The "A" authors must begin with Jane Austen, so prolific in her characters, her satires of her contemporary society, and her Romantic inclinations surfacing from beneath the witty surface.
If you were part of AP Lang ever, you know that we read the opening chapters of Pride and Prejudice and its recent version Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. For those of you delving into the world of Austen, that combination is an excellent course - very accessible and quite fun to look comparatively at the two milieus side-by-side.
I was turned onto Jane Austen and here plethora of incredible novels by the "Austen Renaissance" that occurred in film-making circa 1995-1996, which would be Emma Thompson's fabulous Sense and Sensibility, Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma, its modern adaptation Clueless, and, the best of all, the BBC version of Pride & Prejudice with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.
In order of Jane Austen: The Complete Novels, here are snippets of the plots - in the order I think I read them:
- Pride & Prejudice - her most famed novel, a tale of 5 sisters, 2 rich gentlemen, and the society that proclaims "it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" to exhibit the faulty reasoning behind that system all the while creating the magnetic connection between Miss Elizabeth Bennet (Prejudice) and Mr. Darcy (Pride). The BBC miniseries is so accurate to this novel - it takes all of the wit and energy and makes what seems quite simple (the marriage rituals of mid to upper class British folks) into a dynamic chess game of manners and mores.
- Sense & Sensibility - as with the former novel, this one also connects abstract ideas to characters via Elinor (Sense) & Marianne (Sensibility) Dashwood, two sisters with different philosophies of life and both having relationship trouble. Whether it is the film or the novel, both look at how both extremes don't work well to emotional survival, that one should find a medium between the two, or at least that's how I see it.
- Emma - here Austen creates a well-intentioned, matchmaking protagonist who actually is quite blind to her own feelings and relationships. Emma is a light-hearted romp; her conflicts are minor and more for teaching our herione about her own selfishness to gain further maturity for her eventual partner.
- Mansfield Park - this one differs in that its main protagonist, Fanny, is a more of an outsider and presented without as much wit and voice and some of her other Austen leads. I personally like the novel and its key/locked gate motif; it definitely shows the flaws in the upper class world that Fanny's relative inhabit and how morally unadvanced those staying in Mansfield Park happen to be.
- Northanger Abbey - love, love this text and its satire of Gothic fiction. The main character wants to live in a novel - the first line of the text is "No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine." Unfortunately, through Austen's plot, the recognition that life is not a novel brings Catherine Morland into maturity.
- Persuasion - I never got into Persuasion in general although I should probably reread it now that I'm older. As a teenager, it wasn't as attractive to read about a woman who was a spinster who broke an engagement with a man and then years later has a second chance with him. I always felt there was a melancholy to this text that the other ones did not have.
- Lady Susan - this is an epistolary novel (vocab to learn = a text in letters/diary form) with widow Lady Susan and her daughter and all the hijinks that occur in their visits.
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