How did you come to find us, mate?

I told the story on Natter yesterday - it's not interesting though. Used to lurk, didn't for a while, got reminded of this place when I was bemoaning lack of places to 'do' fandom nowadays.

So I should really go post about Dollhouse and do some fandom then...

It's weird about Austen -- I've really enjoyed the movie adaptations that I've seen, but I cannot read the books. The minutiae drove me absolutely batshit in text, but was absorbed nicely into the worlds of the movies.

Henry James made me pull out a read pen and edit out all the repetitive language.

Oh, Henry James. You and Faulkner make my head hurt with the long long long long-ass convoluted sentenced.

The minutiae drove me absolutely batshit in text, but was absorbed nicely into the worlds of the movies.

This, so very much. Sense and Sensibility is one of my favorite movies ever, but I cannot get through the book to save my life.

You and Faulkner make my head hurt with the long long long long-ass convoluted sentenced.

Yes, but Faulkner's three-page sentences are things of beauty and James' are drivel.

I'm another who can't get into Austen. I've tried. I think I've managed to get through 4 chapters of Emma, but that's taken a decade or more.

Now I love George Eliot, I read Silas Marner at some point, maybe for Brit Lit and then one summer I read Middlemarch at the beach. It was a few years ago when I went and stayed at the beach for 3 weeks, I'd go sit outside on the beach and read. My copy of Middlemarch still smells faintly of sunblock. This edition has lots of footnotes and I think without them I wouldn't have been able to enjoy it as much.

Maybe if I had footnotes for Austen I could get a better handle on it.

Get a Norton Critical Edition, askye. You'll have all the footnotes you want and then some.

I just discovered one of my favorite short stories from when I was a kid was written by Will Shetterly. I feel dirty.

I don't think I've ever read anything by Henry James. (I took three English courses in college, and two of them were specifically focused on female writers.)

On another topic, when did English and American accents start getting really different? I'm reading a book published in 1889 and set around that same time, and an English boy and an American girl meet on a train, and he thinks she's English because of her "rosy complexion," and they talk a little, and then he asks her if she's English, and she says that no, she's American. At the beginning of this scene, I assumed that, as soon as he heard her speak, he would have figured out that she wasn't English.

If she was from the Northeast and/or from an upper class family, she could sound fairly British. When I moved from Pennsylvania to Utah, several people thought I was English by my Appalachian border accent.

But would she have sounded English to an English person? My mom's from Massachusetts, and some people in New Jersey sometimes thought she was British, but people in England always knew she was American.

I really have no idea what this character's accent would be, other than some American mishmash. Her father's in the Navy, her mother died when she was young, and from ages 5 to 8 or so she lived mostly with a maybe lower-middle-class aunt in upstate New York, and then her father remarried and she moved to live with his wife's family in North Carolina. Nobody has yet remarked on Northern or Southern accents, either, now that I think about it -- everyone who has an accent has been an immigrant.