Bitch In a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen from the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps

Novelist Rodi (Fag Hag, The Sugarman Bootlegs) continues his broadside against the depiction of Jane Austen as a €œa woman€s writer €¦ quaint and darling, doe-eyed and demure, parochial if not pastoral, and dizzily, swooningly romantic €" the inventor and mother goddess of €˜chick lit.€€ Instead he sees her as €œa sly subversive, a clear-eyed social Darwinist, and the most unsparing satirist of her century.€ In this volume, which collects and amplifies three years€ worth of blog entries, he combs through the final three novels in Austen€s canon €" Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion €" with the aim of charting her growth as both a novelist and a humorist, and of shattering the notion that she€s a romantic of any kind. €œHiarious ... Rodi€s title is a tribute. He€s angry that the Austen craze has defanged a novelist who€s €˜wicked, arch, and utterly merciless. She skewers the pompous, the pious, and the libidinous with the animal glee of a natural-born sadist€ €¦ Like Rodi, I believe Austen deserves to join the grand pantheon of gadflies: Voltaire and Swift, Twain and Mencken.€ - Lev Raphael, The Huffington Post