Errrata: Not "ashfors tells her this is fiction" but Ashford tells us
this is fiction ...
Again pray excuse all typos. My brain is still not hooked up properly to my
left side, and that includes my left hand and fingers.
Ellen
On Wed, Jul 24, 2024 at 12:24?PM Ellen Moody via groups.io
<ellen.moody@...> wrote:
I don't know what's come over me -- I'm enjoying this book, perhaps
the mood is analogous to the one three years ago now, when towards the
end of the pandemic as quarantine I began to like mystery/detective
novels when done well by a woman (or following the 1930's feminine
tradition stemming out of Agatha Christia with no misogyny in it --
like Anthony Horowitz's work as far as I've seen).
Aashfors tells her this is fiction, but clearlyi it is her reading of
the Austen papers documents and recent non-fiction interpretive books
(including biographies). I would agree with her that, like in many
families, there seem to have neen unacknowledged erotic relationships,
individuals not heterosexual, clear attempts to deny, hide what would
have been regarded as scandalous (Eliza Hancock, the naural daughter
of Hastngs by Philadelphia Austen Hancock, Jane's father's sister),
but this one as presented is overdoneand has the tropes of
murder-mystery stories, he worst of it is the depiction of Henry
Austen and Elizabeth Knight (the unfortunate wife of Edward who
ceaselessly impregnated her to the point she died of it) as adulerous
lovers for many years so that some of her children were Henry's.
(Francis did the same to his first wife; one wonders how they were
taught to think about themselves).
I guess down the line we are to learn that Henry poisoned Jane. The
flashack technique is used. She quotes from Austen's writing but not
as much as Hornby
But there is something holding me. The narrator is Anne Sharpe, and I
like he (the portrait)r, and its raison d'etre is to track her close
friendship (with maybe lesbian feelings on both sides) with Jane
Austen. Like Gill Hornby in Miss Austen, Ashford also discernsthe
close similar friendship of Jane with Martha Lloyd, The tone or mood
of noth books is alik as Jane is seen similrly (from a reading od
wghay's left of Austen's leeter). I admit too making the fragmented
non-fiction come alive as a coherent set of events appeals, This is
why I liked Miss usten Regrets by Gwyneth Hughs.
I like it better than the Jane Austen Project by Katherine Flynn whose
science fiction genre POV had kept it respectable. I may go back to
find out if Flynn has an interpretation of the non-fiction papers
and documents not allowed in scholarly critical writing by those who
want to be respected. There are preposterous so-called scholarly
works (Helen Kelly is that her name), the becoming Austen book of
several years ago, the notion Austen was a strong Catholic (by
Catholic writers), or to have had unlikely remarkable learaning in
phiosophical writing without ever being in company with the milieus
that might have nbeen an influence then.
llen
Ellen Moody