Celebrating 250 Years of Jane Austen – by Pretending She Was a Lesbian Who Was into Her Own Sister
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.
To read the rest of this article, you need to donate at least £5/month or £50/year to the Daily Sceptic, then create an account on this website. The easiest way to create an account after you’ve made a donation is to click on the ‘Log In’ button on the main menu bar, click ‘Register’ underneath the sign-in box, then create an account, making sure you enter the same email address as the one you used when making a donation. Once you’re logged in, you can then read all our paywalled content, including this article. Being a Donor will also entitle you to comment below the line and access the premium content in the Sceptic, our weekly podcast. A one-off donation of at least £5 will also entitle you to the same benefits for one month. You can donate here.
There are more details about how to create an account, and a number of things you can try if you’re already a donor – and have an account – but cannot access the above perks on our Premium page.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
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.
JANE AUSTEN: PRIDE, PREJUDICE AND PROPAGANDA
Yawn! Yawn!
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”?
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….
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”.
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?
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.