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    Tilneys, Weasels, and All Things Jane >> The Chawton Round Table >> Message started by: TheHighPriestess on 10/04/01 at 15:22:32

Title: Kicking things off with a bit of a rant!
Post by: TheHighPriestess on 09/28/01 at 22:27:41

Does anybody else get hugely irritated when people who claim to be Jane Austen fans consider her "Victorian?" I have received solicitations in the T&T guestbook to join "Victorian" webrings, though my website is all Jane/Regency and has nothing Victorian on it; I've seen websites that are "Victorian" websites that seem to want to include Jane Austen as a Victorian writer. She wasn't a Victorian! She died two years before Queen Victoria was BORN! The Regency culture was different in many ways from the Victorian culture, though admittedly Jane was conservative for her time. However, she wasn't one of those uptight, prissy, swooning simps of a couple generations down the line. The carelessness of such an opinion really irritates me!

My family thinks Jane Austen is a Victorian, but I don't blame them, as they are completely uninterested in her other than being polite to me. It's excusable. But it really BUGS me when people who have read the books, who know something of Jane's life, who should know better, keep dragging poor Jane into the uptight, repressed Victorian era.

</rant>

Title: Re: Kicking things off with a bit of a rant!
Post by: Puck on 10/02/01 at 20:13:50

ITA, it makes the nerve in the back of my neck itch!

However, I can understand it well. Unfortunately, the only two Janes in the English canon are the author Jane Austen, and the novel "Jane Eyre", which were published within 50 years of each other (which, in the annals of geo-time and people with only a vague notion of history, is NOTHING). Jane Austen/Jane Eyre -- same thing!

Poor Jane Austen suffers from the association -- JA's novels as a whole are far beyond CB's as a whole, and yet CB's JE just might be more generally known than any one of JA's.

JE has always been considered a Victorian novel, and with the JA/JE connection in people's minds, therefore........ ((Funny how the application of algebra to literature doesn't seem to strike many people as utterly foolhardy! -- A=B, B=C, therefore A=C))

Jeannie

Title: Re: Kicking things off with a bit of a rant!
Post by: Cyberlibrarian on 10/03/01 at 17:31:39

Jeannie, you never said there'd be any math! :o

Title: Re: Kicking things off with a bit of a rant!
Post by: Lydia on 10/04/01 at 15:22:32

It is irritating, isn't it? But the Regency period is itself so slighted. Because it's so short, and not much of real import (minus wars w/ France and a lot of partying, I mean) happened. You don't find the period discussed in history books and any of those off-shoot books that purport to help writers lump the Regency in with the Victorian, as if in a century, things aren't going to change a bit. I blame the schools. �:shrug

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