The Other Austen

I adore it! Fantastic casting, hilarious, fun Gothic fantasies, beautiful everything, and a pretty faithful script.

The ONLY thing—because my bitch ass always has to nitpick something—was that they changed Henry’s political views. Novel Henry denies the state of the world (he seems to think that English protestants are incapable of performing such atrocities as murder, unlike those heathen French Catholics who were then in the heat of revolution), whereas movie Henry states that novels can reflect real life happenings. Movie Catherine is the one to deny the connection between novels and real life, at least in speech; in thought, we know she has some pretty horrific fantasies. I think this dismantles Austen’s ironic take on the binary between the logical/”always correct” masculine and the irrational feminine. The narrator of NA says that Catherine turns out to be correct in her assumptions about General Tilney: because his domestic abuse of Mrs. Tilney is no worse than physically killing her. A pretty radical idea! I just wish that film (the medium) could capture the nuance of it.

Um, wow, end of rant. Haha, but anyway, I really love the adaptation and I think it’s probably better to create a feminist Henry for viewers to fall in love with rather than have the irony be lost entirely on everyone.

Hey there! I read it about 3 years ago when I was studying abroad in Bath. I most likely left it behind me. Here are a few other articles I found:

http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol28no1/bell.htm - Detective fiction with Jane Austen!

http://www.janeaustensoci.freeuk.com/pages/novels_em.htm - This mentions P.D James’s mentioning that Emma could be considered the first detective novel.