Whichever You Prefer

The book has a delightful cover (which is NOT a portrait of  Jane Austen, no matter what the Rice family maintains – but that’s another story) and Barnes and Noble has nicely published this British work, first printed in 1905 – which last bit they don’t exactly lie about, but the date is pretty much hidden at the very end of the jacket blurbs.

There's the 1905.

No mention of 1905.

   
 
 
 
 

Fairly good book, actually.  Scholars haven’t discovered much that’s new about Jane Austen in the past century anyhow, and the Edwardian prose style is interesting.  So I get to Chapter Five, which is going to discuss The Six Novels.  The Author begins by criticizing “what purports to be a book” recently published (1905, remember) that summarizes the plots of the novels.  And she compares anyone who’d try to read Austen that way with a lazy diner who would rather gobble – say – hamburger, instead of coping with the challenge of a good rib roast.

Well, what she actually wrote was “…the laziness that prefers hash to joints.”

The phrase did give me pause.