Sure! So, Austen is pretty much a vicious socioeconomic satirist; these are not romances, they're exposes. Sometimes superficially romantic, but often not. Nevertheless, because anything related to love & marriage is coded feminine and therefore superficial, and also because we've lost connection with her sociopolitical context, and so cannot perceive the full sharpness of her irony, she's often stereotyped by contemporary culture as a sort of prissy proto-romance-novelist.
I once tore a copy of How to Read Literature Like A Professor physically in half, because it made some snide throwaway joke about how even though Jane Austen doesn't really deal with it violence is a major thing in literature. (it was from my ex-in-laws, so no loss there.) What happens to Georgiana Darcy, to Colonel Brandon's lost love, that's not violence? Or, heck, what happens to Jane Bennett, or to Charlotte Lucas? Austen obsessively comes back to the economic gendered violence of entailment, which essentially left women homeless if their fathers died before they were married, which is pretty much sexual coercion when you get right down to it.
You see it in the development and marketing of Austen culture - frex, the idea that Bridget Jones is somehow a modern version of Austen narratives is borderline insulting. Austen = fanservice for ladies, not hard-hitting sociopolitical satire, in the public consciousness. And that's really quite a shame, because she's such a magnificent bitch.
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I once tore a copy of How to Read Literature Like A Professor physically in half, because it made some snide throwaway joke about how even though Jane Austen doesn't really deal with it violence is a major thing in literature. (it was from my ex-in-laws, so no loss there.) What happens to Georgiana Darcy, to Colonel Brandon's lost love, that's not violence? Or, heck, what happens to Jane Bennett, or to Charlotte Lucas? Austen obsessively comes back to the economic gendered violence of entailment, which essentially left women homeless if their fathers died before they were married, which is pretty much sexual coercion when you get right down to it.
You see it in the development and marketing of Austen culture - frex, the idea that Bridget Jones is somehow a modern version of Austen narratives is borderline insulting. Austen = fanservice for ladies, not hard-hitting sociopolitical satire, in the public consciousness. And that's really quite a shame, because she's such a magnificent bitch.