Surprisingly funny for Austen! I first read this one for a Gothic Novels class - fantastic class by the way - and really liked it. It's not my favorite of hers, but definitely worth reading. I enjoyed the way she defended her craft against critics of the novel genre. ( )

Edited by Claire Grogan

I really enjoyed this book. The tone and narrative are different from Austen's other novels, which makes for a refreshingly insightful and enjoyable read. ( )

Can you stand such a ceremony as this?

Her nonsense suits our nonsense.

ENCHANTING BORES

Miss Thackeray said of Jane Austen that her very bores are enchanting. She was no doubt thinking of Miss Bates, who would have been terrible to live with in Highbury but is a joy to live with in EMMA, the very best bore, I suppose, in all fiction. But Jane's bores are all good, Mr. Woodhouse, Lady Bertram, Mr. Collin's, and the excellent Mrs. Allen, who, "while she sat at her work, if she lost her needle or broke her thread, if she heard a carriage in the street or saw a speck on her gown, must observe it aloud, whether there were anyoe at leisure to answer her or not. " There are people who are not amused by these bores. They say, in excuse, that bores may be made so life-like in fiction as to become as tiresome as they would be in fact. But the excuse wont hold, for it is nothing but the old anti-aesthetic confusion between the representation and the thing represented. If it held, then the picture of an ugly man would be itself ugly, and no tragedy, no representation of suffering, could give pleasure to the spectator. (Rousseau fell into this confusion when he said that we went to a tragedy for the pleasure of seeing others suffer, without suffering ourselves.) But Boileau's couplet states the truth familiar to us all:
Il n'est pas de serpent ni de monstre odieux
Qui par l'art imite ne puisse plaire aux yeux.
And bores "imitated by art," do not bore but amuse. The fact is, people who are bored by J.A's bores are probably bored by Jane herself. We are not all born with a sense of humor and some of us are born bored. Others have boredom thrust upon them.
That is why it has been said that we are all bores to somebody. The enthusiast is a bore to the indifferent, the statistician to the poet, and the metaphysician to the political partisan. Many worthy people are bored by articles about the theatre, and some of us are even bored by gossip about golf. But these are cases of boredom by accident, by the fact that the speaker happens to be addressing the wrong listener. The golfer whose gossip bores me will not bore a fellow-golfer. The genuine bore is the person of one subject, on which he adresses eerybody, including, of course, a majority of wrong listeners. Or he is a bore by mental character - loquacious or pompous or peevish or simply silly about every subject. He is a bore, that is to say, not to some one but to everyone.
How is it that these types, so deadly in fact, may be made so amusing in fiction? There is first, of course, the old artistic secret of selection. The novelist or the playwright chooses just as much of the bore as suits his purpose, exaggerates him here and deletes him there - in short, gives him what he lacks in real life, form. Then he must look at him with a kindly eye. He must suffer bores gladly in life, or he will never get us to be glad of them in representation. They must appeal to his sense of humor and to his good humor. He must imaginatively sypathize with them, as indeed he must with all his personages, villains as well as heroes. This gift of imaginative sympathy is precisely what is lacking in people who are bored by Jane Austen's bores or by anything.
Macaulay compared Jane to Shakespeare for her avoidance of caricature. He might have compared them in their genial treatment of bores. Shakespeare's bores are notoriously among his best things. He is the colossal bore, the bore outstanding even among the usual boredom of the Court. But Shakespeare enobles him by putting something of himself into him, for instance, those maxims of worldly wisdom to utter to Laertes - and that seems hardly fair. But take his minor bores, so obviously studied from the life and presented with absolute realism - Dogberry and Verges, Shallow and Slender and Silence. You can hear him quietly chuckling as he chats and drinks with the real prototypes. And you know, too, that he enjoyed their company, cheerfully taking what in them would have been tiresome to other men as part of the human comedy, excellent stuff to "do."
They are bores who, like Miss Bates and lady Bertram, can never bore the judicious. On the other hand, one need not, I think, forgo all claim to jugeotte if one admits that by lapse of time and change of taste, one or two of Shakespeare's people who presumably were not bores for him have become merely tiresome for most of us. I submit that the ghost of hamlet's father has become merely tiresome to most of us, that he does not impress us either as he does Hamlet or as he did Shakespeare. We were intended to shiver, but we are more inclined to smile and then to yawn. Some of the Shakespearian fools have lost their fun. Lancelot Gobbo, for instance, bores me - and I imagine many other playgoers - stiff. Then in Shakespeare, as in lesser men, there are people who have to be borne with because they are necessary to the plot, and for no other reason. Antonio is such a one, and I confess to being bored by Antonio. And if anyone wants an additional bit of internal evidence that THE TEMPEST is "vey late" Shakespeare I suggest may find it in Prospero, who strikes me as the product of a slightly tired Shakespeare. As we all know, Shakespeare made Prospero the mouthpiece of some of the most gorgeous poetry he ever wrote, but between these poetic outbursts there are unmistakable longueurs. Prospero fears that at times he must be boring Miranda, and therein, I think, reveals Shakespeare's own fear that he must be boring his public. At the last revival of the play, Mr. Henry Ainley spoke and played Prospero beautifully - I cannot imagine a better performance - but I was glad when it was over. Not even this accomplished actor could hide from us the fact that Prospero is sometimes a bore. And, heretical though it may be, I will venture the opinion that there is apt to be boredom in the acted Falstaff. But Falstaff is one of our greatest English masterpieces of wit and humor and human character? Yes, to read, to imagine in one's mind's eye, to turn over on one's tongue; but on the stage his eternal paunch gets in the way. His wheezings and puffings , his gurgling potations, and all that "business" that actors think indispensable to a grossly fat man are to me mere ugliness and the occasion of ennui.
The marvel is that, with all these changes wrought in us by three centuries, we are still able to take Shakespeare's point of view about most of his characters and that so few of them have become bores. Jane Austen has only been tried for a third of that time, to be sure, but I cannot think of a single one of her people who has even begun to show the slightest sign of "turning," of causing the reader boredom instead of delight. It looks as though they would "keep" for ever.

From ENCHANTING BORES by Arthur Bingham Walkley, MORE PREJUDICE, 1923. ( )

Thoroughly enjoyed, and one of my favourites. Well written and i could realli identify with the over imaginative heroine. I liked the themes of horror stories and her recurring theme of social hierarchy. The ending was good as always and i liked the male hero as he was mysterious and not as definitive as the heroes in her other books, so it left it more to the imagination. ( )