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Montag, 12. März 2018

How I Became a Jane Austen Superfan / Ted Scheinman

A love for books and mischief is often born in childhood, and it seems possible that no child in English letters has ever had as much fun pillaging her father’s library as the young Jane Austen; certainly no other child has left such a record of her resulting spoils. In her juvenile notebooks, Austen logs a series of literary performances in various forms that also serve as a reader’s diary and a partial family scrapbook. Austen began these sketches around 1787, having survived two stints at boarding school, neither of which was a model academic experience. At the first, she and her sister, Cassandra, nearly died of typhoid fever, while the second was overseen by a one-legged huckster who claimed to be French and called herself Madame la Tournelle, but who in fact was an Englishwoman named Sarah Hackett. She couldn’t speak a word of French, but the imposture of her exotic last name seems to have convinced various fathers of the gentry that hers was a school where their girls might learn the European niceties—the sort of school, as Austen would later write in Emma, “where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.” The peg leg, at least, was real.
Instead, Austen’s true education was in the family library, which she approached as a young marauder who marked her favorites with wicked parody. This period of artistic apprenticeship, beginning in earnest when Austen was 12, includes some of the most vigorous short comedy in English prose. These days, to the uninitiated, Austen is remembered as an artist of manners, a prim moralist, a feminist avant la lettre, or merely a kindly domestic ironist—or more likely some mixture of all these. But in childhood, hers was a dark imagination, where she applied the cadences of 18th-century moral writing and popular melodramatic novels to narrating tales of viciousness and dissipation. As her family would emphasize almost to the point of annoyance after her death, the young novelist loved Alexander Pope’s moral epistles and Samuel Johnson’s moral essays even more, but the truth is she was an eclectic (and certainly not a squeamish) reader who devoured the bestsellers of the day, some of them rather lurid for preteen consumption. Like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, the young Austen read French romances and all manner of Gothic novels, the juiciest of which were heavy on rape, incest, and grisly death. George Austen may have been a clergy man, but he was hardly censorious, and his daughter read what she pleased, whatever her siblings and Victorian descendants might claim thereafter. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/how-i-became-a-jane-austen-superfan/

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