Germaine Greer on Jane Austen

[shewhomust]

Female self-worth could have been invented by Jane Austen. No wonder we still value her.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I am so very fond of Germaine Greer- always provocative, always original, always her own woman.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I'm not a Greer fan for the most part - but what she says here is sensible and obviously true.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I am with GG on this one, for sure.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

I don't really buy it--it sounds like Greer just hasn't read much stuff written before Austen, if she's genuinely arguing that Austen might have "invented" female self-worth. I mean--Merry Wives of Windson? Fletcher's The Tamer Tam'd? Rachel Speght's Mouzell for Melastomous?

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

I also gotta say that I disagree with her about Mansfield Park. As I recall, Fanny doesn't hold her tongue and refuse to speak up in any way because "it would make her stronger"--she does it because she's meek and obedient and "good."

I hated her. By the end of the book, I wanted dreadful things to befall her.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

When she's good, she's very good; but when she's bad...

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I certainly hated Fanny; enough not to have re-read Mansfield Park in a long while. I'm attracted to this reading partly as a way into not hating her - but I suspect you're right, all the same: meek and obedient and smug.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Oh, I do agree about Fanny Price - though this may have something to do with the fact that I studied Mansfield Park for 'A' level. The Crawfords were more to my taste, though they were set up as something of a false dichotomy: I'm not sure even Elizabeth Bennett would have passed muster with FP.

As for earlier examples, I'd chuck Constantia Munda into the mix (as an even more full-on Swetnam basher), and - perhaps more controversially - Pamela Andrews. Jane Austen was a big Richardson fan, after all - and I think Pamela's endurance against various kinds of abuse and temptation may well be an ingredient in the Fanny Price mix. But I much prefer Richardson's version!