Sequels

Browsing in a used book shop, I came across Jane Austen's Charlotte! A second glance confirmed the misreading, it's by Julia Brown, not Jane Austen. It is Brown's inventive completion of Sandition, the last fragment of Austen's imagination.
There seems to be a plethora of sequels: Presumption: An Entertainment, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice and The Third Sister, a continuation of Sense and Sensibility. After all with the liberties taken in film adaptations, why not sequels? Or is a novel in a different category, more pristine from commercial exploitation. What is your opinion?
I'll report my impressions later. For the moment Harold Blooms thoughts in the essay Canonical Memory, on Persuasion, are more interesting.
A professional review: http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/0...03kincait.html, for those interested.

Compare the following sentences: “He had grumbled and shaken his shoulders so much indeed, and pitied and cut his horse so sharply, that he might have been open to the suspicion of overturning them on purpose (especially as the carriage was not his master's own) if the road had not indisputably become considerably worse than before, as soon as the premises of the said house were left behind – expressing with a most intelligent portentous countenance that beyond it no wheels but cart wheels could safely proceed.” - chapter 1 of Charlotte by Julia Barrett.

“Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve and caprice, that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character.” - Pride and Prejudice. The prose has a lightness, a musical quality. Reuben A. Broer in the essay Light and Bright and Sparkling, Irony and Fiction in Pride and Prjudice, says “Many pages of Pride and Prejudice can be read as sheer poetry of wit, as Pope without couplets.” Last, in Persuasion, “Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, In Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt.”. Here the playfulness in structure has been subdued but the irony remains and how incisive a characterization.

Julia Barrett lays claim to finishing Austen's Sandition. Were it so! The claim is false, as is the author's name; Barrett is the pseudonym of writers Julia Braun Kessler and Gabrielle Donnelly and the style bears the imprint of 'design by committee'. “Arch and cumbersomely worded pseudo-aphorisms take the place of Austen's witty comments”, was the review in Publishers Weekly of Pemberley: A Sequel to Pride and Prejudice by Julia Barrett. And 'arch and cumbersome' is also an accurate description of Charlotte.

When in an English class, a well meaning teacher requires teens to read Austen, the reaction is 'boring', 'there's no action' and when a discussion is attempted the usual is 'whatever'. Which indicates, if not proves that Austen is for adults. Those who's life experience and intelligence allows the appreciation of irony and reading habits, the appreciation of style. Which brings us back to the question of sequels. Do they have any redeeming social value?

Perhaps if the teacher required the students to read Charlotte as a prequel, perhaps they could then appreciate Pride and Prejudice.

An interesting posting; has anybody read the book?
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March 25, 2006
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Filed under: Jane Austen Comparisons, Jane Eyre, Criticism, Books, Uncategorized — by bronteana @ 10:38 am

Dear Jane… Austen

I came across this little Brontë reference this morning. It caught my attention, not because it is yet another comparison between the Brontes and Jane Austen, but because it seems like a peculiar way to make the distinction between the two.

Patrice Hannon, English literature professor, is 'jumpstarting' her career as a novelist by writing a self-help manual on love written with the voice of Jane Austen. The book is called 'Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine's Guide to Life and Love.' The idea for the book came from her students who were commenting on how realistically Austen depicts relationships. This is where the Bronte reference comes in:

As opposed to unrealistic romantic notions often found in novels like “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre,” Austen championed cynicism and lifelike dialogue, according to Hannon.


....

A plethora of Austen! Have you seen The Jane Austen Book Club? If so please comment.
In the film The Jean Austen Book Club, there is a scene where one of the women in the film is undecided whether to have an affair and the internal monologue is expressed by a stop sign flashing – What would Jane do. The visual is worthy of Austen's ironic wit. It is not a bad film even if it has little to do with Austen's style. In a society where the audience watching Oprah are convinced that it's possible to have a deeply “personal” and “honest” conversation with millions of Americans at once, it should not be a surprise that Austen's concept of love, can be translated into contemporary San Franciscan women, most past the age when Austen thought marriageable, trying for the brass ring in the carousel of love.
At the end of the Regency era, those who read, had a homogeneous set of values, so that Austen could make the statement that love could be defined only within the cohesiveness of social mores. The consequences of radical breaking, was the affair and patched up marriage of Lidia or the conservative views of Lady Catherine, of Elizabeth polluting the hallowed grounds of Pemberly. Austen does not define love but rather circumscribes it in the novels of Sense and Sensibility, of Pride and Prejudice, of Emma and Persuasion. She choses not to describe the sexual passion in courtship, stops at the altar, and does not describe the connubial bed, where very probably character surprises lurked.
The protagonists of The Austen Book Club have a much more chaotic moral order. Individualism, not introspection is the rule of conduct and marriage has a money back policy. If propriety is not transferred from Austen's day, marrying for money certainly is but that leaves open the question whether love can be translated from Austen into contemporary culture.
The Austen Book Club ends in marriage as does Austen's plots but the way love is defined is very different. The manifestation of love seems to be equated with sex. It is not badly done however it illustrates why Austen chose not to describe the subject.
It is my opinion that the most serious shortcoming of Austen is that she did not incorporate the name Jane Austen. Not only would her relatives been rich but a certain literary standard could have been insisted on. Perhaps we could have been spared all the book sequels. The film adaptations are a different mater, as the visual has a different stylistic requirement.

There was one Jane Austen-imitation book I saw recently at a bookstore. It was a choose-your-own-adventure book involving main characters from Austen's best novels. My mom, who is such an Austen geek that her master's thesis was written on Austen, grimaced when I told her.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by lilbrattyteen

There was one Jane Austen-imitation book I saw recently at a bookstore. It was a choose-your-own-adventure book involving main characters from Austen's best novels.

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Would you go for a virtual Pemberly where you could be Elizabeth and choose how you would react to being romanced by Darcy? Or does virtual pale in comparison to interacting with your friends?

I have trouble understanding why someone would write wishing to compare herself with another author, and especially Austen since it would inevitably demonstrate her short comings in style, sensitivity to words and subtlety of theme.
It is often overlooked that Austen wrote for adults. Her 'observation of a few local families', implies a meticulous adherence to social reality and the development of a character not via adventure but growth in self awareness. She assumed that the readers had the sophistication of experience to follow the indirect allusions, the connotation of words and metaphors in phrases. That is what I meant by adult readers.
Austen does not engage in fantasy. Her art is not of 'make believe' but of reality as comprehended by the common adult mind. There are no magical golden thimbles, no obsession with dead actors, only the irony of vagaries of conduct.
Jane Austen's Thimble has nothing to do with Jane Austen, that is with literature. Neither in theme or in style can it be viewed as a sequel. Marianne Luban just adds another example of the deplorable sequels or prequels, where the author attempts to hitchhike on the reputation of a dead author. It's reader is the female teenager whose prefrontal cortex is experiencing a rapid expansion into the adult mind and is overwhelmed by emotions, unable to make rational decisions much less of comparative aesthetics. It's an Ego characterized by the phrase - whatever.

Apart from aesthetics, your post violates the Forum Rules, specifically rule 4: In general, you may not use your membership privileges here via posting text or images in the forums, signature lines, or private messaging other members for:
e) spamming -- posting commercial messages, overtly promoting personal or commercial websites, and/or promoting/advertising other forums,

and your, “The E-book is also downloadable there. It's much cheaper. Just do a general search on my name at the site and you'll find it.”, is a blatantly commercial solicitation.

I misplaced my pass word and so had to register all over again. If you had read my post carefully, you would have noticed that I said it was "The Jew of Bath" that was a sequel [and it's acknowledged as such all over the web--you can look it up]. No, indeed, "Jane Austen's Thimble" is certainly not a sequel. It is simply a novella about a troubled young woman who loves the works of Jane Austen and has derived comfort from them during the tough times in her life. If it's not of interest to "Janites"--then pray tell whom? That's why I posted it here. FYI, some people seem to think I did a pretty good job of "aping Jane Austen's style"--and why not? I've read all her novels I can't say how many times. But you can easily judge that for yourself. However, Jane Austen was a genius of a writer. I don't claim that distinction for myself, by any means. And I don't see why my original post would prompt anybody to get their knickers all in a twist.

Marianne Luban [who adores Jane Austen]

Oh, yes--and I forgot to add--"Jane Austen's Thimble" is definitely not a story aimed at teenage readers. That's just an absurd conclusion and proves that "Newcomer" hasn't read the work. In reality, there is no "magical thimble", at least not in the Harry Potter sense. The only "magic" involved is whatever there was about Jane Austen that leaves people feeling an unceasing connection to her two centuries later. At the risk of wringing more knickers, here is a quote from the novella.

Andrea: "Which do we love then--the art or the artist?"

Mr. Mannering: "They are inseparable, surely, the one extending himself into time by means of the other."

This little book is about love. So were the novels of Jane Austen, essentially.