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.
@ Jimmy ("And how many working-class characters are there who aren't servants?")
Well, there's Fanny's family down in...? Southampton, was it? But they're mainly there to demonstrate the EVILS that result from marrying below one's station. Doesn't Fanny's mother write to her sisters APOLOGISING for the rashness of marrying for love?
A good novelist is supposed to be observant. Now, I have nothing against blind people wanting to write novels. More power to them, I say!
But a supposedly sighted author who writes AT LEAST 3 novels (and - I suspect - more), well-stocked with dinner parties among the genteel, without ONCE (as far as my memory serves, please cite examples to dispute this) mentioning the servants who carried in the many soup tureens and cleared away the many meat platters... Is that willfull blindness, lack of observational skills, or just snobbishness?
And, please, nobody use the argument of JA's reflecting her times. Johann Goethe, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft were contemporaries. To name but 3. Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Fielding predated her. i.e. There was a precedent to write novels and plays that included the working class among the main characters... sometimes even treating them with a certain respect.
JA chose to ignore them... aside from the odd groom who brought around milady's horse or accompanied her on her "solitary" rides, the odd mention of "sending 'round a servant to bring you those..." Very few, and most of those were mentioned "off in the wings" or had walk-on parts. I imagine that, in the 3 JA novels which I've read, I could count the servants who had speaking parts on the fingers on one-and-a-half hands. And all their lines added together wouldn`t fill a single page.
And how many working-class characters are there who aren't servants?
@ Wilhelmina Lyre
a) ("I realise that I haven't read Persuasion, either. I'll give myself an extra treat by not doing so.")
You've certainly earned your little treat, Wilhelmina!
b) "Let (s)he that is without sin throw the first indignant, morally-outraged fit." [...] As you can see, I'm quite adept at that already.
Adept??? You're at least a regional contender!
@ Adrian Sroka ('You don't accidently stumble onto perfection six times')
No, and neither did Austen. To call her novels "perfection" is hyperbole at best, and skewiff judgement in my opinion.
I must admit that I've only read 3 of her novels (being 50% of her "major novels"): Emma, Mansfield Park, and Sense And Sensibility. Perhaps the other 3 are "perfection", but - like Wilhelmina - I'm going to allow myself the little luxury of not finding out. I also must admit that I did enjoy her "The History of England", but that was so blatantly over-the-top and purposefully "prejudiced" that it was funny... as it was meant to be. Maybe our Jane should have stuck to comedy.
Adrian, you haven't dealt with W's point about all the plots being basically the same. Or are there really ORIGINAL plots in the 3 that I've missed? Maybe 'You don't accidently stumble onto perfection six times', but maybe you CAN stumble across a hackneyed (even in JA's time) old plot that appeals to the leisured (idle) classes. Aka a "best-seller" formula. Harold Robbins and Mickey Spillane stumbled across one of those (the same one: add some soft-core sex to "serious" subject). That didn't make their novels examples of perfection.
This comment has already disappeared twice (a vague motion of my hand in the air and my laptop jumps to another window, throwing all that I haven't previously "copied" to the ether), so I'll post it now and continue in a new box. I'm too punch-drunk to stop now...