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

Novelist Rodi (Fag Hag, The Sugarman Bootlegs) continues his broadside against the depiction of Jane Austen as a “a 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 “a 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. “Hiarious ... 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