Bitch in a Bonnet — Robert Rodi

Novelist Rodi (Fag Hag, The Sugarman Bootlegs) launches a 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 two-and-a-half years' worth of blog entries, he combs through the first three novels in Austen's canon -- Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park -- 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