The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood

(Paperback)

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A radical look at Jane Austen as youve never seen her as a lover of farce, comic theatre and juvenilia. The Genius of Jane Austen celebrates Britains favourite novelist 200 years after her death and explores why her books make such awesome movies, time after time.
Jane Austen loved the theatre. She learned much of her art from a long tradition of English comic drama and took joyous participation in amateur theatricals and her visits to the theatre in London and Bath. Her juvenilia, then Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma were shaped by the arts of theatrical comedy.

Her admiration for dramas dialogue, characterisation, plotting, exits and entrances is why she has been dramatised so successfully on screen in the last twenty years and these versions are at the centre of her continuing fame, culminating in her celebration on 10 note.

From the stage adaptations of Austens novels (including one called Miss Elizabeth Bennet by A. A. Milne) to modern classics, including the BBC Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Emma Thompsons Sense and Sensibility, and the phenomenally brilliant and successful Clueless, The Genius of Jane Austen presents an Austen not of prim manners and genteel calm, but filled with wild comedy and outrageous behaviour.

Reviews

I relished every page Byrnes knowledge of everything Austen wrote has an enviable thoroughness and perception which is rare among Austen scholars and which illuminates the whole of her text. I am tempted to say this is the best book on Jane Austen I have ever read. Paul Johnson, The Spectator

A definitive and pioneering study of a wholly neglected aspect of Austens art Michael Caines, Times Literary Supplement

A fascinating analysis that marries meticulous historical research with critical imagination and flair The Historical Journal

Author Bio

Paula Byrne was born in Birkenhead and has a PhD from the University of Liverpool, where she is a Research Fellow in English Literature. Her first book, Jane Austen and the Theatre, was shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize. Her second book, Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson , the tale of the scandalous star of the 18th-century stage, literature and high-society, was a Richard and Judy bookclub pick. Her most recent book is Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. The story of Evelyn Waugh's friendship with the extraordinary aristocratic family who inspired Brideshead Revisited, it was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller. A regular contributor to the 'Times Literary Supplement', she lives in Warwickshire with her two young children and her husband, the critic and biographer Jonathan Bate.