Robert Rodi's Blog, page 11

Pride and Prejudice, chapters 19-23

Mr. Collins decides, the day after the disastrous ball at Netherfield, that the time...

Pride and Prejudice, chapters 16-18

Pride and Prejudice, chapters 11-15

Pride and Prejudice, chapters 6-10

…that it was not likely to be...

Pride and Prejudice, chapters 1-5

Jane Austen's second published novel is one of the best known and best loved in the English language, so much so that it's almost impossible to see it clearly any longer; it's become a set of fixed images and responses in our collective mind. Perhaps only Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" has undergone so thorough a metamorphosis from literary work to cultural bulwark, bogged down by the accumulated accretions of generations who know it only second- or third-hand—or who know it only by...

Bitched out

Thank you for your kind attention; it was a pleasure laughing and snarking my way through Sense and Sensibility with you.

I'm putting the blog on brief hiatus in order to concentrate my energies on a new book project: a first-person account of the unusually robust civic life in the singular city of Siena, Italy. The working title is An American Caterpillar, which will make perfect sense when you hear more about it, but that's a subject for another time and place.

I plan to return in...

Sense and Sensibility, chapters 46-50

Sense and Sensibility, chapters 41-45

Elinor, meantime, realizes it's been a week since her brother John came to call with the news that Edward's perfidy had made his wife ill; and she figures she'd better bite the...

Sense and Sensibility, chapters 36-40

Like a master torturer, Austen keeps coming up with new ways to throw her characters together in mutual mortification. The latest gambit involves Charlotte Palmer giving birth, so that her mother, Mrs. Jennings, rushes off to be at her side—handing her houseguests, the Dashwood sisters, into the care of her other daughter, Lady Middleton, who is also hosting the Miss Steeles. Mrs. Jennings can't help congratulating herself on having come up with this arrangement; she's blissfully...

Sense and Sensibility, chapters 31-35

Austen etches a finely drawn portrait of the rejected and dejected Marianne, going over and over the particulars of her history with Willoughby and reaching a different conclusion each time—sometimes condoning him (he's broke, he has no choice but to marry a rich girl), sometimes condemning him (he led her on, the chump). Elinor bravely endures all this while trying to provide some ballast for Marianne's wind-whipped emotions; it's a job only she can do because Marianne refuses to see...