Want to celebrate the 200^th birthday of Pride and Prejudice without actually reading the classic? Check out the very abridged, illustrated version that Jen Sorensen did at NPR Books.

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Humanities seeks to answer that question with a thorough sketch of Jane Austen’s life as she worked to become a writer. Read it to learn about her family’s struggles with money, her obsession with guarding the secret of her authorial identity, and “everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together” with an Irish boy.

Unexpected bit of trivia: Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility, came to the world through a process that looks to the modern eye a lot like self-publishing.

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“It was like, because I didn’t have a penis, I wasn’t allowed to pee standing up,” she recalls, shaking her head. Matters weren’t helped by the fact that Sarah was more of the quiet, literary type, while the boys were made of noise and brawn.

Sarah says, “I used to stand in the middle of their football games while they tackled and pantsed each other, and I’d shout, ‘This is a stereotyped scenario! These gender roles are blatantly archaic!’ But they never listened.”

Still, Sarah knew from the long magazine articles she read about dysfunctional families that developing strong ties with her brothers was important, so she made great efforts to reach out. Unfortunately, these attempts were one-sided.

“I was constantly lending them emotionally wrought novels about teenaged girls dying of cancer, staring at them balefully across a moor, inviting them to audit both ‘Jane Austen: The Biker Chick’ and ‘Liberated Vaginas for the Sovereign Woman,’ but they couldn’t even bother to circle ‘no’ on the calling cards I had specially made in London.”

But things came to a real breaking point earlier this year when Sarah asked her favorite brother, Eric, to read her first-person essay. Things did not go well.

Painting by J.C. Leyendecker

Eric reports: “I believe my response was, ‘It’s good,’ and I even gave a head nod to show her I really meant it. But when I went back to watching TV, she started ranting about how she’d hoped I’d said that the essay really captured what it’s like to be a woman in her mid-twenties struggling with assertion within a larger power structure that primes women to deny their own needs, and that her exploration of an obsessive female friendship was interesting and nuanced. I had no idea what she was talking about, but when I made the sound of a yowling cat, she just stormed out of the room. The next thing I knew she was hovering over the bathtub with stones in her pockets shouting, ‘If Virginia Woolf can do it, so can I!’”

It was clear that Sarah needed a new approach. “They think just because I’m a feminist I won’t ‘get’ it. But now I’m going to prove to them how much I do.”

Sarah’s efforts so far have been multi-pronged, including eating nachos on the couch and dropping cheese between the cracks, picking arguments about inane things and promising to “look it the fuck up on Wikipedia,” and not lecturing her brothers about feminism when they listen to rap (she’ll even go so far as to really enunciate ”bitches” and “hos” when appropriate).

“It’s been tough,” Sarah says, slapping a nearby gyrating scantily clad woman on the behind while holding a dog-eared copy of The Feminine Mystique.

More difficult still has been adjusting to all the talk about boobs. “At least I’m trying, unlike the guys, who just glared at me when I yelled at a passing hot chick, ‘Nice left tit!’ How is that not a compliment? It was like the guys didn’t even care that most women’s breasts aren’t proportional. Having seen so many lumpy, saggy, old lady breasts in filthy locker rooms, I think I know I thing or two about the subject.”

Her brothers, though, say they have noticed her efforts. “It’s really weird,” says Eric. “We love her for who she is and wish she would just relax.”

To that, Sarah’s eyes fill with tears, and as she clutches an Emily Brontë novel to her chest, says softly, “I get it. I really do . . . but man, did you see that right butt cheek? Holla!”

**

Please submit your own funny writing to funnywomen AT therumpus dot net. See first: Funny Women Submission Guidelines.

To read other Funny Women pieces and interviews, see the archives.

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Plot summary of Madding Crowd to follow: please feel free to skip ahead to if you know this story. If you have read the novel but have never seen the 1967 film adaptation, skip ahead only as far as: .

Beautiful and spunky Bathsheba Everdene inherits a farm, which by trial and error she learns to manage. She is loved by three men and must choose the right one, which she fails to do for the first 436 pages. Her choices:

Choice #1: The shepherd; the right choice but initially spurned. He proposes way too soon.

Choice #2: The older, wealthy, bachelor farmer next door; the ostensibly sensible choice, but he proves to be a total wing nut when he shoots…

Choice #3: A rakish soldier; the utter wrong choice whom Bathsheba marries. Conveniently, the rakish soldier dies from the gunshot wound, the wealthy farmer goes to gaol [Victorian for “jail”], and a couple chapters later Bathsheba marries her old pal the shepherd, Gabriel Oak.

I don’t write these books. I just teach them. And I love them, despite—or perhaps because of—the excess skepticism with which I have regarded the possibilities for sustaining long-term, amorous relationships with members of the opposite sex: i.e., men. I say “have regarded” because in this, the post-marital, peri-menopausal stage of life, I am trying very hard to bring into healthier proportions my HDL and LDL levels of romantic skepticism. I recently even ventured into online dating. If you’d like to skip ahead to hear about this new venture of mine, please go to: .

I used to show my students the 1967 film version of Madding Crowd, but they always poked great fun at Alan Bates’s shepherd getup, and the swordplay scene with Terrence Stamp, and Julie Christie’s 1960s modish white lipstick. Their ridiculing of one of my seven-ever favorite films inevitably raised my blood pressure, so I stopped screening it with them. I have similarly been trying to achieve healthier systolic and diasytolic levels in the balancing of my professorial bitterness with my professorial idealism.

Yes, my university students recently and predictably hated the ending of Far From the Madding Crowd. Stephanie G. [students’ names have been changed for my protection] took the lead. She began the class with this little chestnut: “What I didn’t appreciate about the ending was the way Hardy marries Bathsheba off. It’s like, because he’s a man, he can’t imagine her without a man in her life. I really didn’t appreciate that.” Pause; glare. “At all.”

She used “appreciate” to mean “approve of,” as in: “Mother, I didn’t appreciate your embarrassing me that way.” She was deeply—and personally—offended by the novel’s ending, as if Thomas Hardy had composed it in 1874 specifically to irritate Stephanie G. in 2010.

“I agree,” chimed in Kristen S. “I know it’s because he wants to keep his readers happy, but it’s obvious he didn’t want to marry her off—that he just felt an obligation—you know—to end Far From the Maddening Crowd with a marriage.”

I noted her slip—“maddening” for “madding”—but I let it pass. The previous week, I’d corrected Kristen each time she bungled the title, which was every time she said it. I figured, by this point, she’d simply made an executive decision and substituted “maddening” for its antiquated synonym, “madding,” because she thought it was an improvement.

Stephanie and Kristen have been growing increasingly irritated with Thomas Hardy and with me: Hardy because he isn’t Jane Austen, and me because I enjoy making disparaging remarks about Jane Austen.

“Pride” and “Prejudice” [a.k.a.: Stephanie G. and Kristen S.] are also mad at me because when they invited me to speak to their “sisters” at the Very Pretty Girls Sorority on the topic, “The Glass Ceiling: Myth or Reality?” My talking points all led to a single conclusion: “Reality.” The sisters didn’t want to hear this. They wanted to hear that the glass ceiling was definitively broken through by women of my generation. And they wanted to hear that, with the glass ceiling shattered, they could now have it all: the coach, the castle, and the glass .

As if.

Sorry. I retract that. Bad dating karma. And I can’t afford bad dating karma. Because . . .

. . . four and a half weeks ago, I signed up with an online dating site. My online moniker: Bathsheba Everdene.

Yesterday, I got my first hit-on email. It was from Dale, the man you see pictured at that start of the previous paragraph.

The note from Dale did have some charm. He got the literary allusion of my online username [in case you did not, see third paragraph]. And he did not use a single exclamation point or “LOL.” That’s something, I suppose, if you’re content to live in a world of greatly diminished expectations. But he does look like Mr. Potato Head: the mustache, the ears, and the apparent lack of a torso. I know this is jumping ahead, but I don’t think I could have sex with a man without a torso. And I’d very much like to have sex again soon, as in: sometime before the next Chinese year of the dragon [you’ll have to look that one up yourself].

All this leads me to ask:

Q: Is using the online screen name “Bathsheba Everdene” a good idea?

A: Four and a half weeks for a single hit isn’t so long a time.

Right?

Q. Must I really post a photo with my profile?

A: Mr. Potato Head was my first hit in four and a half weeks.

Q: Okay, but must it really be a recent picture of me?

A: Let’s consult a few experts: 1. Jane Austen: “A woman of seven and twenty can never hope to inspire affection again.”
–Sense and Sensibility; 2. Online Dating for Dummies: Their first, in a series of “Some major do’s,” is: “Avoid even a hint of deception. . . . We online daters are a highly suspicious lot”; 3. Oscar Wilde: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”–The Importance of Being Earnest.

To review and weigh the options:

Austen died when she was forty-one. A virgin. Next.

Dummies uses a “don’t” as their first “major do.” Next.

I’m open to readers’ advice. For the moment, however, I’m putting my money on Wilde.

***

Please submit your own funny writing to funnywomen AT therumpus dot net. See first: Funny Women Submission Guidelines.

To read other Funny Women pieces and interviews, see the archives.

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The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Kafka

There’s something about it that seems like a BDSM fantasy, but here it’s the sadist that’s always tied up. You aren’t normally into things like this. Perhaps this night, this afternoon, tomorrow morning will be your threshold to a new openness and an acceptance of the darker side of yourself. In the middle you realize that the excitement here stems from something profound in the other person that needs fixing. Something out of your control. You can only save yourself.

No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

The person lying beside you is a stranger, masquerading as a friend with their unexpected bursts of empathy. A warm body. Better than being alone but falling short of your own colorful fantasy life. He turns toward you, half-dressed. You want to strip your apathy like a sweaty unitard.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

You don’t fuck The Fountainhead, The Fountainhead fucks you.

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

It’s the kind of romance that makes you want to put on a floor-length cotton nightie just so you can take it off later. The itchy kind. Before you take off your glasses and climb into bed, you sip on a glass of grape juice that tastes strongly of tannin and the experimentations of youth. Somewhere in the mix is a classic Canadian love triangle and now you finally understand what bosom buddies really means.  You leave with your socks still on and paddle back home down the river, hoping you make it before your heart–or something else–springs a leak.

Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins

If there were a definition for sex of the body without the full stimulation of the senses that was the opposite of pornography, this would be it. You are satisfied in they ways you can easily articulate. Sheets were mussed and you lie in bed with your nicotine addiction and without the urge for a cigarette. Somewhere, a dog barks.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White

There’s a first time for everyone. Sometimes it’s with two dudes. They say all the right things, and for a moment you think that everything is going too smoothly, according to plan and schedule. Before you get a chance to think too hard about how no one else will ever be as effortlessly serene, it’s time for the post-coital embrace pose. You struggle to think of the exact right thing to say.

Tinkers by Paul Harding

Never before have you been unsure whether something was an act of sex or menial assembly. Each time you approach a climax your imagination trails into an alternate fantasy, but your body ticks off its list of carnal needs like an hourly chime. Only once you’re finished do you realize you’re actually all alone.

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

Stop jumping to conclusions, you say. You’re shaking the bed. What do you want? she asks. You mean which want do I need? you say back. Sure, she says, it’s all in how you say it. You don’t say, you say, you do. She asks for your hand. She pulls out a pen. On your palm she writes: “DO IT YOURSELF.”

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

If all hipsters are this spry mix of classical endurance and impulsive flexibility, then you take back all those things you said about them. Sure, your social standings are mis-matched and you’re too old and stuck up to dance like that in public, but you’ve never felt so alive…

Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins and Embryoyo by Dean Young

There’s only one phrase for a sexual experience like this: poetic justice.

**

**

Please submit your own funny writing to funnywomen AT therumpus dot net. See first: Funny Women Submission Guidelines.

To read other Funny Women pieces and interviews, see the archives.

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YouTube might be profitable soon, thanks to advertising. We’re trying that too.

Google tells publishers there’s an easy way to keep them from aggregating their news stories, and it only takes a couple of lines of code. Of course, that will mean their stories don’t show up on google searches. What do you mean you don’t want that?

The monster-fication of Jane Austen novels continues. Am I alone in thinking this is going to end like an SNL catchphrase, with a really bad series of movies?

Wired Science has a rundown of everything Apollo 11 NASA is providing for the big anniversary. Go geek out.

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