It's now 250 years since Jane Austen was born and assigned the arbitrary gender of ‘female’ by a bigoted cishetero 18th-century midwife. To cash in on the occasion, a new novel imagining non-existent aspects of her love-life has just been published, Six Weeks by the Sea, by Paula Byrne.
The book’s tagline is “The summer Jane Austen fell in love”, and it stands as an attempt at writing a new, modern Jane Austen novel with Jane Austen as one of the main characters – but at least it isn’t so new and modern as to make Jane fall in love with another woman. Not all writers and critics out there nowadays have been quite so restrained, however.
Queerer Than Fiction
Regrettably, some of these people are the very ones who are supposed to act as the guardians of Jane’s memory and literary legacy. Jane Austen’s House, for example, is the charitable body entrusted with preserving the writer’s old home for the nation, which seems a worthy cause. Yet it now sees fit to employ identitarian individuals like Ellora Sutton at the place as a “Visitor Services Assistant” (fancy words for a 'tour-guide', I would imagine).
But Ellora is also, far more importantly, both “a gay woman” and “a queer prize-winning poet”. Were she to be employed by the T.S. Eliot Trust, her assigned non-job would be to walk around Eliot’s old home declaiming: “I can show you queer in a handful of dust.” Instead,
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Steven, great article (as usual) to but…
“she is called upon to meet visitors to Jane’s old home of “all genders” (what, all two of them?)
I can’t help thinking that the use of the term ‘gender’ in situations like this confuses the poor lambs. In linguistics there are only two genders (plus neuter if you’re German, and one or two other variations); but people, if they choose to be unhinged nutcases, can lay claim to as many as they like. What they can’t lay claim to is more than two SEXES!!!
Consistently referring to ‘sex’ might bring some of them back to the fold of grown-up normality.
Jane Austen is supposedly ranked as one of the greatest novelists of all time (though something similar applies to the England footy team). Can anyone explain why? Am I lacking something in the brain department for finding this baffling, or is it the Austen fans that are so lacking?
Well, i think the whole thing is an attempt to slur Jane Austen just because she was black…
Nice one!
Your comment is very interesting, in light of the biographers who said she died of some kind of disease in which her skin developed black pigmented patches. Some say that was a symptom of poisoning, by servants in the pay of the aristocratic woman she pilloried in her unfinished book “Lady Susan”.
Writing for an incredibly small audience, I’m impressed with myself for actually reading this article, well done me, all the genders…. Oh how we laughed….
An observation about the use of upper-case (capital) letters in DS headlines: the only words in the above headline which are all lower-case are ‘of’, ‘by’, ‘a’ and ‘into’. Surely in the context of the article ‘into’ should have been ‘Into’ or even ‘”Into”‘?
I concur!
Capitalising every word in a headline in an unwatned Americanism.
Nonsense! “Unwatned”?
Yawn! Yawn!
JANE AUSTEN: PRIDE, PREJUDICE AND PROPAGANDA
Looks like desperation to me.
”Look at us homosexuals, we are just so fantastically talented and interesting! Look, look, look!”
I agree, it’s desperate. And I feel a bit sorry for them.