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.

I don't think I've ever read anything by Henry James.

Lucky girl.

American accents tended to reflect the accents of the area of Great Britain most of the people came from and also when they left. Colonial accents are inherently more conservative, so accents in Great Britain changed faster than in the U.S. Most American accents kept the short a and hard r that English English started losing in the 17th century, for example.

By 1889, the accents would generally have been pretty different, but without recording devices, how would the average American know what an English accent sounded like? Language scholars base what they know about accents on things like rhyme schemes. The "rosy complexion" was described in books and seen in illustrations.

eta:

When I moved from Pennsylvania to Utah, several people thought I was English by my Appalachian border accent.

The American Appalachian accent is thought to be the closest extant to Shakespearean English. Rural Appalachia was so remote for so long that the accent wasn't affected by the forces that changed other English accents.

By 1889, the accents would generally have been pretty different, but without recording devices, how would the average American know what an English accent sounded like?

Good point.

This author certainly makes a big deal out of Western accents, while never (as far as I can recall) even mentioning Northern and Southern. They're somewhere out in the territories now, and encountered a bunch of people who talk like Yosemite Sam. (I remember reading that the switching of "er" and "ar" -- like "varmint" for "vermin" -- is actually a remnant of a much older English pronunciation.)

Anybody know of any good books about the development of American English usage and accents? I've read Bill Bryson's, but kind of want to know more now.