oy vey

[hel_ana]

NOBODY knows for sure what Jane Austen looked like ... Scholars think that a small pencil-and-watercolor sketch by her older sister, Cassandra, now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London, is a fairly trustworthy likeness ... The image is sufficiently homely that Wordsworth Editions, a British publisher, recently decided to Photoshop it, removing the frumpy headgear and giving Jane some hair extensions and a bit of blush in her cheeks.

Also from the article:

Austen “wasn’t much of a looker,” Helen Trayler, the managing director of Wordsworth, told reporters in Britain. “She’s the most inspiring, readable author, but to put her on the cover wouldn’t be very inspiring at all.”

Ms. Trayler added that she was also thinking of making over “George Eliot, who was frumpy, and William Wordsworth, who was pretty hideous.”

Pictures at the link.

Comments

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

While I can understand your lack of impressed-ness, this doesn't feel all that different from most "rework the image" stuff - we're (humanity is) forever reworking what we think people looked like to fit some idealised concept we have of what they should have...

[hel_ana]

I guess part of the issue is that it feels different to me than Michaelangelo putting Jesus, Mary and Joseph in Italian Ren (to make up an example - I don't know for sure whether he did a portrait of the three of them or not).

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

How so?

[hel_ana]

Because while we definitely do it to remake things how we feel they "should" have been, a lot of earlier generations (without, for example, any knowledge of the textiles of the 1st century middle east that we've gained through archeology etc) remaking was slightly more innocent, from my understanding. Making things how they more or less thought things were (essentially, in fashion, "like now").

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

Fair enough - I'm not sure I agree, but then again, I have a relatively cynical view of humanities ability to intellectually rewrite the past and that it's been doing it since slightly past the dawn of humanity.

Re: totally OT

[hel_ana]

sent

also k_calypso has it and my skype.

[cous-cous.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I think they should redo Jane like a trashy romance cover, with the flowing locks, coming out of her bodice!

[hel_ana]

not helping!

[cous-cous.livejournal.com]

Did you really think I would?

[hel_ana]

Hey! Stop menacing me!

And no, I know better than that.