Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen Paperback | Pages: 160 pages

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Original Title:	Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen
ISBN:	0786706880 (ISBN13: 9780786706884)
Edition Language:	English

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“Truly Alice, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will – that is all, really, education is about, should be about.”

Wow, just wow! Love this little book by Fay Weldon. It is a collection of short essays about Jane Austen, about Writing, about being a Writer written in the form of letters to a fictional niece, very much like Jane Austen herself had written to her niece Fanny Austen-Knight 200 years ago. It is also a very personal, I would say, almost intimate tribute to the wonderful Jane Austen.

I loved Fay W's metaphor about the great "City of Invention", where authors are presented as builders, creating houses in the different districts of genres (and where, yes, there are literary McDonald's, selling books with empty calories) and then how she goes on, unwrapping this metaphor about Literature/the Writing Process in general and then always returns to Jane Austen in particular. Recommended to all Jane Austen addicts and all readers interested in history of Literature in general.


"If it's approval you want, don't be a writer,"

“Sometimes you’ll find quite a shoddy building so well placed and painted that it quite takes the visitor in, and the critics as well – and all cluster round, crying, ‘Lo, a masterpiece!’ and award it prizes. But the passage of time, the peeling of paint, the very lack of concerned visitors, reveals it in the end for what it is: a house of no interest or significance.”

“The good builders, the really good builders, carry a vision out of the real world and transpose it into the City of Invention, and refresh and enlighten the visitor, so that on his, or her, return to reality, that reality is changed, however minutely. A book that has no base in an initial reality, written out of reason and not conviction, is a house built of – what shall we say? – bricks and no mortar? Walk into it, brush against a door frame, and the whole edifice falls down about your ears. Like the first little pig’s house of straw, when the big bad wolf huffed and puffed.”

Define Epithetical Books Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen

Title	:	Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen
Author	:	Fay Weldon
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 160 pages
Published	:	November 9th 1999 by Basic Books (first published 1984)
Categories	:	Nonfiction. Writing. Books About Books

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Ratings: 3.39 From 949 Users | 131 Reviews

Comment On Epithetical Books Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen

This was fun! Im glad I read it. So many home truths here. Fay Weldon has many opinions about Jane Austen, some though not all that I agree with. But really it is more a book about writing, disguised as a book about Jane Austen. Reading it made me feel less alone as a writer. Even the insanely prolific Fay Weldon struggled with exactly the same practical/artistic problems and fought the same despair.

I thought I would like this book because it was a book of essays about Jane Austen. But this book really hasn't aged well. All her talk of City of Invention felt pretentious and irritating. There were a couple of entertaining flashes but this book was mostly a bore--and contained a couple of shocking instances where she said a woman should not have complained of being raped after she participated in a political revolution and that there is subconscious desire to die in people with auto immune

Discovered this gem of book on https://www.instagram.com/p/BXsEpK8ltbB/ Great discussion of Jane, books, and life.

Truly Alice, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will that is all, really, education is about, should be about.Wow, just wow! Love this little book by Fay Weldon. It is a collection of short essays about Jane Austen, about Writing, about being a Writer written in the

This epistolary novel is made up of sixteen letters from our narrator (Faywho, yes, apparently shares some similarities with the book's author) to her niece, Alice, who is eighteen and studying literature and feeling grumpy about having to read Jane Austen. Fay's letters endeavor to explain why Austen is still relevant, and to give Alice some context about Austen's life and times, but end up being more wide-ranging than that: they contain a lot of advice about reading and writing (Fay is a

One of my favorite books about writers and writing. In the form of letters from an aunt, who is published literary novelist, to her niece who is in college and such that Jane Austen has nothing to say to her. Of course, Weldon explains exactly how much Jane Austen has to say. I have always loved the extended metaphor of novelist as builders in the city of literature, with different neighborhoods, and the English language side of town presided over by the great Castle Shakespeare.

What should a feminist aunt, who is a novelist, say to her college-aged niece, who wants to be a novelist? Does every woman need to read Jane Austen to understand how to write? Can a young adult make sense of the complicated sister-to-sister relationship that has kept this aunt estranged from her? Find out. My long-dormant English-major-self jumped for joy reading this book.