Episode 123: In Search of the Austen Adaptation Emma
Our hosts are back on The Literary Life podcast this week with another fun episode in our series \u201cIn Search of the Austen Adaptation.\u201d In this episode, Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas are joined again by Atlee Northmore to discuss the several film versions of Jane Austen\u2019s Emma. To start the conversation, Angelina highlights the challenges of adapting Emma to film. Atlee outlines the major film adaptations of Emma. Then they discuss the ups and downs of the various adaptations, as well as casting, personal favorites and production choices.
Join us this spring for our next Literary Life Conference \u201cThe Battle Over Children\u2019s Literature\u201d featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian. The live online conference will take place April 7-9, 2022, and you can go to HouseofHumaneLetters.com for more information.
Commonplace Quotes:In all our literary experience there are two kinds of response. There is the direct experience of the world itself, while we\u2019re reading a book or seeing a play, especially for the first time. This experience is uncritical, or rather pre-critical, so it\u2019s not infallible. If our experience is limited, we can be roused to enthusiasm or carried away by something that we can later see to have been second-rate or even phony. Then there is the conscious, critical response we make after we\u2019ve finished reading or left the theatre, where we compare what we\u2019ve experienced with other things of the same kind, and form a judgment of value and proportion on it. This critical response, with practice, gradually makes our pre-critical responses more sensitive and accurate, or improves our taste, as we say. But behind our responses to our literary experience as a whole, as a total possession.
Northrup Frye
Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep.
William Shakespeare
A boat will not answer to the rudder unless it is in motion; the poet can work upon us only as long as we are kept on the move.
C. S. Lewis
Selection from \u201cEpistle to a Lady, Of the Characters of Women\u201dThe wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool, her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model of sanity and sense which she had in mind, and conveys to us unmistakably even while she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, sincerity which are among the most delightful things on English literature.
Virginia Woolf
by Alexander Pope
Say, what can cause such impotence of mind? A Spark too fickle, or a Spouse too kind. Wise wretch! with pleasures too refin\u2019d to please; With too much spirit to be e\u2019er at ease; With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to have common thought: You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give, And die of nothing but a rage to live.Book List:
Emma by Jane Austen
Tending the Heart of Virtue by Vigen Guroian
The Educated Imagination by Northrup Frye
Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare
Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis
The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf
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