Jane Austen

"Jane lies in Winchester --
blessed be her shade!

Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made!

And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain,

Glory, love, and honor unto England's Jane!

"Rudyard Kipling Epigraph to "The Janeites"

Last year I had the pleasure of viewing on PBS three wonderful renditions of Jane Austen's works: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Place. This morning I read that my favorite author, C S Lewis (Oxford professor of Literature) held Ms Austen and her works in the highest esteem. He wrote

"... It is perhaps worth emphasizing what may be called the hardness - at least the firmness - of Jane Austen's thought exhibited in all these undeceptions. The great abstract nouns of the classical English Moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used; good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, 'some duty neglected, some failing indulged', impropriety, indelicacy, generous candor, blamable trust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason. These are the concepts by which Jane Austen grasps the world. ... All is hard, clear, definable; by some modern standards, even naively so. The hardness is, of course, for oneself, not for one's neighbors. ... Contrasted with the world of modern fiction, Jane Austen's is at once less soft and less cruel. ... It remains to defend what I have been saying against a possible charge. Have I been treating the novels as though I had forgotten that they are, after all, comedies? I trust not. The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible. 'Principles' or 'seriousness' are essential to Jane Austen's art. Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced provincialism in which we may laugh at the merely unfamiliar. Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work. 'Total irony' - irony about everything - frustrates itself and becomes insipid. ... If charity is the poetry of conduct and honor the rhetoric of conduct, then Jane Austen's 'principles' might be described as the grammar of conduct. Now grammar is something that anyone can learn; it is also something that everyone must learn. ... She is described by someone in Kipling's worst story as the mother of Henry James. I feel much more sure that she is the daughter of Dr. Johnson: she inherits his common sense, his morality, even much of his style. ..."C.S. Lewis A Note On Jane Austen In Essays in Criticism (Oct. 1954)
Bio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen
Views of men on Jane as quoted from above
MSC

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T