...Jane Austen on the art of woo....

...i may be on my way to becoming one of those crazy Austen-ites.... I have never really read any before. I saw Jane Eyre as a play at Shaw Festival once... oh, and i heckled proudly at the TIFF Gala screening of the Jane Austen Book Club (neglecting, of course, to actually read the book for my own book club)...

But I just started Pride and Prejudice, because I have had, of late, one of those cosmic twisters which has put the Jane Austen on my doorstep, (kinda like the Wicked Witch of the East for Dorothy)... my roommate seems to own and love all things Austen, and I trust her literary tastes... It seems to be some sort of Jane Austen-a-thon month on TV, there have been four different Austen flicks on TV in the last week... And as constant as ever is my love for all things Brit....

Anyway, I think I love her for all the same reasons everyone else does... I love the headstrong free will of her protagonists, but the civility and gentility of the society in which they operate... Everyone wants to be an 'individual' but there is something so novel and fun about the thought of being an individual in a society that is not overrun with the MTV credo of being different, yet the same.

Its the same way everyone loves Anne of Green Gables...

Anyway, I knew it was solidified when I read the following:

"I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love," said Darcy

"Of a fine, stout Healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely"

-Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice

It reminds me of a certain something I said about WATT in a recent post... Just with a lot more civility, and a lot fewer references to the actual act of coitus...

Now to get four cats, a really expensive teapot and a lot of new cardigans... this Austenite is BORN!