Putting the boot in - Miss Austin style

[prendrelemick]

This is just brilliant! The language may be genteel and elegant, but no one puts the boot in quite like Miss Austin.

- a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity, by giving it the strong character of pride and ill-nature. She was not a woman of many words: for unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas.

[Lokasenna]

There's always this presupposition, usually by those who haven't read her, that Austen was this genteel, elegant woman... when actually if you look at her writing and contemporary accounts of her, she was an acid-tongued old biddy who took great delight in pointing out the flaws of others...

This is my personal favourite - Austen's History of England (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/austen/austen.html). It never fails to have me laughing.

[prendrelemick]

Much obliged Lokasenna. I have read snippets of it, but never the whole thing