Amy Gentry's Blog - Posts Tagged "jane-austen"
I Found the Anti-Anita Brookner and She's Great
During the pandemic, I noticed a new question popping up during author interviews and Zoom panels: "What are your favorite comfort reads?"
I always dread this question. I read horror novels for comfort. When stressed, I need the stakes in a novel to be higher than those of real life. I find it cozy.
My two favorite genres are lady horror and spinster lit. They overlap more than you would think. Three million British men were killed, wounded, or lost in World War I; that left a lot of single women to tough out years of economic hardship alone. I'd argue that spinster lit is itself a kind of war literature. (See Molly Keane's Good Behaviour.)
Lately, my favorite spinster lit author has been Anita Brookner, who goes further than the prior generation (and anticipates the Sad Millennial Sex genre) by suggesting that freedom and money and plentiful menfolk aren't actually enough to liberate the lonely woman. I could drink a case of this, and for the past month, I've been working my way through her oeuvre, drawing inspiration from her crushingly grim Jamesian plots and almost psychedelically interiorized prose.
But, having recently exhausted the Brookner supply at my library, I found myself feeling--well--exhausted. I don't mean to say that I fell asleep multiple times while reading Strangers, although obviously I did. (I have a great armchair and no objection to an afternoon nap.) I mean that after a while, watching a lonely person get pushed around by relatives, friends, and random acquaintances for two hundred pages--after which she briefly conceives of an exit plan, then gives up, sliding back into the tepid bath of the familiar--it all begins to make you feel a bit trapped.
After all, where are all my adventures lately? In books. And if those books are all about people whose adventures are also in books--books that are, themselves, full of unrealized dreams!--then it's spinsters all the way down, folks.
So, imagine my surprise when I sat down to devour what I supposed would be another grim, lonely classic (albeit with a cheerfully embossed floral cover) and found, instead, a thrilling treatise on liberation. The spinster in Elizabeth Von Arnim's Father wins her freedom on page one, not page 300. The book is all about where it will take her, and who it will make her, and how she'll become the kind of person who can defend it--and defend others from similar tyrannies.
When plump, plain, 33-year-old Jennifer Dodge's monstrous father unexpectedly takes a second wife, freeing her of the promise she made on her mother's deathbed to take care of him forever, she doesn't waste a millisecond wondering what to do with her freedom. On her first day in the wild, she takes a train, walks 20 miles, rents a cottage, stays up all night talking to an eligible bachelor on a mattress she's dragged under an apple tree, and sleeps under the stars. Until the halfway mark, it's just nonstop eating, gardening, looking at birds, and marveling that life can be so freaking pleasant.
Of course, there are obstacles in the second half; there's that looming shadow of a bully, as well as the more lighthearted struggles of Jennifer's new friend, a hapless clergyman, to get away from his domineering sister. But, except for a few tense pages here and there, we always know that things are going to work out, just as we know that, come what may, a Jane Austen novel will end in marriage.
In fact, only one macabre detail prevents Von Arnim (who also wrote the much-beloved book The Enchanted April ) from being something of a twentieth-century Austen. The happy ending of this blithe fantasy isn't a marriage. It's a <spoiler>death</spoiler>. In other words, it's the perfect comfort read.
tl;dr: For a comfort read that doesn't involve gore, or even mild disappointment, try Elizabeth Von Arnim's Father.
I always dread this question. I read horror novels for comfort. When stressed, I need the stakes in a novel to be higher than those of real life. I find it cozy.
My two favorite genres are lady horror and spinster lit. They overlap more than you would think. Three million British men were killed, wounded, or lost in World War I; that left a lot of single women to tough out years of economic hardship alone. I'd argue that spinster lit is itself a kind of war literature. (See Molly Keane's Good Behaviour.)
Lately, my favorite spinster lit author has been Anita Brookner, who goes further than the prior generation (and anticipates the Sad Millennial Sex genre) by suggesting that freedom and money and plentiful menfolk aren't actually enough to liberate the lonely woman. I could drink a case of this, and for the past month, I've been working my way through her oeuvre, drawing inspiration from her crushingly grim Jamesian plots and almost psychedelically interiorized prose.
But, having recently exhausted the Brookner supply at my library, I found myself feeling--well--exhausted. I don't mean to say that I fell asleep multiple times while reading Strangers, although obviously I did. (I have a great armchair and no objection to an afternoon nap.) I mean that after a while, watching a lonely person get pushed around by relatives, friends, and random acquaintances for two hundred pages--after which she briefly conceives of an exit plan, then gives up, sliding back into the tepid bath of the familiar--it all begins to make you feel a bit trapped.
After all, where are all my adventures lately? In books. And if those books are all about people whose adventures are also in books--books that are, themselves, full of unrealized dreams!--then it's spinsters all the way down, folks.
So, imagine my surprise when I sat down to devour what I supposed would be another grim, lonely classic (albeit with a cheerfully embossed floral cover) and found, instead, a thrilling treatise on liberation. The spinster in Elizabeth Von Arnim's Father wins her freedom on page one, not page 300. The book is all about where it will take her, and who it will make her, and how she'll become the kind of person who can defend it--and defend others from similar tyrannies.
When plump, plain, 33-year-old Jennifer Dodge's monstrous father unexpectedly takes a second wife, freeing her of the promise she made on her mother's deathbed to take care of him forever, she doesn't waste a millisecond wondering what to do with her freedom. On her first day in the wild, she takes a train, walks 20 miles, rents a cottage, stays up all night talking to an eligible bachelor on a mattress she's dragged under an apple tree, and sleeps under the stars. Until the halfway mark, it's just nonstop eating, gardening, looking at birds, and marveling that life can be so freaking pleasant.
Of course, there are obstacles in the second half; there's that looming shadow of a bully, as well as the more lighthearted struggles of Jennifer's new friend, a hapless clergyman, to get away from his domineering sister. But, except for a few tense pages here and there, we always know that things are going to work out, just as we know that, come what may, a Jane Austen novel will end in marriage.
In fact, only one macabre detail prevents Von Arnim (who also wrote the much-beloved book The Enchanted April ) from being something of a twentieth-century Austen. The happy ending of this blithe fantasy isn't a marriage. It's a <spoiler>death</spoiler>. In other words, it's the perfect comfort read.
tl;dr: For a comfort read that doesn't involve gore, or even mild disappointment, try Elizabeth Von Arnim's Father.
