Some thoughts on Jane Austen

So this week I've been reading a bit of Jane Austen. See, every now and then I descend into a mood where I just want to lounge on the couch in my underpants and have a good cry, and a few days ago a period drama film seemed like the perfect side dish to complement tears and snot dripping out of my nose.

It's healthy, I promise.

Anyway, I settled on "Mansfield Park," which turned out to be pretty enjoyable. Well, MOST of it turned out to be pretty enjoyable, except the parts that kept awkwardly insisting that the characters address the issue of Britain's role in the slave trade. I hadn't yet read "Mansfield Park," but I had to assume that this was a creative liberty taken by the screenwriter/director, an assumption which inspired me to read the book. Because, even though I'm all about the abolition of slavery, let's just be honest for a second: Jane Austen's books are about who danced with who, who eloped with who, and who violated some kind of code of propriety that you as a modern reader don't fully understand and need to have explained to you by the Internet--I'm not calling these books shallow (and in fact I would agree with those who say that Jane Austen seemed to deeply understand people's characters), I'm just saying that when you try to turn a Jane Austen book into a cinematic commentary on the slave trade, you're just מפגר.

Anyway, my point is that over the past few days I've been reading "Mansfield Park" and loving it. But I have two other points to make: