Novel Eye

The Keira Knightly version. While I was sick and lounging on the couch I watched Pride and Prejudice. I had avoided it assiduously because a) who needs another P&P and b)I had just caught Vanity Fair with Reece before going away. The VF had annoyed me quite a lot. I don't think that Becky Sharp should be excused as merely an intelligent woman in a time when being an intelligent woman was not a desired trait. Nor do I think that all her problems could have been solved by just going to India as director Mira Nair seems to suggest. I will agree that the lowest of Englishmen (or women) could go to India and be lords and ladies by virtue of being white, but that was not the gist of the film. At any rate, I decided it would pass the time to watch P&P and I'm glad I did. It captured for me the romance of the first time I read the novel. And I will say that a large portion of this was because of Miss Knightly herself. How old is Lizzie? IMDB says that she's 27 but I can...

Interestingly, in light of what I wrote below about the realities inside famous novels (and plays) I came across an essay by Doris Lessing about Jane Austen. In it she questioned whether there really could have been the happy ending: "And now here comes my personal caveat, but I am not the only one to think Darcy would not marry Elizabeth. Aristocrats do not marry poor middle-class girls much encumbered with disagreeable relatives. Yes, you believe it for the space and time of the tale, and that is all that is needed...Very beautiful girls, from nowhere, marrying lords in their castles? It all appeals to our nursery memories." It's a fascinating little essay in a book of her random essays on a huge variety of topics. I picked it up as a bargain book from B&N. Rather like reading a blog. One thing that she pinpoints is the absurd way Austen is sometimes taught--by people who don't know the time period to people who cannot imagine it. I remember at one poin...