Janet Todd

Like the primrose or peony, Jane Austen’s novels (or Schubert’s Lieder) have become more beautiful to me now that I take time with them than they were half a lifetime ago. from Living with Jane Austen by Janet Todd

This year marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. When I studied her in 1978 not only had I never read her before, it was before television and movies brought her to attention, before her plots were updated for contemporary romances and satires, before her image show more appeared on a bank note. What a delight to read the thoughts of an academic who has studied Austen and her contemporaries, connecting her own experiences to Austen’s thoughts.

Janet Todd arranges the book by theme, exploring how Austen connects with readers, and how Austen’s advice has impacted Todd over her lifetime. She notes, “what I write are my own thoughts inspired by Jane Austen,” informed by her personal memories and reading life.

I hope that in what follows I can convey a little of the excitement that still overwhelms me as I go on reading Jane Austen. from Living With Jane Austen by Janet Todd

There is a chapter on Darcy as the prototype of the dark romantic hero, another on illness in Austen’s novels and in her personal life. Nature, advice giving, and even death are considered. She plumbs Austen’s candid letters (which shocked E. M. Forster), her satiric juvenilia, and novels for insights.

A wonderful portrait of Austen emerges. We almost believe we understand and know her. It inspires me to reread her novels one more time.

The book includes delightful illustrations, intricate hand cut silhouettes by Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley. show less

The protagonist of this well-written, keenly observed, but occasionally tiresome novel is Ann St. Clair, a woman judged unusual for 1816–she’s independent. Ann earns a very modest living churning out Gothic novels, a supreme irony, given that she’s shy, shrinks from gory sights or bad smells, and swallows a hundred times more feelings than she expresses.

Nevertheless, this shrinking violet enjoys her freedom to go where she will, with whom, and to manage her own affairs, even as she show more realizes the price she pays. With no husband, father, or suitor, Ann has no male protector and is therefore an outlier, something that strikes her most vividly when she visits her kindly cousin Sarah, married and a mother several times over. Sarah believes that a woman’s place is in the home, but she doesn’t criticize her (marginally) more worldly cousin.

Enter Robert James, an Irish-born writer who has attracted a coterie of men who hang on his every word. Robert has written nothing except a poetic fragment titled Attila, and he has a gift for cruel mimicry, yet this earns him the title of genius, a mantle he assumes as his due. Ann, who has drifted into this circle—one of two women the group tolerates, though just barely—is thrilled that the great man has noticed her. So starved is she for attention that she willingly becomes his lover, even though he cares not one whit about pleasing her and grows more and more abusive with passing months. Attila, indeed.

If the subtitle were How to Create a Masochist, A Man of Genius would almost qualify as nonfiction. Ann’s mother has hated her from birth, literally slapping her for daring to open her mouth, while lionizing Gilbert, the father who died before the poor girl was born. So of course Ann finds the most criminally narcissistic man available, violent and sullen by turns, and attaches herself obsessively.

We’ve all known someone like Robert, but, I hope, have had the sense to avoid them and, even more important, the self-respect to resist their gravitational pull. Since masochists believe they have no gravity—or more precisely, that its laws benefit them only on sufferance—reading about such people drives me absolutely crazy. In fact, when I reached the rather too lengthy part when Robert spouts dull, pretentious drivel, and his friends lap it up, I realized that I’d tried reading A Man of Genius once before, and that this section had persuaded me to put the book aside.

But this time, I kept going and was rewarded. An ardent feminist, Todd has much to say about the peripheries in which women reside, either for safety’s sake or because men have displaced them from more comfortable, visible quarters. Yet she never pretends that by definition, women are superior, or men, evil, and she sketches out the limits of discourse and understanding between the sexes with a sure hand. The context is historical, yet you get the picture–not as much has changed as we might like to think.

Also, though Todd dares literary cliché by having her characters move to Venice to try to escape themselves, she describes that city so masterfully that you forget you’ve read a dozen other novels about it. Further, the trip to Venice prompts Ann to delve into secrets from her past, which kicks the storytelling into a higher gear, and whose twists and reversals keep you guessing until the end.

Where A Man of Genius falls short, I think, is the dynamic between Ann and Robert. I like novels that render each emotional moment with care—one reason I stayed with this one—but too often here, the psychological currents swirl in tight circles. Robert never gives Ann a reason to think that he cares for her or enjoys her company, for which she blames herself. I’d have believed this part more readily—and skimmed less—had he doled out morsels that tantalized her, only to withhold them otherwise.

That would have positioned Ann as coming back for more rather than holding onto nothing, and her self-blame would have been easier to swallow. It would have also made her initial attraction more plausible; other than her own pathology, I can’t figure out why she’d bother. show less

I'm tagging this as 'fanfiction' - meaning nothing derogatory thereby - because I can't think how better to classify it: it essentially takes the plot of Jane Austen's Lady Susan and retells it in narrative rather than epistolary form.

Something in the blurb had made me assume this was intended as a sequel, but no, it's a straight retelling. Part of me wonders why... but it does delve more tightly into the characters' personal thoughts and feelings, and it adds sub-plots too scandalous to show more make their way into letters between them.

The author shows something of Austen's insight into character and sharp turn of phrase - in parts. She can't sustain this through the whole book, though. The sentences are much briefer than Austen's, and frequently suffer from run-on constructions. And the attempt to adapt the many points of view that are natural to an epistolary story requires moving smoothly from one point of view to another -- perhaps lacking much example from Austen's other novels which were focused on one character, Todd stumbles here too.

An interesting experiment and enjoyable as an adaptation without in any way supplanting the original. show less

Don’t You Know There’s a War On? is a hard book to review. Ir is bracketed by a woman named Phyllis, a special friend of Maud, the daughter of Joan Kite, the diarist who writes down a bleak memoir at her daughter’s urging. Phyllis sets our expectations telling us Joan is a monster, but Joan, the monster is telling us her story.

Joan describes a loveless childhood with parents too in love with each other to have anything left for their daughter. Even later, after her father dies, her show more mother is too self-indulgent and vain to care about her daughter’s well-being. There seems to be one person who loved Joan, an aunt whom the rest of the family despised for her oddity, poverty, and unmarried state.

Joan comes of age during the privations of World War II while brought up strictly with a social-climbing mother whose strictures of what is proper will inhibit Joan for the rest of her life. After all, just once she is bullied by her cousin into trying to have some fun, and her world is turned upside down.

I struggle with Don’t You Know There’s a War On? Not because of the writing. It is lush and beautiful. Todd creates such a sense of place and time, it is almost dislocating to put the book down and see the contemporary world around me.

I think I like Joan more than I am supposed to despite her bitterness and selfishness. It is not hard to feel pity for the child and the young woman whose needs were so abominably served by her family. And yet, to her daughter, she is a monster. There are these revelations of love, little glimmers that never break through to tell Maud she is loved. Joan is always withholding and punishing, but so much of it is to spare her the pain she lived through. Much of Maud’s own withdrawal is explained by a horrific confession, one that Phyllis insists didn’t happen. And there’s is the difficulty for me, why do I feel so much sympathy for such a monster?

I received an ARC of Don’t You Know There’s a War On? from the publisher through Shelf Awareness

Don’t You Know There’s a War On? at Fentum Press
Janet Todd author site
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2020/07/29/9781909572072/ show less