I know it's hard to believe that I could be friends with people like Liz and Rachel and still never have read any Jane Austen, but it's true. So recently, I decided to tackle her once and for all (in a literary way, obviously). I asked Liz for a recommendation on her favorite of Jane's novels that wasn't 14,000 pages long, and she recommended Persuasion. After reading the little blurb on the cover, it looked good, so I bought it. I sat down to start reading it last night.
Let me just say that a 200 page book that requires a 30 page long introduction and another 12 pages of footnotes and explanations is not for me. I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, I read a lot, have a pretty good vocabulary, etc....but I was having trouble even understanding what they were talking about in the introduction - which is supposedly written in regular, modern-day American English!
So, I will have to go on in life still not having read any Jane Austen and feeling like a complete, uneducated idiot. Hopefully Rachel and Liz will still let me be friends with them!
2 comments:
So you only read the introduction and didn't read the book? Those are always written by people with advance degrees in Boring People to Death. My copy of Howard's End, the one with the ugly cover, has 49 pages of intro and commentary. And since intros in books are always numbered in roman numerals it took me awhile to figure that out. No worries. I'll still love you even if you never look at another Jane Austen book again.
Liz - Persuasion is my favorite too.
Skip the intro! (Who cares about that, anyway.)
Try Emma, maybe you'll like that one better.
Or, put Persuasion aside and wait for another season.
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