Well, now there's this -
and though I just started it, it's very interesting!
In the section about Emma, after the scene where Emma makes a very cutting remark to Miss Bates, the author says:
"And that was when I finally understood what Austen had been up to all along. Emma's cruelty, which I was so quick to criticize, was nothing, I saw, but the mirror image of my own. The boredom and contempt which the book aroused were not signs of Austen's ineptitude; they were the exact responses she wanted me to have. She had incited them, in order to expose them. By creating a heroine who felt exactly as I did, and who behaved precisely as I would have in her situation, she was showing me my own ugly face. I couldn't deplore Emma's disdain for Miss Bates, or her boredom with the whole commonplace Highbury world, without simultaneously condemning my own."
and, "...Austen was asking us to pay attention to the things we usually miss or don't accord enough esteem, in novels or in life. Those small, 'trivial', everyday things, the things that happen hour by hour to he people in our lives: what your nephew said, what your friend heard, what your neighbor did. That, she was telling us, is what the fabric of our years really consists of. That is what life is really about." (my emphasis)
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