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

[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.