It’s been a grand total of four weeks since I last reported on Jane Austen-related misinformation/foolishness on the internet. And already a backlog of new material is building up! Let me clear some of it away now:
* Who’s that girl? Once upon a time, there lived a famous nineteenth-century British female writer named Jane. A little while later, there lived a famous nineteenth-century British female writer who created a character named Jane. Shockingly, these two writers are not the same person.
And yet the Internet cannot seem to fully assimilate this confounding fact. The Jane Austen-Jane Eyre confusion lurks in the body of cyberspace like some latent but dangerous virus, erupting into full-blown infection from time to time.
The most recent flare-up comes to us courtesy of the good people, or perhaps bots, of StarsInsider, last seen reporting on Austen’s fictitious military career. This time, they’ve brought us a slideshow, “Celebrating 250 years of Jane Austen: her work, life, and legacy,” whose second slide (helpfully titled “Jane Austen”) is a picture of . . . Charlotte Brontë. (It’s a colorized and vulgarized version of this famous 1850 portrait by George Richmond.)
But, really, who can blame StarsInsider for this mixup? If these famous nineteenth-century British female writers insist on reusing a name, what do they expect?
* She said what? “Jane Austen’s most beloved novel, Pride and Prejudice, is a story of proposals,” a British writer named Beatrice Scudeler opines in “What Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Can Teach Us About Marriage,” a piece for the women’s magazine Verily.
What follows is a perfectly reasonable analysis of the relative importance of love and duty in Austen’s novel. Perfectly reasonable, that is, except for the part where Scudeler writes, “As Elizabeth says to her sister Jane at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, ‘I am determined that only the deepest love will induce me into matrimony.’ ”
As I have pointed out before—obviously to zero effect--this line does not come from Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice. It comes from Andrew Davies’s screenplay for the BBC’s iconic 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. You can find it here, at 1:38, although you will note that, as spoken by Jennifer Ehle, the words are slightly different (“I am determined that nothing but the very deepest love will induce me into matrimony.”) The people who can’t be bothered to text-search Jane Austen’s novel also can’t be bothered to double-check movie lines.
* It was a dark and stormy (and snowy, and sleepy, and candlelit. . .) night: It’s not a good sign when an article celebrating Austen’s 250th birthday begins, “Jane Austen was born on 17th December 1775.” (Because, as we Janeites know, she wasn't.)
But that’s only the start of the hilarity on offer in a piece, titled “A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Celebrating 250 Years of Jane Austen’s Genius,” that was recently published on a British website called The Conservative Post. (Sample headlines: “Labour’s Carnival of Chaos: Exposing This Week’s Madness From Clowning Street” and “PROUDLY BRITISH: Our Mighty Island – A Celebration of British Greatness.”)
In critiquing the Austen piece, written by Rachael Tearney, I could take issue with its exaggerated and semi-incoherent description of Austen as “the darling of romantic fiction and the architect of the romantic ideal,” or with its nowhere-in-the-text claim that Charlotte Lucas accepts Mr. Collins’s proposal because “she wants very much to be a mother and knows that time is running out.”
Instead, however, I will treat you to the delightfully purple prose that follows that inauspicious start:
“Jane Austen was born on 17th December 1775, during a bitter winter. One imagines the snowy, sleepy village of Steventon, with its thirteen families, safe inside their homes—the flickering firelight spreading warmth through the chilly air.
“Christmas garlands draped from the mantels, the scent of yuletide puddings mingling with the exotic aromas of coffee and hot chocolate, delighting the senses and brightening the eyes* of little children patiently waiting for the morning.
“Or perhaps one hears the voices of a family gathered around the pianoforte, lifting their souls in song, caroling and offering prayers of thanksgiving. Maybe an elderly aunt embroiders a handkerchief, a present for a beloved niece, while a kindly uncle reads aloud as the last of the candle burns down. The lanes and meadows surrounding Steventon Parsonage are filled with a sense of expectation as Christmas approaches.
"Into this idyllic rural scene, a child was born.”
A reader might be forgiven for expecting to hear that a mysterious star was hovering over the Austen stable yard on the occasion, or that the future Prince Regent was on his way, bearing gifts.
I mean, as long as we’re imagining—and virtually every detail in this tableau of uber-Englishness, from the Christmas garlands to the kindly uncle, is made up (nay, embroidered) out of whole cloth—why not really go for it?
* How, exactly, do aromas brighten your eyes? Just asking.
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