It’s about time someone took a fresh look at the whole Darcy and Pemberley set up. He, his grand house and the Bennett sisters all appear as secondary characters in Longbourn, Jo Baker’s brilliant dissection of Pride and Prejudice from the point of the view of the servants, and we form a subtly different impression of them, different in particular from the fawning portrayals of film and television adaptations. Baker’s
Rare sightings of cigarettes being smoked in these pulp fiction versions of classic novels – check out Marilyn Monroe with a pipe. No wonder we no longer see smoking in the media when it looks this cool. Spotted on Imgur, a photo sharing site.
‘I am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever and of finding my own story and my own people all forestalled.’ Jane Austen, 30 April 1811. Its strange to think of Jane Austen doing a disservice to women writers but it seems that the sheer weight of her legacy has been such that some of her female contemporaries – equally of not more successful in their day