flemmings | (no subject)

So the next Austen to read was obviously Emma, which for fifty years was neck and neck with P&P for favourite Austen. Ah well. Not suck fairy exactly but I really cannot be having with Mr. Woodhouse. Ten pages of him was quite enough. And Emma herself is turning into one of those women in straitened emotional circumstances, so no, not Emma for now.

But almost as bad is my next Thick Volume reread, Terra Nostra. I know I'd reread it once before, only a few years after my first read. But when I tried it a few years ago the nightmare feel stopped me in the first chapter. The thing really is an unpleasant drug dream but this time I'm determined to get further in: and this time I have google handy to track down those obscure throw-aways, which helps. Also the net to inform me just how A/U the thing really is. Mind, the net has its oddities too, like a discussion of Pound's Cino which seems to think it's about a dead girl's funeral procession. Don't know where they got that from but maybe I totally misunderstood the poem.

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Mr Woodhouse is indeed a nightmare. Also, textual evidence that Knightley has been grooming Emma since she was in her early teens....

Well, Educating One's Much Younger Wife has been a tradition since Xenophon, so I suppise Austen saw nothing wrong with it, especially since Emma lacked a functional father.

Maybe - not quite Edward/Minnie Benson vibes perhaps but close. (Knightley is not as bad as Benson, true.)

At least he didn't propose to Emma when she was twelve.