Austen it is!

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I’ve counted the votes, and Jane Austen’s Lady Susan will be the next Slaves of Golconda read. I’m excited about reading this, in spite of my misgivings about giving up the pleasure of having an unread Austen novel that I can forever look forward to reading, which is a silly attitude anyway. Lady Susan is quite short, so if people are interested, perhaps they can read some more of her lesser-known work and fill the rest of us in on it — the edition I’ve linked to and that’s pictured here has The Watsons and Sanditon, two unfinished novels, and there are numerous shorter fictions Austen wrote that are available in modern editions and sometimes in the same volume as Lady Susan. For myself, I’d like to read the three works I’ve mentioned, as the edition pictured here is the one I own.

Lady Susan is available online for free here, if anybody would like to read it that way.

It looks like there will be some new people joining the group this time, which is wonderful — all you have to do is post on the book on your blog if you have one and then head over to the forums at Metaxu Cafe for the discussion. There is also a Slaves of Golconda blog where people have posted their responses; could somebody remind people of who to contact if they want their name added to that blog? I’ve forgotten.

Discussion will be begin on March 31st — should be fun!

I’ll close with a quotation from Boswell’s Life of Johnson (you can look forward to more of these in future days):

[Johnson] recommended to me to keep a journal of my life, full and unreserved. He said it would be a very good exercise, and would yield me great satisfaction when the particulars were faded from my remembrance. I was uncommonly fortunate in having had a previous coincidence of opinion with him upon this subject, for I had kept such a journal for some time; and it was no small pleasure to me to have this to tell him, and to receive his approbation. He counselled me to keep it private, and said I might surely have a friend who would burn it in case of my death. From this habit I have been enabled to give the world so many anecdotes, which would otherwise have been lost to posterity. I mentioned that I was afraid I put into my journal too many little incidents. Johnson: “There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.”

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