"Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
Ha! Just a little context here: Jane Austen lived from 12/16/1775 to 7/18/1817. Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813. Mark Twain lived from 11/30/1835 to 4/21/1910. His most famous book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was published in 1884 (Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876). Austen was dead in the ground well before Twain was even born! Nowadays it's probably easy to lump them into a general 19th century fog. Austen's enduring appeal (which mushroomed all over again with the 1995 TV movie featuring the famous Colin Firth lake scene) makes her particularly hard to place. The funny thing is, Austen and Twain died nearly a century apart! Of course, Austen died a great deal younger, at 41.
Apparently, a little research will tell you Twain was part of a group of his generation who didn't care for Austen, including Henry James (1843-1916; 1881's The Portrait of a Lady), Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855; 1847's Jane Eyre), and D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930; 1928's Lady Chatterley's Lover).
James:
"Why shouldn't it be argued against her that where her testimony complacently ends the pressure of appetite within us presumes exactly to begin?"
Bronte:
"Can there be a great artist without poetry?"
Lawrence:
"[S]he is, to my feeling, English in the bad, mean, snobbish sense of the word [...]."
We sometimes allow ourselves to believe that if someone is saying something negative about someone famous, it can't possibly be another famous person, and that if it is it probably reflects poorly on them. Our modern times are suffused with such suffocating logic. People are allowed to have opinions. It's the same nonsense as not being able to handle the artist behind the art. Okay, granted, I've backed off a writer I previously had a great amount of interest in, recently, because of extenuating circumstances, but I can always circle back to them later. I have a good excuse: their books are hard to find anyway, and I hate having to order everything.
Anyway, it just made me chuckle. Twain, I think, would be up to giving us a lot of choice opinions about our present times, and I'd love to hear them. Although would they really be so different from the kind of stuff late night talk show hosts say every night? That's a big question! But we'll always have Austen. It doesn't really matter what anyone says about her...
