Jane Austen Title Game.

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Nitwits and Nitpickers: Village idiots discuss lice and other inconvenient truths

Likes & Likenesses: This newly-found and unfinished Austen novel features Catherine "Kitty" Bennet sulking and whining about not being popular, and grumbling constantly after her sisters are all married off to monied and landed husbands.  She endlessly questions her family and friends (what few can still be called that) about her looks, her personality, and what other people think of her.  Ms. Austen stopped writing at the point where Kitty tries to ingratiate herself to a younger group of girls who see her as a mere nuisance and largely ignore her.  The manuscript is notable for showing how Ms. Austen's writing style had evolved to greater sophistication and clarity; but it is generally feared that even the talented Ms. Austen could not bring the story to a happy and peaceful resolution.


NOTES
• All of the foregoing is fiction.
• During the course of Pride and Prejudice (P&P), Kitty was confirmed to be a source of embarrassment for the Bennet family.  Though she is two years older than Lydia, she was completely under her youngest sister's guidance, and was considered weak-spirited and irritable.
• Kitty was described in P&P as being "ignorant, idle, and vain".  Her oldest sisters, Jane and Elizabeth, had tried to advise her, but she was always mortified by their advice, and never listened.  Fortunately, after her oldest sisters' marriages, Kitty's personality improved drastically -- no longer under Lydia's influence, and with her father's restrictions, as well as the proper attention and management of her oldest sisters, Kitty was said to become "less irritable, less ignorant, and less insipid".
• According to James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, Kitty later married a clergyman who lived near Pemberley; but this was never mentioned in any of Ms. Austen's works.

Last edited by Fnord on 03 Aug 2022, 3:18 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Creeps and Callousness: In yet another spin-off novel of Pride and Prejudice left unpublished by Austin, the reader is given an alternate resolution of the Wickham and Lydia subplot. In this rendition, Wickham ends his days in prison for crimes of child abduction and statutory rape, and Lydia becomes a prominent feminist figure and Gothic novelist.

I would read it!

I really hated that character, having know many real-life people just like him.

Reading a canonical story wherein he gets his comeuppance would make my day!

I know what you mean.

It's interesting that we have a very similar character in Sense and Sensibility - John Willoughby. He is portrayed as more of a villain, though, but he gets away with it.

Not so much a villain (except to Eliza Williams) but an insensitive and irresponsible lout, dallying with the fancies of young women and walking away when he was tired of them, only to realize too late what kind of life he could have had if he had only been more empathetic.

Unlike Wickham, Willoughby at least seemed repentant in the end.

It is a bit of a challenge to read these stories from a modern perspective. People who ensnare 15 year olds are always going to be villainous and irredeemable to me. Of course, that's not how it was historically. A lot of the blame is cast on Lydia in Pride and Prejudice for being "silly." A modern reader expects 15 year olds to be silly.

Back then, many girls were considered to be of marriageable age at 14, so Ms. Austen and her contemporaries probably gave much less thought to Lydia's age than they did to Eliza's illegitimate pregnancy and motherhood.

That’s true.

I’m by no means blaming Austen. She’s one of my favorite novelists. I just find specific passages in a couple of her novels unsettling.

Protests and Prejudice: Sparks fly when Texan cattle rancher, Bob, meets PETA activist, Astrid, at a protest outside of a slaughterhouse. Can they overcome their differences and find love? Can Astrid learn how to ride horses and shepherd cattle? Find out in this soon-to-be literary classic. Available, while supplies last, in select Walmarts and Dollar Generals in Arkansas.

Hens and Hendecasyllables.

(While Elinor works hard on the family chicken farm, Marianne is distracted by the lure of obscure poetic meters.)

Hormones and Whoremongers:

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Sense and Sinsemilla.

(Marianne smokes the strong stuff.)

Wiccans and Wikipedia

Vegans and Vicissitudes

Euthenasia and Youth in Asia ?