D. A. Miller, on the
perverse relation of style to the marriage plot in Austen's fiction (today I am teaching Jane Austen, or The Secrets of Style): "Though the heroine’s adoption
of style may induce the courtship plot, what brings this plot to fruition—what gets
her desire to quicken, too—is a
moment of mortification when, the better to acquire the selfhood she had never
before wanted, the heroine forsakesstyle; or rather, what is much more demeaning, she flattens it into a merely
decorative reminiscence of itself, like a flower pressed into a wedding album."
Also:
A trove of unpublished works by Anthony Burgess.
Phil Hogan interviews Gillian Welch and David Rawlings for the Observer.
