Tag: Reading

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Life(style)

More Pride, Less Prejudice @timeshighered

Sally Feldman stands up for popular works of scholarship

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any serious student of English literature must be a postmodernist with a huge appetite for deconstruction and a cultivated disregard for the enjoyment of the books themselves. Who needs to wade through the 896 pages of Middlemarchwhen it’s so much more interesting – and often far quicker – to identify hermeneutical opposition within a narrative discourse, or apply hypertextual liminality to notions of the authorial voice?

Even though the invasion of cultural theory had only just begun when I was an English undergraduate, it was enough to instil in me a discernible guilt about reading novels for personal pleasure, for feasting myself on Jane Austen’s sparkling prose and barbed satire and delighting in the way her books propose a morality, an idea of how to live.

But now a new book has appeared that has done much to banish that guilt and restore my Leavis-inflected faith in literature as an expression of humanism. It’s a lavishly illustrated edition of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, comprehensively annotated by Patricia Meyer Spacks, professor of English at the University of Virginia. Suddenly I’ve been given a dispensation not merely to enjoy the novels but to care about every detail of the characters and their specific milieux.

Spacks loves detail. But never for its own sake; never in the service of pedantry. Her detail illuminates and refreshes the experience of reading. If you’ve ever wondered why the Bennet sisters spent so much time trimming their bonnets, Spacks can enlighten you. Material was so expensive that to stay fashionable the girls would have to upgrade existing garments as they wouldn’t be able to afford new ones.

Mealtimes are frequently used by Austen as plot devices but Spacks gives them added significance. The Bingleys look down on their country neighbours for serving dinner earlier than in more fashionable town circles. And Lady Catherine de Bourgh can afford not one but two separate breakfast parlours.

Money, of course, is the invisible main character of all of the novels, so our understanding of the real plight of the Bennet sisters is poignantly enhanced when Spacks reveals just how much of it a gentleman needs to run his household, how much the girls would inherit from their mother, as well as the invidious property laws that were responsible for disinheriting them.

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Digital

Digital doesn’t mean the end of the book….

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

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History Life(style)

Georgette Heyer is featured in @timeshighered

“Georgette Heyer’s 1929 romantic novel Beauvallet took these tropes further. It features the roistering freebooter Sir Nicholas Beauvallet, who “bit his thumb at Spain” and is as daring as Drake and as feared. He captures the ravishing Dominica de Rada y Sylva, daughter of the Governor of Santiago. There is, of course, lots of name-dropping laced with swathes of Tudor blarney: it is obligatory to say “poltroon”, “dizzard” and “roistering” whenever the opportunity arises. The book was published amid a positive rage for Tudor Rose tea rooms, suburban “Tudorbethan” semis and Spanish galleons on the mantelpiece.

Heyer set the tone for the many histories, novels, television shows and films that were to follow. You may be forgiven for thinking of Alison Weir with her “character-driven” histories that read like novels and are based around the tragic women of the 16th century, or Philippa Gregory, whose novel The Other Boleyn Girl (2002) charts the coming of Mary Boleyn to Henry VIII’s court. There she becomes a “pawn” in the king’s sexual game with her sister and is subsequently forgotten until she meets a man who dares to “offer … a life of freedom and passion”. Certainly the garish covers of Gregory’s six Tudor romances are suggestive of upmarket Mills & Boon books.”

I started reading Georgette Heyer novels when I was around 10/11, and still love re-reading them, particularly enjoying an academic conference all about Heyer in 2009… and of course she has a decent Wikipedia entry! See where she fits in this full story in Times Higher Education, discussing the fascination that many still have with the Tudor era (Heyer, of course, is much better known for her Regency romances) – I like a bit of Jean Plaidy myself. the conclusion it largely comes to is that this is a mythical image, and: “To a great extent, the Tudor historian has given ground to the novelist, where women writers of romantic and detective fiction have the field almost to themselves. What we want is not history but “faction”.”

Wikipedia: I thought I’d have a go at editing her “legacy” as it doesn’t mention anything about last year’s conference – I think it was quite significant!

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Digital

"Do you read a book a week?"

“If I spend more than an hour surfing on the internet, I find my thinking has changed, and with it, my concentration,” says Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2010). “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

In July, Amazon announced that, for the first time, the sale of digital editions of books had overtaken the sale of hardbacks. But, Carr says, the recent advent of e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad don’t guarantee more readers – only different readers.

“To make a book discoverable and searchable online is also to dismember it,” says Carr. “The cohesion of its text, the linearity of its argument or narrative as it flows through scores of pages, is sacrificed.” It loses what John Updike called its “edges” and dissolves into “the vast, rolling waters” of the net.

Reading requires an inner silence that promotes contemplation and imagination. The flashing images, the cacophony of music and voices, the frenetic sound-bite-length snatches of thinking that electronic media flourish on simply preclude the calm, focused, revelatory process that reading represents. If current trends continue, says George Steiner, the joy that comes from attending to a demanding text, mastering the grammar, memorising and concentrating, “may once more become the practice of an elite, of a mandarinate of silences”.

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Life(style)

Georgette Heyer: The Historical Holiday Read

I have loved Georgette Heyer’s regency novels since my mum lent me ‘Frederica’ many years ago (I know most people think I’m only about 25, but I’m considerably older than that!)… that copy of Frederica has long since disintegrated, but no worries, I tracked down another one!!! In fact, with much diligent searching I have tracked down all her regency romances, and most of her other texts excluding the detective novels, which, never being so popular as her regency romances were (at least not since, although they may have been at the time). I could do a bit more research and make this a scholarly entry, but I’m supposed to be on a week’s break, hence the Heyer’s come out and the brain switches off!! Not managed to get one off the shelf yet, but I will…. and meantime was checking out how far Georgette Heyer appears on the web:

Stephen Fry: Guilty Pleasures (go to around 2:40-3:50)