Category: Blog

Jane Austen’s Most Widely Mocked Character is Also Her Most Subversive

Of all the delightful idiots filling the pages of our well-worn copies of Pride and Prejudice (hint: this is everyone except maybe Charlotte), one of the best is also one of the most overlooked—even by Jane Austen, who never grants her a first name. Mrs. Bennet, mother to the five Bennet sisters and incorrigible social gadfly, is largely dismissed by both the book’s readers and its facetious narrator, but she is perhaps the most radical character in the novel.

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Book Review – Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd

I love William Boyd’s novels, in particular, An Ice Cream WarBrazzaville Beach, and A Good Man In Africa. With Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms, however, Boyd ventured – successfully, I might add – into the realm of the spy thriller. Spy thrillers have never been my cup of tea, so I was hoping Boyd would return to the well written literary novels of Brazzaville Beach and A Good Man In Africa. His latest effort, however, Waiting for Sunrise, continues covering the same type of genre territory he covered in his two previous books.

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The Hidden Horror Inside Jane Austen’s Novels of Love

There’s an urban legend that stalks English Departments about Charlotte Brönte denouncing Jane Austen. “Jane Austen paints a very fine garden,” she is reported to have said. “Step out the gate and we’ll show you the world.”

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Book Review – Absolution by Patrick Flanery

Most of us have strong views about South Africa. Most of us know what South Africa under apartheid was like, if not firsthand, then from news reports, magazines, books, or other people. In Patrick Flanery’s wonderful debut novel, Absolution, set in the years before and after South Africa’s first free election in 1994, one character who knows the “ins and outs” of apartheid is celebrated novelist, Clare Wald.

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Book Review – Wanting by Richard Flanagan

Wanting, the fifth novel by Tasmanian author, Richard Flanagan, opens in 1839 as a former London builder, George Augustus Robinson, aka, the “Great Conciliator,” aka, the “Protector,” has been sent to clean up the killing fields of Tasmania (Van Dieman’s Land) by resettling the remaining natives in camps, first at Wybalenna on remote Flinders Island, and then at Oyster Cove, in the south of mainland Tasmania. As he travels, Robinson notes: “There is not a boat harbour along the whole line of coast but what numbers of the unfortunate natives have been shot; their bones are to be seen strewed on the ground.”

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Actually, Emma is the Best Jane Austen Novel

Jane Austen’s Emma, which came out 200 years ago today, may not be as popular with audiences as Pride and Prejudice, but it’s become the novel that critics consider her masterpiece. Its hero Mr. Knightley hasn’t spawned any swoony Colin Firth-Mr. Darcy screen-equivalents, and its heroine, a pioneering “rich bitch,” may prove hard to stomach, especially when she’s compared to the incomparable Elizabeth Bennet.

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Book Review – The Classics – Emma by Jane Austen

One could hardly have lived in a more constricted and insular world than Jane Austen and yet she managed to bring her world to life with wit, vividness, and insight that are rarely found in the works of today’s modern authors.

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Is it possible to make money on betting?

Sports betting is becoming more and more popular every day. This often raises the question of whether there is a real opportunity to make money, or if all this is just entertainment for sports fans. In this article we will talk about what sports betting is, and also consider them in terms of earnings. Nowadays, there are a large number of opportunities that the World Wide Web offers us, but do not think that easy money exists. You can make money on almost everything, but you should always be prepared for the fact that you will need to spend some time on training, as well as make some efforts. Sports betting is not a simple form of earnings, but they can also be turned into a source of income.
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REVIEW: THE JANE AUSTEN PROJECT BY KATHLEEN A. FLYNN

This year we commemorate Jane Austen’s death. We certainly do not celebrate it. We feel a sense of unfairness about it, not only for our selfish sake–for being cheated out of, based on the lifespan of her parents and most of her siblings, thirty or forty years’ worth of Jane Austen novels–but naturally for Jane’s own sake. She died just before she would have reached real success–the success enjoyed by her contemporaries such as Burney, Radcliffe, and Edgeworth, all of whom she has utterly eclipsed in the intervening centuries. It is just horribly unfair. Jane gave the world such joy and never really had the opportunity to enjoy real fruits from her labor (by which we mean money. From what we can tell, Austen was never big on the whole adulation thing).

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