Austen Mania

I finally got to read the Jane Austen Book Club that Amanda talked about. It was great! I know Amanda already shared but now I am in a total Austen craze so I thought I would share the parts where she talks about everyone's perception of Austen:

"Jocelyn's Austen wrote wonderful novels about love and courtship, but never married."

"Bernadette's Austen was a comic genius. Her characters, her dialogue remained genuinely funny, not like Shakespeare's jokes, which amused you only because they were Shakespeare's and you owed him that."

"Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section."

"Prudie's was the Austen whose books changed every time you read them, so that one year they were all romances and the next you suddenly noticed Austen's cool, ironic prose. Prudie's was the Austen who died, possibly of Hodgkin's disease, when she was only forty-one years old."

"Sylvia's Austen was a daughter, a sister, an aunt. Sylvia's Austen wrote her books in a busy sitting room, read them aloud to her family, yet remained an acute and nonpartisan observer of people. Sylvia's Austen could love and be loved, but it didn't cloud her vision, blunt her judgments."

So I've been trying to figure out who my Austen is, but really she is all of those things. Isn't there a famous quote about every woman thinking she personally knows Austen better than everyone else? I looked for it but can't find it.