Books, Arts & Manners: Novel Distractions

I DON’T know what I would think today of the movie version of Pride and Prejudice, which I loved back then; but with that cast, and Aldous Huxley for co-scenarist, it should please me still. I do, however, have trouble with the current adaptation of an even finer Austen novel, Persuasion, for all the nice things it has to recommend it. Let me state that, though I admire and enjoy Jane Austen, I am not a Janeite, and would certainly not concur with Lord David Cecil’s declaration, “There are those who do not like her; as there are those who do not like sunshine and unselfishness.”

Miss Austen’s dialogue is delightful, but her true forte is description, evocation, commentary; no voice in all her fiction is as sparkling as the authorial. And no character in the novels is quite as worldly-wise as the omniscient narrator, who gives omniscience a truly human tone. Yet there is something a bit constrained and constraining about the fictional world in which everything revolves around who will, or will not, marry whom. The traditional ending of comedy may be a marriage, but here it is also the beginning and the middle, with everything, like a stream or rivulet, panting for the matrimonial river to debouch on.

JS

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John Simon

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I DON’T know what I would think today of the movie version of Pride and Prejudice, which I loved back then; but with that cast, and Aldous Huxley for co-scenarist, it should please me still. I do, however, have trouble with the current adaptation of an even finer Austen novel, Persuasion, for all the nice things it has to recommend it. Let me state that, though I admire and enjoy Jane Austen, I am not a Janeite, and would certainly not concur with Lord David Cecil’s declaration, “There are those who do not like her; as there are those who do not like sunshine and unselfishness.”

Miss Austen’s dialogue is delightful, but her true forte is description, evocation, commentary; no voice in all her fiction is as sparkling as the authorial. And no character in the novels is quite as worldly-wise as the omniscient narrator, who gives omniscience a truly human tone. Yet there is something a bit constrained and constraining about the fictional world in which everything revolves around who will, or will not, marry whom. The traditional ending of comedy may be a marriage, but here it is also the beginning and the middle, with everything, like a stream or rivulet, panting for the matrimonial river to debouch on.