WELP, I can exclusively report that this is a whole bunch of nonsense. Jane Austen wrote 90% of an excellent book and then 10% absolute shenanigans. Fifteen years have passed since I first read Mansfield Park, and the update is that my opinion of it is unchanged. It rules! It’s great! The Crawfords are very fucking fun, and Henry Crawford’s heel turn feels completely frustrating and unearned, and the only shift in my opinion is that I feel even sorrier for Fanny than I remember feeling, and I hate Edmund even more than I remember hating Edmund. But let’s put…
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Welp, the time has come. Henry Crawford has showed back up, and he is fucking around, and he is finding out. The time has come for Henry Crawford to be an all-the-way fuckboy, and if my memory is correct, he is going to then substantially reform because he legit falls for Fanny, and then Jane Austen’s going to be like “Henry Crawford seems nice AND fun? Can’t have that!” and narratively ruin him. But let’s see how matters unfold. Not to keep beating a dead horse, but Mansfield Book continues to rule. I am having the best time reading it,…
Leave a CommentRemember last week, when I dedicated several hours of my time to the important research question “Was Jane Austen making an anal sex joke?” That same energy has not carried forward into week two. I do not understand what’s so morally insupportable about putting on a little play with some neighborhood friends, even a slightly saucy play, and Fanny and Edmund are so annoying about it that I can’t be bothered researching it to find out. Fanny does not think the Bertrams and the Crawfords should put on a play; Edmund does not think the Bertrams and the Crawfords should…
1 CommentLook, I did not expect to kick off Mansfield in May by performing a full-scale investigation into whether Jane Austen was or wasn’t making an anal sex joke in Mansfield Park. I am as surprised as you by this turn of events. As with so many things in the last year and a half, I am but a leaf blown wildly about by the winds of chance and circumstance. Here I was, innocent as a lamb, reading Mansfield Park in the car, wondering only about the extent to which Mary Crawford was wronged, looking not for anal sex jokes but…
1 CommentI have been threatening it for years, and now I’m going to do it! Long, long ago, when I was a college whippersnapper, I read Mansfield Park for a class and thought it was REALLY QUITE GOOD. Then some time passed, and everyone talked shit about Mansfield Park because Fanny’s a pain and Edmund’s a drip, and my vague memories calcified into the following: Mansfield Park is unfairly maligned (by the world); and The Crawfords are unfairly maligned (by Jane Austen) Well, 2021 is the year we’re going to find out the truth! Is Fanny as much of a pain as…
Leave a CommentWhen I got to the end of Chapter 19, I said “Ohhhhhh shit” because my friends? The idyll (??) portion of Elinor Glyn’s masterpiece, Three Weeks, has finally ended. The drama has begun. Because after yet another (argh) night of floral scents and uncontained passion, the Lady blows this popsicle stand. Paul is so distraught about her sudden departure that he falls into a desperate illness–brain fever! This sounds like a very real thing that real humans suffer from, and not a nonsense invented by Elinor Glyn as a convenient plot device for her extremely silly novel. Have any of…
Leave a CommentOkay, I got distracted and forgot to write about the first six chapters of Elinor Glyn’s 1907 trashy book Three Weeks, but luckily Alice, the host of the readalong, had it covered. I’m going to catch us up REAL QUICK on all the action of the first six chapters and then get into the second six. The book opens with this introduction for American readers: And to all who read, I say—at least be just! and do not skip. No line is written without its having a bearing upon the next, and in its small scope helping to make the…
Leave a CommentHere’s a line from the first paragraph of this section of the #TraLaFrankenstein readalong, so that y’all can understand how I felt when I opened this book back up. I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labours for the night, or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it. See, this is how you know that I’m at the end of my rope with Dude Nonsense. I blame Jason Bateman and Jeffrey Tambor, but a lot of different people are at fault. It’s…
Leave a CommentWell, the good news is that, in the third section of our #TraLaFrankenstein readalong, the creature doesn’t turn to evil as a result of being in love with Agatha and her spurning him. The bad news is, he basically turns to evil because Agatha (and Safie and Boy De Lacey whose name I can’t be bothered to remember) spurn him. GREAT. The creature continues telling his tale of woe to Frankenstein, a very unsympathetic audience. It’s all about how he reads Paradise Lost and Plutarch’s Lives and The Sorrows of Young Werther and learns — doesn’t seem like much of…
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