The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood

Austen shared Fielding’s irreverence for literary and artistic convention. Her characters are no more heroic than Fielding’s, and often as physically odd or repulsive. In a deliberate echo of Tom Thumb, Austen set her stories in villages called Pammydiddle and Crankhumdunberry. Like Fielding, she took the clichéd situation and rendered it absurd. In ‘Frederick and Elfrida’ she parodied the novelistic convention of depicting two antithetical sisters, one beautiful and foolish, the other ugly and clever. In this topsy-turvy world it is the ugly Rebecca who charms the hero:

Lovely & too charming Fair one, notwithstanding your forbidding Squint, your greazy tresses & your swelling Back, which are more frightful than imagination can paint or pen describe, I cannot refrain from expressing my raptures, at the engaging Qualities of your Mind, which so amply atone for the Horror, with which your first appearance must ever inspire the unwary visitor. (MW, p. 6)

In Tom Thumb, Princess Huncamunca is confounded by the ugliness of Glumdalca: ‘O Heaven, thou art as ugly as the devil.’ Queen Dollalolla, meanwhile, is permanently drunk:

Oh, Dollalolla! do not blame my love;

I hoped the fumes of last night’s punch had laid

Thy lovely eyelids fast.7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Just as Fielding’s heroes are characterised by their unheroic qualities, such as physical ugliness, drunkeness and violence, Austen’s earliest characters are also drunkards, murderers and adulterers. Jealous sisters poison each other, landowners beat their workers with a cudgel on a whim, and children bite off their mother’s fingers. Austen’s letters suggest that she long continued to find physical ugliness, illness and death amusing.8 (#litres_trial_promo)