Three lesser Austen’s
More low-effort entertainment. I love that old English life–so full of gossip and leisure. I’d have made a bad debutante myself, but I can relate to their overblown anguish. Who hasn’t made more of love than it deserves?
These are three of the less memorable Austen books (the more memorable being rather too memorized). Northanger Abbey stands out as her first, and therefore lightest and funniest, novel. The heroine is not particularly to be admired, unlike future heroines. She’s simple and silly and humorously human.
Persuasion and Mansfield Park fade to black almost as soon as you’ve finished reading them, though I’ll propose that the heroine in Persuasion doesn’t really deserve a happy ending (she’s righteous but not not right) and that the hero in Mansfield Park is merely settling. If that story took place today, there’d be a sequel where he divorces Fanny and moves in with a bottle-blonde to puruse all he’s “missed”.