Folly and futility

Her writing is anemic, devoid of passion and of substance, they – who do not understand – declare. Undeserved fame; popularity, a mere result of Anglo-saxon cultural hegemony, they insist. Boredom. A simplistic cheesy, spinsterly worldview resulting in an inability to write about anything other, than the most unbearably turgid marriage arrangements, those allege, who do not know. »A disappointment« they profess, »a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers, but … no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck«.

Oh, what bliss must be ignorance; what heaven self conceit?Lucky pedestrians, moving nonchalantly, cotton budded on well designed polished surfaces. Unaware of depth and grit, shrinking the big, magical world into a tiny, predictable pebble.

Those unmoved by Jane Austen's writing, the ones, who do not get her; those, not in awe of her wit, audacity and technical brilliance – in short, all, who do not love her books –; the vain, the foolish, the ignorant; those, who've never heard of the laws of entailment: Indeed they are the fortunate ones, spared the knowledge of class divisions, poverty and despair. Never having to live in the abyss of an uneven match.

How sweet a life, completely devoid of strangulated passions. Untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy and fearless. Comfortably situated, no need to surmount impossible obstacles. Never any pressure for utmost technical daring. Feeling, above all, not the slightest inkling to endanger oneself by curiosity. Nor by writing sentences carried by their own subtle DNA. Living forever enveloped in self assured haughtiness instead. Being blissfully unaware, without the slightest occasion to question the pleasant air of one's own self-deception. Always able to mistake a book by Jane Austen for a middle-class, matrimonial love story with a happy ending.

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^{An excellent debate, originally posted by Blogger Anne Mohnen: Jane Austen vs Emily Brontë The Queens of English Literature Debate, with actors Dominic West, Sam West, Mariah Gale and Eleanor Tomlinson}