A Fanny Price to make the Vrooms blush

[ish mailian]

Miss Austen rose out of a vast (as she herself saw it) treacle swamp
of eighteenth-century female writing and she reordered the genre,
reordered it inimitably, so that readers forever after will, in her,
treat courtship’s comedy with a little of the deadly seriousness it
warrants. This collection reveals a Jane who even as a
fourteen-year-old—a little sister publishing within the family—is
already compassionate, and also already something of a meanie, already
artful in her depictions of the Demolition Derby that was an
eighteenth-century drawing room. Moreover—and this is an odd
thrill—this collection shows glimpses of a bawdy Jane. Yes, Jane could
indulge in lewd hints and poor taste, especially when she was young
and somewhat unsupervised. Frankly, I’ve always had a funny feeling
about the mature novel Mansfield Park, where the name of her unmarried
heroine is “Fanny Price.” That a fanny can have a price—as devised by
a novelist so closely focused on marriage’s monetary basis—involves a
pun that only an insensitive, uncareful writer could be numb to.
Poking around for “fanny” on the internet, I discover that the
earliest anatomical, naughty uses of the word start coming up in
English texts in the century before the novel’s publication. (In fact,
in England the word has always denoted a body part different from, and
naughtier than, the common American reference.) The juvenilia in this
new collection corroborates my faith that Miss Austen could have been
as friendly with common vulgarity as, say, Shakespeare and Chaucer
were.

In the Austen family parlor, I’ve always pictured Jane on a kind of
stool in the corner. Plus maybe a writing surface, provided it was a
very small surface. From such a corner, the quiet, ill-published
girl—who referred to herself as a spinster always and early—could
observe the arena. That’s what I pictured. But no, Jane was in the
center; she was a star, even from these earliest days. She had fans
around the hearth. The whole extended family looked forward with
relish to the publication (the of course very limited publication) of
her sketches and poems and funny pastiches and botched novellas. Each
of these little masterpieces is dedicated, with amusing
faux-pomposity, to a brother or sister or cousin or parent or aunt. In
one pamphlet she collaborates with her artistic older sister, Camilla,
who provides cameo portraits, almost of a Mad Magazine caliber, to
illustrate a goofy history of the English royal succession that might
have been written by John Cleese and Eric Idle. Monty Python is an apt
reference-point: some of this is so modern in its tones, and so
off-the-wall, it’s really best appreciated with the kind of eye that
might enjoy those recent British satirists, or George Saunders, or
Donald Barthelme.

http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/jones_w17.html
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l