Jun 24, 2019 09:03 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 25, 2019 05:55 PM by C C.)
The real reason Jane Austen never married
https://www.historyextra.com/period/geor...r-married/
EXCERPT: One of the greatest writers in the English language, Jane Austen (1775–1817) is famed for her works of romantic fiction [...] Her present-day popularity derives chiefly from the fact her heroines, although two centuries old, act as romantic beacons for the modern age. With a universal message of marrying for love rather than money, they provide examples, albeit fictional, of women choosing husbands due to strings of the heart and not of the purse.
If the old adage ‘write what you know’ is applied to Austen’s writing, then she should have had one of the happiest marriages in the history of matrimony. But here lies the paradox. One of the supreme purveyors of romantic love in English literature, and the creator of numerous blissful couplings in print, never took her own trip down the aisle. The whitewashing of Jane’s public persona began almost immediately after her death in 1817 with the autobiographical note her brother ... The mere fact that Jane did not find a Mr Darcy in real life and so lived – it seemed – as a virtuous Christian ‘spinster’ was enough to satisfy Victorian curiosity.
By the middle of the 20th century, however, this somewhat distorted view of the now much-admired and studied author began to be challenged. Literary critic QD Leavis protested in 1942, for example, against the “conventional account of Miss Austen as prim, demure, sedate, prudish and so on, the typical Victorian maiden lady”. Her essay was just one of many that would bring into question and then rewrite the received biography. And with this rewriting came the desire to know exactly why Jane Austen had remained single. [...Interesting exploration of various theories about such over the decades follows in conjunction with information of Austen's life, and why the theories potentially fail...]
[...] The fact that Jane Austen remained single all her life, while her literary heroines enjoyed both romantic wedded bliss and financial security, is one of English literature’s greatest ironies. The simple fact is, though, that even if Jane had herself experienced a happy marriage with a husband only too obliging for her to continue writing, with the prospect of possibly a large family to bring up Jane may not have had the time to write to the extent she did and so develop her incredible talent that is so revered today... (MORE - details)
Why Psychiatry Is Still in the Nineteenth Century
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...th-century
EXCERPT: . . . If we were to resurrect a cardiologist from the 19th century and seat him at Mr. B’s consultation, he (it would be a "he") would be completely amazed at what had happened to his specialty. Moreover, he would have no idea about what he was seeing: The tests and the examination would be outside anything he knew. The diagnosis would have no meaning for him. The treatments would be unintelligible.
Next door, with Mrs. A, we have a resurrected psychiatrist (though he would have been called an "alienist"). He is not at all confused by what is going on, though some of the questions might be different from the ones he would have asked. The diagnosis would be entirely familiar (though he might call it "melancholia"), but the concept of "serotonin" and the drugs that act on it would be strange. His 21st-century colleague is honest enough to tell him that many patients don’t respond very well to these drugs and that truly new ones have not appeared for many years. Both of them know that a considerate and supportive environment helps recovery, but that the risk of suicide is a real one.
Why this immense gap between what cardiologists and psychiatrists know? They are equally intelligent. They work as hard. They care as much. The answer is both simple and complex. It’s simple in that the reason is the difference in basic scientific knowledge about the heart and the brain. It’s complex in that the reason for this difference lies in the nature of the two organs.
The heart is not a mystery. [...] None of this applies to the brain, which is a thousand or more times as complicated as the heart. Depression is a disorder of mood and emotion. Though we have some ideas about which parts of the brain are particularly concerned with these functions (e.g., the amygdala), no one knows how the brain produces, say, happiness, and how this differs from, say, sadness—that is, how different patterns in the amygdala code for different emotions. So no one can say what happens when this system malfunctions and results in the abnormally persistent mood we call depression.
If you don’t know how something works, you can’t put it right when it goes wrong. [...] Neuroscience, as I tell my students, is as much about what we don’t know (but need to) as about what we do know. (MORE - details)
https://www.historyextra.com/period/geor...r-married/
EXCERPT: One of the greatest writers in the English language, Jane Austen (1775–1817) is famed for her works of romantic fiction [...] Her present-day popularity derives chiefly from the fact her heroines, although two centuries old, act as romantic beacons for the modern age. With a universal message of marrying for love rather than money, they provide examples, albeit fictional, of women choosing husbands due to strings of the heart and not of the purse.
If the old adage ‘write what you know’ is applied to Austen’s writing, then she should have had one of the happiest marriages in the history of matrimony. But here lies the paradox. One of the supreme purveyors of romantic love in English literature, and the creator of numerous blissful couplings in print, never took her own trip down the aisle. The whitewashing of Jane’s public persona began almost immediately after her death in 1817 with the autobiographical note her brother ... The mere fact that Jane did not find a Mr Darcy in real life and so lived – it seemed – as a virtuous Christian ‘spinster’ was enough to satisfy Victorian curiosity.
By the middle of the 20th century, however, this somewhat distorted view of the now much-admired and studied author began to be challenged. Literary critic QD Leavis protested in 1942, for example, against the “conventional account of Miss Austen as prim, demure, sedate, prudish and so on, the typical Victorian maiden lady”. Her essay was just one of many that would bring into question and then rewrite the received biography. And with this rewriting came the desire to know exactly why Jane Austen had remained single. [...Interesting exploration of various theories about such over the decades follows in conjunction with information of Austen's life, and why the theories potentially fail...]
[...] The fact that Jane Austen remained single all her life, while her literary heroines enjoyed both romantic wedded bliss and financial security, is one of English literature’s greatest ironies. The simple fact is, though, that even if Jane had herself experienced a happy marriage with a husband only too obliging for her to continue writing, with the prospect of possibly a large family to bring up Jane may not have had the time to write to the extent she did and so develop her incredible talent that is so revered today... (MORE - details)
Why Psychiatry Is Still in the Nineteenth Century
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...th-century
EXCERPT: . . . If we were to resurrect a cardiologist from the 19th century and seat him at Mr. B’s consultation, he (it would be a "he") would be completely amazed at what had happened to his specialty. Moreover, he would have no idea about what he was seeing: The tests and the examination would be outside anything he knew. The diagnosis would have no meaning for him. The treatments would be unintelligible.
Next door, with Mrs. A, we have a resurrected psychiatrist (though he would have been called an "alienist"). He is not at all confused by what is going on, though some of the questions might be different from the ones he would have asked. The diagnosis would be entirely familiar (though he might call it "melancholia"), but the concept of "serotonin" and the drugs that act on it would be strange. His 21st-century colleague is honest enough to tell him that many patients don’t respond very well to these drugs and that truly new ones have not appeared for many years. Both of them know that a considerate and supportive environment helps recovery, but that the risk of suicide is a real one.
Why this immense gap between what cardiologists and psychiatrists know? They are equally intelligent. They work as hard. They care as much. The answer is both simple and complex. It’s simple in that the reason is the difference in basic scientific knowledge about the heart and the brain. It’s complex in that the reason for this difference lies in the nature of the two organs.
The heart is not a mystery. [...] None of this applies to the brain, which is a thousand or more times as complicated as the heart. Depression is a disorder of mood and emotion. Though we have some ideas about which parts of the brain are particularly concerned with these functions (e.g., the amygdala), no one knows how the brain produces, say, happiness, and how this differs from, say, sadness—that is, how different patterns in the amygdala code for different emotions. So no one can say what happens when this system malfunctions and results in the abnormally persistent mood we call depression.
If you don’t know how something works, you can’t put it right when it goes wrong. [...] Neuroscience, as I tell my students, is as much about what we don’t know (but need to) as about what we do know. (MORE - details)