September 29, 2008 -Joan attempts Jane-

Image quality seems a lot better today, yesterday's picture was really disappointing because it's all about the detail, which you really can't see. This flower was all alone on the trellis, there wasn't a single other bloom.
Last night I finished reading Joan Aiken's incredibly disappointing continuation of Jane Austen's The Watsons. I know that the woman is just trying to help you better understand the times and customs, but in doing so she absolutely murders any attempt to sound like Jane Austen. I mean, she talks about Napoleon Bonaparte and his relations with Russia, Jane Austen would never have written about such a thing, her stories were about the people in them, not events happening hundreds of miles away, every Austen fan knows that, it's trademark. And the way that she felt it necessary to explain the ingredients or components of anything and everything that we, as people of the modern era, probably have never heard of before. You can always tell when an author is awkwardly weaseling something into a paragraph just for the sake of the reader, making the characters ridiculously explain what is perfectly clear to them. It's extremely distracting. And some of the things Aiken had the young women doing, unheard of. You have to remember we're talking Victorian England here. She wrote about an elopement in passing, nobody seemed to think it was that big of a deal, and then all of the sudden a different sister becomes the disgrace of the family because she's living above an apothecary's shop. I'm afraid that's just not the way things would have went. The romance was incredibly unsatisfactory, and far-fetched even for an Austen novel. I disliked the fact that Aiken had the heroine's romantic interest writing her a letter, rare was the Victorian gentleman who would have done such a thing before becoming engaged to his female correspondent.
And so, in summary, as an avid Jane Austen reader and fan, I hardly feel that any sort of justice has been done to this remarkable woman whom I consider to be one of my greatest teachers.