I've just read a comment by Jimmy at https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/question/view/2618 and was reminded of an e-mail that I received not long ago. It said something like: "[Do you] Want to write like Jane Austen?" Or maybe "How to write like Jane Austen". I suppose that it was offering places on a writers' workshop / seminar / whatever, and came from either "The Writers' Workshop" or "Writers & Artists". I've been looking through my e-mail inbox and can't find it, so I guess that I must have binned it. Or maybe there never was such an e-mail and dementia is advancing on me. Can any of you confirm [seeing something like this] (and rescue my sanity)?
Anyway, Jimmy's comment ('According to Jane Austen, the correct form was "Do not you think" ') has spurred me to answer this question "Want to write like Jane Austen?" with a resounding "Certainly NOT!" *
Not only do I not want to write "Do not you think", I ALSO don't want to write novels where the #1 obsession is "Is she going to catch him in the end?" NOR novels where none of the main characters seem to work for a living (OK, OK: an exaggeration, but there ARE a lot of idle rich swanning about with nothing better to do than going for outings in carriages) while the working class hardly puts in an appearance. (And a low income disqualifies them from love.)
Or have I been reading the wrong Jane Austen books?
* Not even the fact that Pride and Prejudice is by far the most down-loaded book of the Gutenberg Project's list sways me. (16,690 down-loads compared with the much-more-deserving #2, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, at 10,183) [See http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?sort_order=downloads] (Sherlock Holmes comes in 3rd, and a piece of erotica victoriana 4th. That's the only one I downloaded. [I've already got Alice in printed form.]) Of course, you have to remember that all the books on their list are copyright-free.
Actually, P&P is one of Austen's that I haven't read. (Perhaps the only one?) But I promised myself that if I was a good girl and behaved myself, I wouldn't have to. Even if it's free.
Try that again: you don't like Jane Austen's work, do you? Give us an edit facility, do, W&A!
You like Jane Austen work, do you, Wilhelmina? Just a guess...
It has been postulated that there are only 7 basic plots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots
JA only used one of them (the one labelled "Comedy" in this list). "Booker makes sure to stress that comedy is more than humor. It refers to a pattern where the conflict becomes more and more confusing, but is at last made plain in a single clarifying event. Most romances fall into this category."
Now, I have no problem with that: Works as diverse as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Sliding Doors are covered by this. As are all the Austen books (as far as I know). But the difference between any 2 Austen books is much less than that between A Midsummer Night's Dream and Sliding Doors.
What bothers me is that Austen chooses as the role models she presents to her reader such prigs as Edmund and Fanny, who are DISGUSTED and SICKENED by Miss Crawford's practical charity towards a "fallen woman", calling it "evil [...] her total ignorance,
[...] a perversion of mind". Or Edmund's father, who considers the projected private perforance of a play to be a HUGE indecency...
And in Sense And Sensibility, the moral is that repressing your passions, PRETENDING that you don't really care is MUCH to be preferred to allowing your emotions free rein... and will be rewarded as such.
Oh yes: another lovely detail. Virtue is ALWAYS rewarded: Vice is ALWAYS punished... as long as we accept Jane Austen's standards of what is a virtue, what is a vice.
In MY book, Miss Crawford behaves much more decently (at the end of the Mansfield Park) than either Fanny, Edmund, OR his father. But she's EVIL, with a "perversion of mind".