels are more domestic, I think. But I'm not sure who Austen's more precise contemporaries would have been, and how much of their work has survived (though free ebooks for public domain books may make tracking them down easier than it used to be. . .)

[likeadeuce]

And a comment here reminded me of Maria Edgeworth as an Austen contemporary, and I went and found this Amazon review of Belinda, which makes it sound AMAZING (if ultimately frustrating in some ways):

'Besides this being as readable as Jane Austen, this book is witty and intelligent. It raises thought provoking questions about gender roles and transgression that suggest that Edgeworth was not an ordinary woman. Unfortunately, like many other 18th C. novels, the book ends with all the usual conventions intact. The women who cross dress (and the man who cross-dresses!) are returned to their spheres and/or married. Don't get me wrong though, this book is quite innovative. I don't know of many literary women having duels and stepping in iron traps that cut up their legs. Also particularly interesting is Edgeworth's treatment of colonialism: there is a cross-racial marriage that is entirely sanctioned. And yet the thought of the heroine marrying a creole is not approved. It is much better for her to marry an Englishman in the parliament. This is a delightful book that would entertain romantics and scholars. I would like to think that I am both, though.'

[kindkit]

Okay, that sounds entirely awesome. Must check Project Gutenberg.

[likeadeuce]

I don't know of many literary women having duels and stepping in iron traps that cut up their legs.

How could that NOT pique someone's curiosity!?

[(Anonymous)]

If you like Jane Austen I'd recommend Edith Wharton - she wrote a century later and American, but possibly the closest in terms of detailed social life and domestic politics. My preference would be for the House of Mirth and the Custom of the Country - some complex and flawed female protagonists.

Another author you might enjoy is Collette - her semi-autobiographic Claudine novels are great, starting with a young girl pushing gender and social constraints in a late nineteenth century french school system, lots of girl crushes, ends up in Paris with an older male lover. A rollicking good read!

[kindkit]

I've read a little Wharton, but at the moment I'm really looking for books from (roughly) Jane Austen's era.

[oursin]

Thackeray might fit the bill for men's social and domestic world of the period - not so much Vanity Fair, possibly Pendennis.

I have heard good things about Maria Edgeworth, though it is a long time since I actually read anything by her and it has faded.

I could, if necessary, make a case for George Eliot being extremely good on men in their social world and their domestic concerns.

As you may have noticed, I love Charlotte Yonge's contemporary-setting novels set somewhat later in the C19th than Austen, but possibly not everybody's cuppa? (Much more religion than in Austen, but she does do very good characterisation.)

[legionseagle]

I re-read Maria Edgeworth's Patronage quite recently. It's got both the men in the domestic sphere and the interesting domestic women characters, but it's one of those frustrating novels where you've got the wit and the liveliness ("To hear you talk, one would think you had an argosy of lovers at sea, uninsured" a brother says unsympathetically to his sister, who's doing a bit of a Marianne) but then it gets a bit bogged down with the schematic plot and the didactism. The other Edgeworths Belinda and Helen are a bit less worthy, I think (and then there's her Irish novels The Absentee and Castle Rackrent; I quite like The Absentee apart from the hero's determination to not ask the sensible questions which would solve everything until things are almost disaster central.)

There's Susan Ferrier ("the Scottish Jane Austen") whom I enjoyed a great deal at one point, and Emily Eden (The Semi-Attached Couple is about 15 years after Austen; The Semi-Detached House is a good bit later). Someone once described The Semi-Attached Couple as P&P, but focussing on the Pemberley family and that's probably fairly accurate: it's based around a whoppingly wealthy man who marries a very young, very beautiful woman on a very slight acquaintance, with both their family and society's massive approval and about how that works out afterwards. It's quite political (Eden was acting Vicereine of India for her brother the Viceroy at one point) in a sort of proto-Trollopian way, but focussing on the electioneering efforts of the women attached to both candidates and stuffed full of social comedy.

There's Mary Brunton's Self-Control (Austen I think thought the Canadian canoe scene in this hysterically funny)

[kindkit]

Ooh, thanks for all the suggestions! They all sound very interesting.

[kindkit]

Thanks!

I've read Eliot and I've read Vanity Fair, but maybe I'll give Pendennis a try. It is a bit late, though. My (very inexpert) sense is that 1815 is a lot more like 1780 than it is like 1850. Still, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I want to read some Regency or at least early 19th century novels about male characters that are written by men, rather than by women. The sexes were so much more segregated then that I think women may have had a poor idea of men's emotional lives, and vice versa.

likeadeuce discusses Edgeworth's Belinda in a comment above--there are cross-dressed women fighting duels and it sounds altogether delightful.

Yonge is probably not my cuppa, though. I don't even like Austen when she gets religious, hence Mansfield Park being a novel I don't want to re-read.

[oursin]

I forgot R S Surtees, who might fit the bill. Also, tell you someone else who might, Bulwer-Lytton - made his name with contemporary novels before doing historicals and sf. Disraeli? - for an acute outsidery perspective perhaps.

[lilliburlero]

Is Sterne too early for you? A lot of the proto-post-modernist hu-ha around Tristram Shandy's reputation contrives to obscure the fact that it's a novel about men in domestic life, the relationship between two brothers, and between one of those brothers and his manservant. The Sterne novels that focus on Yorick might be a bit less your thing as heterosexual romance is central (though Yorick himself often forgets he's supposed to be swooningly enthralled by Eliza), and in A Sentimental Journey he's frankly a bit of a pest to the female population in general, but there's still a lot of introspection, and more gravitas than you might think.

I think there's quite a bit of Scott that you might enjoy, despite his reputation being as a teller of adventure tales. Redgauntlet is really quite domestic: and I think you would enjoy the friendship between Alan Fairford and Darsie Latimer.

[kindkit]

Sterne is early, but for my purposes early may be better than late. My non-expert sense is that the Regency is much more of a continuity with what went before (long eighteenth century and all that), with Victorianism as a pretty decided cultural shift. I once read about a hundred pages of Tristram Shandy and then gave up, but it sounds like it's worth another try. So thanks for that suggestion, and the Scott too. By the way, do you think Tristram Shandy would benefit from being read in an annotated edition? I can always get a non-annotated one from Project Gutenberg, but sometimes it's helpful to have notes.

[lilliburlero]

I think you have to read more than 100 pages to get to the good stuff irrc. I had several false starts too, but then something clicked (I think that it was that I didn't have to play along with the parlour games, or find them hilarious). I read it in an annotated edition (Oxford World's Classics) and I did find the notes occasionally helpful, but I don't know if they're absolutely necessary; I found myself consulting less as I went on, and enjoying it more.