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American friend re the cold front that roared through today: "Temperature here's going from 65 to 20 like it saw a state trooper." Doesn't work in celsius, from 15 to -4, but yeah. Some wind there. Wore boots to physio which guaranteed the snow flurries stayed flurry.

Have finished two M Corvinus, Bodies Politic and Going Back, plus Jesse Sutanto's Vera Wang's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers. Have Dead Man's Sandals and Dial A for Auntie by Wishart and Sutanto respectively to be going on with. Sense and Sensibility chugs along whenever I make it to the front room bike. Confirms my late 20s opinion that Austen was far more misanthropic than people give her credit for. Maybe Elinor and Marianne's mother is an exception but she never met a middle-aged woman she didn't loathe. And by middle-aged, I mean over 35.

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Austen was far more misanthropic than people give her credit for.

She was!

....I think there's the other captain's wife in Persuasion (memory, where art thou) but I dint remember how old she is.

I was surprised at how young Lady Russell was in Persuasion-- or I think it was Lady Russell. And Mrs. Bennett can't be much more than forty.

They really are so young! Cholinergic (NO, SWYPE) Colonel Brandon is thirty-six!!

The real shock for me was how young the three musketeers are. Athos is thirty! A mere infant!!

Anne Eliot herself was under thirty! One starts to imagine how Legolas must have felt, while part of the Fellowship of the Ring.

Edited 2024-02-29 06:13 (UTC)

All about her bloom having faded, prompting a university friend to snarl 'These people think they're effing trees!'

Just a touch of misanthropy to keep us on our toes!

I don't think she's all that keen on Mrs Norris and Lady Bertram, but she certainly makes them amusing.

Not keen at all, but it makes me wonder, 'Did she not know any nice older women at all?' Or were they all mean souls, cribbed cabined and confined by village life?

I guess Mrs Croft, Mrs Jennings (bit tactless for sure!), and Mrs Gardiner are all right. But the issue of what age constitues a Regency older woman always confuses me.

Mrs Jennings is as vulgar as Mrs Bennett, though, and Mrs Gardiner is much younger, going by her husband's age. I wouldn't put her at much more than thirty, which as you say, is... uhh, how is that older? But she is, for once, a reasonable mother.

A little while ago I wrote about the sheer horror of those 3 or 4 families in a country parish that you can't get away from....

People never talk about dear sweet Jane as ancestress of du Maurier or Shirley Jackson, but I think she's in the DNA.

Not only her female descendants. I detect ancestry in both Amises and Maugham. Who didn't have her excuse for biliousness re the rest of humanity ie the narrow confines of village life where one is far and away the most intelligent person around.

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