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A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really MatterShe knew what she was about, and refused all temptations to wander from her course. After Emma was dedicated, at his own invitation, to the prince regent—Great Britain’s acting monarch during the senility of his father, George III—Austen heard again from the prince’s librarian, a pompous clergyman named James Stanier Clarke, who had been serving as the regent’s intermediary. (The prince did not of course deal with Austen himself, even if she was one of his favorite writers.) Clarke took the liberty of inflicting upon her that common torment of successful authors: he gave her an idea for a book. “Any Historical Romance illustrative of the History of the august house of Cobourg,” the German noble family whose youngest son was about to marry the Prince’s daughter, “would just now be very interesting,” he helpfully explained. but . . . I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter.—No—I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way. “I am fully sensible that an Historical Romance . . . might be much more to the purpose of Profit or Popularity, than such pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages as I deal in,” Austen replied (“romance” here meaning something like “saga”)—Her own way was to make art out of the very things that absorbed her attention in her own life ...» |
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