Skip to main content

Northanger Abbey, the end

This novel was one of Austen's earliest, if not the earliest published. I was reading her early unpublished work, Love and Freindship (sic) and saw some decided similarity between it and Northanger Abbey. Love and Freindship (sic) was written before Austen knew how to spell, and I find it nearly unreadable, even with grammar corrected. Northanger Abbey has emotional conflict arising from love, friendship, gossip, speculation and is overwrought and excruciating with satire and dry interjections from the author. The end had me cringing. How different from Mary Shelley's loving and lovely interpositions in her own works.

I feel discouraged from this work in continuing to read the rest of Austen. Technically now I have read all of her books, but I was going to re-read the big and cinematic three before watching the Masterpiece Theatres.

My focus as a writer of love has shifted considerably. In high school I tested every boundary I knew in my work and as I matured I decided most of those experiments were unsuccessful. I concluded that the most lasting love is found in faithfulness, fidelity, devotion, and I became more interested in chivalry, Camelot, and found my ideals in accord with Victorian romances, where the characters suffer dutifully through bad choices and are rewarded richly. However Austen's cynicism reminds me of the self-destruction possible in adhering to those ideals. There is some suggestion that Austen was disappointed in love and her cynicism was born from that. How can I ignore that kind of pain in my ideal Victorian world? How can I continue to paint the rose-colored pictures of successful and earned love when I have seen the devastation of those who followed the formula and failed to see results? Or, like Austen, do I spend too much time thinking about other people?

After reading any work of verisimilitude (sp?) I am left with the conclusion that life is a muddle, that there are no easy answers, a concept blanketed in what I learned in English class as "human condition."

And so I concede to this, I do the best I can, and the only thing I can positively promote in any of my works is hope, and as I feel that cynicism is the death of hope, I am tired of Jane Austen and will not be continuing the books for a while.

Popular posts from this blog

Where does it lie

I look out onto the yellow and brown vegetation beneath my window, at the castle-like buildings far away and wonder where do I lie in all of this? There was a time when I was unfettered. This was a time before I entered the working world, before I was independent. My heart was free as a bird when I was in college. I did not know what happiness I experienced in my creativity because I had never known different. In other aspects of my life I knew pain but my stories, sprung up lately from a gothic mist into an immersing Pre-Raphaelite painting, were a richness and the most beautiful thing I had ever known. That the most beautiful thing I knew to exist happened inside of me made me very happy, even though I didn't know it. Now I know the sun is setting, even though I can't see it, because the bank of brown, twisted trees and shrubs is lit gold, like a reflection from a golden chalice. Slowly, slowly it will fade until everything is a homogenous, uncertain gray. This is the nightma...
more &

Cassandra stood poised at her vanity mirror. Her long hair, which spilled past her waist, was twisted in one hand, and in the other was a pair of jeweled scissors.

As she lifted the scissors to cut, a larger hand wrapped around hers. Cassandra withdrew with a cry. "Kell! I didn't see you come in." He took the scissors away. "I take it you got the job." "I did," she said crisply. "Return my scissors to me." "Not if you intend to cut off your hair. What do you mean by this nonsense?" "I can't have long hair in the laboratory. It might catch fire or something." "Look there." He guided her to the window. Below them lay the scattered remains of a centuries-old city park. The benches were near invisible due to growth, while the pond had extended far beyond its original boundaries. Ducks floated serenely on its surface. "We played as children. Do you remember how you prized your hair?" Cassandra laughed a little drily. "Of course. I insisted all my powers as princess lay in my hair. I was haughty. unworthy of the friendship of you and your sister." ...
more &

Snow White and the Prince

I dreamed in darkness, cold and alone. Phantasms shifted around me, frightening me, but I was powerless to escape them or even move, as I was sealed in a casket. I thought of the Queen, my Stepmother, and tears dripped from my eyes as I considered the quasi-poignant moments we had once shared, when we might have been considered to be close, when the Queen had nearly been a mother to me, and the face of love had shone radiantly upon me, before eclipsed again by the storms of Venus. I thought of the huntsman, stung to consider that my only friend had been poised to betray me, to kill me, and again in my mind I felt the horror of his shadow, of waiting while he came behind me, knowing there was no escape for me from a death he would inflict. My heart lifted as images of the Prince entered my mind, his grace atop a white-maned horse, always out of my reach, just beyond the words I longed to speak. If only there had been more time for us to fall in love. He might have saved me from those...
more &