alt Hacker News"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a robot suit to ride around and fight things with."
I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains. There always seem to be tourists there visiting from all over the world. That is really heartening.
She was very innovative. Maybe even underrated as a craftsperson at the sentence level. My favourite trick that I believe she invented is slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter, essentially unnoticed. Lots of people have copied that from her.
And class-pressure narratives will never not be relevant to people's lives. She's a very very humane storyteller in that respect.
I am slightly biased - she's my great aunt (x 6). Used to find that embarrassing but now I feel quite proud.
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She made free indirect speech [1] the cornerstone of the English language novel. She is recognized as a titanic figure. I don't know who would underrate her!
What I find strange is that people enjoy her books as romantic comedies because the world she represents is incredibly claustrophobic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech
Edited for clarification
> I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains.
I have believed for a long time that Austen is broadly popular because her works deal with issues of human relations and economic prosperity at the heart of modern, bourgeois existence. The draw is summed up in this excellent quote from the article:
> They also both, mostly, focus on characters who have enough privilege to have choices, but not enough power to escape circumstances.
That's a perceptive description of middle class life. The movie "Clueless" is an illustration of how easily Austen's insights translate to a society that is superficially very different from hers. [0]
> to see how wildly popular her work remains
There's an annual Jane Austen festival there too - it really brings people from all over the world. Very fun event even if you're just +1 to someone who's into it.
I upvoted for the perfect first line for this HN post. That you're related, makes sense.
Do you have an example of her writing moving into iambic pentameter in prose, please?
I googled for examples from her books but — search results are terrible.
I recall this from one of Donald Westlake's books:
"He stopped on a dime and collected 5 cents change."
Go ahead, be proud! Be Austen-tatious!
laughed and was warmed by the end reveal. i support gushing over literature in HN
I'm not well read, and don't think I'd be able to finish any of the classics. As such I have no clue what "slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter" means. I came here for the robots.