Bitch in a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen from the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps (Volume 1)

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