this intangible sense of appreciation for good honest Englishness (as embodied by a house in the country)
Ah, that's the really important thing that it's all about, for me :D But yes, I agree that they should have a chance to really work out the details of how their lives and values differ—the more so because they do connect so significantly over what really matters, but those differences are still real and important.
Aww, Freddy would be good for Clive!
I understood all of his subsequent romances as “not what he would have most honestly wanted to write.”
Yes, definitely. Austen isn't as not-really-interested in her central pairings as that suggests for Forster, but I think there is a tendency to view all her books primarily as romances all about the main pairing when a lot of the time that's not what she's most concerned with at all. Persuasion is one of the books where the pairing really is the main thing, and so is Pride & Prejudice; I'm thinking especially of Mansfield Park (my darling fave, though I wouldn't recommend it to you; if you don't like Anne's passivity you probably really wouldn't like Fanny), in which the getting-together is very brief and offstage but the point of things, including for Fanny herself, is not really about her love interest and there's all sorts of other stuff going on in the story. I find it especially interesting reading Austen's happy het endings in context of the fact that she herself never married—in all these stories about women finding fulfilment in marriage, what is she saying-by-not-saying about women who didn't or couldn't, perhaps similar to how Forster is saying-by-not-saying things about queer men?
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Date: 2024-05-27 08:07 am (UTC)Ah, that's the really important thing that it's all about, for me :D But yes, I agree that they should have a chance to really work out the details of how their lives and values differ—the more so because they do connect so significantly over what really matters, but those differences are still real and important.
Aww, Freddy would be good for Clive!
I understood all of his subsequent romances as “not what he would have most honestly wanted to write.”
Yes, definitely. Austen isn't as not-really-interested in her central pairings as that suggests for Forster, but I think there is a tendency to view all her books primarily as romances all about the main pairing when a lot of the time that's not what she's most concerned with at all. Persuasion is one of the books where the pairing really is the main thing, and so is Pride & Prejudice; I'm thinking especially of Mansfield Park (my darling fave, though I wouldn't recommend it to you; if you don't like Anne's passivity you probably really wouldn't like Fanny), in which the getting-together is very brief and offstage but the point of things, including for Fanny herself, is not really about her love interest and there's all sorts of other stuff going on in the story. I find it especially interesting reading Austen's happy het endings in context of the fact that she herself never married—in all these stories about women finding fulfilment in marriage, what is she saying-by-not-saying about women who didn't or couldn't, perhaps similar to how Forster is saying-by-not-saying things about queer men?