On Jan 25, 3:09 pm, Joseph DeMartino  wrote:
> On Jan 25, 12:44 pm, Doug Freyburger  wrote:
>
> > The Emmas mini-series should be good.  Somehow I ended up liking
> > Victorian romances.
>
> Beating Amy to it:
>
> Austen is Regency romance, not Victorian.  Jane was born in 1775, the
> year of Lexington and Concord.  "Emma" was published in 1813, in the
> midst of the Napoleonic wars.  Victoria came to the throne as a very
> young woman in 1837, and reigned until her death in 1901.  But the
> period of her greatest influence, what we think of when we say
> "Victorian", is really the period from about 1850 or 60 until 1890 or
> so.  (By the turn of the century even Victorian England was not nearly
> as "Victorian" as it had once been.)  In American terms it is the
> difference between a novel written in the Age of Jackson and one
> written after the Civil War.  A very different physical world and
> mental atmosphere.  Think of the difference between Washington Irving
> and Mark Twain, or between Austen herself and Charles Dickens or even
> Conan Doyle.
Or between the 1920s and the 1950s; fashions and attitudes changed
completely. In Jane's day, ladies wore thin, clingy, Greek-Revival
dresses (sometimes as wet as any t-shirt), and men were still wearing
bright colors to formal dinners. As to attitudes -- the Victorians
actually considered Jane's books as rather risqué. Even as late as
Kipling's age, she was regarded as a "men's" writer, not only for
occasional naughtiness of plot, but for her tough, "masculine"
objectivity. (And it is worthy of note that many "manly" authors, such
as Kipling, himself, and Scott, looked up to her.)
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32