“You could not shock her more than she shocks me,” wrote W. H. Auden. “Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.” The shocking “her” of these lines is not, surprisingly, one of Auden’s outré modernist contemporaries, but a novelist usually associated with staid domesticity: Jane Austen. “It makes me most uncomfortable to see,” Auden continues, […]

This post was originally published on Jacobin.