Have a cuppa2/20/2023 ![]() ![]() But that is the world of fantasy fiction.īy all means provide a more detailed and expository background to her life and times.īut please do not put words into her mouth as part of what the museum calls “historical interrogation” – those are the words of extremist, terror-driven behaviour. Inexcusable.Īnd even more so when a person presumably dedicated to preserving her memory (and at a house in which she lived) puts words into her mouth that are not of her own times.Īs a sensitive and perceptive young woman, Austen would almost certainly have changed her views if time travel was possible and she was writing today. To arrogantly transport her two hundred years into a future she could not have possibly imagined is a nonsense. Not simply stories of romance, intrigues, feuds and heartaches, but brilliant social histories to be treasured as documentation of bygone times. In her books, Austen portrays the attitudes, customs and values of the distant era in which she lived. A séance with Austen perhaps or a session via spiritual Zoom? A signed statement of regret and atonement from beyond the grave? As is the museum’s proposed display panel declaring, “Black Lives Matter to Austen”.Ĭan’t help wondering how Ms Dunford arrived at this conclusion. Taking sugar in her tea and wearing cotton apparel irredeemably connect her to responsibility for the exploitations imposed by the slave trade. But that transpires as an innocent pleasure by comparison with the tannin tipple in which the dissolute Austen indulged.īut there’s more of this ludicrous guilt by (distant) association. Museum director Lizzie Dunford has been reported as claiming the writer’s love of a cuppa links her to “the exploitation of the British Empire”.Īnd there I was thinking I was supping with the Devil with my nightly dram of Laphroiag. Her “crime” is a double-whammy of having enjoyed a regular brew and also dressing in clothes made of cotton, a fashion normality of her times.īowing to the pressure of the noisy minority, staff at a museum dedicated to Austen’s life and writing are busily re-evaluating her place in what is termed Regency era colonialism. Seems that the much adored novelist and regular tea drinker Jane Austen (pictured) has fallen foul of those determined to obliterate Britain’s past those sad souls who wish to leave not a trace of history before the start of the current century. You know, the brew that guy with the accent as broad as the Dales is forever chuntering on about. Spluttered and dribbled before disaster was eventually averted. ![]()
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