Saturday Rave: the divine Jane.

I know the birthdays of four writers off by heart. Three of them are members of my close family (my father, a daughter, and me) and the other one is Jane Austen, which is today, the sixteenth of December. 

Happy Birthday Jane!

I've written about Miss Austen's work several times before, but, good heavens, so I should have done. Her complete works run to only six novels* (and two of those were published posthumously, so we can't be sure exactly how finished they are. The title of Persuasion, for example, is not Miss Austen's own (her working title was The Elliots makes much more sense, to me)).

But, if Miss Austen's works are not particularly extensive, they are particularly fine. In fact I would say they are uniquely intelligent, cogent, funny, generous, human, divine, and glorious.

Here, more or less at random, are a couple of sentences from Miss Austen's first full-length novel, Sense and Sensibility. As a rule Miss Austen's characters are miracles of subtlety, but as it's the pantomime season I've chosen something broader. And, ooh, Miss Austen has a wonderful way with a baddy:

Mrs Ferrars was a little, thin woman, upright, even to formality, in her figure, and serious, even to sourness, in her aspect. Her complexion was sallow; and her features small, without beauty, and naturally without expression; but a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity, by giving it the strong character of pride and ill nature.

Still giving joy after a couple of centuries, too.


illustration by Chris Hammond (1860 - 1900)

Thank you, Jane!

Word To Use Today: insipid. This word comes from the Latin insipidus. Sapidus means full of flavour.

*Not counting the novella Lady Susan.