Lona Manning's blog

New Publication: "Retelling Jane Austen"

8/28/2024

New Anthology of essays about Jane Austen Adaptations & Derivative Work
....with an essay by yours truly!

I'm excited to announce that Retelling Jane Austen is out in the world! Let me first thank the editors, Tammy Powley and April Van Camp. Tammy contacted me about two years ago and invited me to participate in an anthology exploring the world of Jane Austen adaptations, informally known as Austen fanfic or Austenesque fiction. This anthology also discusses some of the movies and mini-series adaptations of Austen's books.

Austenesque adaptions--fan fiction, variations, cartoons, movies, mini-series, YouTube series--have increasingly been a subject of academic study in recent years. Two dozen writers and scholars have contributed essays to this anthology and Drs. Powley and Van Camp got it all organized and saw it to completion. Natalie Vandenberg looks at the 2022 version of Persuasion that kicked up such a kerfuffle in Austen circles, and Damianne Candace Scott, aka "Black Girl Loves Jane," looks at the pushback against diversity in Austen interpretations.
My essay looks under the hood at the popular Austenesque book, Captain Wentworth's Diary (2007) and explores how author Amanda Grange refashioned Jane Austen's Persuasion, transforming it from a book told mostly from the consciousness of Anne Elliot the heroine to the POV of Captain Wentworth.
It was a pleasure working with Tammy on this project and it's wonderful to finally see it out in print! The book is priced for the academic market, so your best bet might be to recommend it for purchase to your local university, college, or municipal library.
For space reasons, an accompanying book review of Captain Wentworth's Diary was not included in the anthology, so I am posting the book review below:

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CMP#200 Top 5 18th C. Tropes Austen Didn't Use

8/20/2024

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"[Scholar] Ellen Moers goes on to say that it could be argued that Jane Austen achieved the perfection she did precisely 'because there was a mass of women's novels, excellent, fair, and wretched, for her to study and improve upon... It is the uncovering of a literary tradition from which she has been summarily removed.'"
"It is not necessary to praise or imitate one's predecessors in order to be the inheritor of a tradition they forged."
-- Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen

CMP#200 Top Five 18th Century Novelistic Tropes Austen Never Used

I've read a lot of novels of the long eighteenth century (click on Authoresses or Book Reviews at right) and I'm fascinated by the similarities to, and differences from, Austen.
In some earlier posts, I talked about the similarities between some 18th century novels and some characters and plot devices in Austen's novels. There will be more to come, so stay tuned! But in the meantime, let's look at the contrast between Austen and her contemporaries. She said "pictures of perfection" made her "sick and wicked," that is, she didn't like the too-good-to-be-true heroines who populated sentimental novels. She laughed at wildly improbable incidents, and she noticed when characters were given nothing to do: of one novel, she said, "there are many characters introduced, apparently merely to be delineated."
She avoided the incredibly improbable coincidence, the ridiculously improbable misunderstanding, and her heroines were all rational creatures--not helpless, mewling crybabies.
Below, just for fun, are some of the novelistic tropes that Jane Austen avoided:

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CMP#199 Is Lydia a Feminist Rebel or a Victim?

8/8/2024

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This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws some occasional shade at the modern academy. The introductory post is here. My "six simple questions for academics" post is here.

CMP#199 Lydia Bennet: rebel or victim?
Is Lydia Bennet a feminist rebel or a victim of grooming? And how should we feel about her marriage to Wickham?
Jane Austen portrays Lydia as laughing and joyful when she elopes in Pride and Prejudice. She refuses to be parted from Wickham, even though they are not married. Her sister Elizabeth deplores Wickham and his “wretched” character, but she speaks to Jane not of his unforgettable conduct, but of “their conduct.” She also says to herself: “how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue.” [Emphasis added]
Elizabeth thinks her sister, even at 15, should have known better. She comforts herself that at least Lydia thought she was eloping to get married: “she was serious on the subject of their journey. Whatever he might afterwards persuade her to, it was not on her side a scheme of infamy." Austen also tells us that Mrs. Bennet was not “humbled by any remembrance of her misconduct.” Because of course both Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, as Lydia’s parents, must be thought of as being in large measure responsible for her faulty character.
Still, Austen does not absolve Lydia on account of her age and inexperience, and neither does Elizabeth. No doubt we'd react to a 15-year-old running off with a grown man differently today and assign blame differently...

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CMP#198 3 books that look under Austen's hood

8/1/2024

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CMP# 198 Three books that look under Austen's bonnet

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Now, this is something I'm happy to see in Austen scholarship and I hope it becomes a trend--forget about books that explain how Austen held exactly the same views as a blue-haired tattooed humanities undergraduate in an Ivy League university. These three newly-published books return to the formal scholarship of studying the nuts and bolts of Jane Austen's writing and the artistic choices that impelled her. Is the "under the hood" metaphor unsuitable for Austen? How about "under the bonnet" if in the UK? Still no? How about embroidery? Turning over the embroidery and looking at the back side, then.
How does Austen do it? And how did she differ from her predecessors and contemporaries? Let's return to studying the text. And--this is what I am all about--study the text in the context of the literature of Austen's day. This will bring you rewarding realizations and will make it clear that Austen was very much engaged with what she read.
I think this kind of scholarship is just the sort of thing Janeites would enjoy...

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New Publication: "Retelling Jane Austen"

CMP#200 Top 5 18th C. Tropes Austen Didn't Use

CMP#199 Is Lydia a Feminist Rebel or a Victim?

CMP#198 3 books that look under Austen's hood

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