| Title | : | Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0786706880 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780786706884 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 160 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1984 |
Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen Reviews
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“Truly Alice, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will – that is all, really, education is about, should be about.”
Wow, just wow! Love this little book by
Fay Weldon. It is a collection of short essays about Jane Austen, about Writing, about being a Writer written in the form of letters to a fictional niece, very much like Jane Austen herself had written to her niece Fanny Austen-Knight 200 years ago. It is also a very personal, I would say, almost intimate tribute to the wonderful Jane Austen.
I loved Fay W's metaphor about the great "City of Invention", where authors are presented as builders, creating houses in the different districts of genres (and where, yes, there are literary McDonald's, selling books with empty calories) and then how she goes on, unwrapping this metaphor about Literature/the Writing Process in general and then always returns to Jane Austen in particular. Recommended to all Jane Austen addicts and all readers interested in history of Literature in general.
"If it's approval you want, don't be a writer,"
“Sometimes you’ll find quite a shoddy building so well placed and painted that it quite takes the visitor in, and the critics as well – and all cluster round, crying, ‘Lo, a masterpiece!’ and award it prizes. But the passage of time, the peeling of paint, the very lack of concerned visitors, reveals it in the end for what it is: a house of no interest or significance.”
“The good builders, the really good builders, carry a vision out of the real world and transpose it into the City of Invention, and refresh and enlighten the visitor, so that on his, or her, return to reality, that reality is changed, however minutely. A book that has no base in an initial reality, written out of reason and not conviction, is a house built of – what shall we say? – bricks and no mortar? Walk into it, brush against a door frame, and the whole edifice falls down about your ears. Like the first little pig’s house of straw, when the big bad wolf huffed and puffed.” -
Ah. Compulsory school reading. Isn't it delightful?!
I think it a slight flaw of the school system to make books that are as boring as hell compulsory (actually Hell would probably be a bit more exciting, all fiery and whatnot). Why? Do these people like torturing kids? Do they get a perverse pleasure out of turning our brains to goo?
Answer: yes. Yes they do.
This book can be summed up as so:
- Coconuts fall from trees
- Jane Austen is cool but radical
- Midwifery is a hazardous occupation
- Crocodiles put a stopper on the imagination
- Canberra is thrilling
- Women who bake bread for their husbands are not feminists
- Nothing that Fay Weldon says can be taken at face value
I will now go off to hide this book in corner and proceed to forget it ever existed. :) -
Dear Aunt Fay,
I wanted to enjoy you more than I did. I normally love epistolary formats, especially with a literary theme! I appreciated your knowledge on Jane Austen. I learned a few tidbits about her life, the world the she lived in, and her novels. However, your lecturing tone which crossed the border to downright condescension became tedious. Perhaps because I live in a world where any social media app I open is full of people "talking at me" and I long for congenial conversation at times? Though I am glad to have met you. I am also most glad our time together was short and over.
Sincerely,
A tired reader who sympathized with niece Alice. -
What an excellent little book!
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"Alice" is a fictional character, the author, Fay Weldon, signs her letters to this nonexistent niece "your aunt Fay" and most of the book reads more like essays than a novel. Sounds ghastly, right? It probably is if you read it at the wrong moment.
Like many people who loved this book, I received it as a gift, put it aside, and then started reading one day when I was in the right mood. And BAM! I was hooked and read this short piece in an afternoon (127 pages in this edition). It definitely helps to like Jane Austen; it's hard to imagine someone who hasn't read Austen or doesn't like her work enjoying this book.
Most of the "story" consists of Aunt Fay "explaining" Austen's life and times to her niece, a young woman of eighteen who has dyed her hair punkette style (the book was first published in 1984) and who has to read Austen for school--and isn't looking forward to it. The conceit is cleverer than it sounds, and there's a neat twist at the end. Fay delivers some lofty and, for some readers, pretentious-sounding passages on the meaning of Great Literature, while discouraging her niece from writing a novel before she has had anything in the way of a life.
But the real meat of this work is the discussion of Austen as a person and a writer who lived in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and into the first two decades of the nineteenth as an Anglican clergyman's daughter in village England. As Weldon (or Aunt Fay) describes it, all these facts are inseparable, and essential, in understanding Austen's work. And if you aren't familiar with the horrible realities of that time and place, even for a middle-class woman (as best we can define Austen's level for today's world), then you lack the necessary background to appreciate her fiction--and you will be troubled by all those questions whose answers elude junior-high school students: Why didn't "they" (Austen, her sister, her fictional characters, middle- and upper-class women in general) just "get a job" instead of remaining trapped in shabby-genteel poverty? Why does Austen almost never refer to current events, among the most dramatic in English history (the Napoleonic Wars, great stuff!)? Why does she not describe all those peculiar articles of clothing that we would like to visualize, or elaborate on all those bizarre two-hundred-year-old customs? And why would anyone willingly marry Mr. Collins?
For someone like me, who spent years immersed in Pride and Prejudice and who has spent even longer than that reading and thinking about Austen as a person, woman and writer, reading this book was like an alcoholic's finding a case of Jack Daniel's outside the kitchen door. I was flabbergasted as Weldon put forward every last one of what I thought were my unique opinions about Austen and her works and times. The obvious explanation is that my opinions aren't unique or even all that unusual, but even among my fellow Janeites I often feel alone in my outlook. Seeing my ideas laid out one after the other and presented as Gospel--bam bam BAM BAM BAM--was, let us say, highly addictive.
Many readers who love this book cite the "City of Invention," Weldon's beautifully-imagined metropolis of all the lasting literary works, with the reeking slums of porn huddled somewhere near the docks and the prefabricated suburbs of genres like romance and mystery rising far too quickly on the outskirts. It is a nice metaphor, but it's also fair to say that times have changed. We feel very differently now about porn and genre fiction than we did almost thirty years ago. Not only do many more of us read and write it unashamedly, but the idea of a strict division between Literary and Genre is as dated for many of us as "separate but equal" as a sound basis for a public school system. And when Aunt Fay starts railing against "word processors" and decrees that longhand is the only way to write fiction ... oh, please!
No, the stuff that makes me want to run down the street waving this book and shouting "Read this now!" is the wealth of insight about Austen. I could fill this generous review space several times over with my favorite quotes, but I will have to content myself with picking out two or three of Weldon's major themes.
First: her discussion of fiction as different from, and superior to, nonfiction. It "rais[es] invention above description" (p. 52). Almost anyone can be taught to write a detailed, accurate description. The genius of fiction is the author's imagination (thus the literary "City of Invention"). Weldon rejects the well-worn advice always to "write what you know," seeing it as the source of Austen's duller passages when she followed it too faithfully. "Fiction, thank God, is not and need not be reality" (p. 32). "Novels are not meant to be diaries" (p. 90). "You do not read novels for information but for enlightenment" (p. 29).
Second: Weldon's feminism, beginning with her accounts in the early letters of the harshness of women's lives at that time, especially the dangers they faced from constant childbearing in a world without modern medicine or access to birth control. She takes "a tender view of Mrs. Bennet" of Pride and Prejudice, with her five unmarried daughters, saying that "Women were born poor, and stayed poor, and lived well only by their husbands' favour." "Enough to give anyone the vapours!" (p. 27)
Weldon's assessment of Mr. Bennet ("callous and egocentric," p. 109) and Mr. Woodhouse of Emma ("irritating, difficult and hypochondriacal," p. 80) is refreshingly harsh and accurate, even if not necessarily the way Austen meant us to see them, characters who may have been based on her own beloved father. As in her sympathetic attitude toward Mrs. Bennet ("tenderer than her creator's"), Weldon is "looking at [Austen's world] from the outside in, not the inside out" (p. 30).
"Austen's books are studded with [examples of] male whims taking priority ... over female happiness," says Weldon. "[Austen] does not condemn. She chides women for their raging vanity, their infinite capacity for self-deception, their rapaciousness and folly; men, on the whole, she simply accepts" (p. 19-20). Weldon finds examples in the Austen family history that reflect the way of that world, that "when a man has a principle, a woman pays for it," as when one of Austen's aunts was accused of shoplifting and her husband refused to buy the shopkeeper off, insisting on a trial. "He believes in honour; she stays in prison" (p. 94).
Finally, there is the most fascinating argument of all, one that explores ideas I have been wrestling with literally for years: whether Austen was truly "good," really accepted the morality of her times, or simply had her spirit crushed. Austen lived her forty-one years as a dutiful spinster daughter, at home with her (eventually) widowed mother and fellow-spinster sister, never allowed to achieve independent adulthood. Did she embrace this restricted existence happily and cheerfully because she believed it in her heart to be right and just? Or did she bow to necessity, accepting defeat with the good manners her society required of women? I disagree with Weldon's idea that Austen brought on the Addison's disease that killed her as a sort of auto-immune response to frustration and years of repressed anger. Claire Tomalin's biography has established the most likely cause as tuberculosis caught by nursing one of her brothers.
But apart from psychobabble, there is a real sense in the arc of Austen's life and career of a brilliant, fierce, angry rebel caught, beaten down and stifled into docility. Weldon suggests that there was another reason besides the obvious financial one that Austen never married: that in the woman and the writer there was a "ripple of merriment, this underground hilarity" and that "something truly frightening rumbled there beneath the bubbling mirth." "She knew too much … for her own good" (p. 97-98).
Weldon presents an interesting theory in her interpretation of Mansfield Park, the first book Austen wrote after the death of her father. In the contrast between the "unspeakably good" heroine, Fanny Price, and the "witty, lively, and selfish" Mary Crawford, Weldon suggests that Austen was working out her own internal struggle between her "good" and "bad" sides that was "never quite reconciled." The "rebellious spirit" in Austen learned the "defences of wit and style" like Mary, while the "dutiful side accept[ed] authority, endur[ed] everything with a sweet smile and [found] her defence in wisdom" (p. 109).
William Deresiewicz, in his book A Jane Austen Education (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), accepts the dutiful Austen as the real one, the "good" side her only side. "Usefulness and kindness," he says, "those same standards of decency she had championed in Mansfield Park … mattered to her more than all the wit in the world" (p. 192). But this, I am convinced, is a man's view, even two hundred years later still preferring what Virginia Woolf called the "Angel in the House," "utterly unselfish," "sacrificed herself daily," "never had a mind or a wish of her own" (p. 22), to the uncomfortable reality of a genius in a woman's body.
Like Weldon, I say an emphatic No! to so depressing a view. That wit is too ferocious and too powerful, too great a triumph of art and inspiration to be discarded so casually. Weldon reminds us of "Lady Susan," Austen's unpublished epistolary novella, in which a thoroughly "wicked woman" romps through genteel society but is never punished as fictional morality demands (p. 85). It's unlikely that Austen's family approved of "Lady Susan;" certainly Austen's father never tried to have it published as he had Pride and Prejudice.
"If it's approval you want, don't be a writer," Aunt Fay warns her niece (p. 112); earlier she has said that "A writer writes opaquely to keep some readers out, let others in. It is what he or she meant to do. It is not accidental - obscurity of language, inconsistency of thought ... it's not for everyone, it was never meant to be" (p. 106).
Rather than believe in a Jane Austen who rejected her greatest gifts in favor of a dubious piety, I accept Aunt Fay's version: "I think indeed she bowed her will and humbled her soul, and bravely kept her composure ... and escaped into the alternative worlds of her novels ... and her self-discipline was so secure [that] she brought into that inventive world sufficient of the reality of the one we know and think we love, but which I think she hated, to make those novels outrun the generations" (p. 40, emphasis mine).
Anyone who loves Jane Austen's work and has wondered what the person was really like, or why she wrote what she wrote, should not miss this book. Whether or not you agree with all of "Aunt Fay" 's conclusions, you will be left with some excellent food for thought--or, if you prefer, several cases of superior bourbon. -
Poor Alice to have such a 'know-all' aunt. Alice is a fictional niece but even so, if I had an aunt write such long, self-obsessed, boastful and patronising letters such as this, I'd understand why my own mother and her sister, this aunt had fallen out.
I had hoped, very much, that this book would help me to explain why Jane Austen was such an excellent writer. Instead, I found myself skipping the bits about the aunt's life, the aunt's way of writing and the aunt's opinions on life and the universe JUST to find the words that were about Jane Austen and her books.
Did you know, for example, that Marxists are usually meat eaters? Such a sweeping generalisation if ever there was one!
My recommendation to anyone who wants to read this little book is to do so very slowly, i.e. read it as if you were the recipient of the letters and then read one every evening or every other day for example. I read it in one go and could not wait for the ending.
There is no doubt Fay Weldon is clever and can probably talk endlessly about fascinating subjects but this would not have made me want to read, appreciate or become a fan of Jane Austen at all. -
One of my favorite books about writers and writing. In the form of letters from an aunt, who is published literary novelist, to her niece who is in college and such that Jane Austen has nothing to say to her. Of course, Weldon explains exactly how much Jane Austen has to say. I have always loved the extended metaphor of novelist as builders in the city of literature, with different neighborhoods, and the English language side of town presided over by the great Castle Shakespeare.
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This was fun! I’m glad I read it. So many home truths here. Fay Weldon has many opinions about Jane Austen, some though not all that I agree with. But really it is more a book about writing, disguised as a book about Jane Austen. Reading it made me feel less alone as a writer. Even the insanely prolific Fay Weldon struggled with exactly the same practical/artistic problems and fought the same despair.
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Interesting premise to examine the work of Jane Austen, through the narrator's letters to her niece, Alice. The letters are written initially while traveling in Australia, then continue when she returns home to the UK. Not much is said about the places she writes from.
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i recommend this book to you if you are blind
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Parts of this book were quite enjoyable, however I could never shake the feeling of being lectured in a very condescending way which made it not overly satisfying to read.
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Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen has been on my to-read list for years. I borrowed a copy from OpenLibrary, and have rather mixed feelings about it. Whilst I very much enjoyed the first letter in this epistolary novella, and felt both engaged and immersed within it, the rest of the book felt inconsistent. Many of the letters which followed were quite dull, and lacked the wit and humour present in the first. They also tended to include, almost exclusively, biographical details about Jane Austen. I've read Carol Shields' fantastic biography of Austen, and for me, nothing is going to come close to it. A lot of the factual prose here came across as something you might find in a basic children's history book. At around the halfway point, I had completely lost interest in it, and decided to put it down completely.
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Inte den värsta boken och skulle vilja säga att den tar sig. Ger en liten fin inblick i hur en författade ser på världen, en liten mer inspirerande läsning om Jane Austins liv än att bara läsa på Wikipedia.
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Everyone in my lit analysis class is a hater for not liking this!!! Like no fucking way they did not pick up on the satire. "OOOO she's so pretentious" did we even read the same book??? God forbid someone describe how much they love reading and writing and wanting to share that love with a younger family member and encourage her to consume media in all different forms from all throughout history
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An interesting short book with lots of information on Jane Austen and her novels. The author also provides some detail from her own experiences on the art of writing fiction.
This book was first published in 1984. -
2,5 stars. Was able to continue and read because of the snippets about Jane Austen and because of the reading challenge I'm part of. This is 160 pages, but felt like 560 pages :O
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What a fun read for fans of
Fay Weldon! It is a real treat for her fans to peek over her shoulder while she pens her epistolary experiment! One need not be a fan of
Jane Austen, but if one is, well, all the better!
Alas, one need be a fan of Weldon, and I had not read her, so all the worse! She seems to have been quite prolific, but this is not the Weldon novel to begin with, I suspect, as it seems more of a playful, self-indulgent, but ultimately failed experiment, a sort of "romp" through an essay on what it means (for Weldon) to be a writer. Some of the historical context on Austen and the thoughts of an established writer on her craft are interesting enough, but they seem to fit their epistolary novel's clothing rather poorly. I would rather have read straightforward essays than these letters to a fictional niece--who in an epistolary novel that is true to its genre would roll her eyes at the arrival of each self-involved, condescending letter with her aunt's gallivanting return address. Austen slowly recedes as a topic, and the letters (and plot) begin to seem contrived and tiresome--a fun idea whose execution flagged.
That being said, for Weldon's fans, this may well be a fun, quick read, especially if they also have read Austen. If one of my favorite living authors experimented with a sloppy literary paean to one of my favorite deceased authors (say, if
Monika Maron penned a pseudo-"Letter from the Desk of
Virginia Woolf"), I would be enthused. Indeed, Woolf's
Orlando was a failed literary experiment that I enjoyed but would never recommend as a reader's first (or third) novel by Woolf. -
A friend - thank you Dee - once sent me this book after a conversation about Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. She mentioned it as a sort of introduction to Jane Austen and her world. Last month I finally decided to pick it up.
The book is comprised of a number of letters that an aunt, who happens to be a published writer, sends to her niece, who is doing an English major at the University but doesn't want to read Jane Austen. So the letters starts by addressing Austen, her world, beliefs and social rules and then goes on to expand on the subject of being a writer. From what I found both characters are fictional (although Fay Weldon is indeed a successful published author) but the book is very much a work of nonfiction.
I did like her comments about Jane Austen very much. If we understand the time frame in which her stories were written it is a lot easier to understand what she meant with certain scenes, dialogues or behaviours. Weldon gives us just a glimpse of that but what she gives is enough to understand that society.
She also gives her opinions and advice on what is literature, and what is not; how does an author work and why and what's the relationship with the readers. Although I found this part of the book interesting material to think about I have to admit that my favourite parts were the ones related with Austen and her body of work. Anyone who has read and enjoyed Austen will probably like to read those letters too.
Grade: 4/5 -
Questo libro si macchia di uno dei peccati più brutti grazie alla presenza ingombrante dell'autrice: l'arroganza.
Jane Austen emerge a singhiozzi in pochissime righe e tutto il resto delle pagine è dedicato ad un poco nascosto elogio di sé e da sprezzanti giudizi non richiesti su altri autori.
Carissima Fay Weldon, la prossima volta non ingannare i tuoi lettori nascondendoti dietro false argomentazioni, ma scrivi chiaramente nel tuo titolo che il presente libro altro non è che una celebrazione delle tue presunte e inarrivabili doti artistiche e dei tuoi pensieri nazifemministi.
A mai più arrivederci. -
I thought I would like this book because it was a book of essays about Jane Austen. But this book really hasn't aged well. All her talk of City of Invention felt pretentious and irritating. There were a couple of entertaining flashes but this book was mostly a bore--and contained a couple of shocking instances where she said a woman should not have complained of being raped after she participated in a political revolution and that there is subconscious desire to die in people with auto immune diseases. Do not recommend.
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E mi fermo qui: 10% del libro su Jane Austen, il resto i deliri di una scrittrice che consiglia spassionatamente a sua nipote di scrivere un libro, fingendo con i suoi genitori. Nemmeno il contesto storico è approfondito, solo di sfuggita. Il resto del libro è una guida per la nipote alla scrittura.
Se siete amanti di Jane Austen state alla larga da questo libro -
The things I have to read for English. I wouldn't read this on my spare time - and I love books.
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3.5 stars.
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I had to read this for Advanced English
Look, I found Weldon's persona enjoyable at times but other times hard to engage with.
Only 2 stars from me
(I'm just glad I finished it) -
La nièce (imaginaire) de l'auteur lui fait part de sa difficulté à lire et aimer Jane Austen et en même temps de son envie d'écrire elle-même un roman. Sa tante lui répond sur ses sujets mais disserte également sur la littérature en général et la vie des auteurs et c'est ces lettres qui sont regroupés dans cet ouvrage.
Fay Weldon est une sommité dans la monde austenien et j'avais donc très envie de découvrir ce qu'elle avait à dire sur Jane Austen. De plus, nous les janéites, avons souvent étaient confrontées à des gens qui ont du mal à comprendre toute la magie de la plume de l'auteur et j'espérais également y trouver des réponses à leur apporter. Certains passages de ce livre sont proprement passionnants. Bien que je connaisse déjà bien les moeurs de l'époque, l'auteur nous projette littéralement à la place d'une femme de la fin du dix-huitième siècle avec des faits précis et nous aide à comprendre bien des choses. Ce qu'elle dit de l'écriture et de la littérature, la façon dont elle la représente comme une citée imaginaire m'a beaucoup parlé, d'autant que la nièce s'appelle Alice alors c'est un peu comme si elle s'adressait directement à moi non ?
Bien sûr, il y a des passages un peu plus rébarbatifs et j'avoue que je n'ai pas aimé le ton condescendant de l'auteur envers la jeune femme. Elle la prend souvent de haut même si elle fait amende honorable à la fin. Quelques informations, que je sais fausses, sont énoncées comme des vérités et elle raconte parfois la fin d'un livre ou l'autre de Jane Austen ce qui, à mon sens, n'est pas la meilleure manière de donner envie aux gens de le lire.
Malgré ces petits défauts, j'en retiens surtout le positif, l'humour de l'auteur et quelques passages surlignés que tout fan de Jane Austen devrait avoir lu.
http://janeausten.hautetfort.com/arch... -
I could have done without the fictional guise of the letters and an imaginary niece/family. I would have preferred a more straightforward collection of essays. For that is what the book really is, essays where Weldon muses about writing and reading.
Weldon is highly quotable and makes numerous spot on remarks that had me nodding my head in recognition. Like these -
The mere recording of event does not make a book. Experience does not add to Idea.
Fiction is much safer than non fiction. You can be accused of being boring, but seldom of being wrong.
You do not read novels for information but for enlightenment.
I do not think the life/personality of writers to be particularly pertinent to their work, but I do think the times in which writers live are important.
I believe that reading books you do not really want to read, like looking after children you do not really want to look after, should be a very highly paid occupation.
It is not only ignorance in the illiterate we need to combat, it is insensitivity in the well-to-do.
The kind of swooning, almost erotic pleasure that a good passage in a good book gives...is it the pleasure of mind meeting mind, untramelled by flesh? Of the inchoation of our own experience suddenly given shape and form? Why yes, we cry: yes, yes, that is how it is! -
What a curious little book. I’ve never read Fay Weldon before, although I was familiar with her name. I found this book at Amber Unicorn Used Books in the Jane Austen section (a section I always check in used bookstores as one can never have too many copies of Austen’s novels) and the title caught my fancy.
But what is this book? Fiction or non-fiction? One-sided epistolary novel or lit crit? A defense of Jane Austen or advice on becoming a writer?
Obviously, I enjoyed the Jane parts of this the best. Ms. Weldon’s observations of Jane Austen and the era in which she lived were entertaining and in some cases, a new perspective. As a lover of Jane myself, her love for Jane is to be admired and commended.
I am not a writer, alas. I’m not creative in any way really, so the parts in the book that explicitly addressed writing were a bit boring. Her “City of Invention” analogy for the process of writing fiction never quite gelled for me. I’m curious what actual writers think about how Ms. Weldon writes about writing. Have any of my writer friends read this book?
There was a lot of humor and wit and pithiness in this book. I enjoyed her voice. I might actually read another of her books. -
"Inspired by an exchange of letters between the novelist Jane Austen and a niece, herself a literary aspirant, this epistolary novel chronicles the responses to young Alice, a college student with black and green hair who sees little point in the study of literature (she's declared Jane Austen petty, irrelevant, and boring), by her abashed but forbearing Aunt Fay. Sometimes with irony, often with passion, Aunt Fay attempts to introduce her recalcitrant niece to the many enchantments that lie in what she calls the City of Invention: that place where the reader and writer through the magic of literature meet."
~~back cover
I didn't care for this book. It seemed stilted, as though Aunt Fay were intentionally being literary and long winded. I would have appreciated a softer response, one more likely to appeal to a know-it-all collegiate niece.
