Jane Austen is more than a giantess among women writers. She is also a giantess among the giants, holding a place of pride and prominence among the greatest writers of either sex and of all ages. She doesn’t merely tower above George Elliot, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and the Brontë sisters, she also towers above [...]
Moral imagination runs not incidentally but necessarily in tandem with a certain aspect of conservatism, what I think of as imaginative conservatism. The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (259 pages, Ivan R. Dee, 2006) The Moral Imagination is a very engaging collection of a dozen essays on a dozen authors [...]
We live in a mad, mad world where anything goes and many things have gone. One of the things that appears to have gone is a sense of sanity. Take, for instance, a recent essay in The Atlantic which claims to show that William Shakespeare was in fact a woman.[*] The essay itself, which was written [...]
It is interesting that at least half the great books I considered for this list were stories I would not want to enter, but loved reading. Literature allows us to gain a breadth of experience our own circumstances would not permit and at very little expense to us… If there’s something book lovers like almost [...]
Jane Austen’s heroines live, choose, and marry according to the highest wisdom about love that is ruled by principle, not convention—by the prudent mind, pure heart, and informed conscience rather than by the false prudence of the world preoccupied by money, image, lust, or self-interest… Readers of Jane Austen’s novels recognize the plot that informs [...]
Moral imagination runs not incidentally but necessarily in tandem with a certain aspect of conservatism, what I think of as imaginative conservatism. The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (259 pages, Ivan R. Dee, 2006) The Moral Imagination is a very engaging collection of a dozen essays on a dozen authors [...]
In his narrow pursuit of one ruling idea, the fanatic ignores the greater world surrounding him and blinds himself to the rest of reality… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Mitchell Kalpakgian as he explores the nature of the fanatic and how fanaticism is incompatible with truth. —W. [...]
In an age when transgressive readings of literary classics have become the norm, it is refreshing to hear from a scholar who takes Jane Austen’s works as he finds them, not as he wishes them to be. Jane Austen & Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists by Peter W. Graham (216 pages, Routledge, 2008) Jane Austen’s novels [...]
For Jane Austen, happiness in general is the goal of human action done according to morality, a code of conduct according to which every person has value; and happiness in marriage is the result of each spouse valuing and pursuing the other’s happiness above all else… In our time, according to one of several divergent [...]
The continued appeal of Jane Austen’s work is in the true simplicity and humility hidden within the complex, deceitful web of human pride and prejudice… Taking some entertainment time, we sat down last week to watch again the classic BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth) was just as pompous [...]
Over the past few days I’ve been reading through Alfred A. Knopf 1915-2015: A Century of Publishing, a volume celebrating the legacy of one of the world’s most influential publishers. Knopf, now a division of Random House, has published twenty-five Nobel Prize winners and numerous Pullitzer Prize and National Book Award winners. What struck me, [...]
We are not born into a savage wilderness but into a beautiful mansion of the Lord that the Lord and those who have gone before us have built. We must avoid neglecting this mansion but rather glorify and preserve it—as we should all of the Lord’s Creation. Whit Stillman, in the novel version of his [...]
Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship is a magnificent Jane Austen adaptation, not least because it conceives of the perfect ending for the unpolished project of Austen’s juvenescence, Lady Susan. This is Jane Austen, and it is a comedy, so of course there must be a wedding at the end. But how does one best pull [...]
Because Whit Stillman has adapted Jane Austen’s Lady Susan for his new movie, Love & Friendship, it is worth asking the question: Will most people find that Mr. Stillman has discovered, in this early work of Austen, something new and unfamiliar about her, and made it accessible? The question is prompted by the reports of [...]