http://isgreaterthan.net/2007/12/is-greater-thans-2007-year-end-recap-in-equations/ Literary-minded culture blog Sun, 25 Sep 2011 06:38:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc http://isgreaterthan.net/2007/12/is-greater-thans-2007-year-end-recap-in-equations/comment-page-1/#comment-6398 Chanda Mon, 18 May 2009 20:40:19 +0000 http://isgreaterthan.net/?p=506#comment-6398 As a postscript to my equation, this letter appeared in the 14 May 2009 issue of the London Review of Books: Frank Kermode gets at what 21st-century Janeism is about: ‘It is said that among the television audience there were some who saw Darcy’s emergence from his pond – an event Austen omitted from her narrative – as the high point of the book’ (LRB, 30 April). And things have got worse since Andrew Davies’s 1995 serial. It is sad to think that there is a generation who, when they try to conjure Lizzy Bennet from the page, will have to fight back images of Keira Knightley pouting and pretending not to be beautiful in a mud-hemmed dress. Janeism wasn’t always so aggressively female-friendly. Rudyard Kipling wrote the endearingly odd story ‘The Janeites’ (making the term famous) in 1924. His Janeites are not mob-capped elderly women of Bath, but soldiers and officers on the Western Front. Soldier Humberstall, invalided out of the army with a head wound, finds a way back to the front, to discover that he is only fit to be an assistant mess-waiter. He survives in the officers’ mess by being introduced into the ‘cult’ of Jane by the head mess-waiter – chalking ‘Reverend Collins’, ‘Lady Catherine de Bugg’ and ‘General Tilney’ on the battalion’s guns brings him 100 cigarettes instead of a ticking off. But being able to speak to superiors on equal terms is not Jane’s only godmotherly power. When the battery is destroyed in a barrage, Humberstall is the only survivor. After he jokingly calls the senior nurse Miss Bates – a plot twist Ian McEwan would envy – she makes room for him on the hospital train, saving his life: ‘You take it from me . . . there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place. Gawd bless ’er, whoever she was.’ Endowed with such healing power, it is no wonder that Pride and Prejudice was prescribed to shellshocked soldiers, or that Churchill said it was Austen’s novels he turned to when things seemed bleak during the Second World War. So it has not always been girls sighing over Darcy’s wet shirt; Lizzy has also had her devoted boy fans. In a lecture to the women of Newnham College, Cambridge in 1911, A.C. Bradley needed no scriptwriter’s prompting to say of Elizabeth Bennet: ‘I was meant to fall in love with her, and I do.’ Kate Brayshay Melksham, Wiltshire As a postscript to my equation, this letter appeared in the 14 May 2009 issue of the London Review of Books:
Frank Kermode gets at what 21st-century Janeism is about: ‘It is said that among the television audience there were some who saw Darcy’s emergence from his pond – an event Austen omitted from her narrative – as the high point of the book’ (LRB, 30 April). And things have got worse since Andrew Davies’s 1995 serial. It is sad to think that there is a generation who, when they try to conjure Lizzy Bennet from the page, will have to fight back images of Keira Knightley pouting and pretending not to be beautiful in a mud-hemmed dress.
Janeism wasn’t always so aggressively female-friendly. Rudyard Kipling wrote the endearingly odd story ‘The Janeites’ (making the term famous) in 1924. His Janeites are not mob-capped elderly women of Bath, but soldiers and officers on the Western Front. Soldier Humberstall, invalided out of the army with a head wound, finds a way back to the front, to discover that he is only fit to be an assistant mess-waiter. He survives in the officers’ mess by being introduced into the ‘cult’ of Jane by the head mess-waiter – chalking ‘Reverend Collins’, ‘Lady Catherine de Bugg’ and ‘General Tilney’ on the battalion’s guns brings him 100 cigarettes instead of a ticking off. But being able to speak to superiors on equal terms is not Jane’s only godmotherly power. When the battery is destroyed in a barrage, Humberstall is the only survivor. After he jokingly calls the senior nurse Miss Bates – a plot twist Ian McEwan would envy – she makes room for him on the hospital train, saving his life: ‘You take it from me . . . there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place. Gawd bless ’er, whoever she was.’ Endowed with such healing power, it is no wonder that Pride and Prejudice was prescribed to shellshocked soldiers, or that Churchill said it was Austen’s novels he turned to when things seemed bleak during the Second World War. So it has not always been girls sighing over Darcy’s wet shirt; Lizzy has also had her devoted boy fans. In a lecture to the women of Newnham College, Cambridge in 1911, A.C. Bradley needed no scriptwriter’s prompting to say of Elizabeth Bennet: ‘I was meant to fall in love with her, and I do.’
Kate Brayshay
Melksham, Wiltshire

]]> http://isgreaterthan.net/2007/12/is-greater-thans-2007-year-end-recap-in-equations/comment-page-1/#comment-2516 Is Greater Than » Is Greater Than Year-End Equations: 2008 Edition Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:54:27 +0000 http://isgreaterthan.net/?p=506#comment-2516 [...] Join us as we break through the year’s rhetoric and double-speak as simply as we know how, and leave your own equations in the comments. For the historically minded, take a look at 2007’s edition. [...] [...] Join us as we break through the year’s rhetoric and double-speak as simply as we know how, and leave your own equations in the comments. For the historically minded, take a look at 2007’s edition. [...]

]]> http://isgreaterthan.net/2007/12/is-greater-thans-2007-year-end-recap-in-equations/comment-page-1/#comment-2314 Laura Pearson Thu, 11 Dec 2008 05:01:37 +0000 http://isgreaterthan.net/?p=506#comment-2314 Is Greater Than > a lot of things. Is Greater Than > a lot of things.

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