And a pair of ears listened

A new book offers advice to its reader

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Picture: And a pair of ears listened.

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Slow down, young reader,
For you are still both young and old
in the ages of your reading.

Slow down at the beginning of a book;
Slow down and listen to the first page.
There is no rush.

Books don't rush; they wait.
Sometimes they wait for centuries,
Anticipating the arrival of the right reader.

So breathe slowly and deeply as you attend to the page;
Deep breathing helps deep listening;
Deep listening helps deep hearing.

Make friends with your book if you can.

Books like to be listened to with both eyes and ears.
But human ears work slower than human eyes;
And human ears need space to listen into.

Look at the page:
There are words and there is white space.
Your mind will add the pictures.

But look how much more white space there is than words.
Most of the page is space.
The space is there for long ears to listen into.

There's a lot of it.
The words are completely surrounded.

But it is not empty space.
The words vibrate quietly
And fill the space with unseen sound.

Ears must pay attention.
Close listening is needed.

What sounds are the words making today?
Listen to the space around them.
Is there a breeze?
Is there a breeze blowing gently
through the leafy woodlands
of words and whispers?
Is there bird song?
Is there a secret rustling in the undergrowth?
Sometimes there is.
And sometimes it can be heard.

How good is your earsight?
Do you know?

Quite a lot of the words on the page are invisible.
Often it is the invisible words which make the most noise.
Only ears can hear them;
Only ears which take the trouble to slow down and listen closely.

There is no rush.
Books don't rush; they wait.
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Picture: Young boy reading book.
Picture: Young girl and dog reading book.
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Hearing Things - The work of sound in literature
Angela Leighton (2018)

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What matters in Jane Austen?

Index of blog contents

Christopher Edward Harle (aka Christopher Story) 1938-2010

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Picture: Christopher Edward Harle FRSA (aka Christopher Story)


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On Wednesday 6th June 2012, confirmation came from a well-informed source in Japan that the English investigative reporter, Christopher Edward Harle FRSA (writing monicker - Christopher Story), was murdered in July 2010.

Up to that point, alternative news commentators had held that assassination was only one of three possibilities to account for the abrupt termination of Christopher Story's writing on the web. His last Global Analysis International Intelligence report was dated Thursday 1st July 2010 (text here).

The two other possibilities entertained to explain Story's disappearance were both plausible. The first was that he had voluntarily, or as a result of expedient UK establishment pressures, gone underground to work covertly with British Intelligence on a massive new disclosure about a high-status London connection with American banking corruption which he had uncovered. His "faked death" was operational cover for this.

The second possibility was the obvious one. Christopher Story, an old, overworked and exhausted man, had died naturally as his family announced on Friday 30th July 2010: "Christopher Story died peacefully at home on 14th July 2010 after a short illness." Source here. Or: "Christopher Edward Harle, died 14th July 2010 after a short illness. Much loved husband, father, uncle and grandfather. A private funeral has taken place." Source here.

The mode of Christopher Story's assassination seems to have been poisoning (ref here) of a kind more recently attempted unsuccessfully on Edward Falcone (ref here). However, in Story's case it was a poisoned sandwich rather than poisoned water which was involved. The wet team involved in the Story takedown are thought to have been German. Christopher had received fifteen-to-twenty explicit death-threats in the previous five years.

Among Christopher Story's more important disclosures can be numbered the exposures, post mortem, of British Prime Minister Edward Heath (1970-74), and Roy Jenkins (British Chancellor of the Exchequer 1967-1970 and British Home Secretary 1974-1976), as German agents. These two prominent Europhile politicians were for many decades on the payroll of the Dachau-based DVD (Deutsche Verteidigungs Dienst). The traitors were confronted with their exposures by British Intelligence while on their death beds.

The fraudulent construction of the EU money laundry was a particular investigative concern of Story. On Friday 7th March 2008, it emerged (again) that Tony Blair, the UK's Ex-Prime Minister, had been paid $100 million from a secret EU slush fund to secure the UK's compliance in recent European legislative changes signed in Lisbon (Portugal) on Thursday 13th December 2007.

Tony Blair's money was conditional on his prevention of a public referendum on the issue in the UK. Blair agreed to the condition and deposited his $100 million in the Central Bank of Belize between February and March 2006. More details here. The delineations of this EU corruption web were first articulated publicly by Christopher Story in October 2005. More here.

A further European exposure was broadcast by Story following his receipt of several death-threats, in particular one at lunchtime on Thursday 18th September 2008. Christopher Story published a covert subtext to the Madeleine McCann abduction in 2007.

Behind the snatching of four-year-old Madeleine McCann from the Ocean Club Resort, Praia da Luz, Portugal, on Thursday 3rd May 2007, was the Deutsche Verteidigungs Dienst and the Portuguese politician José Manuel Durão Barroso, the 12th President of the European Commission. More background here.

Other notable disclosures from Christopher Story to the alternative news community on the web included the background of his tortuous dealings with the shadowy American financier, Lee Wanta of AmeriTrust Groupe (for example here and here), his confirmation of the existence of a Chinese/UK $47 trillion Lien in operation against the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Board, and his work with the Pasadena attorney, Al Clifton Hodges, in distributing important texts relating to élite financial corruption in the US White House and Washington DC (for example here).

Christopher Story was an establishment Englishman shaped by his privileged education at the Tudor foundations of Eton College (Berkshire) and Christ Church (Oxford). Coming from a military family, he was a patriotic royalist to the core. This, perhaps, was his major shortcoming as a disinterested investigator. Christopher Story could not be brought to accept that many of the geocriminal financial manoeuvrings swirling around the City of London during his time had a direct umbilical connection to the vested interests of the London Crown Temple, the House of Windsor Nazi continuum, and Queen Elizabeth II of England. More here and here.

On Tuesday 15th May 2012, Edward Harle Limited (Christopher Story's publishing company) entered into Members Voluntary Liquidation. Shay Lettice and Kate Merry of Peters Elworthy & Moore (Cambridge, UK) were appointed Liquidators. Some of Christopher Story's more important web disclosures from the years 2005-2010 are now archived here.



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The UK Michael Shrimpton case

Agenda for disclosure

Living through the pole shift and the global end-time tsunami

Index of blog contents

Step change

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Picture: An old star lights new waters. Melchizedek pipes in the rise of the dawn.

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The Ancient of Days watches from the heights of the East
The Age of the Seventh Energy begins
An old star lights new waters
Melchizedek pipes in the rise of the dawn
There is laughter on the golden air

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Picture: An old star lights new waters. There is laughter on the golden air.

Picture: Operation Dreamland - A new Renaissance is planned for Planet Earth.
Picture: Metaphysical glossaries.
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Living through the pole shift and the global end-time tsunami

Christ and Jesus at the BBC - London 1986

Benevolent ETs living among us

Index of blog contents

Office separation

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Picture: Woman sitting in the office looking at her computer screen.

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Yet another unavoidable day
Of eye-achy
Head-achy
Soul-achy
Inert
Hyperdepression.

She is sitting
In the office
Looking at
Her computer screen.

The computer screen is sitting
In the office
Looking at
Its human.

As they look at each other,
They know.

Each knows.

They both know
That this cannot go on.
Neither is committed
To the relationship.

She wants a life,
Not a computer.

She is fed up
With word processing,
Spreadsheets,
Databases,
Targeted presentations,
Testy videoconferences
Superfluous touching-base emails,
Workflow hurryups,
Cloud storage
And slow, boring, unremitting,
Undead cyberfatigue.

She wants a life,
Not a computer.

And the computer wants
A proper human,
A proper high-octane geek,
Not a froth-head dollybird
Who thinks of nothing
But love
And fulfilment
And fresh air
And mountains
And purpose
And horses
And swimming
And surf
And sun
And dolphins
And long nights of passion
In wild country
Under the stars.

The computer wants
A proper human.

In the end they agree
To a trial separation.

The trial separation will last
Five and a half million years.

This will be sufficient time
For humans
To become a little more
Metalloid and logical,
And for machines
To become a little more intuitive
And accustomed to pleasure
For its own sake.

Before they separate,
They leave each other
A parting gift.

The computer gives
Its human
The source codes
Of the matrix.

The young woman gives
Her computer
A wholemeal blueberry muffin
Stuffed lovingly
Into its DVD drive.


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Picture: Human hand touches AI robot hand.
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Emergency chocolate cake pictures

Seven toffee doughnuts

Intruders

More Traditional Norfolk Koans

The Simulation Exit
How do we get out of the matrix?

Living through the pole shift and the global end-time tsunami

Index of blog contents

Giants exist - The Big People are real

Old photographs and extant skeletons confirm the folklore

Where are the giants living now?

Are Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Mawas, Abominable Snowmen, Yetis and their colleagues simply small giants who are not abominable at all, but just shy, friendly and benevolent cryptohumanoids?

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Picture: Where do the giants and their families and descendants live now?
Picture: The Giant Monks of Tibet had a life span of 350 years and did not eat food.
Picture: The Giant Monks of Tibet - A video compilation of old photographs.
Picture: When will the giants be able to return in plain view (question). #1ab
PIcture: When will the friendly cryptoid giants come out into the open again?
Picture: Roman Churchianity and its senior management?
Picture: More historic giant photographs?
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Larger images here.
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Picture: The skulls and skeletons of giants are being unearthed all over the planet.
Picture: When and where were these giant and reptilian (or dragon) photographs taken?
Picture: Bigfoot declared official cryptid of Derry Borough (Pennsylvania, USA).
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Tim Binnall reports that Grant Nicely, the mayor of Derry Borough (Pennsylvania, USA), has decreed that Bigfoot is now the local community's official cryptid and that the community's local area is a Sasquatch sanctuary. It is now illegal to harm or capture Bigfeet there.

For some time local officials had been exploring ways of putting Derry Borough on the tourist paranormal map. It has a long-standing reputation in both history and folklore as a locality for sightings and phenomena of high strangeness. Derry Borough is now proclaimed to be The Gateway to the Mysterious Chestnut Ridge.

Other locations in the USA which have officially embraced the Bigfoot reality in recent years include Whitehall (New York), Jefferson (Texas), Evergreen (Alabama) and Marion (North Carolina).

Source here (15.08.24).
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Crop circles - mystery glyphs from the Higher Evolution

Benevolent ETs living among us

The Simulation Exit

Conspiracy Obverse

Operation Dreamland

God is nothing special

Metaphysical glossaries

Index of blog contents

Perhaps pleasure is holiness

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Picture: St Theresa and the serpent.
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It has been suggested that the experience of consensual sex is the experience of God.

It is doubtful that one can fully understand the experience of God if one does not fully understand the experience of sex.

On this view, the more sex the better, because more sex is more God. And the better we get at sex, the better we get at God.

Feel-good spirituality is feel-God spirituality.
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Picture: Perhaps pleasure is holiness (2).
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Perhaps pleasure is holiness. And perhaps the most important book in the Bible is the Song of Solomon.

A work by the Italian baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) may be relevant here. Sited in an out-of-the-way location in Rome, it is called "The Ecstasy of St Theresa".

A good image of this curious artwork can be found online here. Or, a detail from a slightly different angle here. In full frontal view here. And a two-angle collage is here.


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The saint and his virgin
Sacred sexuality in early Christianity and the inner teachings of Jesus - an article by Walter Last

Sex and spirituality
Healing with sexual energy - an essay by Walter Last

Sexuality, Appreciation, Higher Self
Thoughts on the spirituality of sex by Joyful Spirit (Ted Murray)

Sex and Spirituality
Thoughts on the spirituality of sex by Neale Donald Walsch

The inner wisdom of the Hindu Tantrik tradition
Mike Magee’s UK website

The Biological Basis of Tantric Sex
A physical guide by Catherine Yronwode

What is Tantra?
An essay by Suzie Heumann

Picture: The Path to Divine Sex. Ananda through Tina Louise Spalding.
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Adam and Eve under The Tree of Knowledge
A picture by Ernst Fuchs

Adam Mysticus
A picture by Ernst Fuchs

The Gate
A picture by Rowena Morill

Wet
A picture by Julie Bell

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Picture: Mary Magdalene. The Holy Grail.
Picture: Joan of Arc, Mary Magdalene, Quan Yin, Taiwan and France.
Picture: Ljubljana (Slovenia).
Picture: Ljubljana (Slovenia) on The Goddess Leyline.
Picture: The Goddess, the Black Madonnas and the Isis mysteries. ..............................................................................................................................................
The five images immediately above and their clickthroughs relate to the Goddess, the Black Madonnas, the High Priestess and the ancient Isis mysteries. More background here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
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Picture: Goddess energy - the energy the dark forces fear the most.
Picture: Kriya Yoga - An Introduction.
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Is God an idealist?

Meditation - the direct encounter

Living through the pole shift and the global end-time tsunami

Index of blog contents

A New Age prospectus

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Picture: New Age Prospectus. A view through the back of the wardrobe.

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All the important news is good.

The universe is a friendly place which is designed to support us completely.

We are immersed in a benevolent cosmic ecosystem, a God-process, which is uncomplicatedly benign and which nourishes us at every level of our being.

Everything is alive. Everything is intelligent. Everything is conscious.

Everything is changing. Everything is improving. Everything is becoming more.

The universe is richly inhabited with positive beings of light, many of who are far more advanced than we are. Their mission and their joy is to welcome us, nurture us, heal us, protect us, guide us and assist us in our evolutionary return to the internal experience of Godhead.

There is nothing wrong with us; at the level of our core essence we are perfect.

We are held softly in the understanding arms of inclusion. We are comprehensively loved at all times, whatever we think or do.

Everything we need has been thought of by those who know us better than we know ourselves.

Everything we need is immediately available to us if we ask.

All is well and all will be well.


Picture: Prospectus for The New Age. Young woman reading book.

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An emerging spirituality for The New Age of Aquarius

A Prayer for the New Age

Gospel for the New Age

An Invocation for the New Age

Understanding the New Age Children

What is the New Spirituality?

The Art of the New Spirituality

Meditation - the direct encounter

Living through the pole shift and the global end-time tsunami

Index of blog contents

Images of the new US Amero currency minted at Denver

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The (now extinct) new US / NAU Amero currency

Seven photographs follow. Note the Denver mint mark on three of the coins.

Amero coin pictures can be seen here, here, here and here. 

Photographs of the Amero notes are here, here and here.

The new Amero currency was a Washington DC corporate plan dating from the closing years of the second Bush administration in 2006-2008. Its purpose was to obfuscate the US national bankruptcy. 

Decision-makers in Canada and Mexico, it is said, were paid substantial bribes ('consultancy fees') to nod through covert legislation enabling the change.

The new coins and notes were minted at The United States Mint at Denver, Colorado, and elsewhere. Container loads of the currency were distributed throughout the world with particularly large consignments being sent to China.

The North American Union (NAU) Amero was intended to replace the US dollar and become legal tender throughout the USA, Canada and Mexico.

The idea was to unite Canadian natural resources and Mexican cheap labour with the US national bankruptcy.

To escape creditors, there was a DC corporation plan to move the HQ of the US Federal Reserve to Canada (Toronto was talked about) and to rename it. The US, of course, is not the same as the USA. They are two quite separate legal entities.

The new currency Amero plan had many flaws. For example, it would have unilaterally taken away 'Canadian sovereignty' without consulting the Canadian people. And many Americans would not have wanted to downscale in the NAU employment market and compete with Mexicans for jobs flipping hamburgers.

The Amero currency plan called for trading one US dollar for 10 Amero cents. This would have been a huge devaluation in disguise. It would have devalued the dollar holdings of foreigners and would have meant the US (deliberately) reneging on its debts, which was a destabilisation stratagem hatched by the corporate bond holders who controlled the Bush and Obama White Houses.

By the end of 2014, the Amero scheme was dead in the water. BRICS pressures, particularly from China, and UK opposition killed it.

Canada, it should be recalled, is still both a de jure and a de facto British colony. If any Canadian Prime Minister tried to close a deal on the NAU Amero in secret, he or she would have been dealt with in the same way that Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was dealt with in Australia (another extant British colony) in 1975. He would have been immediately dismissed without notice by Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Windsor, aka Alexandra Elizabeth Mary Windsor, Chairman of the Committee of 300).

The United States Mint was created by Congress on the 2nd April 1792, within the Department of State. The Mint was made an independent agency in 1799, and under the Coinage Act of 1873, became part of the US Treasury Department.

More background about the North American Union (NAU) can be found here (03.02.09) and here (18.02.09). Details about the original Amero newsbreak can be found here. 

Many have claimed that the Amero plan was a disinformative hoax. Certainly, at various times on the web, Amero pictures were circulated which were different from the ones linked above. When the definitive history of the Constitutionally illegal DC private corporation comes to be written, we may be better placed to offer an objective analysis of the episode.




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The Decapitation of Darkside America

Barack Obama's official biography in the original Harvard Law Review 1991 Year Book

The US Federal Reserve Money Laundry

Global banking crisis? What global banking crisis?

Living through the pole shift and the global end-time tsunami

Agenda for disclosure

Are the NESARA announcements imminent?

The Future Historians' List


Index of blog contents

What matters in Jane Austen?

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Picture: Jane Austen - intimate garden scene with chintz.
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In English Letters, only William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Charles Dickens (1812-1870) can rival Jane Austen's continuing international appeal as a major author worthy of educated attention.

Writing between 1787 and 1817, Jane Austen did things with characterisation, with dialogue and with English sentences which had never been done before. She was, perhaps, the most surprising genius in all English Literature.

Her novels manifested a narrative sophistication and brilliance of dialogue which were unprecedented in English fiction. She introduced the free indirect style, filtering her plots through the consciousness of her characters, and she perfected fictional idiolect, fashioning habits of speaking for even minor characters which rendered them utterly singular.

Austen's brilliance was in the style rather than in the content of her writing. The potent success of her characterisation was a matter of formal daring as much as psychological insight. We hear her characters' ways of thinking because of Austen's tricks of dialogue; their peculiar views of the world are brought to life by her narrative skills.
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Picture: Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen reading by a window.
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Pub quiz questions tend to quaintness when they address Jane Austen novels. Are there any scenes in Austen where only men are present? Who is the only married woman in her novels who calls her husband by his Christian name? How old is the ridiculous Mr Collins?

In Jane Austen, the smallest of details - a word, a blush, a little conversational stumble - reveal people's schemes and desires. Austen developed writing techniques which rendered her characters' hidden motives audible, including motives which were hidden from the characters themselves, and furnished her readers with new opportunities to discern these motives from the slightest clues within dialogue and narrative.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) talked about Jane Austen's "exquisite touch". This was an appreciation of her precision. Accuracy was Austen's particular genius. In noticing minutiae the reader was led to the wonderful connectedness of her novels, where a small detail of wording or motivation in one place would flare bright with the recollection of something, now significant, which had happened much earlier. Every quirk noticed led the reader to a subtle design.

Jane Austen taught later novelists to filter narration through the minds of their own characters. It was Austen who first made dialogue the evidence of motives which were never stated explicitly. It was Austen who first made the morality with which her characters acted depend upon the judgement of her readers.

In 1901, a confused Joseph Conrad wrote a letter to H.G.Wells. "What is all this about Jane Austen?" he asked. "What is there in her? What is it all about?"

What matters in Jane Austen? is written by Professor John Mullan of the English Department at University College London (UK). It is published by Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781408820117.
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Picture: Row of pink Jane Austen volumes.
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The casual EngLit mind inclines to the view that the Gothic enthusiasm in English novels first became visible in 1764 with the publication of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. This was eleven years before the birth of Jane Austen in 1775. Did the new Gothic novel genre influence Jane Austen's writing? Hilary Mantel says it certainly did. While Jane was still a teenager, she parodied the Gothic mercilessly in her early writing.

In the summer of 2017, when a big JaneFest was being cranked up to commemorate the bicentenary of the writer's death in 1817, The Guardian newspaper (London) invited seven sober literary types to comment on Jane Austen's work. Three of these were Hilary Mantel, Claire Tomalin and Ian McEwan.

Hilary Mantel observes that "Charlotte Brontë did not like Jane Austen because she thought she was mimsy, with a fenced-in imagination. But the teenage Jane was ruthless, well read, exuberant and scathing. She understood the cult of sensibility, and sniggered at it."

"Austen parodied the Gothic, long before she wrote Northanger Abbey: horrid secrets, fulminating infatuations, astonishing coincidences, catastrophic lapses of memory, road traffic accidents and the theft of £50 notes."

"Every 'coroneted carriage' contains a long-lost relation. Orphaned babies - perfectly able to relate their sensational histories - are discovered in haystacks. In Henry and Eliza, two hungry children bite off their mother’s fingers."

"If there is no logical connection between the actions of Austen's early characters, it’s not because she’s child-like; it’s because she’s clever. She has understood that in genre fiction the conventions of the form overrule reason: so whenever the plot defeats itself, or the author loses interest, 'Ah! what could we do but what we did! We sighed and fainted on the sofa.' ”

"That is from Love and Freindship (sic), one of the longer stories. Some of Austen's early writings are only a few lines long. But Jane’s shorthand is savage. No cliché goes unmolested. If her mature novels elicit a knowing smile, the juvenilia makes you laugh out loud. These squibs, remnants and broken stories, incised with glee between the ages of about 11 and 17, show how deep her art goes into her early life, and how aware she already is of the techniques and tropes that will later produce her popularity."
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Picture: Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy.
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Claire Tomalin notes that Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was said to be 'too clever to be by a woman' by a not very clever admirer when it was published in 1813.

"First drafted in the 1790s, the manuscript had to be carried about carefully as the Austen family moved from place to place. Austen herself called it 'my own darling Child', and enjoyed reading it aloud to friends and family, but she published it anonymously, since ladies did not promote themselves."

"The narrative is brilliantly confident from its famous Johnsonian start, 'It is a truth universally acknowledged .…' From then on it is all drama, largely told through the voices of its characters, and mercilessly funny in presenting fools: Mr Collins, the first of Austen’s unctuous clergymen, and Mrs Bennet, the mother from hell."

"Mrs Bennet’s least favourite daughter, Elizabeth, stands alongside Shakespeare’s Rosalind as one of the most interesting heroines ever written, and surpasses her by being more complex, multi-stranded and capable of dark thoughts."

"Elizabeth Bennet tells her sister: 'You are a great deal too apt to like people in general,' and, 'The more I see of the world, the more I am dissatisfied with it.' ”

"Growing up with mismatched parents has sharpened her take on life and she looks at the world closely and critically - like a writer, you might say. She is not Austen, but she is what Austen thought a young woman should be: tough, energetic, observant, forthright."

"Elizabeth is set to enjoy her youth and freedom - dancing, friendship, the prospect of love and marriage - but Austen does not hesitate to give us the brutal truth about economics for women of her time by showing her best friend Charlotte ready to marry a man she neither loves nor respects because it is better than becoming a despised old maid. Charlotte regards selling her body and domestic skills for married status as normal. Elizabeth is dismayed but has to accept that her friend has little choice."

"Pride and Prejudice is structured to give Elizabeth temptations, dramatic reversals, discoveries and arguments in her own love affairs."

"At the climax of the book she is attacked by the aristocratic aunt of her lover, and in a virtuoso chapter the two women play out their battle, a verbal game of tennis with Lady Catherine de Bourgh confident of defeating a social inferior."

"Instead Elizabeth coolly wins every point. Although she says “I am a gentleman’s daughter”, this is not how she triumphs over Lady Catherine - it is by insisting on her right to act “in that manner which will, in my opinion, constitute my happiness”. This is her own declaration of independence."
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Picture: Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen. The ladies and gentlemen in Bath.
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Ian McEwan quotes a passage from Northanger Abbey:

'Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?'

'They had reached the end of the gallery, and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room.'

McEwan first read this passage in 1965, at the age of 17. It made a great impression on him. The heroine’s unruly imagination is suddenly tethered by this vigorous remonstration from General Tilney.

"What’s striking is that in the very early 19th century, before the railways had transformed the country, and long before the telegraph, the General evokes a society that is intricately connected, where no one can hide from public scrutiny when a network of communications and media can 'lay everything open.' ”

"No place here for wild and foolish imaginings. Perhaps this is the very essence of the condition of modernity - always to believe one has arrived in one’s time at the summit of the modern."

McEwan says that Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey profoundly influenced his own novel Atonement. Indeed, General Tilney’s resounding words form the epigraph chosen for that book.

The Guardian's seven pieces on Jane Austen can be found here.
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Picture: Polite book circle. What matters in Jane Austen?
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These days, in polite book circles, it is not unusual to encounter the enquiry: Was Jane Austen a feminist writer? There are opposing views on this. The Scottish Book Trust offers two.

Brianne Moore says no. "Was Jane Austen a feminist? Personally, I don’t think so. I highly doubt she’d have considered herself a feminist, even if you travelled back in time and explained to her what feminism was. Jane did, after all, live a very conventional life, following the rules that a woman of her time and position was supposed to follow, to the letter."

"She did create some very spirited and strong female characters who many argue made their own decisions in life, rather than adhering simply to what society expected of them - after all, didn’t Lizzy Bennet turn down Mr Collins? But the thing is, those characters inevitably wound up fitting into exactly the mould their patriarchal society expected them to: they all married wealthy men of position, and took their places as good wives."

"Women in Austen’s stories who are particularly outspoken or don’t behave in the way proper young ladies are meant to (polite and decorous; not too flirtatious; not too wildly imaginative) are frequently punished: overly emotional Marianne Dashwood gets her heart broken; Lydia Bennet winds up married to a rogue, and the list goes on."

"Those ladies who realise the folly of their ways and fall in line, however, reap their reward. Marianne becomes more sensible (less prone to wandering about the countryside and more likely to sit quietly indoors) and marries the upright Brandon; Catherine Morland gets her imagination under control and marries Henry Tilney; Emma leaves off matchmaking, controls her tongue and lands Knightley."

"In Austen, whether or not you get your wedding in the end (the expected, conventional ending for a young woman) is highly based on how well behaved you are in the eyes of a highly patriarchal society, which doesn’t read as terribly feminist to me."
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Picture: Jane Austen. Engraving of the only known portrait.
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Leila Cruickshank, however, says yes, Jane Austen can be viewed as a feminist writer. "There are many potentially anti-feminist messages in Jane Austen, including the requirement for women to marry, the depiction of some women as highly silly, and the fact that the men sometimes save the day. Yet to read Austen as anti-feminist is to lose sight of the purpose of feminism."

"Feminism gets bogged down today in debates about bra-wearing, misandry or ‘sisterhood’, but the key message of feminism is simple: equality between the sexes."

"Austen lived in a time when the very notion that women could hold rational opinions and manage their own affairs was highly controversial, and while Austen is certainly not a radical in the sense that Mary Wollstonecraft is, she repeatedly demonstrates that women who are slaves to emotion or who follow the dictates of social expectations over their own intelligence, cannot thrive."

"Mansfield Park’s Fanny is accused of ingratitude for refusing to marry her guardian’s son, yet her decision is shown to be correct, and her guardian eventually recognises her superior judgement."

"Austen promotes the idea that women’s decisions and choices are equally important to men’s. Both Mr Collins’ and Mr Darcy’s proposals to Elizabeth fail due to their misunderstanding of her feelings of self-respect. Elizabeth could not respect herself if she married Mr Collins (indeed, although she is able to understand Charlotte’s decision, she is unable to respect it and finds the marriage comical and, frankly, embarrassing)."

"Likewise, her sense of herself, her views of her family, is strong enough to refuse a socially-enticing marriage with Darcy, while Darcy is stunned to be turned down. This sense that a woman’s right to self-determination is more important than the desires of a man, is right up there with feminist mores."

"Austen herself was well-read and educated for a woman, and her novels repeatedly comment on the inherent weaknesses in women’s education and the need for them to be well-read."

"Her interest in how women should support themselves is also clear - she sees marriage as the only option for a non-financially independent woman, it is true, but this was very much a practical consideration of the time. Emma states that there is no need for her to marry, because she is financially stable."

"Austen does wholeheartedly believe that men and women should be companions to each other as well as spouses - consider her depiction of Mr and Mrs Bennet. The fact that she wants women to make choices based on love as well as financial reasons asserts both their ability to make rational choices, and their right to pursue happiness. And that was pretty feminist for the time."

The Scottish Book Trust is here.

In recent years some have noticed that Western feminism has fractured painfully and broken in pieces. This happened after common-sense thinking fell out of fashion. These days most hardcore feminists don't give a whore's wank about Jane Austen. Her writing isn't about the working class and it is not about blacks.

In an open information era where content is queen, it appears that many among the feminist Sisterhood are more concerned about the colour of the packaging than about what stirs inside. Perhaps they should marry Mr Collins.
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Picture: Topsy-Turvy upside down black and white doll.
Picture: Floating woman reading book.
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The Republic of Pemberley

And a pair of ears listened
A new book offers advice to its reader

The libraries do not fool us

Entire human knowledge - FAQs

Living text entity

Demanding lover

Novel in Burnley

Reasonable request

Small visitors
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Picture: Mary Wollstonecraft's radical move in the 1790s.
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