Asserting strength and independence

Jane Austen is not an obvious ally of today’s feminist movement. All six of her novels are now more than two centuries old. All six centre on a tale of provincial domesticity and romantic courtship. And all six are full of twists and witty turns that move inexorably toward a gratifyingly happy ending.

Yet below their glittering surfaces and rose-coloured tales of well-matched couples falling deeply in love, Austen’s novels vigorously critique the patriarchal structures of her day. They bristle with anger and a deep sense of injustice. Many of her plots and sub-plots about men and power — and women’s resilience in the face of that power — sound like stories we are hearing today.

Austen wrote in the early 1800s, when life for most women involved submerging their individual identities in their responsibilities as daughters, wives and mothers. Women were considered politically, economically, socially and artistically subordinate to men. It was a life that condemned many women to half-lives of humiliation, loneliness and abuse.

The novelist and short story writer Carol Shields has concisely summarized the complicated nature of Austen’s artistry and appeal. Austen, declares Shields, exploits “an arch, incontrovertible amiability” to conceal “a ferocious and persistent moral anger.”

Read all: theconversation/in-jane-austen-fairy-tales-meet-biting-feminist-critiques

Austen’s Autumn

Jane doesn’t give us pages of extravagant description. Instead she paints a perfectly recognizable picture for us in just a few lines. My favorite passage, though, is from Persuasion, chapter 10. This scene takes place on the group walk to Winthrop:

Anne’s…pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves, and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which had drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. She occupied her mind as much as possible in such like musings and quotations…

 And a bit further on:

 The sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by, unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory.

Read all: shannonwinslow/austens-autumn/ 

Jane Austen's Garden in Autumn

Autumn seems to be well and truly upon us now, with bright colours showing through the trees, cool nights and chilly mornings, heavy dews with bright sunny days.

Amazingly the Show Border is still in “wow” mode with a lovely show of colour from the summer annuals. The Tigridia’s - Ferraria Tigridia - (summer flowering bulbs) showed the last 3 petaled bright red flower two weeks ago. All have now been dug up last week by Sheryl, who is one of my 3 new garden volunteers.  Sheryl is a Botanical Artist and has brought pictures for me to see some of her very lovely plant paintings.

September/October and occasionally August are the months to see “Orb” spiders generally sitting in the centre of their beautiful webs which when covered with dew in the early mornings, glisten and twinkle as they move in the sunlight.

Read all: jane-austens-house-museum.org.uk/Jane-Austens-Garden-in-Autumn