Jane Austen Makeover
Publisher Wordsworth has decided that Jane Austen is too ugly for its latest book cover, so it's given her a makeover. The original portrait, by her sister Cassandra, shows her looking like the Wicked Witch of the North and helps explain why she wrote romantic tosh. Sorry, English feminists; I know you regard her as our finest novelist, but to me her novels are merely upper-class Mills & Boon. Wordsworth should have left her as the sad and lonely figure she was.
posted by Unknown @ 24.3.07
2 comments
2 Comments:
Not having had the dubious pleasure of reading either type of novel I cannot comment. However, i once met a rampant feminist who criticised these books for ending with the hero and heroin getting married and living happily ever after. Her point was that the starry eyed girlies are not warned that blokes are slobs who smoke drink and fart in bed! Hence divorce!! Mind you the original portrait looks like she has just found out!
I knew there was something about that expression....
I was forced by an English Lit. A level course to read not only Jane Austen, but also Chaucer, George Eliot and the poems of D. H. Lawrence! Gross. The one good thing about that course was reading Shakespeare's Othello. Brilliant! Topical too. It's all about a black hero being conned into killing his beautiful wife by a white psychopath.
As for Mills & Boon, if you haven't read one of its blurbs, you haven't lived. And the cover art! I love those beautiful dazed girls who are supposedly in the throes of passion, but whose expressions indicate that the evening's curry has just exploded under their nose.
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