What I’m reading #146

In the July Literary Review Lucy Lethbridge reviews seven books about Jane Austen. One, already savaged by Private Eye for its allegedly cavalier treatment of another author’s research, is Lucy Worsley’s BBC TV tie-in Jane Austen at Home:

The very first illustration [. . .] is a photograph of a broken egg cup recently unearthed in the garden of her childhood home, Steventon Rectory. ‘It’s not impossible’, reads the caption, ‘that Jane Austen once used it to eat a boiled egg.’ Well no, not impossible, but…

After further consideration, Lethbridge concludes:

There’s much intriguing historical detail but also quite a lot of padding (‘imagine Jane happy, if you will, life before her, running through the Hampshire fields on a summer evening’), occasionally intercut with questions guaranteed to wake up the snoozing telly viewer. ‘Did Jane ever have lesbian sex?’ is one. The answer, unsurprisingly, is probably not.

Speaking of Private Eye, in the 14 July issue (not online) Remote Controller reviewed ITV’s Love Island, a reality show “in which all the narrative tension comes from who will shag whom, and whether it will be before the first or second commercial break”:

What has shocked ITV is that a franchise aimed at a target audience whose average evening involves four neck-tattoos and necking eight Jägerbombs has scored highly with viewers keener on fair-trade nail varnish and organic Sav Blanc. Eng Lit graduates will find that Love Island most resembles a porn movie based on the novels of Iris Murdoch, with names uncommon at the font bewilderingly swapped: “Theo said to Tyla that Montana said to Theo…”

Meanwhile, in America, Kat Rosenfeld exposes The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter for Vulture. It is an extraordinary, long, thoroughly investigated account of online book reviews used as bullying – passed on by people who condemn the book in question without reading it – and the chilling effect this has on authors. I had not heard of YA Twitter, which:

regularly identifies and denounces books for being problematic (an all-purpose umbrella term for describing texts that engage improperly with race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other marginalizations). Led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches when it comes to calling out their colleagues’ work, and amplified by tens of thousands of teen and young-adult followers for whom online activism is second nature, the campaigns to keep offensive books off shelves are a regular feature in a community that’s as passionate about social justice as it is about reading.

According to Rosenfeld, such campaigns involving thousands of people tweeting and retweeting and Tumblring and the rest:

are almost always waged in the name of protecting vulnerable teens from dangerous ideas. These books, it’s claimed, are hurting children.But a growing number of critics say the draggings, well-intended though they may be, are evidence of a growing dysfunction in the world of YA publishing. One author and former diversity advocate described why she no longer takes part: “I have never seen social interaction this fucked up,” she wrote in an email. “And I’ve been in prison.”