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A little Austen aside, following Kit-Kat Club's last, and with according apologies-- Austen's books are melodramas when viewed from our cool and distant Noughties perspective, I think. All that fuss about kissing! All that worry! But what I thought Austen did so well in Northanger is to mock both the industry that had grown up very recently, and to a great degree around her, and also to self-deprecatingly puncture her own literary balloon.
When it comes to the crunch, it is true that most of the puncturing, both in Northanger and in her other works, is of the conventions of the stories of the day, but the fact remains that Austen perpetuated them in her own right with unions such as the Bennett Darcy marriage, or the variant ending of Mansfield Park, etc etc. That is why Northanger is so intriguing-- to an extent, Austen is repenting of her own additions of fuel to the fires of young ladies' (often irrational) aspirations throughout the Kingdom and the colonies...
I am, in case it is not conveyed at all, a serious fan of her works and her writing, which drips with acidic wit as can be found, as far as I know, nowhere else. |
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