snob lit

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“’Genre fiction’ is a nasty phrase – when did genre turn into an adjective? But I object to the term for a different reason. It's weasel wording, in that it conflates lit fic with literature. It was clever marketing by publishers to set certain contemporary fiction apart and declare it Literature – and therefore Important, Art and somehow better than other writing.
     The term sneaks back into the past in a strangely anachronistic way, so that, for example, Jane Austen's works are described as literary fiction. This is nonsense. Can anyone think for a moment that were she writing today she'd be published as lit fic? No, and not because she'd end up under romance or chick lit, but because she writes comedy, and lit fic, with a few rare exceptions, does not include comedy within its remit.
     Austen never for a moment imagined she was writing Literature. Posterity decided that – not her, not John Murray, not even her contemporary readership. She wrote fiction, to entertain and to make money.”

— Elizabeth Edmondson [She is the author of 30 novels], The Guardian
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“a mixture between David Beckham’s ‘Instinct’ and Ralph Lauren’s Polo Blue"

From: Etsy

“A very interesting study has recently taken place at the University of Liverpool where they got 450 mice and put them near different male and female urine samples. The result? They have found out that there is a certain chemical, or pheromone, found in male mouse urine that determines the preference of them to female mice over time, as in, it attracts them.
     And the Open Source Journal ‘BMC biology’ researchers have named the substance (in what has been called a 'bizarre homage') ’Darcin’ after Mr. Darcy himself, because of his power to draw in the women.
     But what would our Mr. Darcy smell like?”
— The Bennet Sisters
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deep structure

"[...] Longbourn is delightfully audacious; after all, Jane Austen is a very tough act to follow. Pride and Prejudice has been read and reread by enchanted readers since its publication in 1813. George Henry Lewes, the Victorian critic and partner of George Eliot, declared Austen to be 'the greatest artist that has ever written,' and Virginia Woolf called her 'the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal.'
     Today these judgments have reached something close to cultish fervour. Yet Austen’s great successor, Charlotte Brontë, was baffled by all this admiration. For her, Austen’s work lacked 'what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and sentient target of death.' It’s one of literary history’s most famous misjudgments.

   But if Charlotte Brontë had taken up the challenge of a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, she might very well have hit upon the sort of broader, more sympathetic point of view Jo Baker has derived from the servants’ quarters. Baker shares some of Brontë’s qualities — a power of description, a feeling for the natural world, a regard for emotional turbulence — and she shows a comfort with the past that allows her to imagine it in a vivid way. […]
     With large imaginative sympathy and a detailed knowledge of early-19th-century housekeeping, Baker gives us a sobering look at the underside — or the practical side — of daily life circa 1812, where in a bourgeois household, however hard up, a staff of people, knowing their place, worked an 18-hour day, every day, to achieve for their employers even the minimum of comfort. In Baker’s account, the Bennets are employers more considerate than many — Elizabeth gives the housemaid, Sarah, one of her dresses — but social distances are thoughtlessly taken for granted. Certain lines are never crossed, and certain others often are: an upper-class young man was never too grand to hang around downstairs in hopes of ruining some servant girl."
— Diane Johnson, The New York Times
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“I believe the dead are at peace, but it is not right to speak of them with levity.” ― Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights

"Yes, A Questionable Shape is that zombie novel you’ve been hearing about, but don’t believe the publicity: Bennett Sims, the book’s author, is barely interested in genre at all. This isn’t even The Keep or Motherless Brooklyn—something that stokes the intellect while still delivering generic thrills. I get no sense Bennett Sims loves zombies.

     Mostly, this book is concerned with memory. The undead 'return to the familiar,' wandering 'to nostalgically charged sites from their former lives.' Do they understand why they remember what they remember? Do any of us? For all the talk about the undead, Sims uses very few tropes from zombie narratives—not even to subvert them. He demonstrates little affection for genre….
     Over and over again, Sims demonstrates astonishing skill with image. Shadows sweep 'back and forth, like a massive phantasmal broom.' The wax at the base of a candlestick looks 'as if a congregation of gnarled ghosts was kneeling in prayer before the flame.' These similes transform the familiar world into surreal gems, so concrete that I can feel each in my hand."
— Benjamin Rybeck, ElectricLiterature
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"Quirk Books’s spring catalog [2009] features at least one title I’d like to get my hands on: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. Like a DVD loaded with extras, the book includes the original text of the Regency classic, juiced up with 'all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem.'”

— Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times
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"I will brook no refusal, Miss Dashwood."

"Historians of Canadian literature often call Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague of 1769 the first Canadian novel. Though it was published in England and written by an Englishwoman, Frances Brooke spent the years 1763 to 1768 in Quebec, and drew extensively on her experience there for her novel, the first and best half of which is vividly set in Lower Canada.
     Emily Montague is no mean literary achievement. It has a lively heroine, Arabella Fermor (there is  further play on the allusion to the original of Pope's Belinda, although this Arabella is firmly Protestant) and a sentimental heroine, Emily Montague—a kind of contrast that recalls Richardson's vivacious Anna Howe and serious Clarissa Harlowe, as well as looking forward to Austen's Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, Emma Woodhouse and Jane Fairfax; it has a well-developed sense of location; and it incorporates strong female characters and a vigorous feminist stand. It is an epistolary novel, and pays marked attention to the necessary hiatuses in communication between Lower Canada and England,
allowing time not only for transatlantic sailing, but also for the winter freeze-up of the St Lawrence River.  That is, while Brooke takes on the epistolary convention with its frequent strains on credibility, she is businesslike and convincing in following through on the consequences of her choice.
     Even today it is a good read, thanks to the vivacity of one heroine, the social and topographical interest of the story, and the rapid pace of the narrative.
     Nevertheless, by the time Jane Austen took the pen into her hands in the late 1780s, a sentimental epistolary novel of 1769 inevitably seemed dated, and to 'a mind lively and at ease' it must have called for parody.
     Young Austen, as I believe, answered the call; and Emily Montague seems to me a strong candidate as the novel most aptly parodied in her wild little fiction 'Amelia Webster' from Volume the First, as well as a prominent target, among others, for her exuberant take-off of the sentimental novel, 'Love and Freindship,' from Volume the Second."
— Juliet McMaster, Young Jane Austen and the First Canadian Novel: From Emily Montague to 'Amelia Webster' and 'Love and Freindship'
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“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before” — Cliff Fadiman

From: Sims Reed - Rare Books

Here's to a blissful summer of reading for all you Jane Austen fans. Her lesser-known works are waiting to be discovered — or rediscovered.
"The heroine of Northanger Abbey is not so popular, maybe because the title is hard to pronounce, maybe because the novel wasn't re-made for television until 2007, but probably because Catherine Morland doesn't have much in the way of an identity. The narrator writes that no one would take her for a heroine — and then throws a hero in her path and makes her one."
—Rachel M. Brownstein, author of Why Jane Austen?
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