Still reading about actresses … and Ann Radcliffe

John Singer Sergeant’s portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth

Dear friends and readers,

I’m now into Sandra Richards’s important The Rise of the English Actress, and am chuffed to be able to say at long last I’ve discovered it was in the mid-19th century that the tide began to turn for actresses and they became socially acceptable outside the stage and achieved respectability for some on it. A key figure was Fanny Kemble, and a central instrument, the writing of memoirs. My guess had been it was the later 19th century. I was wrong.

It’s worth saying that when I’ve asked this question not only do I not get an answer; people in academic conferences in sessions on actresses shrug. They couldn’t care less when the kind of lying half-slanderous memoirs ceased nor when actresses were able to tell their lives more truthfully and as adults. They seemed not to value the truth nor serious sober life-writing as such at all. Well I do and I’ve been vindicated.

But I’ve no time to present this book; it will have to wait until I return — as it is well past one in the morning until I return — for I’ll have a time away for a few days at the South Central 18th century regional conference on landscapes and vistas at Asheville, N. Carolina where I’ll give my paper on Ann Radcliffe’s landscapes.

And though it is no longer December, but as it has been a very cold night, I’ll share a poem by Radcliffe I had not come across before embarking on this new paper (and reading Clara McIntyre’s Ann Radcliffe in Relation to her Time where it is printed), but loved upon reading: her winter evening with pleasant accompaniments of light, music, congenial companionship, favorite dog

Welcome December’s cheerful night,
When the taper-lights appear;
When the piled hearth blazes bright,
And those we love are circled there

And on the soft rug basking lies,
Outstretched at ease, the spotted friend,
With glowing coat and half-shut eyes,
Where watchfulness and slumber blend.

Welcome December’s cheerful hour,
When books, with converse sweet combined,
And music’s many-gifted power
Exalt, or soothe th’ awakened mind.

Then, let the snow-wind shriek aloud,
And menace oft the guarded sash,
And all his diapason crowd.
As o’er the frame his white wings dash.

He sings of darkness and of storm,
Of icy cold and lonely ways;
But, gay the room, the hearth more warm,
And brighter is the taper’s blaze.

Then, let the merry tale go round.
And airy songs the hours deceive;
And let our heart-felt laughs resound,
In welcome to December’s Eve

Of course the last thing Radcliffe would have wanted was to be an actress.

Helen Allingham (1848-1926), Coming Events

And so to bed,
Ellen

Jane Austen’s Letters: Letter 66, Tues, 24 Jan 1809, from Castle Square

Anne Elliot (Amanda Root), aged 27, at Kellynch, about to be rented; she is looking back, reading over old letters and books in a trunk she is packing as she prepares the family things for their life in Bath (1995 BBC Persuasion by Nick Dear)

Dear friends and readers,

This time I’ll begin with a comment on Jane Austen’s life as it is slowly emerging from a close reading of these letters. I think as she grew older — and that’s by this time (1809) she had gone outside the family’s point of view for her feelings and understandings. She had intuitively done so before they left Steventon (we see this in her reaction to the family’s intense sycophancy over the father’s letters to patrons for the two sailor sons — she is against what they do), but she had not thought it out, she had not developed an alternative view of her own. This happened during the time at Bath, which I conjecture included a period of breakdown: signs of this break-away for real include the thwarted desire to set up housekeeping with Martha and her sister, the ceasing of most raw filips against childbirths, marriage, flirting which show genuine resentment of those who are living conventionally. She got a lot, a lot out of her reading; we don’t begin to see the extent of her reading or what she knew about (like politics — the peninsular war is part of her terrain we have seen in the last couple of letters).

The sense I have that she was at this very time working on Lady Susan and had written The Watsons in all their mututal but differing frank and unsanctimonious register makes this group of letters (unusually uncensored with none omitted) of more interest than they would be. Lady Susan and The Watsons, with their bold frankness as going beyond her home and family. They would not permit her to go on with the first (Watsons) or publish the second (Lady Susan). The Watsons is as startling frank, exposes false values and reality, as relentelessly as Lady Susan.

I’m wondering if the missing four months between January and April where we find this startling letter of an attempt to get back a ms of a gothic style book (she had pinned hoped on too as part of a popular subgenre of book), contained a struggle by Austen and to keep on with The Watsons or Lady Susan and when she saw it would not do, she turned back to the three books she had on hand and decided they would ahve to provide her with what she could use at long last to attempt publication. When she got to Chawton she began to save and to revise, first her favorite novel, Elinor and Marianne, and then the one she knew in her gut would please (First impressions) if only she could get it to the public somehow or others.

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Emma (Kate Beckinsale) trying to escape Jane’s letters, but apparently not managing it; Harriet (Samantha Morton)’s astonishment (1995 BBC Emma by Davies)
So, to general remarks first:

She does talk of weighing her style here and it can refer to novel writing: “I begin already to weigh my words & sentences more than I did, & am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset …

Again no gap and we begin to get a real feeling of continuity going on.

The weather continues very bad: “not but that you may have worse, for we have now nothing but ceaseless snow or rain & insufferable dirt to complain of … ” There’s a second later reference to all the snow and one finally to how she does like to keep someone “waiting in the Cold” — on top of the detailed trouble between the new flooded (yearly?) storecloset (which would contain their things, precious things as we’ve seen), not to omit that the closet “defeated them” gives us what she needed to escape from (Lady Susan) and what to record felt life from (The Watsons).

I take it in this letter she admits the stanzas in the previous letter are by her: “I am sorry my verses did not bring any return from Edward” (I realize “my” could just mean she sent them but do not feel that’s that meaning in context, in context is by me). She did have some ambition — of the best kind — to be as purely classical as Homer Virgil Ovid and Propria que Maribus. She knew the phony pompous stuff parading as classical verse was not its best spirit.

As to the matter it is heavily family (again Henry is the “excruciating” one), illness, real discomfort over Martha’s behavior on Jane’s part (she is not sympathetic to Martha’s newly franic male catching). We can glimpse too distress, discomfort, mortification in Martha (which Jane records enough to allow us to see); some attempt at joking to lift Cassandra’s spirits over the coming death of Mrs E Leigh (Cassandra’s godmother). Literary talk which reveals the backwater Austen is in: sermons, Cassandra is trying to force More’s dreadfully reactionary didactivc Calebs in Search of a Wife on Jane and Jane trying to escape this book — this puts me in mind of Emma escaping one of Jane’s letters:

She regained the street — happy in this, that though much had been forced on her against her will, though she had in fact heard the whole substance of Jane Fairfax’s letter, she had been able to escape the letter itself.

Well Jane will not escape Hannah More and although she is downright against evangelicals, the milieu impinging on her will tell in her later books (MP, Persuasion). There is a catch in Austen’s throat as she uses the word “future home” for Chawton. I’ve not heard that word “home” since Steventon and again the very early days of Castle Square when Jane planted the syringa and hoped for the best.

And then most unexpected a genuinely grand ball! who’d have thought it.

Jane Austen is aware of what is happening in the Peninsular war. Fascinating. I must read Escaille’s Peninsular War.

But as important is the poor mad woman escaped from an asylum; not told as fun or amusing but with real interest and a kind of intense curiosity. Austen has unexpected identifications, no? She signed herself MAD four months (April) later.

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An order for prize money, Portland, Maine 1813

Opening passage reveals the real rhythms of these letters to Cassandra; let us suppose three packets of letters to Frank showed the same rhythms. Like many another novelist, Austen was also herself a letter-writer and (in effect) diarist. Cassandra has hurt a finger on her writing hand in some way. Since she had written on Tues, she would have waited until Fri (3 day interval — as LeFaye suggests in the introduction to this 4th edition)

My dear Cassandra
I will give you the indulgence of a letter on Thursday this week, instead of Friday; but I do not require you to write again before Sunday, provided I may beleive you & your finger going on quite well.

A reference to Burney which shows Austen alive to the unreality of the idealization of the characeter, Cecilia:

Take care of your precious self, do not work too hard, remember that Aunt Cassandras are quite as scarce as Miss Beverleys.

Charles is now beginning to appear regularly in the letters again; he had not been here since before they left Steventon and he was so obstreperous and demanding for his own place when it came to the patronage plum giving out (and the letters written at the time) and also a dancer, someone who liked to dance and flirt (as we would say). Note again a characteristic given Henry which is not the one the family wants us to think of as dominating. Excruciating. Henry was a demanding urgent sort; I hear that incisive held-in-check aggressive tone in his notification of her death. She is jealous that Henry will get there first; tell what he knows and all Charles said. We have seen her credit Henry with real insight and information about Stoneleigh Abbey and the history of the incomes of all family members now and in the past.

Charles’s Fanny only in expectation of not being well. Poor woman was another made incessantly pregnant while she lived once she married. We’ve not got that September letter — hardly any from her to Charles. He makes money by violence. As to this encounter, see Southam on the hardships of the life on board ship (pp. 131-32). He gives us a description of the general (corrupt in the extreme, lousy) system of patronage and prizes (interest he calls it). Very few got any prize money it should be noted. LeFaye cites Sheila Kindred’s essay on Charles’s capture of La Jeune Estelle (JA Society, Collected Reports for 2006, pp 50-53): this is an excellent article, showing the exact particulars of what Charles did, how the sum from sale of perishable goods came to 539.14s.11d 3/4s (two and one third times his regular annual salary; he also sold the vessel; years later Charles specifically names this vessel in his entry in a naval dictionary. Later in the letter we find she is keeping up with the peninsular war.

I had the happiness yesterday of a letter from Charles, but I shall say as little about it as possible, ·because I know that excruciating Henry will have had a Letter likewise, to make all my intelligence valueless.-It was written at Bermuda on ‘I 7 & 10. of Decr; –all well, and Fanny still only in expectation of being otherwise. He had taken a small prize2 in his late cruize; a French schooner laden with Sugar, but Bad weather parted them, & she had not yet been heard of; — his cruize ended Dec 1 st My September Letter was the latest he had received. —

Cassandra is going to London in three weeks, I assume to join Eliza and Henry: how often Jane and Cassandra were apart. This is worth thinking about, not ignoring: the why, the effect, how they seemed not to have minded

This day three weeks you are to be in London, & I wish you better weather — not but that you may have worse, for we have now nothing but ceaseless snow or rain & insufferable dirt to complain of — no tempestuous winds, nor severity of cold. Since I wrote last, we have had something of each, but it is not genteel to rip up old greivances. –

Then a joke — I presume these sermons by her cousin were pretty bad; this is the same sort of joke as when she speaks of all her political correspondents. Cassandra has no unknown mysteries; Jane only the papers she can get hold of and read with intelligence and honesty:

You used me scandalously by not mentioning Ed. Cooper’s Sermons; — I tell you everything, & it is unknown the Mysteries you conceal from me. –

Back to sick aging single women, the Austen women’s world. I note all the references to letters Jane receives. She had not the Internet or a phone but did what she could

And to add to the rest you persevere in giving a final e to Invalid — thereby putting it out of one’s power to suppose Mrs E. Leigh even for a moment, a veteran Soldier. — She, good Woman, is I hope destined for some further placid enjoyment of her own Excellence in this World, for her recovery advances exceedingly well.-I had this pleasant news in a letter from Bookham last Thursday; but as the letter was from Mart instead of her Mother, you will guess her account was not equally good from home. — Mrs Cooke had been confined to her bed some days by Illness, but was then better, & Mary wrote in confidence of her continuing to mend.

Fanny Price (Sylvestre Le Tousel) in the passageway of the Portsmouth house; at least she is there in April (1983 BBC Mansfield Park by Ken Taylor)

A curious passage about Fanny Knight: She was 16 the day before (Jan 23rd). The way Austen talks reflects the back-handed disciplinary way these people might talk of their children. Then we get Austen citing a platitude: while you give happiness to others, you will get your share. (That is not the view endorsed by the novels.) She is not eager for Fanny’s overlooking what she is writing – I don’t think this is that much a joke — remember how she excused herself (she did) to her young nephew, and here I do think we have a rare reference to Austen’s novel writing. She does not flow; she has to work at her first drafts too. Indeed this is the most interesting passage we’ve had in a while. She does not forget the real life context she writes in: lodgings, she’s upstairs and not so warm, but not literally wet as she would be and was when she contended with water seeping in, eroding the house downstairs, ruining objects and clothes.

You rejoice me by what you say of Fanny — I hope she will not turn’ good-for-nothing this ever so long; — We thought of & talked of her yesterday with sincere affection, & wished her a long enjoyment of all the happiness to which she seems born. — While she gives happiness to those about her, she is pretty sure of her own share. — I am gratified by her having pleasure in what I write — but I wish the knowledge of my being exposed to her discerning Criticism, may not hurt my stile, by inducing too great a solicitude. I begin already to weigh my words & sentences more than I did, & am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset, it would be charming. –

How often she uses the dash in her letters and in her manuscripts for her fragments of novels.

What a misery they lived in. I can’t get any contractor to come in and fix small jobs either. They (the Austen women) have been defeated — but she is defeated with good grace. That’s the task and her real tone: here she puts me in mind of Robert Louis Stevenson:

There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits.

Everything had to be moved out. Imagine the wet and the blackness and sour smell.

We have been in two or three dreadful states within the last week, from the melting of the Snow &c. — & the contest between us & the Closet has now ended in our defeat; I have been obliged to move almost everything out of it, & leave it to splash itself as it likes. —

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Hannah More’s didactic books enjoyed a long printing history; Coelebs now available in facsimiles. ON the church tracts for children, see Dixon

Early on in the general discussion on Austen-l (which has now ceased) of Jane Austen’s letters we had quite a controversy over this next passage (if I can find it I’ll put it in the comments here). It is true that the novel may be read as romance. Nonetheless, Austen is obviously pressured to read Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife and does not want to read it. She does not like intransigent didacticism, especially when aimed at women; she has shown over these letter no strong religiosity of spirit. She is unwilling to quarrel with Cassandra over this but she hopes to be left alone (she was not). The reference to her “delight” when she reads it is a reference to the hypocrisy of people who will say anything others do, or an admission that perhaps (like people watching Downton Abbey who know they are like black people watching Amos ‘n Andy) she will be drawn in. But until then she resists.

The passage is of interest showing that people read politically — More’s book was liked as reinforcing conservativism — and we may infer from this and that Cassandra left this passage go, that Cassandra would have destroyed letters showing Jane reading liberal and radical works or commenting positively on them:

You have by no means raised my curiosity after Caleb — My disinclination for it before was affected, but now it is real; I do not like the Evangelicals. — Of course I shall be delighted when I read it, like other people — but till I do, I dislike it. —

I don’t know why others have not picked up in these verses from Letter 65. (Brag had been preferred to Speculation at Godmersham, though Speculation was “under” Austen’s special aegis, Letter 64.)

To me the next passage suggest again Jane wrote the stanza she sent in the last letter (“‘Alas! poor Brag, thou boastful Game! …”) I am puzzled as to why they seemed classical to Austen as they are not in couplets, but it may be that the game aspect, the sense of urbanity is what she refers to here. I don’t know that she is making fun either; we need to know more about how classical authors were taught, which poems chosen, what the teacher might say — for this is from the schooling she acquired as a bye-blow of her father teaching boys and her brothers: — or possibly she read the kind of essays published at the time on Virgil; again most of the titles that come down to us taht she or her characters read are not criticism but novels, travel books, poetry, occasionally a straight history.

I am sorry my verses did not bring any return from Edward, I was in hopes they might-but I suppose he does not rate them high enough.-It might be partiality, but they seemed to me purely classical-just like Homer & Virgil, Ovid & Propria que Maribus.

Remember how twice a day she was intensely looking for a letter from Frank. One finally came. She is very anxious about him. She reads how so many are slaughtered at Corunna and she thinks about it. Maiming was common; he was seeking prizes and that means violence. It was a kind affecionate letter; she lingered over it, and I suggest she answered, showing her anxiety for him:

– I had a nice, brotherly letter from Frank the other day; which after an interval of nearly three weeks, was very welcome.-No orders were come on friday, & none were come yesterday, or we should have heard today. –

Their inadequate present home. They hoped that Miss Curling would not seek to stay with them. Their house would be damp and cold — damp from the floods from snow, cold from how they don’t over heat the place (as we’ve seen). This is a connection shoring up Frank’s connections in the navy so they must make do. Imagine Jane trying to make a room more comfortable and knowing she must really fail beyond showing that she made the effort: (This is The Watsons stuff).

I had supposed Miss Curling would share her Cousin’s room here, but a message in this Letter proves the Contrary; — I will make the Garret as comfortable as I can, but the possibilities of that apartment are not great. –

Eliza is a servant and they would like to take her with them to Chawton. Remember how she and Eliza sat and ate black butter together by the fire in “unpretending privacy” (Letter 63). Straight off plates held on their laps together; on another day Eliza kept to her bed ill. LeFaye seems to think “sweetheart’ refers to Eliza’s mother. That’s not likely. It’s a boyfriend-lover. Eliza is making no difficulties about how she will have t live apart from this boyfriend. For Downton and other country house and supposed norms that say servants shall have no boyfriends, at least at this level of life the mistress does not appear at all to stop romance. When they were going to Bath Austen wrote of another romance and how she would provide romance interest for servants then. Sally playing John Binns is playing hard to get to get a higher salary. Jane not as kind or forbearing as Mr Austen had been, but also she and her mother have less money:

My Mother has been talking to Eliza about our future home-and she, making no difficulty at all of the Sweetheart, is perfectly disposed to continue with us, but till she has written home for Mother’s approbation, cannot quite decide. — Mother does not like to have her so far off; — at Chawton she will be nine or ten miles nearer, which I hope will have its due influence — As for Sally, she means to play John Binns with us, in her anxiety to belong to our Household again. Hitherto, she appears a very good Servant. –

I get a great kick out of the following epigram like utterance: its spirit went staright into Austen’s Sense and Sensibility when Eleanor Dashwood comes to Cleveland and has to watch Mrs Palmer go into stitches of happy laughter upon being told her plants are all dead:

You depend upon finding all your plants dead, I hope. — They look very ill I understand. –

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Emma Woodhouse (Romola Garai) just delighted to come to a ball at the Crown Inn (2009 BBC Emma by Sandy Welch)

Jane never tired of balls — in The Watsons Emma just revels in the one she goes to, with all its pains, mortification for the boy, attempted and thwarted romances (Miss Edwards for Captain Hunter) grating snobberies and stupid jockeying for position by those she’s surrounded by)

I imagine she might have said, echoing Johnson, the woman who is tired of balls, is tired of life. What could list shoes be? They were “shoes made of list, a strong, coarse material used for the selvage of carpets or other woven fabrics.” They sound rather porous, but presumably were not. Let us hope Jane reached home with with her ball shoes not ruined and her feet dry. But it’s odd that she can’t put the shoes aside for when she wants to go. Someone (a servant?) brings her a pair, there they are and so she must go home now. Would a family have only one pair? (I ask that rhetorically.)

Part of the enjoyment here is she is with gay younger women, still eligible for marriage. It’s a refreshing change from older single women forced to become companions, to be eager to come to someone’s house so they can get some tea. Captain Smith is a connection of her brothers and thus looking out for Jane for a partner. We have had Captain d’Auvergne before (see Letter 62) — he’s one of those who shows up for these dances – and his friend likes to be fancy too. Subsets of people do different sorts of things.

Your silence on the subject of our Ball, makes me suppose your Curiosity too great for words. We were very well entertained, & could have staid longer but for the arrival of my List shoes to convey me home, & I did not like to keep them waiting in the Cold. The room was tolerably full, & the Ball opened by Miss Glyn; — the Miss Lances had partners, Capt. D’auvergne’s friend appeared in regimentals, Caroline Maitland had an Officer to flirt with, & Mr John Harrison was deputed by Capt. Smith, being himself absent, to ask me to dance.– Everything went well you see, especially after we had tucked Mrs Lance’s neckhandkerchief. in behind, & fastened it with a pin. —

Anna too has gone to a ball and here Austen refers discreetly, indirectly to a sudden angry rebellion which was partly self-harm, self-destructive: Anna cut off her long hair. Jane Austen was one of those who said Anna should not be given a hard time as the cut hair would make her miserable enough, and also this would pass the incident most kindly. It could be that ignoring it was one way to repress the rebellion itself. As told in the following paragraph, the stepmother was for once decent and did not try to stop the girl’s enjoyment at the ball.

We had a very full & agreable account of Mr Hammond’s Ball, from Anna last night; the same fluent pen has sent similar information I know into Kent. — She seems to have been as happy as one could wish her; — & the complacency of her Mama in doing the Honours of the Eveng must have made her pleasure almost as great.- The Grandeur of the Meeting was beyond my hopes. –I should like to have seen Anna’s looks & performance — but that sad cropt head must have injured the former.-

A desperate pathetic Nancy Steele (Maggie Jones) (1971 BBC Sense and Sensibility by Denis Constanduros)

And then a series of not-so-funny jokes if you were Martha and reading this. Her relationship with Dr Mant is immoral but a decorous air because he is a clergyman. Ho ho. Maybe the joke is against Jane Austen herself. She felt her love was betrayed and so treated this heterosexuality as immoral. By this time Jane ans Martha are clearly growing apart. Dr Mant has not responded in some way that Martha longed for. Jane is not undeceiving Martha: Not telling Martha some painful truth. Martha is longing for a husband. That’s how Jane sees this: Martha cannot see happiness without this. Again we have Martha’s sending her regards; I see this as intense anxiety. She fears losing any one ‘s approbation. Martha is overdoing her solicitude about Cassandra’s finger.

Martha pleases herself with beleiving that if I had kept her counsel, you would never have heard of Dr Mant’se behaviour, as if the very slight manner in which I mentioned it could have been all on which you found your Judgement. –I do not endeavour to undeceive her, because I wish her happy at all events, & know how highly she prizes happiness of any kind. She is moreover so full of kindness for us both, & sends you in particular so many good wishes about [your] finger, that I am willing to overlook a venial fault; & as Dr M. is a Clergyman their attachment, however immoral, has a decorous air. –

Many of Goya’s powerful remembered images come from this wretched colonialist war set on foot by Napoleon

Peninsula war was very grievous, much misery. Moore’s son dead. Here is evidence she reads about politics. (I must read about this war when I return to my work on Winston Graham’s later Poldark books, one of which is set in Portugal and another has repercussions from the Portuguese entanglement.)

Too lovely handwriting shows low status is the joke here perhaps

Anna’s hand gets better & better, it begins to be too good for any consequence. –

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Marianne Von Werefkin (1860-1938), Woman with a Lantern (1912)

And a final curious identification When I hear of the homeless I hear a bell ring for me; so Austen takes this gothic like story. Too bad she never lived to write up a novel from it, but then she was not allowed to publish Lady Susan and set aside The Watsons.

We send best Love to dear little Lizzy & Marianne in particular. The Portsmouth paperl4 gave a melancholy history of a poor Mad Woman, escaped from Confinement, who said her Husband & Daughter of the Name of Payne lived at Ashford in Kent. Do You own them

For full series, see Jane Austen’s letters

Ellen

Kirsten Pullen’s Actresses and Whores

Mae West surrounded by male supporters after she was arrested for making the movie, Sex

Dear friends and readers,

I returned to my project of reading towards and then writing a review of Nussbaum’s Rival Queens (on 18th century actresses), and found myself again facing this vexed question of how to treat prostitution. Nussbaum is determined to distinguish actresses from prostitutes, to insist the “whore” angle has been exaggerated, is even unimportant, especially when it comes to the really successful actress. So many others say the “whore” position is one incessantly attached to any actress until the later 19th century. Sometimes I’m beginning to think it’s still attached — except for the unusual actress, often English, who has made herself an icon of high culture art and/or (quiet) feminism.

So I’m reading both Sandra Richards’s The Rise of the English Actress and Kirsten Pullen’s Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society as my last two survey books before writing. I’ll write about Richards when I’ve finished it; this blog is on Pullen’s book which (like Elizabeth Howe’s First English Actresses and Kristina Staub’s Sexual Suspects) is a kind of antidote, contrast, rebutal to Nussbaum. Pullen differs from all these but Staub because Pullen wants to more than acknowledge that later 17th century and many 18th century actresses worked as prostitutes or were promiscuous or went in for serial relationships (very like today). Like Staub she sympathizes with women who become prostitutes, does not sneer at or degrade them through language or implications; Pullen goes further: she wants to legitimize prostitution or women’s sexuality in liberated forms.

The glaring fault or gap in Pullen’s presentation is she leaves out a real aspect of prostitution: violence. I couldn’t find the word in all the first chapter. Yes other professions have problems with injuries, hurts, exploitation of the body, but a miner when a mine falls on him has not been put there to have that happen: violence is part of what costumers want to pay for. Prostitutes are directly answerable by their bodies. Yet Pullen is valuable: she makes all sorts of persuasive counterarguments showing how this stigmatizing of the prostitute is unjust; they are not different from the rest of women, only on a continuum, and the edge of this continuum matters (it spills over into today’s sex trafficking, modern forms of chattel slavery for women).

So Pullen’s is a fresh frank book which can make one question, why the need to separate actresses from prostitutes so intensely as Nussbaum does when at the same time Nussbaum is happy to show her actresses crossing all sorts of sexual taboos? What really bothers Nussbaum to separate prostitution off? I doubt it’s the violence for she remains resolutely at a distance from the body most of the time, but rather that in the 18th century and today a woman needs to de-sexualize her worldly presentation or she cannot rise to power, big money and respectability. It’s the respectability Nussbaum craves for her actresses. (Without it no tenure I suppose and for academic women the guise is dowdy clothes.)

This is a third in a series of blogs I mean to write on 18th century actresses (see Margaret Woffington, Francis Abingdon, with Susannah Cibber and Catherine Clive, foremother actress, writer, poet), another of several about the treatment of prostitutes and women’s sexuality in our society (e.g., On “an argument for not trying to decrease prostitution”).

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There is no picture of Elizabeth Davenport Boutell; this is an unusal one found in books and on the Net as Elizabeth Barry (see the common one and wikipedia): it has the merit of genuinely capturing a thoughtful face which is not conventionally pretty; I don’t know its provenance

In Pullen’s prologue she argues that Mae West was the first screen heiress of earlier actresses, a woman who actively sought to break down repressive restrictive notions of sexuality for women; she then moves to two chapters on the long 18th century stage — her best and most persuasive because she show that the sexualized demeaning legends that grew up immediately around the actresses often had little connection with the literal realities of their lives. Betty Boutell provides the first ironic story.

Boutell was a second line actresss (so to speak) in the restoration (Elizabeth Barry was a more central presence) and the ugliest scurrilous assertions were made about Betty Boutell, basically that she went to bed with anything. A famous line from a particularly misogynistic poem refers to her as Betty Boutell “whom all the Town fucks.”

Elizabeth Davenport Boutell was her full name (born 1649, died 1715). Judith Milhous has put together the real details of Boutell’s career and life. Guess what? we cannot connect Boutell to even one man as his mistress or as one stage in a series of serial monogamous relationships on her part regularly at all. When it comes to her private off-stage life what we discover is Betty Boutell married a Mr Boutell, and led a respectable married and prosperous life in the 1670s and 80s. Upon becoming financially successful enough to be independent, she separated herself from him and travelled (to, among other places, Holland several times in the 1690s). She became close with one woman friend, Elizabeth Price who she helped with a lawsuit against an Earl. There is evidence of her living in London and caring for her sister, Francis, when Francis became ill — her sister was not as strong as she and suffered nervous collapses and was towards the end of her life confined in an asylum and then taken care of by Betty (and her money). When nearly 50 Betty was still acting in Breeches roles, and living a cosmopolitan life travelling in Europe. When she retired she was well off enough to buy an annuity for Price, and to inherit money from her sister’s first husband, collect a debt from one Justin Maccarty (3rd son of Earl of Clancarry), rumored to be her lover, but there is no proof of this or even anecdotes of any kind. She died in 1715 leaving bequests worth about 800 pounds.

And yet Betty is best remembered as a whore, so strongly helplessly heterosexual she could not resist any man in town. How or why is this? Pullen shows that the kinds of parts Boutell took would create (if they were real in the world) a woman who was promiscuous. In her first chapter Pullen also goes over attitudes towards sex, women, marriage, actresses. Whore was a term used for any unchaste woman — and in common pop parlance today one finds “ho” used similarly. Older historians used the whore/actress connection to limit the agency and write condescendingly of women. It’s virtually impossible to disentangle much that was rumored with what actually happened to a woman. Much that we do have suggests (Pullen is quite different from Nussbaum continually) a lack of respect for actresses. Pullen does agree with Straub that rowdiness was very bad for actresses, they did not enjoy it, thrive have “robust” responses (as Nussbaum claims). Who could when, for example, one of Middleton’s men threw shit in Rebecca Marshall’s face when she tried to flee him.

Earlier historians of actresses show a lack of respect for their women; simply assume the general truth of the sex rumors and go about to explain (justify) why women did accede to sell their bodies. They never stop to think maybe this or that woman didn’t. No empathy here, no endowing them with real humanity with all its individualities. Or you get the kind of thing Lawrence Stone in his study odes: he will say well she must’ve been frigid, that’s why or how she escaped promiscuity (women naturally are promiscuous you see, they all want heterosexual sex from men). Quaif denies women agency and choice; more recent studies show women did assert their romantic and sexual desires (Lois G. Schwoerer) but cannot get their minds around an idea a women might just see that independence of men was the real way to achieve liberty, peace of mind, personal self-respect and power over the self.

Pullen is very good on the 17th century stage world: she describes (unusually) a rough, hard, mean place, often squalid in experience and risky for actors and actresses; we learn about its crafts (too) as well types of plays, staging: theater stage design, costumes meant to display women and underline sexuality strongly (in men too). Pullen also remembers that men were prostitutes, men had a problem with status, also threatened the class status of aristocrats, the wealthy and respectable. Mohun (a baron) got away with murdering William Mountfort with impunity. Mohun a lout, thug, drone; Mountfort a hard-working intelligent actor. Wjho cared what they were as individuals. Pullen does agree with Nussbaum that both male and female actors did play and same roles and kinds of roles over and over which the public persisted then (and does until today) creating a sort of putative personailty/biography from.

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Charlotte Charke (another unusual image); there is no image for Margaret Leeson

In Chapter Three Pullen takes us into two memoirs of women who are openly sexually promiscuous: Margaret Leeson and Charlotte Charke. Pullen wants us to see how the circumstances of these two and how they wrote about it show why we must bring into our perspective how women sold themselves for sex and not reject them for this at all. In effect Pullen wants to increase the number of women we respect.

I knew of Charlotte Charke’s life and autobiography: she is probably known to 18th century scholars because she was the daughter of Colley Cibber (who threw her off) and openly lesbian, a transvestite, but I had never heard of Margaret Leeson. Leeson was able to write her memoirs because in her last years she had become a brothel madam and was thus somewhat protected from the violence and control from others lower status prostitutes had to endure.

Leeson’s book is long: I downloaded 3 full volumes in ECCO. What a hard and in the end sad life she had. In a nutshell, when young she was seduced, impregnated and abandoned by a young man; her family refused to take her in. Abandoned by his man she could not find any job to support herself, had not been trained for any and ended up a prostitute in the streets. Strength of character, luck took her on a journey where she became a successful brothel madam for a couple of decades. But late in life aging (perhaps ill), she became depressed, lonely, and in the end without friends. It could be her business went badly so she wrote to make money, but her memoirs were the final thing that destroyed her. Instead of creating sympathy. (There is no wikipedia article on her.) Pullen thinks Leeson’s memoirs actually destroyed her career as a brothel-madam. Leeson died in extreme poverty, aged sick. In her memoirs, Leeson does assert her right to a life of her own, to respect, to sexual pleasure. Sometimes she revels in her life, sometimes she apologizes. She too downplays the violence.
I felt for her.

Leeson was never an actress but I can see how she belongs to Pullen’s book. At the close her (poignant to me) memoir Leeson makes an argument for valuing other kinds of virtue in women than chastity (or virginity): generosity, charity. Like many other actresses then and since, shows herself charitable (today’s actresses interest themselves in good causes); in one case, Leeson is kind to another brothel-madam left dead and destitute; Leeson praises people for generosity; and presents herself as never debauching an innocent young woman; and asserts that she did find work including prostitution for women ejected by their families. She has several love affairs but also strong friendships with women; her female friends sustain her. These latter details remind me of how Fanny Hill justifies one of the madams who becomes her friend in the novel by Cleland.

I know for some there’s no need for me to rehearse the the outline of Charlotte Charke’s life, but as seen in Pullen’s perspective a rather different set of experiences emerges (also different from Emma Donoghue’s because Donoghue wants to prove she was a lesbian and active sexually). We see a hard-working life. The obviously transgressive Charlotte , Colley Cibber’s unlucky daughter, sister of the vicious Theophilus (no help to anyone but himself) was a late child, not sympathized with (mother exhausted by this time), so had a neglected childhood. She married Richard Charke to get away; he was a violinist, spendthrift, promiscuous, indifferent to her; alas Charke lies to the reader frequently: defensively, to cover up, but it’s lies.

Much of her life she worked in the theater as actress; she worked with her brother in illegal theaters; with Fielding, father’s rival, took male roles repeatedly, for her a breeches role not a woman revealing herself but a male role (acted roles her father took and roles meant to recall him), reputation as rebellious and 1737 act destroys her connections with legitimate theater world; ran puppet theater, 1746 a strolling played, 1753 return to London and begins to write (for money), memoir, novels, and dies 1760 still estranged from family and living with Mrs Brown

Was hers an appeal to lesbians in the audience? Is this why she was so frank? Pullen says this handle was a double-edged sword, for Charke became disliked because she was clearly not subjugated to men; she had a regular audience in women by the 18th century; her power appealing as alternative to conventional women’s roles. A woman of conflicted identities, without resources, in debt. So cross-dresser seen as “whore” because she is “outside the mainstream” fo “femininity” Pullen does not see her as aligned in public mind as a man but a prostitute. She cross-dressed because it was easier to find work as a man, she attracted attention and got jobs on stage, she felt power and privilege; she uses theatrical conventions. Charke exhibits playfulness and she plays a comic hero; denies natural characteristics of women, remains in control of her fate; a world of women working and living together. Yet she yearned for the comforts of family life. She wanted someone to love her.

Pullen ends on an usual summing up: in these memoirs we see the “whore” position offers a woman space from which to speak. In the 18th century it was not even acceptable for the chaste woman to write and publish a book with her name on it.

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Lydia Thompson

I was at first puzzled by Chapter 4. Pullen tells the story of Lydia Thompson and Charlotte Cushman, two actresses who defied norms of femininity at the time. This may be seen in their pictures.

Charlotte Cushman

Thompson dresses like a masculine woman who is exposing her usually hidden sexual parts. Cushman really looks mannish, powerful body and although her lower legs are exposed, the flat shoes do not allow them to be taken as sexy.

Their stories: Thompson — together with a troupe of women and her second husband, Henderson — succeeded in making a financial success of a burlesque act which was bawdy and involved cross-dressing and breaking sexual taboos. Then after initial approval. the critics turned against her: what was most loathed was her defiance of male prerogative (she led her troupe) and her exposure of female as well as male aggression in sexuality. The criticism was vitriolic, mostly because she was making money, getting audiences, apparently amused the crowds.

What Pullen shows is Thompson fought to have her own narrative of her life emerge and it never did. Thompson stressed middle class background, respectability (which by contrast Boutell never had a chance to). Thompson even had children to show, but at the same time on stage she flaunted her sexual behavior. Those attacking made her subordinate to Henderson as if she had no agency. She tried and tried to get a discourse dominant which showed she was in charge; she never managed that. Thompson tried to construct a story that would appeal to the public and was really partly true, but she could not control what use was made of her words and photos.

Pullen ends her tale of Thompson on a odd climactic moment: it seems that Thompson literally assaulted her worse critic, Storey, in the face with a horse whip. Pullen says when this event was told in newspapers every attempt made to downplay Thompson’s violence. Since Pullen has had so little violence in her book, this sudden eruption is startling. This violence of Thompson comes from nowhere, like from a vaccuum, Pullen herself treats in almost a trivializing way, as half-joking justified retribution.

Charlotte Cushman was probably a lesbian and did make a successful career out of popular theater — vaudeville. She was more accepted by the critics for she was content to present herself as lower class. She said financial circumstances drove her to the stage. Like Margaret Woffington, Cushman played male roles as males. So in this woman’s life and public history, the element of class ironically emerges as what affected how she was allowed to succeed in life.s consciousness, what class the actress feels she belongs to. Here also the question of fashion comes in: it is not just self-expression, but (as in Francis Abingdon’s success) a visible marker of identity according to controlling conventional norms. Cushman got away with her act because she presented herself as not defying upper class femininity — thought the cross-dressing was still seen as transgressive, and treated as a joke, not discussed seriously, the way 18t century actresses delivering epilogues were treated.

At the same time in normal social life neither woman was ever acceptable, ever invited into respectable women’s homes or society. Pullen cites two treatises (Dr Sanger and Dr Action) who denied good or natural women sexual feeling. The horror felt by these Victorian men as well as what was said of Cushman, Thompson, and at the opening of the 19th century other actresses (say Dora Jordan) reminds me of Trollope’s attitude towards transgressive women. Trollope has them in the “virtuous” place in his plot-designs but treats them as inferior and polluted; Dickens leaves them outside as monsters. Thackeray has them inside but as very bad or as jokes.

So these two women were not socially successful but symbolically important. Pullen’s argument is that to understand what happened to them we need to recognize and to respect the whore component here. We can’t avoid it as they were called whores and worse, so if we marginalize them stigmatized women, we lose their story and its signficance. Pullen is making the point that from the marginalized position Thompson was forced to take, she spoke to her social order and thus it is important to recognize the validity of the job as prostitute.

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Julia Roberts (note the long hair is still a characteristic of the whore-actress) and Richard Gere (Pretty Woman).

Pullen’s last chapter is about prostitution. At first she was so dead wrong, that I was tempted to put the book down at last. But then she produced an example of her stance that made me pause.

She begins with a movie, Pretty Woman and from that deduces “the performative nature of prostitution.” This is taking Judith Butler and Lacan very far; first her evidence is a movie, a sentimentalized fiction. More centrally, that the real self of someone is different from their self on the job or in different roles is one thing but to disassociate prostitution from the real body is to mistake it altogether. This is social constructionism misused. What Kirsten wants us to see is prostitution is a form of playacting. She did ethnic research among prostitutes &discovered that’s how they like to see themselves. I like to see blogs as important writing; does that mean they are?

What is the difference between an actress and prostitute then? that actresses are taken seriously and respected because of 150 years or realism on stage, discourses of admiration for their acting and they live so luxuriously and are accorded fame. First not all are, and then throughout the book and here too Pullen is forgetting the central reality of prostitutes lives: they are answerable directly with their bodies; she wants us to ignore the story of the “poor beaten victim” as a simply stereotype; it’s not. Has she not heard of trafficking women? Violence is wreaked on prostitutes; they are outside the loop of respectability and the police care not. Police use and beat them too. People are violent creatures. Whores (let us use the demeaning term) have no status. It’s a free-for-all (and homosexual people face the same terrors).

I was going to shut the book – not because I’m against someone being
sympathetic to prostitutes but then I noticed Pullen turned to “high
class” prostitutes” (those who are hired by agencies for big sums of
money) and she began to make her argument in ways that resemble Nussbaum’s — by looking at exceptions. She also began to make the argument that prostitute stories in movies and fiction are told to make political points about areas of life outside prostitution.

I read on.

Her argument is that the two stereotypes, beaten up street-walking victim, or high class call girl who “succeeds” leave out the myriad of realities and types and experiences that make up the reality and history of prostitutes lives over the century. One is it’s something many women have done for a little while or part time to make ends meet or achieve some goal for which they can make enough money only by selling their bodies. Selling your uterus for someone to impregnate artificially is analogous. Pullen manages to suggest the array of reasons women might go in for prostitution. You do learn of organizations prostitutes make up for themselves and individuals who went public (it’s very rare) like Linda Marchiano who played Linda Lovelace in the notorious Deep throat. And she admits it does seem most women who go public pay harshly for it, and most of the lives told end in misery and are harder to endure than lives lived where men treat women as chaste and thus not subject to physical moves without some previous by-your-leave.

Nevertheless, Pullen’s persistent notion that performance as what prostitution is “really,” that it corresponds to women on the stage does actresses as disservice, trivializes what actress do on stage (people are not actors on a stage, what we do counts in life, the play is over after 2 hours) and on the face of her own evidence does not correspond to the reality based experiences of actresses. She becomes sentimental telling the love experiences these prostitutes had with customers and bosses that they tell her. These tales correspond to the biographies of actresses that Nussbaum (and Laura Engel in her book Fashioning Celebrity) recount – in that they mirror today’s mores more than what happened.

So many of them are ashamed too. The use any word but prostitute for themselvese any word but “whore” — which has come back to mean promiscuous women once again in the 21st centruy. Feminism has not even been able to make the term narrowly precise; it’s slander.

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Juliet Stevenson (in Rosalind, a breeches role in As You Like It) and Fiona Shaw (as Celia) in a 20th century production of Shakespeare’s play — two actresses who have escaped the stigmatizing

One thing comes clear: how tabooed this profession is, how stigmatized promiscuity among women. Pullen downplays the violence and her pooh-poohing (for that’s what this is) over the “victim stereotype” and arguing against attempts to stamp out prostitution by getting after the men who frequent them is (I think) allowing this to happen, supporting the establishment’s cruelties towards women. What would she say to traffickers in undeveloped countries who snatch women? of laws and customs which allow families to sell their daughters as submissive wives at ages 12-15. Shall we let them do what they want too?

It would be wonderful if the truth about women’s lives which leads to prostitution, the false tales told of women on the stage could change the way women in general and women who are driven to sell their bodies are seen and treated. Yes women have resorted to this out of desperation on and off during their lives sometimes; they have occasionally lucked in and found a good husband; gotten a job on an interview which included a demand for sex, a promotion. But they have also been raped and engulfed through debt and having no friends or relatives who will help them and died young and sick most of the time. Or gotten out in time and died old and quiet.

Pullen’s is finally a generous minded book which is wrong because she slides over harsh realities with her performative nonsense. It doesn’t work on its own terms.

Still on her behalf and behalf of reading this book and thinking about it, I’d like to confide a brief incident. I’d been reading Annibel Jenkins’s rich, informative, insightful biography of Elizabeth Inchbald, a later 18th century actress and playwright and writing about it on line and when I told of Jenkins’s demonstration that Inchbald has sexual desires and experience outside her husband at least once, I was confronted with a repeatedly urged denial and Inchbald’s behavior if it were so characterized in the derisory absurd term, “sleeping around” (why is a fuck called sleeping around; you need not sleep with anyone to fuck them or be fucked). Jenkins herself will wonder why another actress who did not maintain the chaste reputation Inchbald did, Mary Well, didn’t sleep with a given man. It did not occur to Jenkins in that moment maybe Wells didn’t like him. No she was an actress, ergo probably promiscuous, and ergo could have nothing against sex with anyone.

Pullen wants such seething underlying hatred of women’s sexuality which comes out today as slut-shaming to end and writes her book in this good cause.

Helen Mirren who uses as well as defies the sexual stereotyping (from “Scent of Darkness” in Prime Suspect: in the next instance she spits in this man’s face in retaliation for the way he has tried to destroy her career)

Ellen

Jane Austen’s Letters: Letter 65, Tues-Wed, 17-18 Jan 1809, from Castle Square

1812 winter walking dress

Dear friends and readers,

This is another wintry letter (see Letter 64): snow, cold, people ill, such a severe winter, a doctor. During this period she’s writing The Watsons, Lady Susan.

General observations:

It’s filled, stuffed with middling aged single women, Austen’s world and most of them living on the edge: from Miss Murden to the Miss Williams’s, to Martha – again a reference to her running after a man. I fear that Nancy Steele is a part satire on Martha. It hurt and offended Austen that Martha was not satisfied with her; she has learnt to accept it, but her feelings fuel characters who chase men no matter who or what. She grows irritated with one woman recently married, Mrs Col Tilson for parading herself and seeking attention.

There’s also still (!) the problem of escorts when she does go somewhere — two men have disappointed and now Austen is hoping for others who will not be troublesome. She wants men because the conventions say they must have them, for the appearance of the thing, but men who will not be felt as there. There is certainly enough here and in these letters to suggest a lesbian orientation. Terry Castle should have argued from a general reading of the letters (if she did one, but it takes time and effort and hard work and maybe she’d have found the letters boring).

Still on the problems of being a single women – even if at the same time she prefers to be single — of travel. It seems men use travel etiquette to control the women. Austen puts it this way: “Edw & Henry have started a difficulty respecting our Journey …” She does not detail it. I have to go back and look at where early on Frank makes for difficulties and see if the way it’s stated shows as clearly that Austen feels this is a partly a frustrating ploy.

Her mother (Austen’s) ill again is part of the vein of everyone sick,
and again we have from Austen dubiety that the mother is really ill;
as the years have gone on and with Mr Austens’ death, it seems to me
Jane’s view that this is hypochondria has won the day and Mrs Austen
is subdued. She has lost ground as she ages — what happens to older
people as even if they have enough money become more dependent on the
young.

She is again looking forward to Chawton, at least comfortable in this
prospect — in having somewhere for sure they are really going to -
but as yet by no means really eager.

We now have 3 letters in a row with no break whatsoever. They also
look uncensored. Then suddenly a leap and Austen “disappears” (to use
Nokes’s term) for 3 months and then an astonishing letter demanding a ms back — if we take into consideration how we’ve hardly had a mention of the novels. One thus far to be precise, about First Impressions that Martha has memorized it is the implication — now there’s something I understand as I never did before — it’s significant it’s Martha who has read it incessantly. She and Martha were some sort of lovers. As Martha once loved Austen, so she loved FI (its former title).

I wonder if the missing gap registers a time when it came home to
Austen that wow now retired and in a house at least her brother owned,
with few people about, a lower status house, she’d be left alone to
write. If she voiced this openly and was shot down for it, but ignored
the family’s not wanting her to turn primarily into writer and thus
wrote her MAD letter anyway. She wanted the ms back because she was
going to Chawton and foresaw she could work on it.

I wish we could know this because then we’d have definite evidence (though Harman has close read persuasively new glimpses and hints) the family were partly complicit or didn’t mind how Austen’s attempts at a career (sending ms’s out) had gone nowhere. I don’t think this is special punishment but rather the way women were treated and Austen was no different.

1809 — we are getting close to Chawton, to when Austen begins openly
at long long last to writing about her novels in her letters. I know
the discussions are not really satisfying, but still there will be
some! the extent to which the letters either hid the writing or
Cassandra destroyed any references to it is much much greater and
frustrating than I had thought before I started this project.

**********************

Jacob Ruisdael (1628-82), Winter landscape

Moving through the specifics of the letter:

Cassandra’s godmother has not yet died and Austen has enjoyed the letter Cassandra sent telling of the life at Godmersham:

I am happy to say that we had no second Letter from Bookham last week. Yours has brought its usual measure of satisfaction & amusement, & I beg your acceptance of all the Thanks due on the occasion. –

I don’t understand this sentence unless it means literally what it says: Cassandra thought to send Jane and her mother and Martha a scarf worn close around the neck. Today a cravat is a highly uncomfortable neck-gear under which one ties a tie, but in the 18th century it could be any kind of clothing worn about the neck. Since (as we shall see) it was cold, perhaps Jane had a sore throat.

Your offer of Cravats is very kind, & happens to be particularly adapted to my wants-but it was an odd thing to occur to you. –

The cold and snow. In the previous letters there had been responses to stories of illness. We see that boys were taught to sew when they were very young, even if older they could divest themselves of this skill. Nothing so useful as a shirt or garment, but a footstool. The satin stitch was a strong one.

Yes — we have got another fall of snow, & are very dreadful; everything seems to turn to snow this winter. — I hope you have had no more illness among you, & that William will be soon as well as ever. His working a footstool for Chawton is a most agreable surprise to me, & I am sure his Grandmama will value it very much as a proof of his affection & Industry — but we shall never have the heart to put our feet upon it.-I beleive I must work a muslin cover in sattin stitch, to keep it from the dirt.-I long to know what his colours are — I guess greens & purples

And now the hitch over travel arrangements. We are not told why, but evidently Edward and Henry are starting up difficulties. Jane says “if the former” wants to stop us from going into Kent,” and I take the former to mean Edward. Jane’s plan will it will not do. Their arrangements are made; they are going to use the Croydon Road (which I take it was a coaching-able road); they have slept at the inn at Dartford before. Why Edward wants them to go straight to Hampshire and Chawton I know not.

Edwd & Henry have started a difficulty respecting our Journey, which I must own with some confusion, had never been thought of by us; but if the former expected by it, to prevent our travelling into Kent entirely he will be disappointed, for we have already determined to go the Croydon road, on leaving Bookham, & sleep at Dartford.-Will not that do? — There certainly does seem no convenient restingplace on the other road.

Then a paragraph noticing how little pleasure Anna Austen (later Lefroy) got out of life: put down and marginalized, ostracized by the jealous resentful stepmother, Mary, she does have a Matthew aunt who might actually be a decent interesting person. There is nothing against it. Austen will live in hope. Anna is getting to go only because James and Mary visited before this and Mary was pleased at the woman. Her praise proves nothing I suppose because she’s the usual hypocrite plus she has no understanding of what is worth while in people. Anna is growing up and looking better because of this, but Mary is very begrudging in all compliments, and won’t praise the young girl beyond this minimum. Austen may have sniffed at the smallness of balls nowadays; not she finds Anna will not even have this tiny ball and she is sorry. The girl would have enjoyed it.

“Anna went to Clanville last friday, & I have hopes of her new Aunt’s’ being really worth her knowing. — Perhaps you may never have heard that James & Mary paid a morning visit there in form some weeks ago, & Mary tho’ by no means disposed to like her, was very much pleased with her indeed. Her praise to be sure, proves nothing more than Mrs M.’s being civil & attentive to them, but her being so is in favour of her having good sense. — Mary writes of Anna as improved in person, but gives her no other commendation. — I am afraid her absence now may deprive her of one pleasure, for that silly Mr Hammond is actually to give his Ball-on friday. –

A whole bunch of marginalized, people who have suffered continual stress because of this squeezing of them. Earle Harwood we will remember displeased his family by marrying for love a young woman the domineering hypocritical would have ostacized. Miss Murden needs that disabled desperate carebox (basket); we may hope that we will have enough of a quorum to go on. The Williams family; there is nothing to indicate ugliness or bitterness beyond the home-y-ness acknowledged briefly. The purple and mahogany are excuses to end the men back to safety.

– We had some reason to expect a visit from Earle Harwood & James this week, but they do not come. — Miss Murden arrived last night at Mrs Hookey’s, as a message & a basket announced to us.- You will therefore return to an enlarged & of course improved society here, especially as the Miss Williamses are come back. — We were agreably surprised the other day by a visit from your Beauty & mine, each in a new Cloth Mantle & Bonnet, & I daresay you will value yourself much on the modest propriety of Miss W’s taste, hers being purple, & Miss Grace’s scarlet unity and forbearance. It’s been my understanding that flecks of gold are alway actually welcomed.

The state of Austen’s clothes. She is giving herself time to come up to some sort of costume.

I can easily suppose that your six weeks here will be fully occupied, were it only in lengthening the waists of your gowns. I have pretty well arranged my spring & summer plans of that kind, & mean to wear out my spotted Muslin before I go. — You will exclaim at this-but mine really has signs of feebleness, which with a little care may come to something. –

The eager Miss Nancy Steele (Anna Madeley) embarassing even her sister, Lucy (Daisy Haggard) (2008 S&S)

Marths running after any one, even Dr Mant. Is not this Miss Parolles’s from Burney’s Cecilia (or Anne Eliot, more discreetly) — or Miss Nancy Steele chasing after her doctor-male in S&S:

Martha & Dr Mant are as bad as ever; he runs after her in the street to apologise for having spoken to a Gentleman while she was near him the day before. — Poor Mrs Mant can stand it no longer; she is retired to one of her married Daughters. –

CA is Charles’s wife; she gave birth at the same time as Mrs Esten. Kintbury is the family home of the Fowle group. Mrs Esten is Esther Palmer and thus related to Mrs C-A, a Palmer. Mary Jane is Mary Jane Fowle, relative to Cassandra’s dead love (he is being kept alive in memory to spare Cassandra having to try again). The Aunt Martha is Jane’s beloved Martha who is leaving them.

We hear through Kintbury that Mrs Esten was unluckily to lie in at the same time with Mrs C.A. When William returns to Winchester Mary Jane is to go to Mrs Nunes for a month, & then to Steventon for a fortnight, & it seems likely that she & her Aunt Martha may travel into Berkshire together. –

This brings memories of their (Martha and Jane’s) love. It put me in mind of the letter sent to Martha and the ones about Jane’s visit to her before the blow feel about leaving Steventon. Jane’s love for Martha and their enjoyment of one another’s company is strong here because of the understatement.

We shall not have a Month of Martha after your return-& that Month will be a very interrupted & broken one; –but we shall enjoy ourselves the more, when we can get a quiet half hour together. –

Austen does distinguish Sydney Owenson from the huge mass of people turning out drivel, but she’s not really doing or delivering what is claimed: strong sensual and chivalrous action. Jane’s use of a pun shows she is alive to the intensity of romantic vocabulary, but begs leave to say it’s not real. If it could touch the body and warm the body up during winter it might be worth something. And she is rightly irritated by the foolish boast one has written something quickly. Austen’s books were “gradual performances”, at least 3 across a lifetime.

We have got Ida of Athens by Miss Owenson; which must be very clever, because it was written as the Authoress says, in three months — We have read only the Preface yet; but her Irish Girl does not make me expect much — If the warmth of her Language could affect the Body, it might be worth reading in this weather. — Adieu

(Nancy Paxton has an excellent chapter on Owenson’s The Missionary in her Writing Under the Raj.)

******************************

Emma (Kate Beckinsale) and Harriet Smith (Samantha Morton) visiting Miss and Mrs Bates and Jane Fairfax (1996 BBC Emma)

Jane Austen spends her time with marginalized half-desperate people — this is the bottom part of the world of the Watsons, Miss Bates telling Patty not to tell her what this or that in the house needs.

So, on this day so cold (and people without funds or clothes to offset it) that some servants’ friends nearly froze to death and one may now be permanently crippled:

She bids adieu as if Cassandra were in front of her; she must stir the fire and with Martha and Mrs Austen visit some maiden lady friends in the same economic circumstances as they:

So now Miss Murder is the paid companion of the chemist’s widow. She fears spending too much money on herself or has long habituated herself to denial. Probably the latter idea is meant too: Remember the stinking fish of Southampton; well Jane didn’t think the place was particularly good on light. The “neat parlour” is a carved out area three removes from a window. Reminds me of modern cubbyholds in offices. Only the big bosses get the windows. That last line is a kind of dig. They hear the apothecary at work. Years ago I was actually offered a full time job at LaGuardia Community College and a tenured person needled me I would smell the chicklets from the nearby chicklet factory. On the other hand it reads neutrally. It is simply the truth and Austen does not like pretension. In fact the sound made them lively or they heard lively people nearby:

“. — Adeiu –I must leave off to stir the fire & call on Miss Murden. Evening I have done them both, the first very often. — We found our friend as comfortable, as she can ever allow herself to be in cold weather; — there is a very neat parlour behind the Shop for her to sit in, not very light indeed, being a la Southampton, the middle of Three deep — but very lively, from the frequent sound of the pestle & mortar.

We have met the Miss Williams in an earlier letter where we learned they were not pretty and not young; they managed by the males taking far more than one sinecure and they were connected to Aletha Bigg (who rented the prebendal house LeFaye tells us). Not in good health either. Conversation consisted of the doctor coming in and talking of how severe the weather is and exchanging tales of illness. her mother went on and on about her illnesses; Austen does not make fun here. The mother cannot walk easily — perhaps arthritis? Can anyone wonder at Sanditon? Maybe its source was not centrally Austen’s own mortal illness and terrible pain at the time.

Who is Hamstall? As they are clergymen’s daughters, it’s natural for them to have such books. Examination of the Necessity of Sunday-drilling (memorization of passages in Sunday school?), Sermons, chiefly designed to elucidate … doctrines. The goal of the the third type Austen can at least approve: Practical and Familiar Sermons … Better than pontificating.

Mrs Smith (Helen Schlesinger) ill, imporverished (1995 BBC Persuasion)

We afterwards called on the Miss Williamses, who lodge at Dusautoys; Miss Mary only was at home, & she is in very indifferent health.-Dr Hacket came in while we were there, & said that he never remembered such a severe winter as this, in Southampton before. It is bad, but we do not suffer as we did last year, because the wind has been more N.E.-than N.W — For a day or two last week, my Mother was very poorly with a return of one of her old complaints — but it did not last long, & seems to have left nothing bad behind it. — She began to talk of a serious Illness, her two last having been preceded by the same symptoms;-but thank Heaven! she is now quite as well as one can expect her to be in Weather, which deprives her of Exercise. — Miss M. conveys to us a third volume of sermons from Hamstall, just published; & which we are to like better than the two others; — they are professedly practical, & for the use of Country Congregations. –

Could these be by Austen? Remember how she talked of Speculation being under her special protection and her protest against substituting brag? Maybe that was part of her talk conversation too. Read and perpend:

I have just received some verses in an unknown hand, & am desired to forward them to my nephew Edwd 6 at Godmersham. —

‘Alas! poor Brag, thou boastful Game!
          What now avails thine empty name?­
Where now thy more distinguish’d fame?
          –My day is 0′ er, & Thine the same.–
­For thou like me art thrown aside,
          At Godmersham, this Christmas Tide;
And now across the Table wide, Each
          Game save Brag or Spec: is tried.
“­Such is the mild Ejaculation,
          Of tender hearted Speculation.”-

This poem not included in non-attributed or dubious poems; still I wonder. The line: “My day is o’er … For thou like me art thrown aside … Austen gives this for hypocritical use to Lady Susan; the idea surfaces over and over for Jane Fairfax, Anne Elliot. I’ve seen her use “Ejaculation”, & Fanny is very tender-hearted at Speculation. She uses this stanzaic format in one of her attributed poems. I suggest it could be by her and Cassandra would understand this.

How hidden this pair of women were. They are as guarded as I remember Renaissance women being.

***********************

Frederick Wentworth (Ciarhan Hinds) (1995 BBC Persuasion)

Wednesday:

She opens with her longing for a letter from Frank. She looks twice a day. This is not the first time she has expressed intense longing for letters from Frank; I will go back and look for the other couple of times before I try to write a published paper which I may do eventually — or give a paper at another conference. It need not be JASNA. I suggest their relationship was intensely close. Had we the three packs of letters we’d be able to discuss it; as is, all we have is his getting the place for her and his mother and sister, his apparent attempt to stop the move to Chawton, the depiction of males with letters “F” in the novels and the knowledge we do have of the letters — plus I think the intensity of MP and Persuasion towards the male heroes.

–I expected to have a Letter from somebody today, but I have not. Twice every day, I think of a Letter from Portsmouth. –

Then we see that in fact Austen longed to be rid of or ignore some of these marginalized companions: probably a combination of embarrassment and (the strong word she uses) “shame” (to be associated with them), plus boredom. Emma is bored silly by Miss Bates and also bored at the Coles’s party. She does know it’s wrong; she has Mr Knightley not be embarrassed or ashamed; and she felt back about dropping Miss Irvine. On the other hand, she is not a landowning gentleman like Mr Knightely or a heiress like Emma. To be seen with Miss Murden for Miss Austen is to be classed with her. The “as yet” also used of Charlotte when Elizabeth bids adieu suggest that Austen does identify to some extent; she knows that eventually Miss Murden will not be so well pleased, once she becomes used to not being scared of downright homelessness or near it.

– Miss Murden has been sitting with us this morning-as yet she seems very well pleased with her situation. The worst part of her being in Southampton will be the necessity of our walking with her now & then, for she talks so loud that one is quite ashamed, but our Dining hours are luckily very different, which we shall take all reasonable advantage of. –

Then, showing in a way how little some of her attitudes changed, we return to her usual irritation at the presence and burdens woman who are so stupid as endlessly to give birth give other women. She is talking about being at the christening or perhaps godmother? There is no indication who Mrs H.D. is

Mrs HY D. has been brought to bed some time. I suppose we must stand to the next.

She does identify with the upper classes. The queen’s birthday interests her for this but alas as we shall see later she “sides” with the queen against the king and the way he treats her. In this she makes stronger feminist comments than she does anywhere else. She does not care that the queen is accused of adultery; she is with her all the way. LeFaye tells us a ball was held at Southampton every Tuesday fortnight and this one was put off one day to look like they are celebrating the queen’s birthday. And here the old problem of having to get somewhere in a style she cannot afford and how her brothers will not only not help but take advantage of this somehow to discourage her from doing what they don’t care for. She lights on the Wallops as having males and accommodation least likely to be troublesome to them – embarrassing, limiting, perhaps demanding attention in return for their help:

The Queen’s Birthday? moves the Assembly to this night, instead of last — & as it is always fully attended, Martha and I expect an amusing shew. — We were in hopes of being independant of other companions by having the attendance of Mr Austen & Capt. Harwood, but as they fail us, we are obliged to look out for other help, & have fixed on the Wallops as least likely to be troublesome.-I have called on them this morng & found them very willing;

That Cassandra likes to hear this kind of detail about dances that bores many a 20th century reader; some of Austen’s descriptions of these balls are intended to amuse her sister. And Cassandra apparently has not given up on finding some husband for Jane — Jane has made it cystal clear to all she prefers Martha, off letter (like offlist) and on letter perhaps (destroyed ones) wanted a life apart with Martha and Cassandra and was stymied and repressed. Later we shall see (over Haydn the apothecary) at the same time Cassandra does not want her sister marrying down. To be fair, Austen in her descriptions does not openly long to marry him. Not for her endless pregnancies. So she shall decline Capt Smith’s invitations to dance. He is a friend of Charles (who does not appear anywhere near as often in all these letters as Frank does — probably a factor of her not writing about him and whatever she wrote being destroyed — his marriage for example). And he was less diplomatic than Frank, and less successful.

I am sorry that you must wait a whole week for the particulars of the Eveng. — I propose being asked to dance by our acquaintance Mr Smith, now Captn Smith, who has lately re-appeared in Southampton — but I shall decline it.­He saw Charles last August. –

Her irritation at women who parade in front of other women their great feats in getting married. And her ironic appreciation that it is the asses of the world who have “boundless influence.” In a sense she’s wrong here, for unless Mrs Coln Tilson has high rank and money as well, she will be ignored. And probably was:

What an alarming Bride Mrs CoIn Tilson must have been! Such a parade is one of the most immodest peices of Modesty that one can imagine. To attract notice could have been her only wish. — It augurs ill for his family –it announces not great sense; & therefore ensures boundless Influence. –

I’m not sure which Fanny is meant here, as after all Fanny Austen Knight lives at Godmersham. It cannot be Charles’s wife as she is with Charles (and having a hard time of it, as Deborah Kaplan’s articles show):

I hope Fanny’s visit is now taking place.-You have said scarcely anything of her lately, but I trust you are as good friends as ever.-[continued upside down at top of p. 1]

Poor Martha again currying favor. These anxious assertions in the last months of Martha’s living with the Austens at Southampton to Edward, to Cassandra, to Henry that she really does care for them teach us why she was eager to become independent of these people. Not Jane, probably it was Jane (and also Frank, but that was drinking down the poison of her desire for him, and his persistent indifference to her since they were young)

Martha sends her Love, & hopes to have the pleasure of seeing you when you return to Southampton. You are to understand this message, as being merely for the sake of a Message, to oblige me. –

And Henry irritated about something. He and Edward we recall were making difficulties about traveling in the last letter. Very pointed:

Yrs affect[ionate1y­J Austen.
Henry never sent his. Love to me in your last-but I send him Mine. —

*************************

The 2009 BBC Emma has the poorest Miss Bates of all the Austen films

And so this revealing slice of her life has come down to us. As I said this is one of a small series of letters where none are missing and perhaps nothing cut.

I am persuaded Lady Susan was written between 1805 (the watermark of the paper is that date) and 1809 with optimum time 1808 or so. In other words just the time she is living this bare existence of cold, genteel impoverished respectability, all morality she as far as others can see.

And what does she write? Not only The Watsons (from this time), a direct reflection of her milieu at the time and the one her father rose from, but Lady Susan — as a curiously distanced strong wish-fulfillment just as Pemberley was to be (for our extant text is that of 1811). Yes Lady Susan is an absolute cruel monster, especially to her daughter but she is also all gaiety, all strength, all liberty including a sex life at night when no one can gainsay her. No one to trouble her about how to get from one place to another. Lady Susan flies low.

In a way I’m repeating something of what Murdock said only from a very different perspective, and the drastic simplification when you compare it say to the nuances Leonora(Edgeworth), Delphine (Stael), Les Liasions Dangereuses (LaClos) is part of why she wrote it. She cut away all unpleasant realities which would preclude her inhabiting this presence — which defies all, exposes much even if not explicit, and by so doing (by the way) escaped the direct censure of her family. The family would see it as fable as it had no obvious connection to them.

People mistake when they see Austen’s primary inspiration as other books. Other books gave her the forms she could follow and improve on. But she was not bookish in this sense. Not a person who looks in the dreampools of books, but someone who wrote out of what she saw in the natural social world (so too did Trollope and he too has the same relative dearth of allusion).

She comes home from MIss Murden and she is Lady Susan at night, in the early morning. Machiavelli said he did the same; he wrote at his desk what he did because he was powerless, impoverished, marginalized in his later years. He’d even dress up to write. Jane didn’t have the clothes to waste.

Ellen

See the whole series of blogs on Jane Austen’s letters

Ellen

Foremother Poet: Phyllis McGinley (1905-78)

Phyllis McGinley when young

Dear friends and readers,

About two weeks ago now Wom-po seemed to flower with poetry by Phyllis McGinley: one member and then another and then another put a poem by McGinley on the list and people began to speak of how much they enjoyed her poems. I was one of them and now think it’s high time I devoted one foremother poet blog to Phyllis. First of all, Ginia Bellafante and all those who peg McGinley as more or less complacently in rapture with life as a middle class wife in the suburbs are wrong, in effect asking us to dismiss McGinley.

Read and consider these:

Evening Musicale

Candles. Red tulips, ninety cents the bunch.
          Two lions, Grade B. A newly tuned piano.
No cocktails, but a dubious kind of punch,
          Lukewarm and weak. A harp and a soprano.
The ‘Lullaby’ of Brahms. Somebody’s cousin
          From Forest Hills, addicted to the punch.
Two dozen gentlemen; ladies; three dozen,
          Earringed and powered. Sandwiches at one.

The ashtrays few, the ventilation meager.
          Shushes to great the late-arriving guest
Or quell the punch-bowl group. A young man eager
          To render ‘Daddy Deever’ by request.
And sixty people trying to relax
On little rented chairs with gilded backs.

Occupation: Housewife.

Her health is good. She owns to forty-one,
          Keeps her hair bright by vegetable rinses,
Has two well-nourished children — daughter and son –
          Just now away at school. Her house, with its chintzes
Expensively curtained, animates the caller.
          And she is fond of Early American glass
Stacked in an English breakfront somewhat taller
          Than her best friend’s. Last year she took a class

In modern drama at the County Center.
          Twice, on Good Friday, she’s heard _Parsifal_ sung.
She often says she might have been a painter,
          Or maybe writer; but she married young.
She diets. And with Contract she delays
The encroaching desolation of her days.

This anti-war lyric:

Ballad of Fine Days

All in the summery weather,
          To east and south and north,
The bombers fly together
          And the fighters squire them forth.

While the lilac bursts in flower
          And buttercups brim with gold
Hour by lethal hour
          Now fiercer buds unfold.

For the storms of springtime lessen,
          The meadow lures the bee,
And there blooms tonight in Essen
          What bloomed in Coventry

All in the summer weather,
          Fleeter than swallows fare,
The bombers fly together
          Through the innocent air.

*******************
McGinley’s social verse is social satire. McGinley became “the “bete noir” of feminists in the 1970s, because she was widely marketed and reviewed as against ambition: the title of her book was Sixpence in my Shoe (as bad as barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen), with satires on power, ambition, and making light of access to control of your income. She is presented as someone innocent of any understanding of say The Disinherited Family by
Eleanor Rathbone, a labor politician in the UK who said to allot
money to men as the heads of families assumes it makes it to the
wives and children and showed it didn’t.

McGinley certainly does reflect the world of the 1950s, but it is the one we can read about today in Anne Tyler’s The Amateur Marriage. Another of her books is The Diary of a Mad Housewife which can be aligned with a long tradition of such self-deprecating books — a latest one is Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. But they may be taken very differently than celebratory — as in the way Alison Light dealt with Mrs Miniver in her Forever England.

More from the sonnet sequence called “Sonnets from Suburbia:”

Lending Library

Between the valentines and birthday greetings
With comical verses, midway of the aisle,
Here is a rendezvous, a place of meetings.
Foregathers here the lady bibliophile.
A dollar down has bought her membership
In this sorority. For three cents daily
Per paper-jacketed volume she can dip
Deep in Frank Yerby or Miss Temple Bailey,

Lug home the current choices of the Guild
(Commended by the press to flourish of trumpets),
Or rent a costume piece adroitly filled
With goings on of Restoration strumpets
And thus, well read, join in without arrears
The literary prattle of her peers.

Trapped women. The world Betty Friedan exposed. Her poems follow the vein of Dorothy Parker. And these show the second aspect of her verse held against her: her formalism, her penchant for rhyme and intricate stanza formations. Just not modern. Just not what men were doing — Annie Finch has shown us that women tend to like and use rhyme.

For example,

Song of the Underprivileged Child

Youngsters today need television for their morale as much as they need fresh air and sunshine for their health…It is practically impossible for boys and girls to “hold their own” with friends and schoolmates unless television is available to them. To have television is to be “cock o’ the walk.” Not to have it, well, that is unthinkable.—Angelo Patri in an advertisement of the American Television Dealers and Manufacturers in the Times.

Mother, my mouth is dimpled,
          Mother, my cheeks are pink.
There are stars in my eyes
From exercise
          And the vitamined juice I drink.
My way is a winning way, Mother,
          My manners a hundred proof,
But I’ll never be Queen of the May, Mother—
          No aerial’s on our roof.

We have no Console Model
          For viewing of Imogene,
No Super-Precision
Full-Room Vision
          Dual-Antennae Screen.
So my playmates cry
As they pass me by
          With courtesy less than scanty,
“There goes the girl
Who doesn’t know Berle
          From Caesar or Jimmy Durante!”

What use to bind my hair, Mother,
          Or cherish my childish brain?
I can’t quote banter
By Eddie Cantor,
          I never see Benny plain.
Though I’m lavish with treats
Like sodas and sweets,
          Though my roller skates roll like jet,
Hark to the jeers
Of my youthful peers:
          “She’s got no video set!”

An outcast tot am I, Mother,
          Stranger to fun or flatt’ry,
Pitied by none
Beneath the sun
          Save God and Angelo Patri.
So turn the key in the lock, Mother,
          While you kiss my tears away,
For I’ll never be cock o’ the walk, Mother,
          I’ll never be Queen of the May!

To be fair to the view of her as creating paeans to mythic suburban moments, here is one of her most frequently reprinted poems:

McGinley later in life

The 5:32

She said, If tomorrow my world were torn in two
Blacked out, dissolved, I thnk I would remember
(As if transfixed in unsurrendering amber)
This hour best of all the hours I knew:
When cars came backing into the shabby station,
Children scuffing the seats, and the women driving
With ribbons around their hair, and the trains arriving,
And the men getting off with tired but practiced motion.

Yes, I would remember my life like this, she said:
Autumn, the platform red with Virginia creeper,
And a man coming toward me, smiling, the evening paper
Under his arm, and his hat pushed back on his head,
And wood smoke lying like haze on the quiet town,
And dinner waiting, and the sun not yet gone down

Twelfth Night

Down from the window take the withered holly.
Feed the torn tissue to the literal blaze.
Now, now at last are come the melancholy
Anticlimactic days.

Here in the light of morning, hard, unvarnished,
Let us with haste dismantle the tired tree
Of ornaments, a trifle chipped and tarnished,
Pretend we do not see

How all the rooms seem shabbier and meaner
And the tired house a little less than snug.
Fold up the tinsel. Run the vacuum cleaner
Over the littered rug.

Nothing is left. The postman passes by, now,
Bearing no gifts, no kind or seasonal word.

The icebox yields no wing, no nibbled thigh, now,
From any holiday bird.

Sharp in the streets the north wind plagues its betters
While Christmas snow to gutters is consigned.
Nothing remains except the thank-you letters,
Most tedious to the mind,

And the gilt gadget (duplicated) which is
Marked for exchange at Abercrombie-Fitch’s.

There is much information about her life at wikipedia. She is claimed by Utah as a daughter. Many of her poems are online. There is a Twayne book: Linda Welshimer Wagner, Phyllis McGinley (New York: Twayne, 1971). The best essay I’ve read on her is by Nancy Walker of Stephens College, Source: American Humorists, 1800-1950. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 11. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982. An interview: “The Lady in Larchmont,” Newsweek, 56 (26 September 1960): 120-122.

Several women on wompo declared McGinley to have been a personal foremother for them, how they remembered reading McGinley’s verse as children and young women; one woman said she wanted to be a poet after reading McGinley: “they were my first encounter with a woman poet, my first sense that poetry and reflective practice sh/could be a part of the daily lives of American women.” When I first read her, I was drawn to comments she made about how growing up relatively isolated in Oregon and Utah left her to lose herself in any and all reading she could get hold of: “I am probably the only person left living who has read the entire works of Bulwer-Lytton–when I was ten years old.”

Ellen

Jane Austen’s Letters: Letter 64, Tues-Wed, 10-11 Jan 1809, from Castle Square

Anne Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady (1st edition), among the books Austen mentions in this letter

Dear friends and readers,

I am in the ironic position of having pictures to illustrate this letter with for everything but what is most interesting (and to some unexpected) in it: Austen’s repeated identification or at least written awareness of servants and poor frozen-to-death or crippled people. It is very cold.

An 18th century Flemish painting of a village in winter

I note also once again that letters are missing. Letter 64 is a transcription from an ms and traveled about to 6 places or people it is now in the Maine Historical Society. How many times published? 3 Looking at capitalizations, dashes; punctuation, abbreviation, spelling it seems faithful. (I will make an effort from here on in to pay more attention to the letters as ms’s or from wherever they come.)

This is a longer letter than Jane has written since the earliest phase of their coming to Southampton. Austen responds to a letter from Cassandra, and one from Bookham. (As a side issue I’ve mentioned before how puzzling it is to me that Burney never mentions Austen and how when Austen mentions the Cookes and Bookham, Burney never comes up. Here is a family and group of people whom both knew, and Burney by 1809 a famed novelist.)

The second portion (or page) of the letter concerns plans to visit Bookham and a reference that is so tantalizing: Jane speaks of her “political correspondents” who have been writing her of the Portuguese colonialist war. This conjures up a whole other correspondence beyond that to Frank where Austen discusses politics. Walpole’s correspondence is said to divide this way: with some to one interlocutor all politics and another all literature; to Madame du Deffand he is all gallantry; she (poor blind aging too woman) pours out her soul to him as she does not quite to Voltaire. Except that perhaps Jane is ironic, and referring to her frustrating lack of information in this deflective playful way she has.

Then we get detail about Godmersham, showing Jane entering minutely and empathetically into Cassandra’s troubles mothering 11 children. Here we fina a back-handed reference to Edward’s not about to give a generous present just at the time they are moving into Chawton (which Mrs Birch wishes for Cassandra). Much on life at Godmersham which anticipates evenings at Mansfield Park (playing cards)

Then back to the aunt at the Paragon with her stringent ideas that all the world should be catering to her, at Scarletts her rich country house (she found it “so dirty and so damp”); how dare John Binns engage himself elsewhere. (This is not Downton Abbey it seems, no Lord and Lady Granthams in sight. Forgive the contemporary media reference, gentle reader)

Then we hear of her and her mothers’s reading (and Martha too? perhaps Martha still there). Austen reading Anna Grant’s second book, her Memoir from her life as a girl in Albany New York. Semi-mockery of a popular gothic novel by Mrs Sykes.

She puts her pen down, and so to the next day, Wednesday: she worries Eliza’s health – she did die in a couple of years; Henry now getting wealthier which by contrast association brings to Austen’s mind his over-worked horse, and the freezing to death of a farmer’s wife and child. Here we do feel a genuine note of humanity and distress. In the letters Jane Austen repeatedly shows real identification and sympathy for servant and working class people: eating non-pretentiously with them was in a previous letter.

Charles’s rug comes to her mind: it’s to keep people warm. Then Marmion. Austen reading Scott’s poem and sending it to Charles “very generous in me I think.”

Finally no letter from Adlestrop — Cassandra’s aging godmother, Mrs Elizabeth Leigh of Adlestrop, said to have been very ill, still dying (not yet dead). No news is good news. That’s the world I live in. Does Cassandra continue well? her namesake? the ball Anna Austen makes do with would not have done for her.

**********************

The Battle of Corunna (16 January 1809): Brigadier General Craufurd with 95th Rifles, 43rd & 52nd Light infantry during the retreat to Corunna

To begin,

Austen responds to one of Cassandra, and one from Bookham.

I am not surprised my dear Cassandra, that you did not find my last Letter very full of Matter, & I wish this may not have the same deficiency; — but we are doing nothing ourselves to write about, & I am therefore quite dependant upon the Communications of our friends, or my own Wit. –

Casssandra had perhaps complained Austen was unusually contentless.

This post brought me two interesting Letters, Yours, & one from Bookham, in answer to an enquiry of mine about your good Godmother, of whom we had lately received a very alarming account from Paragon. Miss Arnold was the Informant there, & she spoke of Mrs E.L.s having been very dangerously ill, & attended by a Physician from Oxford. –

Cassandra’s godmothe’s ill health ended Jane’s previous letter (63). Cassandra’s letter to Jane said Cassandra had also sent one to Adlestrop. The whole of these lines breathes real concern and distress; I take it this is Jane identifying with Cassandra who cared about this woman. In this era godmothers could be second mothers easily — the role was taken seriously not just from religious practices and feelings, but because death was so common. if you lost your biological parents, the godparents were supposed to step in in some way.

Your Letter to Adlestrop may perhaps bring you information from the spot, but in case it should not, I must tell you that she is better, tho’ Dr Bourne cannot yet call her out of danger;­ such was the case, last Wednesday — & Mrs Cooke’s having had no later account is a favourable sign. — I am to hear again from the latter next week, but not this, if everything goes on well. — Her disorder is an Inflammation on the Lungs, arising from a severe Chill, taken in Church last Sunday three weeks; — her Mind, all pious Composure, as may be supposed. — George Cooke was there when her Illness began, his Brother has now taken his place. — Her age & feebleness considered, one’s fears cannot but preponderate-tho’ her amendment has already surpassed the expectation of the Physician, at the beginning.­I am sorry to add that Becky is laid up with a complaint of the same kind. —

Becky is the servant, presumably much younger.

I am very glad to have the time of your return at all fixed, we all rejoice in it, & it will not be later than I had expected. I dare not hope that Mary & Miss Curling may be detained at Portsmouth so long, or half so long — but it would be worth twopence to have it so. –

Mary is Francis’s, Austen’s older sailor brother’s wife and Miss Curling Mary’s aunt (her father’s sister). It would be worth twopence to have them stay at Portsmouth? that’s the price of the stamp so despite the plangent tone of Austen’s longing to have Cassandra home, it’s abruptly cut off with this dry surmise. She does not herself miss Mary. Jane Austen would have had to be superhuman not to resent Mary’s rejection of the Southampton household and refusal to return. She probably had done all she could (reading to her) to make Mary comfortable and had not realized how all her efforts just made the women even less comfortable. I suggest Francis’s wife was like Edward’s Elizabeth: of a very ordinary intellect, didn’t find her sister-in-law (or mother-in-law) comfortable to be around.

Then the very interesting bitten off bit about politics:

The St Albans perhaps may soon be off to help bring home what may remain by this time of our poor Army, whose state seems dreadfully critical.­ The Regency seems to have been heard of only here, my most political Correspondants make no mention of it. Unlucky, that I should have wasted so much reflection on the subject! –

Now I wonder if she is kidding. Are her “political Correspondants are an ironic invention; in fact Jane Austen has no source of special information and wishes she did. Since the St Albans is Francis’s ship and she means that he will soon be off to bring home what remains of the slaughtered suffering men, she could be that Francis does not speak of it in any detail. Not surprising. Either of these possibilities could be what she means rather than she writes to political people.

This is the story of John Moore at Corunna — part of the Portuguese colonialist war. (See Charles Esdaile’s The Peninsular War) the retreat occurred in dreadful conditions. The story is also told (briefly) in Park Honan’s biography of JA and her times (p. 243). Frank is now a captain sailing to China and India and he was paid handsomely for doing the East India’s company’s bidding — Honan offers a good deal of special pleading to make us sympathize with the man’s hard work despite the ignoble sordid goal (opium trading). Honan thinks Jane Austen was reasonably well informed with what the nature of the business was and the battle of Corunna. He suggests that Mansfield Park could be meant implicitly to function as Jane’s quiet critique of distant wealth gotten this ways.

(In later letter Jane’s honest relief she knew no one has been criticized as heartless; it’s tactless to us but not Cassandra.)

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The old rectory at Bookham, a 1961 photo

They (Jane and mother) are to leave their Southampton home for good on
April 3rd. Apparently Cassandra did not like Bookham or she would feel
the lack of Austen so strongly that the day spent at Bookham needs to
be made amends for. Why the knowledge does Edward no good I don’t know
since a little later we are told Jane is not holding her breath for the Mrs Birch’s expected present:

– I can now answer your question to my Mother more at large, & likewise more at small­ with equal perspicuity & minuteness, for the very day of our leaving Southampton is fixed — & if the knowledge is of no use to Edward, I am sure it will give him pleasure. Easter Monday, April 3d is the day; we are to sleep that night at Alton, & be with our friends at Bookham the next, if they are then at home;-there we remain till the following Monday, & on Tuesday April 11th, hope to be at Godmersham. If the Cookes are absent, we shall finish our Journey on y” 5th These plans depend of course upon the weather, but I hope there will be no settled Cold to delay us materially. .- To make you amends =for being at Bookham, it is in contemplation to spend a few days at Barton Lodge in our way out of Kent. –

Now Barton Lodge was the home of Cassandra’s friend, Mrs Birch. It’s
not clear whether Cassandra would be there or not (I’m not sure the
arrangement is that Cassandra will set forth and visit Mrs Birch with
Jane and then Jane and she return to Godmersham), but Jane I suppose
would be a substitute and she could convey news of Mrs Birch to
Cassandra. She has already written to Mrs Birch who has written back
teasingly hoping that Edward would fork across with something when it
is so obviously needed. “Odd’ is the polite word for someone breaking
a polite barrier. Edward would not permit his daughter, Fanny, to come; she has become another substitute for his wife. Jane says anyway we have no bed for her. Since all will come to Godmersham afterward, the loss is small

– The hint of such a visit is most affectionately welcomed by Mrs Birch, in one of her odd, pleasant Letters lately, in which she speaks of us with the usual distinguished kindness; declaring that she shall not be at all satisfied unless a very handsome present is made us immediately, from one Quarter. Fanny’s not coming with you, is no more than we expected, & as we have not the hope of a Bed for her, & shall see her so soon afterwards at Gm — we cannot wish it otherwise. –

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18th century playing cards

Austen now turns her attention to imagining life at Godmersham. We have breezy irony about William and his cross-stitch. What was in Uncle Deedes’s packet. He is a relative of the dead Elizabeth. Uncle John is a Bridges relation to Marianne. While speculation is a bridge type game and said to be simple, brag is yet simpler, it’s mostly luck and no thinking. That Speculation was under Aunt Jane’s “patronage” testifies to everyone’s sense of her relative wittiness. There is an insightful disquisition on this passage in David Selwyn’s JA and Leisure (271-72) and it is the game played in Mansfield Park; it is an older game and had lost popularity by the 18th century, the more complicated gambling game was preferred. this is a cheerful passage, spirited

William will be quite recovered I trust by the time you receive this. — What a comfort his Cross-stitch must have been! Pray tell him that I should like to see his Work very much. — I hope our answers this morng have given satisfaction; we had great pleasure in Uncle Deedes’ packet — & pray let Marianne know, in private, that I think she is quite right to work a rug for Uncle John’s Coffee urn, & that I am sure it must give great pleasure to herself now, & to him when he receives it. — The preference of Brag over Speculation does not greatly surprise me I beleive, because I feel the same myself; but it mortifies me deeply, because Speculation was under my patronage; — & after all, what is there so delightful in a pair-royal of Braggers? it is but three nines, or three Knaves, or a mixture of them.-When one comes to reason upon it, it cannot stand its’ ground against Speculation-of which I hope Edward is now convinced. Give my Love to him, if he is.-

But then leaves the gaiety and drops down to more grimness because she must consider the aunt. Now our reading of the letters helps us out here. We know that Jane Austen indeed loathed Bath and what she feels about this aunt’s niggardliness, egoism: Mrs Norris is a portait of Aunt Jane. We have seen the legacy the uncle got and their behavior over Stoneleigh; not one dime for the Austens once of Steventon. So we can rejoice Robert and Martha have escaped her. Of course a carriage. Holders are people now in Bath (See LeFaye’s index) and the marriage is explained there. Miss Irvine. Remember her? a maiden lady who missed Jane Austen and regretted not getting letters, how Jane felt guilty not to have responded. But she did value Miss Irvine and of course the aunt would not mention her.

The Letter from Paragon, before mentioned, was much like those which had preceded it, as to the felicity of its Writer. — They found their House so dirty & so damp, that they were obliged to be a week at an Inn. — John Binns had behaved most unhandsomely & engaged himself elsewhere. — They have a Man however, on the same footing, which my Aunt does not like, & she finds both him & the new Maidservant very, very inferior to Robert & Martha. — Whether they mean to have any other Domestics does not appear, nor whether they are to have a Carriage while they are in Bath. — The Holders are as usual, tho’ I beleive it is not very usual for them to be happy, which they now are at a great rate, in Hooper’s Marriage. The Irvines are not mentioned.-

On Anne Grant’s letters see my foremother poet blog. This is not Jane’s first reference: she looked for and enjoyed Grant’s Letters from the Mountains, but not enough to hold onto them. Austen’s reference to or way of referring to Grant does show a certain sophistication. Ausetn realizes this is not the real woman we are encountering, but her persona through a book showing a specific kind of face. It’s very frustrating the way Austen does not explain what are these faults. Sufficient for her not to want to hold onto Grant’s book. I’d like to think Austen tired of the sentimental effusions, did not go for the romantic nature of the text, but then she does value travel and descriptive writing.

The American Lady improved as we went on — but still the same faults in part recurred. –

Now the tone of this next passage does not give much comfort to those who want to see Austen reading Gothic with intense seriousness. It’s apparently a gothic novel very recently published, 5 volumes. They read the latest thing. I don’t have the resume to hand (it’s an older Notes & Queries article) but have sent for it through interlibrary loan. As it’s publication date was 1808 one can’t get it out of ECCO either. (I will note separately that LeFaye’s literary entries under “subject” are good; she has read a lot of the works and her references are thorough)

– We are now in Margiana & like it very well indeed. ­We are just going to set off for Northumberland to be shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there must be two or three sets of Victims already immured under a very fine Villain. –

Jane put her pen down until the next day

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A later illustration for Marmion by John Edmund Buckley

A new day brings an asperity of tone (slight mockery) in the reference to Henry’s great business success (Austen never forgets it’s not she who is making this money) but the tone of her hoping Eliza’s health is
better is simple and sincere. Austen then speaks not of Henry but Henry’s horse. Here Austen shows an attitude like that
of Southey: genuine awareness of the horse who is overworked hard.

Wednesday. — Your report of Eliza’s health gives me great pleasure — & the progress of the Bank is a constant source of satisfaction. With such increasing profits, tell Henry, that I hope he will not work poor High-diddle so hard as he used to do. —

She turns to newsprint. The sentiment reminds us how she was glad they didn’t know anyone dead in Corunna but it is not meant to be read so harshly. Austen is again registering her awareness of the ordinary and servant lives around her. Frozen almost to death. It is January in Southampton and it did snow and ice over. Miss Wood — another maiden lady, another one on the edge unmarried. The Middletons had no home or estate, the sister is the wife’s sister, another maiden woman. Austen’s world was made up of maiden women far more than we realize. It was to them she was acceptable. She does feel for the dead child. The maiden sister may end up a cripple. So on the edge, unmarried, a cripple>. This is matter for a poem by one of Austen’s favorite poets, Crabbe:

Has your Newspaper given a sad story of a Mrs Middleton, wife of a Farmer in Yorkshire, her sister & servant being almost frozen to death in the late weather — her little Child quite so?-I hope this sister is not our friend Miss Wood — & I rather think her Brotherinlaw had moved into Lincolnshire, but their name & station accord too well. Mrs M. & the Maid are said to be tolerably recovered, but the Sister is likely to lose the use of her Limbs. —

A rug is used for warmth – the association is clear. And at last a reference to a literary work of value again: Marmion, and Austen knows it is because she says it is generous of her to send it. Scott by the way did not undervalue his work. Only later reprints were cheap. I’ve never read all of Marmion, only started it. Its content is wholly out of what she usually tells of — or is allowed to have told of to us — ballad violence, heavy rhythmic stuff, Scottish history. She does not mention Scott’s name here:

Charles’s rug will be finished today, & sent tomorrow to Frank, to be consigned by him to Mr Turner’s care — & I am going to send Marmion with it; — very generous in me I think —

Cassandra’s god-mother is dying and Cassandra not getting any younger

As we have no letter from Adlestrop, we may suppose the good Woman was alive on Monday, but I cannot help expecting bad news from thence or Bookham, in a few days. — Do you continue quite well? –

Cassandra not sentimental. She also now has 11 children to care for
and the birthday of one might not loom large in her mind when she sits
down to write to Jane

In the postscript I detect a real sniff. In my time I was better served, had a better time. Slightly priggish in feel and puffing herself up, but from other comments she has made about Anna, and from our knowledge of Anna’s situation (kept at home, kept down, has a hard time getting shoes for a ball), I still surmise that Jane is aware of the impoverished youth the stepmother and environs are delivering Anna. Jane had it better than this. Nevertheless, it’s not just ungracious or clunky; it’s show-offy.

The Manydown Ball was a smaller thing than I expected, but it seems to have made Anna very happy. At her age it would not have done for me.-

Poor Anna, married off soon and then many pregnancies and genteel poverty as a widow. She burnt her attempt at a novel she began in Austen’s lifetime but did publish three other books.

Anna later in life

See JALetters; Jane Austen Letters

Ellen

Ann Radcliffe’s landscapes: Christa Wolf (No Place on Earth) and the Siege of Mainz

Christian Wilhelm Dietrich, Landscape with Bridge

Dear friends and readers,

I rejoice to report that I’ve finished my Ann Radcliffe paper: “‘What are men to rocks and mountains?’”: The content of Ann Radcliffe’s Landscapes” (see proposal). It takes something under 21 minutes to read and if anyone is interested in it, I’d gladly share it (ask me and I’ll send it by attachment). It focuses heavily on Radcliffe’s 1794 Journey Made in Summer book, and I learned a lot in doing it. This blog is on two of the books I read which I could not go into in detail in the paper.

First: Christa Wolf’s No lace on Earth, a historical fiction which imagines the great German writers of the later 18th into 19th century, Karoline von Gunderrode (1780-1806) and Henrich von Kleist (1777-1811), met and walked and talked in a village by the Rhine (they could have but alas didn’t). Both Kliest and Gunderrode killed themselves. Another woman writer of the era (life-writing), Bettine von Armin (I’m not sure the later Elizabeth married into that family) wrote a life of Gunderrode and told why Gunderrode killed herself: forced into a nunnery, when Gunderrode got out (she was as ill as Fanny Burney at court), there was no place for reading intellectual women, and she did away with herself.

Christa Wolf’s essay on this novel and an interview she let someone shed light on Radcliffe for me. It is headlong, no chapters, just an intense rush of two subjectivities. We move back and forth between Kleist and Günderrode with the connectives supplied by the present tense narrator (unnamed, but of course Christa Wolf). It’s all about modern poetry in Germany too, men and women’s relationships, about coping with social life’s demands. About unearthing this pair from the grave. An ironic level is provided by the details of the room, position of the people, and the costumes. Kleist and Gunderrode take a walk together — this reminds me of Jane Austen novels where characters gain a modicum of liberty & peace by leaving the house and going for a walk. As they walk, they express their radical or individual thoughts. Talk of sexuality — or at least think. It’s not clear all the time whether someone is talking or thinking. But what are they wearing? He is in a military uniform, she a nun’s outfit. They are encased, imprisoned, endlessly imprisoned even by their clothes.

I admire Wolf’s ability to imitate and call to mind the way people talk to one another in social life, the bitter acid underneath the depiction doesn’t corrode me, but rather makes me feel the keen knife of truth. The way Karoline is accused of being arrogant struck me; also (as I wrote on Austen-l) They did have it worse in some ways than the English (and French). I was struck by one phrase Wolf has Gunderrode use of herself: “ignominious loneliness.” Gunderrode lives in fear that her she will be seen as living in this kind of state: she is unmarried and no one wants to marry her; she is given no options she can stand. This state is one she is determined to hide and present another face to the world. I felt that this phrase again could be one that Miller is suggesting Austen lives in and that he has lived in when he found she stretched out her consciousness to him. It’s the state of Miss Bates for while the novel shows her socializing, that’s a tiny percentage of her hours. The 2009 Emma (by a woman, Sandy Welch, and that’s significant) makes a point of showing us the Bates household when alone

Wolf puts thoughts into the minds of Kleist and Gunderrode which I have when faced with analogous strained and alienating situations. It’s validating and comforting to see them there because they are expressed with nobility and as intensely understandable, even right. This is how I feel when I read George Sand in some of her earlier works and her non-fiction.

The thoughts she puts into the minds of Kleist and Gunderrode also express or articulate thoughts I have imagined other contemporary rebellious/romantic or simply highly intelligent people of the age had or which seem to predict, describe patterns of behavior I have recognized but rarely see others acknowledge, much less argue for. This is true for Radcliffe as to her behavior: she stopped publishing at the height of her success and simply fell silent but for one slender publication of poems. She did attempt to publish her pageant romance; that is, she actually put it to the press to set up, but then backed down and withdrew it.

It’s true for Jane Austen (!). I believe Jane Austen had a special relationship with her brother Frank, and do think it went as far as erotic love. I doubt they ever came near to doing anything about it, but I see enough in the letters of Frank’s behavior to feel he knew it (Farrar, Strauss Giroux translation by Jan Van Heurck, p. 94). The section on Kleist and hia sister, Ulricke, and sentences like “This is the thing concerning which they cannot and must not ever, with a single word, with even so much as a single glance, show each other that they understand their own and one another’s feelings [fully I'd add] … Which they tolerate by failing to perceive what their blood is urging deep down in its abysmal muteness. (Alas, incest is in some ways natural.) Frank is said to have carried Austen’s packets of letters to him (they amounted to 3) every where he went; within a few days of his death, a great-great niece or granddaughter is said to have destroyed them. Maybe she was acting on understood orders. Now he’s dead, get rid of them. There are other many such insights: Shelley, Mary Shelley and others.

Christa Wolf when young

In Wolf’s essay on the novella she does not say what she wants to rebel against, what she wants to do, how she feels particularly. She dare not. Well she did it here; it’s an indirect defense of herself — at times not a justification but defense of not so much suicide but chosing the path which is not safe: “freedom falls to our lot who are destined to be destroyed.” (p. 118). I did like the dark ending and wish she had included more imitations 20th century style of intimations of landscape 18th century mode:

Now it is getting dark. The final glow on the river.”
Simply go on, they think.
We know what is coming.

Karoline will soon kill herself, and Kleist when still very young in a few years. See especially “Culture Is What You Experience: An Interview with Christa Wolf,” by Christa Wolf and Jeanette Clausen, New German Critique, 27 (Autumn, 1982):89-100

One of my foremother poet postings was on Gunderrode.

The only one

How all my wits are now enslaved,
To one, to one alone I cleave;
To embrace this only one
Is my sole desire’s aim;
If I this secret wish employ,
Or fool myself in many a dream
And let my longing me consume,
To give birth to what would kill me.

Resistance is no use to me,
I come back even though I flee,
I rage, my conscience to bestir,
But cannot wean myself from her,
Must groan in anguish in my joy.
My drinking cup is filled with tears,
I sink in dreams and crazy fears;
I do not hear the dance’s sound
As it swells aloft, around.

Wave on wave swells in delight,
But I can’t see the colours bright
Streaming from the source of light.
Springtime airs try to caress,
Scents of flowers try to kiss,
But all of that is lost on me,
Is as though unborn to me,
For my spirit is held fast
By one desire above all else
To possess but one, and one alone.

Hungry amid many a guest
I sit at the joyous feast
Which Nature on the earth bestows:
Ask myself:will it soon end?
Can I then escape at last
From the nauseous repast
Which feeds other guests so lavishly,
But brings no sustenance for me?
For I have but one desire,
One longing and consuming fire;
My world is held in captive bond
By one desire, and one alone:
To possess but one, and one alone.

— Karoline von Gunderrode (English translation of “Die Einzige”

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Kostheim, 1793: just before the terrible seige of Mainz began, where a series of fierce sea and land battles were fought.

Radcliffe has a very long section in her Journey book about the seige of Mainz. She journeys to the place, describes the ruins, gets a pamphlet, reads and tells the story and then re-tells what she sees with the insight she’s gained. Her thesis: it’s not over when it’s over by a long shot especially for poor civilians and women and children.

My second book was about the Siege of Mainz by Arthur Chuquet: The Wars of Revolution: VII: The Siege of Mainz and the French Occupation of the Rhineland, 1792-1793, trans and annotated by Wm D. Peterson. Chucquet tells a story uncannily familiar to anyone who has studied failed (many are utter failures) revolutions; those who take over (the French) supposedly wanting to free the oppressed actually don’t pay attention to the middling people who had learned to survive reasonably well under the old corrupt order and fear and don’t want change; they end up themselves domineering and exploiting. The poor and powerless fear all people above them and don’t know how to rule (deliberately left untaught). The old establishment fights back successfully with its priests. I’ve summed up a story told about fascinating individuals. The French who came in and Germans who joined them were the intellectuals, the artisans, the middling sort with real ideals and how their weaknesses come out. A real lesson for today. Goethe who lived in Weimar (not far off) wrote a famous account of this seige and the re-installation of the ancien regime.

The city had been a bye-word for luxury and corruption When the old order was put back much had been destroyed physically and was never rebuilt as it had been. That’s the moment Radcliffe is traveling through.

When the revolution began, and the aristocrats and their flunkies and soldiers fled what happened? A group of people who came to be called the Clubmen (they were part of a differently elite club) took over. They came to an astonishingly tactless and anti-liberty decision to incorporate this part of Germany into France. They could not get the old trade routes back for the bourgeois; the ancien regime types would not deal with them (reminds me of capitalism’s response to communism). I assume the clubman were terrified of the combined forces of Prussia, Austria, England which soon gathered force, but this will not give the people their liberty (pp. 70-72.) Each of these groups is out for specific interest: Prussia wants to expand to take some of Poland for example.

Some people saw how bad all of this was right away: “barbaric, terrible,” others said it was the “tragic necessities of war.” Immediately demanded are loyalty oaths to France. An anti-emigre law. We then get a long series of portraits of people fighting for Mainz, the revolution. The besiegers bring home how militaristic the whole culture, revolutionaries and aristocrats, all male. These are indidividuals who spend their lives making war. If you see this as indicative and widespread, you can understand why Napoleon upon getting into power made and spread continual war. Not just high aristocrats, that’s why middling males were taught to do and be (p 102)

Then a long section on the battles, the sea fights, the ships, the sorties, attempted tricks and betrayals (people disguised and telling lies about Paris), trying to get someone who is Prussian and in prison to negotiate; the failure of a political settlement when Danton falls from power.

Not mentioned by Chuquet: Heinrich von Kleist was there. It was one of his shattering experiences, and became a setting for some of Kleist’s own worst emotional experiences. Kleist was forcibly packed off to follow his family’s century-old military tradition as a 14-year-old and was only 16 when his guards regiment took part in the siege of Mainz (another Kleist, a major general, actually commanded one of the assaults on a further enemy position). Not exactly ideal for any young man and definitely not for such an over-sensitive one as Kleist. Mainz was also where he had his later nervous breakdown in the aftermath of his burning of his uncompleted ‘Robert Guiscard’ manuscript and absurd, first failed suicide bid.

Goethe was an eye-witness and darts in and out here and there. So that’s where he got his (to Germans and 18th century scholars) famous book.

It’s an extraordinary book about a significant siege. I doubt I can do justice to the details of what it reveals happened stage-by-stage during this siege. Each set of events has direct analogies with what happens politically today in reality during wars; the biggest difference of course is modern warfare when contemporary weapons are used does not permit this kind of fighting over a piece of land in this way. Single individuals in combat or leading groups of individuals cannot cope with much modern technology; but in places where this technology is not used (that means outside the purview of the modern US empire, or where it doesn’t reach beyond its bombs and drones) simulacra probably do. It’s the jockeying for position and ways in which treaties are just negotiating stances behind fierce anger and rage and struggle for land, wealth, money, position. I was struck by repeated refusals of groups of men to fight — called cowards but it was their lives — how the powerful once back in power returned immediately to reactionary laws and so the French new ideals and norms were actually missed at first and might have done good had they had some means really to implement them, which it seems they never quite did, as those who had their hands on trade and commerce which were needed to back up these norms, immediately refused to trade. As I say, how reminiscent of what happened after 1945.

One learns what thwarted the French revolution from having the good effect it might have, and why terror so often emerges from such revolutions — atrocities from all sides.

The bombardment of Mainz: burning the cathderal, engraving by Tielker after drawing by Schutz

The book is part of a larger series of such books published by Nafziger, on a plethora of wars and individuals battles or sieges or sites. If each one is as good as this, they immensely valuable. My problem with the books I had on the Peninsula war was they were so fat and about so many others things beyond the battles and wars, and here it’s shown if you just go that thoroughly (extrapolating out to economics or other social arrangements that make for whatever is happening), how much you can learn.

To conclude on Radcliffe: in almost 50 pages she depicted the same siege that Chuquet did from the same humane and insightful stance (about politics) with the significant difference she continually emphasizes the effect on the civilian population (hardly mentioned by Chuquet), she details the destruction of buildings and art (only in passing), and imagines how it felt to endure these war conditions. She names the same people in charge; she sees how important the clubmen were who took over Mainz and how badly they handled the bourgeoise. She notices how few people vote. She notices and talks of people thrown out of the city, fleeing who were terrified when no one would take them back. How the people were surveyed and monitored and forced to produce such and such food and such and such water. The sick.

She differs from Chuquet and he comes out better in this in blaming Custine, the head of the French forces for the defeat. He was executed. Not that she wants the place to have been totally destroyed, but she does not see that Custine was a brave man for refusing to take the situation to this. On the other hand, she describes the quay size, traffic, burgesses and concludes *it was not an important city commercially* Aristocratic cities are good for aristocrats; it seemed prosperous because it was admired as an icon and all the impoverished parts of the city, the real lives of ordinary people ignored. And now the destruction of property as the result of war will not be remedied easily or any time soon she says because in the first place its reputation was skewed and the city’s real basis and economy never truly described. Radcliffe’s husband had a hand in this book and she says so but I’m loathe to say everytime she has a remarkable insight it’s just him.

Wm Turner’s Buttermere Lake, with part of Cromackwater, Cumberland (a near contemporary painting)

Non-sequitor: Ive found an Italian article which says the beautiful, lyrical part of Radcliffe’s book about her time in the Lake District — a suspiciously over-long autumn — may have been written earlier and is the product of more than one trip. That makes sense to me and the writer seems to be sound on this.
Sanna, V. “La datazione del libro di viaggi di Ann Radcliffe.” Critical Dimensions: English, Germand and Comparative Literature Essays in Honour of Aurelio Zanco, edd. Mario Currelli and Alberto Martino. Cuneo, Italy: Saste, 1978. 291-312.

Ellen

Jane Austen’s Letters: Letter 63, Tues-Wed, 27-28 Dec 1808, Castle Square

Tamsin Grieg as Miss Bates reading Jane Fairfax’s letters to her mother, Mrs Bates (2009 BBC Emma)

Dear friends and readers,

Heads of topics: She wishes she could help Cassandra with the 11 children; a free thimble. They are waiting on Chawton; mother putting together some “useless silver” (ware). Austen identifies with Miss Murden (single, broke, has to take a job as a chemist’s wife’s companion; this where she talks in sign language to an impoverished deaf man in a boarding house and recommends Stael’s Corinna; she eats black butter with Eliza (rejoicing in “unpretending privacy”); Henry still distressed, James has been and gone to the theater. There are still many destroyed letters. Writing novels never mentioned, yet we have evidence she writes all morning regularly . . .

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One feels endlessly compelled to qualify. On Austen-l we had a thread on whether the letters are superficial (I really meant to counter the typical dismissal of them as joking, not meaning it, meant for family eyes &c&c) or unsatisfying, as I started this week’s letters I looked at the dates. By LeFaye’s own computation in her introduction to this edition, that means probably 6 missing letters. 2-4 a week, or 3 a week is what LeFaye figures.

If we start to count on average often 6 missing, for the break here of 3 weeks is typical, we can really make no generalization of what the whole was. We can say this remnant is meager in numbers.

J. J. Feilds as intensely pained Henry Tilney (Davies & Feilds saw though NA to the core of the original conception)

What can be destroyed at this point? One kind of detail that has struck me which I had not noticed before in simply reading through are the few references to Henry Austen and those here surprising – if you were to believe how optimistic he is said to have been and liking to present himself shallowly. Since Elizabeth’s death he is presented as grief-stricken, really upset when he comes to Godmersham, and in this letter the tiny detail, doubtless overlooked by Cassandra’s vigilance:

I hope he comes to you in good health & in spirits as good as a first return to Godmersham can allow. With his nephews, he will force himself to be chearful, til he really is so.

Myself I see no reason to think he was boulverse by Elizabeth’s death; we are not near Eliza’s fatal illness, though her disabled son was a burden and died. We do know he overextended himself, that his business was very stressful one (considering the wars, over-building) and in the end he opted for retirement to a small income as a curate and nobody wife, living near his sister.

I’m also struck by how in the last part of the letter the irritatingly sullen Miss Murden– sitting there ungracious and very silent, Jane suddenly shows she identifies. Miss Murden was understandably distressed I’d call it; like many of these single women the Austens surround themselves with, she has no money, and Martha has found for her a way of surviving by being companion to, Mrs Hookey, the Chemist. Not exactly going up in life. Jane writes then

I cannot say that I am in any hurry for the conclusion of her present visit, but I was truly glad to see her comfortable in Mind & spirits. — at her age perhaps one may be as friendless oneself, & in similar circumstances quite as captious.

Given the mortality rate, Austen could find herself w/o a brother willing to put up with her, Cassandra dead, mother dead and she’d be as badly off. She is “one” in the second phrase.

I had not noticed before the “I recommended him to read Corinna” is said to an impoverished deaf man, Mr Fitzhugh. His family is willing barely to support him — as little real concern for disabled people then as now. Jane’s using sign language shows it has spread — it was invented mid-18th century by three philosophes altogether and simply transformed the existence of deaf people. No longer left to be idiots. That she knows it is startling. But it’s telling him to read it. I had once read she preferred it to Milton but know that reading is wrong since she never mentions Milton in this sentence. I’ve read Corinne and can see how it would be a comfort to an intelligent person. A deeply philosophical travel book about non-conformity. I wonder how he would have learned to read, where? would someone read it to him through sign language? I know it existed in English by 1808 – and probably this was the copy Austen was thinking of.

Ann Hathaway as Jane Austen walking with disabled brother, George (2008 Becoming Jane)

I see no real buoyancy in this letter on the whole. It is the same mixture as the previous. In fact Chawton is not primarily what’s on her mind. Here we see other people are; what she is doing when she writes is kept from us. The 6 missing letters could have been about that or contained something we’ll now never know.

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Now I go through consecutively. Irresistible not to say
first of course yes she is looking forward to Chawton too: the
humiliating, desolating loss of her pianoforte for a small sum is to be made up for at least:

Yes, yes, we will (underlined by Austen) have a Pianoforte, as good a one as can be got for 30 Guineas.

But the generally usually rebarbative tone of the whole letter
throughout does not suggest any continual rejoicing at the coming move. This is a less pleasant letter than the last. The abrupt irritated tone especially strong on Tuesday. Austen moderates somewhat on Wednesday, but not a lot.

The first sentence does seem to suggest sometimes Austen wrote only once a week:

I can now write at leisure & make the most of my subjects, which is lucky, as they are not numerous this week.

The second about the “party” just arrived home in safety:

Our house was cleared by half-past Eleven on saturday, & we had the satisfaction of hearing yesterday, that the party reached home in safety, soon after 5.

Blake Ritson as Edmund Bertram (2007 MP): Austen poured parts of James Austen into Edmund

LeFaye suggests James and his wife, Mary, but two letters ago (Letter 61) only James is there, and that allows him to go to the theater (Mary did not like books & poetry & we’ve no reason to believe plays found any more favor with her) Austen says her brother, James is there alone and this will give her a chance to see that Martha goes to the theater in Southampton at least once. Rereading that passage, maybe after all Jane did go to the theater more often that we suppose. Her remarks would be destroyed by Cassandra: theater going not acceptable? salacious innuendos? hard to say.

Then the usual acknowledgement of Cassandra’s letter:

I was very glad of your letter this morning, for my Mother taking medicine, Eliza keeping her bed with a cold, & Choles not coming, made us rather dull & dependent on the post. You tell me much that gives me pleasure, but I think not much to answer.-I wish I could help you in your Needlework, I have two hands & a new Thimble that lead a very easy life.

Eliza and Choles are both servants. Jane suggests they or he provides amusement and interest. Again she’s not above noticing servants. Needlework: I can imagine Cassandra has a lot: 11 children! At least one still in diapers. And maybe more than one not yet in trousers.

Then Jane’s not-so-kind gossip to Cassandra:

Lady Sondes’ match surprises, but does not offend me; — had her first marriage been of affection, or had there been a grown-up single daughter, I should not have forgiven her — but I consider everybody as having a right to marry once in their Lives for Love, if they can — & provided she will now leave off having bad head-aches & being pathetic, I can allow her, I can wish her to be happy.

I like to think Jane’s tone comes from considering her correspondent; also this value or norm of widows not acceptable when they remarry, but have to admit this fits in with other snatches. It does have this: we learn that Lady Sondes’s first marriage was not for love; it was an arrangement. Why had there been a grown-up single daughter this would reconcile Austen? someone for her to talk to? What stands out really is Austen has no tolerance for other people’s emotional pains coming out in physical ailments. I get the feeling this was not tolerated much in the Austen household, except of course for Mrs Austen (who herself when younger makes a play to the boys in her poem
of ignoring their miseries as nothing. It was in her monetary interest to.

LeFaye tells us Lady Sondes married as her second husband Genl Sir Henry Tucker Montresor. Lefaye’s citation of an article on the JA Collected Reports is useless to me as she doesn’t tell the year; Ron’s website at least conveys information the husband was a respected general in the Napoleonic wars

I’ll jump ahead to later in the letter where Austen mentions this match and man again. It was on her mind:

I have laid Lady Sondes’ case before Martha — who does not make the least objection to it, & is particularly pleased with the name of Montresor, I do not agree with her there, but I like his rank very much-& always affix the ideas of strong sense, & highly elegant Manners, to a General

A painting of him:

I hope Jane’s dislike of the name of Montresor is not a dislike of a French name but fear this is so.

Do not imagine that your picture of your Tete a tete with Sir B3 makes any change in our expectations here; he could not be really reading, tho’ he held the newspaper in his hand; he was making up his mind to the deed, & the manner of it-I think you will have a letter from him soon.-

Brook Bridges. No reader — perhaps like Elizabeth (now dead). She, Jane, cannot believe he is really reading. In a way it’s amusing. I’m glad she’s no hypocrite.

Cassandra has probably asked about Mary and Frank Austen, and I get the feeling has tried to present them as pleasantly wanting to return to jane and her mother at Southampton — though I’ve surmised she must know better from Frank’s frank visit to her. Jane squashes that one:

-I heard from Portsmouth yesterday, & as I am to send them more cloathes, they cannot be expecting a very early return to us. Mary’s face is pretty well, but she must have suffered a great deal with it-an abscess was formed & open’d.

I imagine a bad tooth. The Austens did have access to what was known of tooth care and we see Jane going to the dentist in London; in her later letters she is aware of how little they can do.

Then the long passage on Miss Murden. Again I surmise a Cassandra having written that she longs to hear about this party and can hardly wait to know about the treats they ate. Austen again is not having this. What I like about this letter is Austen is not writing to please Cassandra but countering her step-by-step (or should I say line-by-line — as she seems to have Cassandra’s letter in front of her as she writes?

Miss Murden was related to the Fowles; Eliza Fowles’s gain was a sister-in-law; Miss Murden’s was that she didn’t attract a man or had a relative-possible suitor sluiced off (by marriage) — could she have wanted Cassandra’s Tom? Well, irritatingly sullen Miss Murden — sitting there ungracious, very silent, Jane suddenly shows she identifies with in the second passage. Miss Murden was understandably distressed I’d call it; like many of these single women the Austens surround themselves with, she has no money, and Martha has found for her a way of surviving by being companion to, Mrs Hookey, the Chemist. Not exactly going up in life.

Madame Bigeon, another servant with whom Austen on terms of equality (Miss Austen Regrets, 2008)

By looking at the whole passage we see how Austen equally emphasizes the black butter, how it did not come out right but they ate it up the more happily not having anyone around they had to impress: “unpretending privacy” is the kindness remark we’ve had in the letter thus far — she softens considerably the next day when she has Martha next to her. Note too that Eliza the servant is sitting and eating with them on the first day. Unpretending privacy. (In Downton Abbey the servants do not sit and eat the black butter with the family. and I’ll lay a bet in Mrs James Austen’s house and Godmersham they didn’t either:

Our Eveng party on Thursday, produced nothing more remarkable than Miss Murden’s coming too, tho’ she had declined it bsolutely in the morng, & sitting very ungracious & very silent with us from 7 o’clock, till half after ll-for so late was it, oweing to the Chairmen, before we got rid of them.

The last hour, spent in yawning & shivering in a wide circle round the fire, was dull enough-but the Tray had admirable success. The Widgeon, & the preserved Ginger were as delicious, as one could wish. But as to our Black Butter do not decoy anybody to Southampton by such a lure, for it is all gone. The first pot was opened when Frank & Mary were here, & proved not at all what it ought to be;-it was neither solid, nor entirely sweet — & on seeing it, Eliza remembered that Miss Austen had said she did not think it had been boiled enough. — It was made you know when we were absent. — Such being the event of the first pot, I would not save the second, & we therefore ate it in unpretending privacy; & tho’ not what it ought to be, part of it was very good. –

Miss Murden was quite a different creature this last Eveng from what she had been before, oweing to her having with Martha’s help found a situation in the morng which bids very fair for comfort: when she leaves Steventon, she comes to board & lodge with Mrs Hookey, the Chemist — for there is no Mr Hookey –. I cannot say that I am in any hurry for the conclusion of her present visit, but I was truely glad ” to see her comfortable in Mind & spirits;-at her age perhaps one may, be as friendless oneself, & in similar circumstances quite as captious.-

Some of Austen’s irritation comes from the money she has not got and others still have plenty of. Remember the aunt has granted an annuity to him of 100 pounds (and that means Mary too). She did not do similarly to the Austen mother and sisters, did she? James however does not have the money to get one for a boy, so Edward will be compelled to actually make good on his promise.

The “which makes us very happy” is sheer acid.

Mary does not like gardens any more than books. I imagine she didn’t like the degrading work? because of the reference to trenching to be done by his own servants. So John Bond is still there to be used. Mr Austen talked of him with some feeling of his equality as a human being.

]ames means to keep three Horses on this increase of income, at present he has but one; Mary wishes the other two to be fit to carry Women-& in the purchase of one, Edward will probably be called upon to fulfil his promise to his Godson.5 We have now pretty well ascertained]ames’s Income to be Eleven Hundred Pounds, curate paid, which makes us very happy-the ascertainment as well as the Income.-Mary does not talk of the Garden, it may well be a disagreable subject to her-but her Husband is persuaded that nothing is wanting to make the first new one Good, but trenching, which is to be done by his own servants &]ohn Bond by degrees-not at the expense which trenching the other, amounted to.

And two more sections, one on a ball Austen is glad for Anna she will have. Anna has much to endure with that stepmother (left out of Godmersham). No shoes from mother Mary, but mrs Hulbert will bring a pair.

I was happy to hear, cheifly for Anna’s sake, that a Ball at Manydown was once more in agitation; it is called a Child’s Ball, & given by Mrs Heathcote to wm — such was its’ beginning at least-but it will probably swell into something more. Edward was invited, during his stay at Manydown, & it is to take place between this & twelfth-day. — Mrs Hulbert has taken Anna a pair of white shoes on the occasion

Harville, wife and child from 1995 BBC Persuasion

And at last Charles and his wife, which in Austen’s spirit I’ll remark she is already impregnated, waiting to drop one; they are not long married and her health does matter. We’ve had no notice in any letter of their marriage or beginnings; I cannot believe Austen did not write of this before. These letter destroyed — I remember reading Deborah Kaplan that the family was not entirely happy over this match and shall refind the material tomorrow:

I forgot in my last to tell you, that we hear by way of Kintbury & the Palmers, that they were all well at Bermuda? in the beginning of Nov’.-

So much for Jane on Tuesday, 27 Dec at Castle Square

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Chawton Cottage unergoing some process of renovation

Wednesday.

The tone here is much much pleasanter; there is kindness and Austen is looks forward to Chawton in a longish passage, but I’d like to suggest there is just as much dwelling on the here and now and what seems to make soften her is her real engagement with a poor, deaf man who might just be interested in a serious book; a poor single woman captious but who now has a place somewhere and whom she sees what she could be in the future — that she does this suggests she by no means had faith the Chawton scheme would a permanent secure home for her. After al she had been thrown out of Steventon. As a woman she owns nothing; single, she is not directly linked to a man who might protect her interests as the equivalent of his. She is however probably ironic when she says she looks forward equally to her coming association with the Digweed’s bailiff and bailiff’s wife (they are going to live in a bailiff’s cottage) as with Digweed himself. This shows again why she identifies with Miss Murden and after the sudden decisive yes we will have a pianoforte, it’s all money, Henry’s grief, snow and how speculation passes the time.

So here are the passages to exemplilfy what I’ve suggested above.

The day of Edward and Elizabeth’s anniversary; marriage may be said to have killed her:

Yesterday must have been a day of sad remembrances at Gm. I am glad it is over.-

I’ve talked of Mr Fitzhugh and now I’ve looked up the women. Mrs Drew a resident in the boarding house (so no status), Miss Hook, daughter of a brigadier general, but she died in 1816 so perhaps aging single (sloughed off old maid), Mr Wynne, another resident. Why do the film-makers not make a truthful film about Austen’s life. I can see Bergmann doing it or Bresson.

We spent friday Eveng with our friends at the Boarding House, & our curiosity was gratified by the sight of their fellow-inmates, Mrs Drew & Miss Hook, Mr Wynne & M’ Fitzhugh, the latter is brother to Mrs Lance, & very much the Gentleman. He has lived in that House more than twenty years, & poor Man, is so totally deaf, that they say he Cd not hear a Cannon, were it fired dose to him; having no cannon at hand to make the experiment, I took it for granted, & talked to him a little with my fingers, which was funny enough.-I recommended .him to read .Corinna.9-Miss Hook is a wellbehaved, genteelish Woman; Mrs Drew wellbehaved without being at all genteel. Mr Wynne seems a chatty, & rather familiar young Man.

Then comes the poignant passage about Miss Murden which I quoted yesterday. I can’t resist quoting the last line at least again to show that Austen is not depending on Chawton as permanent – it did begin to become that, but she did not foresee it:

I was truely glad to see her comfortable in Mind & spirits; — at her age perhaps one may be as friendless oneself, & in similar circumstances quite as captious.–

If we look at the above one and then this we see Austen surrounded by people glad, grateful, condescending, not above her, that she’s comfortable with them (not threatened). Like Eliza, they would have been glad to eat black butter with her in front of a fire.

A cheerful scene of family & friends & servants (2008 Miss Austen Regrets)

Now the mother’s pathetic (but in a subsidence economy a widow on a small pension) attempt to get some respectable silverware together for Chawton. Remember how nasty Fanny Dashwood was about how the Dashwoods got to leave with their china:. Austen is quietly ironic here surely. It was originally more emphatic according to LeFaye: by “useless silver” is a crossed out “by her.” Now why would this serve the purpose of making them think of John Warren. Though at the time (1808) he is a barrister (high lawyer), charity commissioner (show this) and married, as a boy he was under the thumb of the parsimonious (necessarily I know people will say): perhaps he was one of the complaining boys to whom Mrs A directed her poem or maybe he made fun of any pretensions over silver in Steventon cottage:

My Mother has been lately adding to her possessions in plate-a whole Tablespoon & a whole dessert-spoon, & six whole Teaspoons, which , makes our sideboard border on the Magnificent. They were mostly the produce of old, or useless silver, –I have turned the l1s in the List into ” 12s, & the Card looks all the better; — A silver Tea-Ladle is also added, which will at least answer the purpose of making us sometimes think of John Warren.

Then the passage on Lady Sondes whose case Austen means to put in front of Martha and Austen’s (I think unironic) praise of her second husband (whom we recall Austen said she was marrying for love as opposed to her first marriage): “strong sense, highly elegant manners …” Austen values these

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Turning outward:

She must write to Charles next week. She’s in no hurry. She is not eager for this correspondence the way she was for Frank’s. Harville is said to have been based on Charles; if so, while he’s very handy and good natured, he’s not much on talk. She is making fun of the neighborhood’s pompous crying up of Charles and the insincerity of Harwood (who we’ve heard of before, himself a victim of prejudice), pretending over praise of a “local hero.” Jane knows what’s that’s worth:

I must write to Charles next week. You may guess in what extravagant terms of praise Earle Harwood speaks of him. He is looked up to by everybody in all America.-

And then the longish passage of looking forward to Chawton: There is much wry saturnine here. She is comically irritated by Cassandra’s discretion (it is only comically). The reality is they will not have much satisfaction in neighbors for real, and the irony of who they run with now. Not that she doesn’t like “remarkably good sort of people.” So did Emma the Coles (and found she had to bow to the neighborhood who persisted in treating them as equals so she had to pretend). The country dances anticipates Anne Elliot at the piano, minus the grief of a Captain Wentworth’s mortifying presence nearby. What picture emerges from the life of Chawton: surrounded by non-genteel, looking to new family generation for social amusement. No sense that this is the place she will dig in and write those novels. No elation felt but for the piano.

I shall not tell you anything more of Wm Digweed’s China, as your Silence on the subject makes you unworthy of it. Mrs H. Digweed looks forward with great satisfaction to our being her neighbours — I would have her enjoy the idea to the utmost, as I suspect there will not much in the reality.-With equal pleasure we anticipate an intimacy with her Husband’s Bailiff & his wife, who live close by us, & are said to be remarkably good sort of people. — Yes, yes, we will have a Pianoforte, ( as good a one as can be got for 30 Guineas — & I will practise country dances, that we may have some amusement for our nephews & neices, & when we have the pleasure of their company.

Martha tells Henry he will soon have a bill from Miss Chaplin (a shopkeeper) but not to worry the bill will probably not be redeemed at the bank right away. Henry’s money is not in the good shape some believe, and then how children act as an enforced inhibitor and good thing too. Human beings pavlovian.

Martha sends her Love to Henry & tells him that he will soon have a Bill of Miss Chaplin’s, about £14 — to pay on her account; but the Bill shall not be sent in, till his return to Town. — I hope he comes to you in good health, & in spirits as good as a first return to Godmersham can allow. With his nephews, — he will force himself to be chearful, till he really is so

Henry and Eliza Austen young, marrying (2008 Becoming Jane)

Eliza is Henry’s wife and has not written in a while. She has sombered up over the years — dead son, melancholy husband running about to try to make a middle class household and living.

The snow is something Jane likes casually — she often does landscapes:

We have had Snow on the Ground here almost a week, it is now going, but Southampton must boast no longer.

Remembering again Edward, his sons and them passing the time playing speculation — as they did in Mansfield Park. Do we have to make explicit that Godmersham is Mansfield Park and vice versa?

A PS on the mother growing older: not gone out of doors this week (real life here) but “keeps pretty well.” So less hypochondria, less indulged probably.

Bookham is Mrs Elizabeth Leigh of Adlestrop. She is Cassandra’s godmother — part of the general relatives group of Cookes, Leighs, Austens. She too never married, lived with her brother, Thomas, in the rectory at Adlestrop, was much older — so we understand the association with Austen’s mother.

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JA Among Frenchwomen

It’s an in the midst of life letter. Jane Austen has been reading Stael’s Corinna. As the letter opens she feels for Cassandra stuck at Godmersham, sewing, taking care of 11 children. She, Jane, would do some of the sewing for her if she could. She has a thimble. She has enjoyed a party despite the boredom of the people and later in the letter she becomes more eager.

The missing element is the lack of talk about writing, about her novels. It’s so empty of this I feel she’s deliberately keeping this part of her life out of sight. Only the reference to Corinna and her use of sign language brings in her life of the mind. I can see why she is not depending on Chawton for a new way of life as yet. She had to turn herself around too — to become more publicly pro-active to make her books and publish them.

Letters 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58 & 59, 60. 61, 62

Ellen

How I came to Austen, Radcliffe & the 18th century; or, On Never Tiring of Ann Radcliffe

Elizabeth Bennet (Elizabeth Garvey) brooding over how wrong she has been: she has had postures like this since she read Darcy’s first letter about mid-point in the mini-series

Elizabeth Bennet stands up to and defies Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Judy Parfitt) (1979 BBC P&P by Fay Weldon)

Dear friends and readers,

Late yesterday afternoon I read the following passage:

Her judgment approved of the frankness, with which she had asserted her rights, and of the firmness, with which she had reproved a woman, who had dared to de­mand respect from the very victim of her cruelty and oppression. She was the more satisfied with herself, because she had never, for an instant, forgotten her own dig­nity so far, as to degenerate into the vehemence of passion, or to faulter with the weakness of fear. Her conviction of [his aunt's] unworthy character was too clear to allow El[izabeth] to feel abashed in her presence; for she regarded only the censure of the good, to which she had ever
been as tremblingly alive …

Wait, someone asks? I don’t remember that passage from Pride and Prejudice. It fits but then I can see that some cunning substitute has been made.

Yes. This comes from Radcliffe’s The Italian and is Ellena thinking about an encounter between herself and an abbess which parallels not only in thematic resonance but place that in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Only the last phrase is out of whack with Elizabeth v Lady Catherine, though a case can be made for Elizabeth being as firm against the censure of the good as Jane Bennet, her sister. Elizabeth Bennet is to Lady Catherine de Bourgh as Ellena Rosalba is to the Abbess of San Stefano

Radcliffe meant to allude to the great Venetian painter, Rosalba Carriera by her heroine’s name

The difference between Radcliffe and Austen is Austen does not have such a passage. She does not assure us that this encounter is central, an important moment in the growth of the heroine’s integrity in a moral and psychological sense; rather she leaves people to flounder and assume “Till now I had never known myself” and take away abjection, mortification from Darcy’s lesson and a lesson in humility as a central node in the novel. And following suit the 1979 and 1995 film de-emphasize the moment between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine (Judy Parfitt comes closest to the woman and the longest rendition is in the 79 P&P) and make the letter from Darcy central; the 2005 film almost eradicates it: the moment must be there as it really is the pivotal moment of the book’s close, but is less than one minute long, done swiftly in epitomizing form in the dark.

Lady Catherine (Judi Dench) (2005 P&P by Joe Wright)

No I don’t think Austen was imitating Radcliffe in this novel as I don’t think she was imitating The Mysteries of Udolpho at the close of Persuasion when very like Persuasion where while walking Captain Wentworth and Anne talk of what has happened to them for the last 8 years, & Anne defends her decision to obey Lady Russell Radcliffe in the penultimate chapter of Udolpho has Valancourt and Emily go for a walk and discuss what they have been through and by contrast Emily says she was wrong not to trust Valancourt and take her family’s screwed-up values as her guide.

The question here is not which writer is more proto-gothic or feminist but to show the real obstacles of demonstrating Austen’s feminism and egalitarianism in her novels. It’s been argued by those who read Radcliffe (not enough, most read about her through Austen’s Northanger Abbey) that she is among the most radical of the women novel and gothic writers of her era (among them, Rictor Norton in Mistress of Udolpho, Robert Miles in The Great Enchantress, and to cite but one article, Sydny [Cindy] M. Conger, “Sensibility Restored: Radcliffe’s Answe to Lewis’s Monk,” reprinted in Graham’s Gothic Fictions, Gothic Transgressions), but that is not how she is remembered so to look back at the actual novels and compare (since Austen learned much about subjective narration out of a central consciousness from her).

I returned to Radcliffe yesterday in order to complete my paper, “The Content of Ann Radcliffe Landscapes,” and probably ought to have entitled this blog,”On Never Tiring of Ann Radcliffe” to match my “On Never Tiring of Jane Eyre …” and “On Never Tiring of Austen …. They all never fail me.

Have I told the story gentle reader of how I came to Austen? Probably on Austen-l and other listservs where we’ve read and discussed her novels and (I know) in the preface to my book, Trollope on the ‘Net.

It’s this:

It was quite simply personal need and identification (however ignorant of her era): I saw in P&P an idealized much softened version of my parents’s misery, my father’s boredom with a unintelligent tenaciously conformist wife; I saw Elinor as someone to imitate in order to protect myself and I know the ideal of this character lodged in my mind helped me fend off abrasiveness and guard myself. I was Fanny who couldn’t cross thresholds and have experienced this since even 10 years ago where I teach where it was still hard to go into a room to be with the “higher-ups” (tenured types with whom I & another adjunct lecturer were on a committee on). After my first reading of MP and coming across the words how we find ourselves born to “struggle and endure” I immediately turned to its first page and re-read. The book is never far from my mind; all my life it’s there latent, easily called up to consciousness.

Between the ages of 17 and 19 I don’t remember much. It was a bad dark period for me. But I know I read Northanger Abbey and Persuasion during these years for at age 21 when in an English class I was assigned Emma I remember thinking it was the only one I had not read. (In those days I didn’t know of the juvenilia or unfinished novels.)

Looking down at Bath from Prior Park heights (photo taken by Laura, my older daughter)

Recently the opening of my unfinished book, Jane Austen in Bath, was published in a newsletter by the JASNA-DC people:

We stood high above Bath looking down. It had been an arduous climb. About a third of the way up my husband, Jim, had suddenly suggested ‘maybe we should have gone round’. Even our sturdy sixteen- year old daughter, Isobel, might not have made it up had not a stairway moulded out of the hill’s earth and stones, to which continuous wooden rails were attached, been provided by some prescient civic body. Northanger Abbey had not conveyed how steep this hill really was. I had attributed Catherine Morland’s satisfaction on Beechen Cliff almost wholly to the lingering memory of a hard-won battle: to go on this country walk with her real friends she had had to fend off the pressure and deceits practised upon her by a brother and two false friends. Also unemphatically in the text then was the achievement of the walk itself. And unlike another famous eighteenth-century walker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Catherine had gotten to share her reveries with congenial spirits.

The reader would laugh could I say for how long I had almost let myself dream of standing on this green hill so that I too could reject ‘the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape’ (NA, 111) with the splendid effortlessness of a touchingly innocent heroine.

Emma remains my least favorite of the books.

I never wanted to work on Austen academically — it meant too much, was too close was my naive idea, and I only began to be active and write (most of my writing is on the Net and I imagine will continue to be so until the end of my chapter, meaning my life) when I came onto the Net and the truth is I did this because I found a world of people to be with daily and I felt intimately (however wrong I may have been). I have since learned (using Bronte’s Jane Eyre) that teaching what you are passionately engaged with produces the finest experiences, but did not know that then.

I first read Ann Radcliffe when I came across an exquisitely lovely 3 volumed medium-brown (textured covers) copy of the boo on the open shelves of Brooklyn College! Yes, in 1974 gentle reader a 1797 copy of The Romance of the Forest was available to students and faculty alike on the open shelves of Brooklyn College (CUNY). I was teaching there. It was so lovely I took it home. I was riveted by its nightmares and it too has never been forgotten by me. I’ve taught it, read it several times, once on the Net, put here all the postings I wrote then. Along with Wordsworth’s “Michael,” landscape poetry and my love of bitter melancholy satire, other later 18th century French and English women’s life-writing, this book led to my majoring in the ” long 18th century” (beginning with the later 17th and going onto 1820) with my emphasis on 1760 to 1815.

Elizabeth Bennet (Jennifer Ehle) in the beginning phase of her long moving trajectory of self-examination and regret, remorse: “Till now I never knew myself … ” (1995 P&P by Andrew Davies)

When I was younger and knew people face-to-face or not at all, it was not uncommon for people to be surprised when I told of my love for Austen — as I am a socialist by ideology (there is no party allowed in the US which is even pro-labor or working and lower middle class). Until today I am in my gut not persuaded Austen is not conservative and deeply so in some
fundamental ways that go beyond but also includes ideology; Radcliffe is openly deeply liberal in a modern way in her travel book (I’ll be making a blog on this soon), but she too shows the same rooted impulses for retreat, security in a stable situation with people she can rely on and who are kind enough and have some minimal integrity in the home and in their ideals. Both their feminism is also muted. We can say all we like that Austen wrote this way out of her dependent position but what exists of documents does not bear this out enough. The family has indeed been thorough and destroyed all that might be used persuasively — we have been seeing this in Austen’s letters.

When Elinor awakens in the 1995 S&S by Ang Lee and Emma Thompson, and finds Marianne yet living and having passed her crisis, and looks out the window this is what she sees

No it’s the presence of both women in these books, their stance of sheer non-corruption, and seeking a refuge in beauty, taste, humane feeling shared with a few others that was and remains the deep appeal. I’ve read The Mysteries of Udolpho now at least 4 times, once half-way through in French (Madamde de Chastenay’s translation) and it’s transcendent landscapes live still in the Jane Austen movies (ironically).

My first attempt at a blog, dear reader, was called “Udolpho” (on livejournal some 12 years ago); the livejournal people recently reminded me of this when they deleted it as unused.

Ellen

Jane Austen’s Letters: Letter 62, Fri, 9 Dec 1808, from Castle Square

Mrs Smith (Helen Schlesinger) drinking tea with Anne, from the 1995 BBC Persuasion

Dear friends and readers,

The importance of this letter is it gives us glimpses of the woman in Bath that Austen knew who provided a number of the traits of Austen’s solitary (except for Nurse Rooke) Mrs Smith: crippled, poverty-striken, outside the pale of upper class socializing, sews in a small way. WE see Jane buoyant about going to Bath and uncertain; James, her brother, will not take a 2nd church post and the aunt does come forward with 100 pounds to make it up to his (resentful) wife, Mary.

We are missing a number of letters and developments have happened offstage. In Letter 61 there was still a slightly tentative feeling about the Chawton move: Mrs Austen still to be persuaded; Frank’s sudden intervention; there is no firm security of tone. Martha’s uncertainty. Now it’s a done deal and this may be seen in lines like “We want to be settled in Chawton in time for Henry to come to us for some Shooting, in October at least; — but a little earlier, & Edward may visit us …”

Will not Sept 4th do? People did move for Michaelmas (as rent was paid from Michaelmas to Michaelmas) but I am interested to notice that the Dashwoods move into their cottage (by my calendar) “”Very early in September” the Dashwoods arrive Barton Cottage. “The season is fine . . . ” (1:6:28; 6:24) — which I made out to be on or around Sept 2nd.

In the event the Austens moved in by early July, but I noticed something for the first time. Another gap. After the Austens moved in there are no letters for two years. LeFaye would say the sisters were not separated. I don’t believe it. Cassandra went as often to Kent as usual. Did Austen throw herself passionately into writing her books: she had been doing that all along, 4-5 hours a day and it would be expected that she spend much of her time with the family in the house as usual. She says Henry will come, Edward &c

This time I surmise a period of adjustment and it was not easy after all. Frank had not wanted this is my feeling, and Jane’s two well known poems to him are her way of insisting to him this is what she wants. Maybe the first two years of Elizabeth’s death were hard for Edward to cope with and he let everyone know that. Hard for Fanny too.

But I anticipate — as that the two moving in letters are Nos 68 and 69 and then two year silence and then Letter 70.

I was very moved by the close of this letter.

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Hester Thrale Piozzi

Jane is really immersed in the diurnal and immanent (as Beauvoir would call it). The first page opens with the usual extravagant insistence on what a great letter writer Cassandra is and gratitude for a letter from her and Mr Deedes. My sense is these compliments were made to insist that Cassandra keep writing. Jane wanted these letters like some people long for email letters from friends. She imagines what Cassandra is doing and in turn pours out what is happening just now to her. She is willing to find kindness in one of the visitors who came to pay a duty call to Mrs F.A. (so the Austens did not announce that Mary no longer lived there): Mrs D is found “a really agreeable woman,” not so Mrs Bertie who Jane says had the merit of not being there when they returned the call.

Many thanks my dear Cassandra, to you & Mr Deedes, for your joint & agreable composition, which took me by surprise this morning. He has certainly great merit as a Writer, he does ample justice to his subject, & without being diffuse, is clear & correct; — & tho’ I do not mean to compare his Epistolary powers with yours, or to give him the same portion of my Gratitude, he certainly has a very pleasing way of winding up a whole, & speeding Truth into the World. — “But all this, as my dear Mrs Piozzi says, is flight & fancy & nonsense — for my Master has his great Casks to mind, & I have my little Children” — It is however in this instance, that have the little Children — & I that have the great cask –, for we are brewing Spruce Beer again; –but my meaning really is, that I am extremely foolish in writing all this unnecessary stuff, when I have so many matters to write about, that my paper will hardly hold it all. Little Matters they are to be sure, but highly important …

Austen quotes Mrs Piozzi’s book almost verbatim; she likens her and Cassandra’s situation to Piozzi’s, than which one might have thought no three were more different. But Cassandra and Jane together make up one Mrs Piozzi; Cassandra and Jane have demur at an invitation. Piozzi married, continually pregnant, surrounded by children, anxious to teach them, with the brewing business never far from minds or heart. Jane focuses ironically on the inconsequentiality of what Piozzi writes and herself. She too is brewing home-made beer.

In the first place, Miss Curling is actually at Portsmouth — which I was always in hopes would not happen. — I wish her no worse however than a long & happy abode there. Here, she would probably be dull, & I am sure she would be troublesome. — The Bracelets’ are in my possession, & everything I could wish them to be. They came with Martha’s pelisse, which likewise gives great satisfaction. –

Miss Curling was a relative of Mary Gibson; Jane finds her one of these people who make themselves a burden to others by demanding company, activity and she Jane is glad Miss Curling is staying far away.

While the bracelets might be a lovely memento from Elizabeth, Jane is ironic about this: They came with … which likewise gives great satisfaction.” Jane doesn’t like favors so she downplays them. Then the visit of people looking to make to Francis’s wife — which suggests that the Austens are not letting on that Mary Gibson has fled them and insisted Francis live with her on their own as far as this is possible. Francis recognized how Jane’s invention and landscape gave her much happiness and was glad of it, but he could so little for her.

Soon after I had closed my last letter to you, we were visited by Mrs Dickens & her Sister-in law Mrs Bertie, the wife of a lately made Admiral; — Mrs F.A. I beleive was their first object-but they put up with us very kindly, & Mrs D-finding in Miss Lloyd a friend of Mrs Dundas had another motive for the acquaintance. She seems a really agreable Woman-that is, her manners are gentle & she knows a great many of our Connections in West Kent.-Mrs Bertie lives in the Polygon, & was out when we returned her visit-which are her two virtues.- :

A controlled dry sort of humor; that the admiral’s wife knows a lot of the Austen’s connections in West Kent. It would no be hard for the wife to see more of them than Austen ever would. And directed at high-fire belief in herself.

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2009 BBC Emma: Emma (Romola Garai) buoyant at ball at Crown Inn

There is an unusual tone in the second part of page 2: buoyant. Paragraph 2 has her beginning with her determination to “go to as many Balls as possible”; she is sarcastic ironic about all the usual pretenses: it’s the prettiest village Chawton, everyone will miss them, they know the house. She points out they get it wrong. Then a long piece on a ball she went to — with Martha — and the letter’s gaiety may come from her having enjoyed this ball.

A larger circle of acquaintance & an increase of amusement is quite in character with our approaching removal.- Yes — I mean to go to as many Balls as possible, that I may have a good bargain. Every body is very much concerned at our going away, & every body is acquainted with Chawton & speaks of it as a remarkably pretty village, & every body knows the House we describe — but nobody fixes on the right. — I am very much obliged to Mrs Knight for such a proof of the interest she takes in me — & she may depend upon it, that I will marry Mr Papillon, whatever may be his reluctance or my own.-I owe her much more than such a trifling sacrifice

The hypocrisy of the pretenses to miss them;, of any interest to describe the house they congratulate the audience with.

Yet another joke husband; this is a man willing to marry her,
handsome, not snubbed he returns.

Our Ball was rather more amusing than I expected, Martha liked it very much, & I did not gape till the last quarter of an hour. — It was past nine before we were sent for, & not twelve when we returned. — The room was tolerably full, & there were perhaps thirty couple of Dancers; — the melancholy part was to see so many dozen young Women standing by without partners, & each of them with two ugly naked shoulders! — It was the same room in which we began– 15 years ago! — I thought it all over –& in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with Thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then. — We paid an additional shilling for our Tea, which we took as we chose in an adjoining, & very comfortable room. — There were only 4 dances, & it went to my heart that the Miss Lances (one of them too named Emma!) should have partners only for two.– You will not expect to hear that I was asked to dance — but I was-by the Gentleman whom we met that Sunday? with Capt” D’auvergne. We have always kept up a Bowing acquaintance since, & being pleased with ” black eyes, I spoke to him at the Ball, which brought on me this civility; but I do not know his name, — & he seems so little at home in the English Language that I beleive his black eyes may be the best of him. — Capt. D’auvergne has got a Ship. –

Again this tight recognition of time. Now it’s 15 years ago she and Cassandra danced in this Southampton assembly room. Meaning she was 18 She is thankful she is as happy. Life could be much worse she knows. She goes on about a Captain D’auvergne.

She also went with Martha by ferry back and forth to Chiswell and thinks of Cassandra similarly going to Canterbury in a cool drive with Edward. Again intense enjoyment.

Martha & I made use of the very favourable state of yesterday for walking, to pay our duty at Chiswell-we found Mrs Lance at home & alone, & sat out three other Ladies who soon came in.-We went by the Ferry, & returned by the Bridge, & were scarcely at all fatigued. –

The Lances were a clergyman family who did well by marrying; one of the men built Chiswell.

–Edward must have enjoyed the last two days;-You, I presume had a cool drive to Canterbury. Kitty Foote came on Wednesday, & her Eveng visit began early enough for the last part, the apple pye of our dinner, for we never dine now till five. –

I presume the idea Edward enjoyed the last two days comes from Jane’s sense that he was lucky to have Cassandra with him and go to Canterbury The Footes were a family of the same level as the Austens who married into the Bridges.

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1981 S&S: one of the Austen films where servants are given separate presence, noticed by upper class, treated with dignity (script by Alexander Baron)

Then a long piece on the servants. LeFaye’s notes on these people give Austen’s words a severe and condescending tone. Austen thinks they are bad servants the Hilliards. I read the line as unironic and true: “I am sorry that I cannot assist her.”

Yesterday I, or rather You had a letter from Nanny Hilliard, the object of which is that she would be very much obliged to us if we would get Hannah a place.-I am sorry that I cannot assist her;-if you can, let me know, as I shall not answer the letter immediately. Mr Sloper is married again, not much to Nanny’s, or anybody’s satisfaction;-the Lady was Governess to Sir Robert’s natural Children, & seems to have nothing to recommend her. — I do not find however that Nanny is likely to lose her place in consequence. — She says not a word of what service she wishes for Hannah, nor what Hannah can do-but a Nursery I suppose, or something of that kind, must be the Thing

Again I see no condescension or dissatisfaction with Nanny but a simple wish to help when Jane cannot; there is some slight animus, against the lady who was governess to Robert Slope’s illegitimate children and who he has now married. I suppose this is a then common narrow minded disapproval of a governess who marries her master and the master for having illegitimate children. It was common enough. Hannah’s job would be in the nursery caring for these children.

Where there may be an animus is towards the woman who was the governess to Sir Robert’s “natural” children (illegitimate) and is now marrying Mr Slope (whom Nanny wanted). The notes by LeFaye tell us he had 5 illegitimate children (LeFaye bothered to find that out) and married Anne Prade but do not say if Anne Prade was a governess to Sir Robert’s children.

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1983 BBC MP: Edmund Bertram (Nicholas Farrell) is given the seriousness, intentness on religion, literary impulses Austen suggests her brother James had

A paragraph about family news: for once Aunt Jane Perrot-Leigh is not mean: she has offered to give James 100 pounds a year to replace the 100 pounds he would have gotten if he had taken a sinecure, a second position. “Nothing could be more affectionate than my Aunt’s language …”

What came over her? I suspect it was partly that James was the eldest son and must not do without. The aunt left her property to JEAL as James’s oldest son. But I wonder about this: in James’s poems we see that his wife was incensed at him for not taking the second position and sticking to his “integrity.” That she despised him for this. Maybe the aunt is smoothing things for him; or triumphing over her niece-in-law, both of them being domineering types

=- Having now cleared away my smaller articles of news, I come to a communication of some weight-no less than that my Uncle & Aunt are going to allow James £100. a year. We hear of it through Steventon; — Mary sent us the other day an extract from my Aunt’s letter on the subject-in which the Donation is made with the greatest kindness, & intended as a Compensation for his loss in the Conscientious refusal of Hampstead Living-£100. a year being all that he had at the time called its’ worth — as I find it was always intended at Steventon to divide the real Income with Kintbury. — Nothing can be more affectionate than my Aunt’s Language in making the present, & likewise in expressing her hope of their being much more together in future, than to her great regret, they have of late years been. — My Expectations for my Mother do not rise with this Event. We will allow a little more time however, before we fly out. — If not prevented by Parish Business, James comes to us on Monday. The Mrs Hulberts & Miss Murden are their Guests at present, & likely to continue such till Christmas. — Anna comes home on y” 19th

In one of his poems James laments how his wife is treating him because he won’t take a sinecure for a pulpit he would not genuinely be able to spend much time at. I did not notice Jane’s comment “We will allow a little more time before we fly out?” — meaning before they openly get indignant. She and her mother intend to protest this giving James 100 — when (probably the comparison) the Leigh-Perrots do nothing for the mother and her daughters Cassandra and Jane who are in much greater need and have much less. The Misses Hulberts are as unmarried ladies as Miss Murden; the Hulberts Bath denizens. Jane and Cassandra are not the only Austens to socialize with marginalized maiden ladies.

This letter has two cut parts, both not about family. The first is about Martha who (it’s suggested) acts up around Christmas. (I grow to like Martha more and more with each letter). Henry and the boys will make Xmas merry for Cassandra, but with Martha “so” … the idea Jane will have a sour Xmas.

The Hundred a year begins next Ladyday. — I am glad you are to have Henry with you again; with him & the Boys, you cannot but have a chearful, & at times even a merry Christmas. — Martha is so … [cut away two lines at bottom of page] “We want to be settled at Chawton in time for Henry to come to us for some Shooting, in October at least; — but a little earlier, & Edward may visit us after taking his boys back to Winchester;­suppose we name the 4th of Septr-will not that do? –

Our first two cut away lines. Martha difficult at Christmas; I sympathize. It’s odd to me that Austen and her mother would not to go Godmersham and be with Henry, Cassandra and Edward at Christmas. Hmmm. For the first time it strikes me that there is something to be explained at Jane and her mother not going to Godmersham. Now that Elizabeth is dead, there is no one to dislike or stop them. I conclude that in fact whatever was professed the mother especially did not like to go to Godmersham and it was felt only one sister need be there. This would give Jane time to write and to read, to follow her one bent. This is not socially allowed so not said aloud. (I make a harmless pun.) Notice the mother and sister (Jane) want to be with Henry and Edward. So it’s that they want control over their own space and time Again the 4th of Sept — S&S and P&P begin their dramatic scenes in September:

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2006 ITV Persuasion: Maisie Dimbleby as Mrs Smith

And now the curious story of the Mrs Smith character

– I have but one thing more to tell you. Mrs Hill called on my Mother yesterday while we were gone to Chiswell — & in the course of the visit asked her whether she knew anything of a Clergyman’s family of the name of Alfordwho had resided in our part of Hampshire. — Mrs Hill had been applied to, as likely to give some information of them, on account of their probable vicinity to Dr Hill’s Living –b y a Lady, or for a Lady, who had known Mrs & the two Miss Alfords in Bath, whither they had removed it seems from Hampshire-& who now wishes to convey to the Miss Alfords some work, or trimming, which she has been doing for them-but the Mother & Daughters have left Bath, & the Lady cannot learn where they are gone to.-While my Mother gave us the account, the probability of its being ourselves, occurred to us, and it had previously struck herse1P2 … [two lines cut away at the bottom of p. 4 -text continues below address panel) … likely — & even indispensably to be us, is that she mentioned Mr Hammond as now having the Living or Curacy, which the Father had had.-I cannot think who our kind Lady can be-but I dare say we shall not like the work.-[upside down at top of p. 1

The second refers to a lady who sews for a living and had done some sewing for two Miss Alfords in Bath and would like to sew for them again; this woman had applied to Mrs Hill to see if Mrs Hill had some information about these women. Jane Austen then surmised the name “Alford” is a feint and the woman means to refer to herself and Cassandra who lived in Bath. She wants to send them “some work or trimming.” We might think this odd but only in fiction where people are not as circuitous as they often are in life. The lady knew Mrs Hill was visiting the Austens. Why then pretend to get the name wrong if she sewed for them before? the Austens would knew she knew the name and where they are because she told Mrs Hill about her desire to send them this work. And her mentioning Mr Hammond who replaced Mr Austen (who was not above holding more than one living) is another link and roundabout way of urging her presence on the Austens.

Lines are cut from the bottom of the page. I suggest this: in the last year or so of the Austen’s time in Bath they lived in Trim Street: this was a low street, ugly and the Austens hated it. (I’ve been there, walked it; the thing is it’s self-enclosed and hardly any sun gets in; even today there’s no grass and the houses are close together and dark.) They had really come down to live there. The lady assumes they don’t want to be reminded of their status nor that they used this woman as seamstress. The delicacy with which the woman hints of her presence and that Austen herself does not mention her name suggests the lady was not acceptable in genteel society: remember Mrs Smith, the cripple? she does not go to parties, is not invited anywhere, is anathemized as disgusting by Sir Walter. She sews small things for rich ladies and sends them by Nurse Rooke. The lady might be someone like Mrs Smith, or yet worse maybe socially speaking: living out of wedlock say, a laundress.

But she needs money and she needs work and hopes the Austens’ memory will be prompted out of their old association will take pity on her now they are secure and going to live in the rich man’s cottage. Maybe not for Jane says she “cannot think who our kind Lady may be — but I dare say we shall not like the work.”

Jane feels compunction for the servant but not this woman who they knew casually — and perhaps also she remembers the work the woman did then and thought it bad.

Cassandra cuts the two lines to eliminate how low they got and what Jane said about a woman they knew in Bath who corresponded and why they knew her.

I feel for this unknown woman more than anyone else thus far in Austen’s letters.

Anne Elliot (Ann Firbank) finding Mrs Smith’s block (1971 BBC Persuasion)

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1979 BBC P&P: Charlotte Lucas (Irene Richards) and Elizabeth Bennet (Elizabeth Garvie) at the window as the movie-story begins

And then the final affectionate salutation:

Distribute the affectionate Love of a Heart not so tired as the right hand belonging to it. —

I like the feel of reality there. Her hand is tired. She has been writing a lot.

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2005 P&P: Claudie Blakely as Charlotte saying goodbye to Elizabeth and her previous world

Back to general assessment: I wrote in too academic a spirit: placing the letters against two main types of letter collections that were published and have come down to us from the 18th century: the one where someone creates an interior self, a life, an identity reaching out to us; and the other where she (mostly this kind was written by women, though Southey does it in his Letters from London): the philosophical, political. Women were not supposed to and did not write political treatises (Wollstonecraft was a rare darer) and they did turn to letters to express themselves this way.

LeFaye in her introduction to her new edition of the letters sneers at this as if it’s fake, a put-on to impress. That is a crude response to language and the way academics take taking the product for the process. She’d probably see language like “performing whatever” in the same light.

What I’m impressed by in this letter (62) and increasingly throughout the Southampton ones and until Jane starts writing is the welter of minutiae Austen pours at us. It is tedious to go through. I suggest there’s a been a real growth in this since the letters started up again. It’s hard to put this into words but what I take away from Miller (whose words and sentences are often not parsable; you can’t parse them at all) is Austen’s intense turn away. I have said and maintain she turned away from social life; didn’t like it, shows real Aspergers traits. I see them in this letter. She rejoices when she visits people if they’re not there. A great merit. Whew. She abides our gaze Auden or someone else said. Anne Grant, Elizabeth Grant Smith, Julie de Lespinasse, Madame de Deffand are not faking for others when they make an identity we can revel in — nor Rousseau, but reveling in the zeitgeist of their age which encourages this new individuality and exploring themselves to us, and for us, and with us.

Similarly, Grant again, Helena Maria Williams, Shelley (Mary Wollstonecraft), Hester Thrale Piozzi (whose book Austen can quote nearly by heart — so I must read that one next) are not delving the political world to show off, but because they know it’s intensely important to what’s allowed them to live and experience in life.

Austen has little impulse for life-writing in these ways at all. At the end of her life Elizabeth Inchbald wrote a 3 volume memoir. Alas under the cruel repression and warnings of a priest, she burnt it. Lady Mary Montagu wrote and burnt as she went. Burney is all life-writing when she’s writing living prose. These are social acts, make no mistake about it.

It’s noteworthy that in the novels the heroines rarely write letters; when they do they are for news. What we have are letters which expose someone satirically (Lucy, Mary Crawford, Mary Musgrove) or in a spirit of showing more somberly what they lack (Edward Bertram’s obtuseness and pain). This intense hiding had only the outlet of these
more than half-repressed compromising books. D. A. Miller (JA and Secrets of Style) is hiding too only he hides knowingly and she does not.

I am not sure how aware she was of her lesbian impulses; it’s hard to say. Edgeworth seems unaware and yet they are so vivid in her Belinda. In S&S Austen is not sympathetic to transgressive sex; she shows Willoughby to have wanted to hurt Marianne and that he would have dumped her had she had clandestine sex with him fully the way Miss Williams did. Austen’s literary criticism is naive.

Letters 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58 & 59, 60. 61.

Ellen