Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

Back in the High Middle Ages, a literary form developed (well, many literary forms developed, but I'm interested in one): the chivalric romance. Most English-speakers get little contact with the form, unless they're specialists (the main example in English is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; most of the examples of the form are in French and the final extreme derivatives of it are in Italian -- Boiardo and Ariosto). We do get exposure to them indirectly through Malory -- much of the Morte d'Arthur is translations (somewhat simplified) of French verse romances regarding Arthur. Mediaevalists meet the form in Chaucer (The Knight's Tale being a reasonable example, coming by way of an adaptation from the Italian, and Troilus and Criseyde has some of the marks of one although it has a different formal structure).

The typical form of the verse romance involves knights on quests: I use the plural advisedly, because the general form relies heavily on interlaced adventures, although some examples (like the Gawain poem) do not. In the period, they had a clear social function: to reflect an ideal of chivalric behaviour back towards the nobles who were their audience (many if not most of these poems were the products of aristocratic households). In this they are similar to many of the lyric forms of the same period, which played the game of amour courtois and were frequently not only for but by aristocratic figures. In both cases, the ideals and forms reflected and reinforced a life of leisure (qualified by the fact that the "leisure" involved strenuous military training) and a deliberate separation of social rules from those of other layers of society. (For a discussion of how this reflection worked in actual life, I can direct the reader to Lee Paterson's Chaucer and the Subject of History, which not only analyses examples in Chaucer's work but discusses their reception and the social context.)

(There's a secondary audience which developed later on: a middle-class one which read the stories as pure escapism, the one made fun of in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. But they were not the payors for the original production of the works, and with the decline of the old feudal aristocracy the form basically vanished.)

The chivalric code these works reflected back at the reader (more likely, the auditor, as these would have been read aloud) exalted both prowess and a relatively narrow form of "honour". It did not align in all things with the general mediaeval Catholic Christian ethic (which is why the Grail Quest story in its final form, which has the form of a romance but a content provided by monastic writers, is so aggressively against many of the chivalric patterns, and why Lancelot, the epitome of the chivalric, fails as compared to Bors, Percival, and Galahad). Its audience, however, was happy to take it as normative, and the works can be considered a form of reinforcement of that ideal.

That is not, however, the end of the story.

Consider Raymond Chandler: "But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.... The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure."

The hard-boiled detective novel of the 1930s and 1940s picks up on the overall shape of the chivalric quest, with a twist. The case parallels the knight's quest, and the P.I., like the knight, moves on the edges of society; it is not a coincidence that, just as the knight has to deal with regular challenges from hostile (or even just ambitious) knights which involve significant mayhem, the hard-boiled detetcive is typically beaten up in the course of a case.

Like the knight, the P.I. (as Chandler notes, not a realistic one: "The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.") hews to a code requiring prowess, toughness, a certain amount of care with regards to women (for all of the difference between the ladies amour courtois and the dames of the hard-boiled stories), and a central integrity.

One key element changes in this transposition, though: where the audience of the verse romance wanted to see the knight as someone whom they should emulate, whose code they shared, the audience of the hard-boiled detective story instead relates to them as society does to Jane Jacobs' Guardians: these patrol the outside of our society, not being like us (tougher, stronger, more determined), but (along with the police, with whom they interact) making it possible for society to continue on its way.

If the works have a social function beyond entertainment, then it is not reinforcement (as with the chivalric romance) but rather reassurance: that at least notionally there are guardians out there protecting the circle of society. (Per George Johnston: "Around the battlements go by/Soldier men against the sky,/Violent lovers, husbands, sons,/Guarding my peaceful life with guns.")

There is a further twist to this story.

As it currently stands, the subgenre of urban fantasy has a significant presence of (if not "is dominated by") stories which in their form and protagonists have a direct and unmistakeable descent from the hard-boiled detective story. Sometimes the principal characters are literally PIs (October Daye); sometimes they fill that role within a narrative structure very like that of the PI novel (Harry Dresden, Anita Blake, Matthew Swift, Kate Daniels).

However, these figures do not notionally guard us against dangers which we might take as really out there, the inhabitants of a "realistic" underworld. They guard against dangers which are, by definition, unreal, not just in the sense that they don't exist but in the sense that they cannot. The dangers against which the heroes guard have been displaced into the imaginary, much as the secondary middle class audience for Amadis de Gaula and Sir Isumbras took them as straight tales of marvels rather than as mirrors of behaviour to follow.

Imagine that, sometime before all the media hype and before the creation of the derivative fantasy genre (say in the late 1950s), you sat down to read The Lord of the Rings with no spoilers, and you were a few chapters into it (say, at the end of "A Shortcut to Mushrooms"). Would you have any real idea of what was to come next?

Remember, this is before the crowd of derivative works had created a trope of a quest to bring down a Dark Lord. In fact, the quest as a plot model had fallen into relative disuse (Auden has to dust it off in putting it forward as an explanatory mechanism when writing about LOTR).

What was ahead would have been almost entirely unpredictable. Even after the Council of Elrond, when you encounter elements such as Isildur's heir, or hear of Rohan, Orthanc, and Minas Tirith, and know that the announced thrust of the book will be Frodo carrying the Ring to Mordor, the shape of what is in front would be unguessable. (This is not a plot coupon story; more of that later.)

At the same time, there is nothing arbitrary about the events. Within the scope of the story, there is very little that is pure chance ("...if chance you call it") given the motivations and abilities of the characters. Bilbo's picking up the Ring is chance (or divine intervention) in the plot inside the Hobbit, as Gandalf recognizes, but it's already established background for the whole of LOTR. (There's an excellent case to be made that the timing of Merry and Pippin coming to Fangorn is as well, (and that of Frodo and Sam meeting up with Faramir) but in both cases what all the characters are doing is non-arbitrary in terms of their own world-lines.) Although LOTR (like most realistic novels) incorporates some coincidence, it is not a coincidence-driven plot any more than it is a predictable one.

Or consider Anathem. For much of the book, as with LOTR, it is a narrative of discovery for the reader (and for the narrator). And again, what is discovered is not arbitrary, but integral to the world and the people depicted.

This is not confined to SF/Fantasy, where the broad genre expectations are for wonders and the unexpected. Take a look at Gaudy Night, a number of chapters in. We know it's a detective novel, so we have basic expectations of a problem to be solved (successfully -- this is not a subversion like Trent's Last Case), and a perpetrator to be unmasked. But the shape of the plot developments is not predictable for the reader, regardless of the fact that the action of the novel grows integrally out of the characters' motivations. (As far as chance goes, I would have to count only the collision with Lord Saint-George -- and that's a minor coincidence, in a small city like the centre of Oxford.)

Just to extend the genres represented, I'll hold up The Grand Sophy. Again, the genre gives us some very broad expectations (Sophy and Charles will make a couple by the end of the book). But the plot is a set of broadly unexpected twists, and the sequence of events grows organically out of the characters' motivations.

I'm going to make a carefully hedged claim here: in general, barring special cases, most of what we are likely to think of as the best books have both there traits: the plots are at best only very generally predictable, and the events which make them up are neither coincidental nor arbitrary once one accepts the set-up of the book.

Now consider, in contrast, two other sets of novels.

First: Flag in Exile, Murder on the Orient Express, 1636: The Kremlin Games, and A Lady of Quality.

In each of these books, a diligent reader can guess at a good deal of the detailed shape of the book after a few chapters (e.g. Honor will not only come back into action as an Admiral at Grayson, but will have to deal with both a Havenite attack and internal opposition from Grayson conservatives, both of which she will carry off beyond any reasonable expectation; Poirot will examine each potential suspect / witness and gradually put together his theory, keeping it from everyone until a final recognition scene[1]). In the Flint novel, there's a general shape of plot that has become a standard form in the 1632 novels (uptimer is the central figure in a process of changing / revolutionizing another culture which involves conflict with both conservative downtimers and frequently political or personal conflict with other uptimers; if you know anything about Muscovy in the period (say, from reading The Ringed Castle), you can guess a lot more). In the Heyer case, the general nature of the novels' conflicts, both intra-familial and extra-familial, are very similar to those in many of her previous works.

These novels "work", and are in fact all very popular. But the reading experience is conditioned not by a sense of meeting the unexpected, but by navigating a broadly expected course.

This is not simply a contrast of good versus poor craft. (This is one reason I hedged above.) Weber, for example, typically builds his plots by telegraphing broadly what is going to happen long before he actually shows it; this is a deliberate choice of a type of plot construction which is not uncommon in the thriller or military novel: consider Tom Clancy. The reader is in a privileged position of knowing broadly what is going to happen and the pleasure is gained from seeing just how it plays out, or how apparently unbeatable odds are met by the protagonist. (My personal judgement tells me that this is a good way of making good light reads but rarely for even approaching the very good let alone great: one advantage of first-person narrative or tight third person is that it makes this sort of plot far more difficult to write.) And there are great works, usually in a tragic vein, which gain most of their impact from the audience knowing ahead of time what is to happen and seeing the inevitable play out. (The Oedipus Tyrannos is the classic (in both senses) example; Paradise Lost, which announces its plot in the first verse paragraph, is another.

The plot coupon novel is a special case of the predictable plot. The hero (this is frequently a "quest" or heroic fantasy) is told of a set of tasks which have to be accomplished, leading up to a final objective, at the outset of the novel, and he (usually he) or his companions set about collecting the coupons. Sometimes even the order is decreed in advance. Eddings' series are built this way; so are Riordan's. (Internally, these are justified by "prophecy". but it always strikes me as lazy plot-building.) One trait which makes this a particularly weak plot type is that these coupons are typically arbitrary, independent of one another, and the novel becomes a series of disconnected episodes rather than an organic whole. It's popular in YA fantasy, though, possibly because it provides a simple structure for the reader to measure the progress through the novel by.

Consider, in contrast, another set of novels: The Three Hostages, The Shambling Guide to New York City, and Diplomatic Immunity. These are not entirely predictable novels, but they are driven by entirely too much coincidence. DI not only begins with the coincidence of Miles contact with Bel, but by the fact that he's basically the only person in the galaxy who has the contacts and the knowledge to deal with a situation he's assigned to simply because he's nearby to it. (I mean, would anyone else within several parsecs even have recognized the sigil for the Star Creche?) Lafferty's novel -- which got her plenty of attention, and a nomination for the Campbell award -- hinges on a whole set of coincidences, the biggest being that the conflict which drove the heroine to New York in the first place, and which has no logical connection to the world she has fallen into, turns out to involve a major villain within that world. Buchan's (deservedly classic) thriller is largely worked out organically, but begins with just too may coincidences to be true. Hannay just happens to be able to make contact with Medina just at the same time as he has been handed the kidnapping to solve (and have Medina decide that he would be a useful tool), just happens to be a poor hypnotic subject, and just happens to be a good friend of Sandy, who is Medina's ideal antagonist. (Buchan plays games with the plot coupon theme by deliberately having a character talk about the technique of linking three arbitrary topics together, choosing three images which turn out to be critical to the whole plot.)

Coincidence is one aspect of the more general case of the arbitrarily driven plot. In a plot driven by coincidence, the arbitrariness accompanies things which are intrinsically improbably and advance a plotline; more generally, episodes which are introduced with no organic connection to the central drivers of the plot may not be "coincidence" -- they advance no plot, they're there just for themselves -- but they are surely random.

Again, this can be used in great works as well as mediocre ones. In tragedy, coincidences which keep shutting down options for the protagonist create a sense of struggling vainly against fate (consider Romeo and Juliet). In comedy, coincidence becomes a technique of its own, precisely because expectations in comedy are explicitly removed from those in reality. (And frequently the point of a coincidental episode in a comedy is not to advance a plot arc but to provide an incongruous episode which is humorous for its own sake: consider the scene in Crispin's Holy Disorders with the pet raven.) Once it becomes a structure in itself, coincidence can work very well: the picaresque novel is basically a set of random encounters strung along the thread of the central character's experience; so is Christian's pilgrimage in Bunyan, or Quixote's journey in Cervantes. (A fully coincidence-driven plot moves away, again, from the predictable, frequently in the direction of the absurd.)

So where am I going here?

I realized, as I was looking back on last year's reading, that the books which I rated most highly were those which had an organic development of a set of initial conditions (minimal coincidence -- not necessarily none -- you can get away with one or so simply because that's sometimes just how life is and it can, used carefully, increase rather than weaken verisimilitude) combined with an essential unpredictability in the reading experience: Hild, City of Stairs, Ancillary Sword, The March North, Three Parts Dead.

Neither of these structural principles is exactly unobvious, but it can be interesting to sort one's favourite (or not-so-favourite) books into heaps based on these criteria. Sometimes books by the same author fall into different heaps: Bujold loves coincidence-driven plots, but Memory is far less coincidence-driven than her other books; Heyer is all over the map; Pride and Prejudice is much less coincidence-driven than Persuasion, and Mansfield Park even less so (but MP telegraphs its plot more than do the others).

[1]The contrast with Gaudy Night is not in recognizing that the solution will be reached and the reasoning revealed, as this is a demand of the genre itself; it's that the nature of the plot advancement is generally foreseeable in Christie's case (because of her previous use in other novels) whereas this is not the case with GN by reference to prior works of Sayers, or anyone else.

Nicola Griffith's Hild is a very well-done historical novel, in the sense that it deals fairly well with the historical novelist's dilemma and does not just give us modern people in a mediaeval dress. (Many if not most historical novels do.) It is also a well-written novel, with well-rounded characters, good prose, and a measured pace. I look forward to its successor.

That being said, I'm going to go on a tangent about historicity.

First, we know less about pagan East Anglia in the Seventh Century than we do about Republican Rome, especially if we want to talk about the details of everyday life. (We know the names of kings and battles, and some bits from Bede, essentially.) Every single source we have is written a generation and a half, at best, after the fact, in a Christian society. The texts we have which preserve elements of the earlier society have their own limitations -- embedded heroic stories, the "ruins" of Tolkien's allegory about the writing of Beowulf, do not have much connection with everyday life, even among the nobility. James the Deacon, a character in the novel, lived to be an old man and may have provided information regarding the Synod of Whitby which we have in Bede (which took place, be it noted, well after this first book in the projected trilogy), but even if he or any of his contemporaries told a very young Bede, or a source of Bede's, stories about the early days in the north, and what the fabric of life was like, they have not come down to us. The Chronicle has battles, royal births, and deaths, but it itself was composed rather after the fact and is in no way a primary document. We know virtually nothing about the Anglian (or indeed, general Germanic) practice of the old religion.

Writers didn't suppress details of the old society; they just weren't interested in it, for the parts that had gone away, or took for granted the continuing elements. Much of what we know about social history of the period is actually fairly recent, based on archaeology rather than history.

Griffith takes as much care as she can to get her material and social context right, but she still has a large blank space to fill in, even with all the constraints she conforms to.

Second, Griffith herself has been clear about having "taken heinous liberties with" Paulinus of York. Nothing that she's done with him has been impossible, but the probability of his having been like the man depicted in the novel is low.

Third, Much of the thread of the novel does turn around one entirely made-up character (Cian).

Fourth, the pattern of other royal abbesses of joint monasteries -- Æthelthryth / Audrey of Ely is a later contemporary of Hild's, also East Anglian, about whom we know more of her life before becoming an abbess -- suggests that one need not invoke the exceptional course of being a seer to explain a level of female agency in that society required to become a major figure of this type. Hild is not a one-of-a-kind figure. Occam's Razor leads me to posit, in reality, a rather different life arc for the early Hild.

Fifth, I doubt that the East Angles were as illiterate as depicted; futharc is older than the invasion of England in the Germanic world, was certainly preserved down to the time of (at least) the Ruthwell Cross, and would have been part of the imported culture of the Angles.

The language isn't quite right -- Griffith uses standard West Saxon forms of the Eighth/Ninth Century, as far as I can tell, and not the Northumbrian of Caedmon or Bede. Also, using "York" for the city that was the Roman Eboracum will not fit until after the Vikings name it Jorvik: it is Eoforwic during the period. Similarly, Hild would not have referred to Mercia as "Mercia", which was a Latin form used in the written texts of later Anglo-Saxon England; it would be like us referring to "Anglia" or "Francia"; nor, being Northumbrian, would she have called it "Mearc". She would have said "Marc".

Now, none of this matters all that much. Francis Lymond's world bends somewhat around him as well, to accommodate his story, as does Harry Flashman's. Griffith puts together a coherent world which does not directly contradict what we know. The internal dynamics of that world produce the recorded historical events we have without special assistance from the author. As long as you don't confuse it with the actual past, you're fine.

You could probably write an historical novel about a "most probable" Hild, but (1) it would probably be rather dull and (2) it would also probably be wrong about all sorts of stuff.

But it's worth remembering that for any imaginative recreation of a period in history, it will be shaped by the contemporary concerns of the writer, which will be as transparent to the writer's audience as they are to the writer. Then at some time, thirty, fifty, eighty years later the marks of "period" will become not only visible but inescapable.

There's an article over at tor.com regarding moral ambiguity in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which is mildly interesting -- even though my reaction is "not so much".

My daughter is currently reading the series, so the books are on hand and I read them through, not being averse to a quick light read, and I did enjoy them.  But as far as moral ambiguity went, my initial reaction was that it was unnecessarily skipping some.

My main concern was around Chronos, who is presented as an entirely bad figure (indeed, all of the Titans are presented as black, even those who tend to show sympathetically in actual myth, like Prometheus and Epimetheus). This is (it turns out in the second series) equally applicable to Chronos' "Roman" version of Saturn.  However, there's a long tradition that Saturn's reign was a golden age:  iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna, as the Fourth Eclogue has it.  A month or so ago I was at Stirling Castle, where James V had included a statue of Saturn as part of a representation of his own reign as a new golden age.  (This confused my daughter no end, given her exposure to Riordan). The gods may have had difficulties with Saturn, but humanity seems to have had a better time (although one without fire: if you put everything together, it's one of those semi-Edenic worlds without the need for agricultural labour but also without any of the benefits of civilization.

I don't think that painting Chronos black was needed, even at a middle-school level.  Some shades of grey could have been provided: showing the Titans, for example, as representing a time that was so irretrievably past that their return would be massively destructive, but not simply nasty in themselves.

I will say, though, that the movies make the books look positively sophisticated and subtle, both in their characterizations and in the amount of hacking they did to the plots.  On the topic of absent parents (the focus of the article linked above), for example, the movie inserts a iron-clad rule preventing the gods from having contact with their children (thereby rather improving the optics of both Hermes and Poseidon). Characterization also suffered badly.  Very badly.

... except, of course, it's not.  They've chosen one novel per author.  In reality, it would be bizarre to expect that the very best novelists wrote only one of the top 100 novels.  (Also, their choices sometimes seem to me to be questionable).

I also question the usefulness of selecting novels from, oh, the last 50 years: we're too close.  Too much of our reaction may be to shared memes which don't affect our reaction to novels from 200 years ago. (As the novels are arranged roughly chronologically, this translates as "anything after Catch-22" (which was published in 1961). I'm also dubious about about a quarter of the list falling into this recent category on more general grounds: there's a distortion of perspective distinct from our assessment of quality which tends to make recent names more familiar. (You'll note that I haven't read many of the recent selections, as my tastes diverge from "mainstream" literature in the period, and the major authors I have read, like Pynchon, don't seem to get a look in.)

I've bolded all the books I own, italicized all those I've read but don't own, and added comments as seemed appropriate.
( Cut for length... )

Authors who probably should be on the list but aren't: Walpole, Zola, Smollett, Chesterton, Scott, Hugo, maybe Burney, Powell, (Dance to the Music of Time was started before my 50-year cut-off).

I just finished Mary Robinette Kowal's Shades of Milk and Honey, and it made me think about some of the issues surrounding Jane Austen tributes / pastiches / homages.  There have been a number of these over the years (among which are the execrable Pemberley and P. D. James' Death Comes to Pemberley), and none of them really manages to get very close to the real experience.[1]

I'm prepared to argue that the barriers, taken together, make it almost impossible to do this with full success, short of a Pierre Menard approach.

At the simplest mechanical level, there's the problem of getting the language right.  Words change, vocabularies change, and using only George III/Regency language and using it in the right way requires a great deal of knowledge and care.  (I won't say that it's impossible -- teachers who specialize in the period might have a chance at it -- but it's very difficult.)  In addition, there's the additional constraint that you should exclude period language of a level that Austen herself excluded.  I'm pretty sure, for example, that she never once refers to the ton, beloved of Georgette Heyer. (There's a reason for this: Austen didn't care about the ton, and to the degree that she did, she distrusted them.)

At the next level, there's getting the referents right. An abbey did not usually mean a Gothic building; it would have been far more likely to be a Palladian or Georgian residence of some scale on land acquired from the Crown which had belonged to an Abbey in Henry VIII's day. (It was occasionally used loosely to refer to such a residence even if the land did not go back to an actual abbey).  Being aware of the material culture of the time is tricky (condition of roads, details of clothing and the constraints they imposed, etc.).

Austen's style is not as easy as it seems to imitate (of which more anon: it has to do with her aims and intent as much as idiosyncrasies).

In choosing Dramatis Personae, one has to be careful yet again: the figure of highest rank in all of her novels is a Baronet, and her main figures are almost all gentry ("almost" because there are a few servants and people in trade -- and note that the line isn't easy to draw -- Austen was generally suspicious of cits, but she also gives us the Gardiners).  So playing with nobility immediately marks one's work as un-Austenish.

Except when parodying it, she avoids melodrama.  Nobody ever runs away to Gretna Green in an Austen novel; not even Lydia Bennett.  There are no duels, despite Mrs. Bennett's fears about Mr. Bennett. Nobody dies on-screen, as it were.  The single most violent thing that happens to anyone is a young woman slipping on a step and hitting her head.

She excludes current affairs; except for a few references to naval action in Persuasion and the presence of soldiers in Pride and Prejudice, it would be hard to find any indication at all of the Napoleonic wars.

However, the biggest barrier has to do with the nature of the project itself.

Jane Austen is, in attitude, probably closest to Dr. Johnson of all the English authors.  She's a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, deeply suspicious of anything urban or modern; she's the daughter of a C. of E. Rector with that Augustan view which reduces religion to morality but still values it heavily.  (There's no piety surrounding religion in Austen, but the church is assumed to be appropriately there as an institution.)

She is writing works which engage the present -- her present -- critically but subtly from a deeply moral (and conservative) point of view.  She is deeply concerned with issues surrounding the status and power of women, but she advocates no radical changes: in her view if everyone within the system did as they ought, the system would work; but she sees all sorts of people not doing so.

In a way somewhat analogous to the way in which Stanley Fish's Milton writes in such a way as to engage the reader actively in Paradise Lost, Austen's prose is a steady flow of invitations to the reader to make (or at least recognize) small moral judgements.  Her comedy of manners is about figures who are all somewhat flawed (although most of them are basically "good") -- including her heroines.  In particular, she achieves something of the effect Pope does in balancing couplets by pairing precisely chosen verbs or adjectives with slightly different meanings to evoke their fine distinctions.   (For a Popeian example of this sort of parallelism, consider the verbs in "true genius kindles, and fair fame inspires" -- genius is "kindled" because it is ultimately a flame and fame (= rumour) is inspired because both have to do with breath; genius can be true, but fame is only "fair" (attractive, but not necessarily true).)

The farewell between herself and Mr. Wickham was perfectly friendly; on his side even more. His present pursuit could not make him forget that Elizabeth had been the first to excite and to deserve his attention, the first to listen and to pity, the first to be admired; and in his manner of bidding her adieu, wishing her every enjoyment, reminding her of what she was to expect in Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and trusting their opinion of her—their opinion of everybody—would always coincide, there was a solicitude, an interest which she felt must ever attach her to him with a most sincere regard; and she parted from him convinced that, whether married or single, he must always be her model of the amiable and pleasing.

Note that the virtues assigned to Wickham are both among the most shallow ones possible("There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it."); that if Elizabeth deserved his regard then his "present pursuit" (which itself has a hunting tone around it, making Miss King his prey) is a decline; that Elizabeth's responses (listen and pity) do not include any form of critical assessment (such as she later realizes she should have made).  (There's also, of course, a large dollop of dramatic irony, given that Elizabeth's "opinion of everybody" is about to get a thorough upsetting.)

This is prose which begs for close attention to fine meanings, and also invites our own judgement of what is transpiring -- and the standards for judgement which are held out by the narrator are moral ones.

In contrast a modern day writer setting a novel in the Regency period is almost certainly doing so not because that is the best way to address current concerns critically -- the relations between men and women, particularly, and the forms which society imposes on them, have changed radically since then.  We place fiction in the past because it is one of the few "safe" places left which are exotic. To visit the Regency is to take a vacation from the concerns of everyday life.

If Jane Austen were to be writing today, she would be writing contemporary fiction, because her sort of fiction engages with contemporary issues.  Vice-versa, if someone is inclined to place their action two centuries in the past, it may not be with an intent to avoid critical engagement with human nature entirely -- it may not be just to produce froth -- but it will not be with the same sort of engagement as is required to drive a truly Austenish novel.  In addition, it's hard to imagine any serious author today with the values of an Augustan Tory providing the operative canon for judgement.

I actually think that Kowal's book is good -- although from an Austen point of view it drops into melodrama in the latter part of the book. (In addition, I think her characters are a little too flawed for Austen:many of Austen's characters are basically good but with a single character making them ridiculous (Sir William Lucas' vanity, for example, does not make him an unsympathetic man, just a tedious one)).  I look forward to reading the novel's successors -- but I'm not doing it for their Austenish qualities, but for their own virtues

[1]Note that Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is not in this category.  Clarke is certainly not imitating Austen -- her style is more Victorian -- and it doesn't seem to be homage to any particular author.

 There has been discussion (notably at tor.com) regarding the relationship between mainstream novels (referred to misleadingly as "litfic", but I'll come to that) and Science Fiction.  Aside from revealing the deep insecurity that many commenters have regarding the relative status of the two fields, I've noticed several things that seem to be, well, just wrong.

First, there's a sense that novels that are more serious and less funny/optimistic are more likely to be literary (the deck was stacked in that the article triggering the discussion was on dystopias).  Look, the "Great Tradition" of the novel begins with comedy -- Pamela, Tom Jones -- and continues through Jane Austen.  Even Ulysses is a fundamentally comic work.