-------- Original Message --------
The following is a link to my latest blog post, which, while it does
not
directly refer to Nabokov, the latter part of the post is a kind of
"bookend" to the message I sent to this listserv within the last week
about the acrostics in Shakespeare, Austen, Nabokov and The Ghost
Writer:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/01/getting-to-bottom-of-jane-austens-black.html
That is the last in a series of posts I wrote about a single line in a
letter Jane Austen, at age 21, wrote to her sister Cassandra, while
Jane
was visiting their married brother Edward and his family in Kent, and
Cassandra stayed at home in Hampshire. The line is as follows:
""Mr Children's two Sons are going to be married, John & George-.
They
are to have one wife between them, a Miss Holwell, who belongs to the
Black Hole at Calcutta...."
I post this because I have a strong hunch that Nabokov made a very
serious study of Jane Austen's (and also Shakespeare's) wordplay, and
therefore it is not coincidental that the following article....
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/swanson5art.htm
...includes a discussion of Nabokov's deployment of the term "black
hole" in _Ada_!
Even if it is a coincidence, I think Nabokovians will, in reading my
interpretation of the shorter of the two charades in Chapter 9 of
Austen's _Emma_, enjoy getting a further taste of Austen's outrageous
but covert wordplay, which, I believe, was part of what attracted
Nabokov to her writing, as I have been asserting these past few weeks.
Cheers,
Arnie