(the) American (Novel of)

94 Alison Leigh Brown
tion down to manageable (and publishable) length. In any case I chose just one
of the schemes these two have concocted to include in the current collection.—Ed.
9. Because I am reading Anthony Grafton’s amusing and informative
The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997),
I find her reference to references sufficiently revealing that I had to go and see
if she had any basis for saying what she has said about Austen here. (I had never
seen such reference.) Nearly everyone who talks about Lady Susan also talks
about either Laclos or Richardson or both. I can find no indication that the
relationship between Austen and either of them is “disdain.” The closest I can
come is so tenuous that it is not really close at all. G. J. Barker-Benfield notes
the use Austen makes of Les Liaisons Dangereuses (she “draws on it”) and then
a few sentences later remarks that Sense and Sensibility contains a criticism of
societal expectations of women. So this is tenuous indeed, but it is the best that
I can do. Perhaps Chantal is making a joke with Marianne.—Ed.
10. Jean Genet, Funeral Rites, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove/
Atlantic, 1972), p. 254.
11. Ibid., p. 78.
12. Ibid., p. 75.