Susannah Carson > Quotes

“Othello is about many different kinds of love: it’s about the light, beautiful side of love, and it’s about the twisted, darker side of love, and it’s about how, if you flip the emotional coin, love can make you do terrible things. (James Earl Jones)”
― Susannah Carson, Living with Shakespeare: Actors, Directors, and Writers on Shakespeare in Our Time

“Nor do we need such a great deal of ingenuity to see that all, or nearly all, the great issues in human life make their appearance on Jane Austen's narrow stage. True, it is only a stage of petty domestic circumstance; but that, after all, is the only stage where most of us are likely to meet them.
Jane Austen's stage, then, is narrow; it is also devoted to entertainment; and we may fail to recognize the great issues of life in their humorous garb unless we are prepared to view the comic mode as an entertainment which can be both intellectually and morally serious. - Ian Watt - On Sense and Sensbility”
― Susannah Carson, A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen

“Today we are less accustomed to look for universal norms in what we read ... partly because we tend to see life, and therefore literature, mainly in terms of individual experience. Jane Austen's own standards were, like those of her age, much more absolute; and as a novelist she presented all her characters in terms of of their relations to a fixed code of values. - Ian Watt "On Sense and Sensibility”
― Susannah Carson, A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen

“I’ve attempted to bring together as many perspectives as possible, not in order to be exhaustive–but to celebrate the many different approaches to appreciating Shakespeare that there are possible”
― Susannah Carson, Living with Shakespeare: Actors, Directors, and Writers on Shakespeare in Our Time

“Many of Jane Austen's admirers, it is true, read her novels as a means of escape into a cozy sort of Old English nirvana, but they find this escape in her pages only because, as E. M. Foster has written, the devout "Janeite" 'like all regular churchgoers ... scarcely notices what is being said.' - Ian Watt- On Sense and Sensibility”
― Susannah Carson, A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen