Time, epistolarity & Tuesdays in Mansfield Park

Nabokov’s sketch for house and grounds at Sotherton (from his Lectures on Literature)

Fanny Price (Sylvestre Le Touzel) in her Portsmouth room, reading her letters from home, Mansfield Park, from London (1983 BBC MP, scripted Ken Taylor)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve begun my journey through time, space, places and distances (not to omit observing Tuesdays) in Mansfield Park and have some genuine findings. This thinking emerges also from what I discovered about Austen’s working habits and probable and extant unpublished manuscripts when I was reviewing Janet Todd and Linda Bree’s edition of The Later Manuscripts of Jane Austen (Cambridge).

Roger Sales in Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England says there has been no controversy about the years it is set in; he simply assumes it is set in the year it was written, and writes as follows:

The details concerning the composition and publication of MP are relatively uncontroversial. It was probably begun in February 1811, completed sometime during the summer of 1813, and then published in 1814.

I always knew this to be inaccurate. There are a number of articles on this novel which present differently calendared outlines for the novel. Further articles refer in a relaxed style to the years the novel is set in as one basis for an interpretation, and still others provide a long footnote at the back of a book for the author’s calendar. Books devoted to just this novel often begin with a statement asserting this or that to be true about the date and then proceed from that, which is just what Sales does.

From my week long preliminary geologizing of the calendar in MP (and rereading above said articles), I am convinced this book was not just written in stages (Henry Austen wrote that all his sister’s books were “gradual performances”), but in bits and pieces or drafted parts at first (1796-97 and then again 1805-07), and then first put together in one consistent or coherent whole (1808-10), and finally rewritten in its present polished form between 1811 and 1813. Cassandra’s jotted note was not meant to be a complete account of her sister’s writing; she was copying out annotations Jane had written. That she was not necessarily even referring to the final stage of writing is made plain by her offering the years “98-99” for Northanger Abbey, when we know from Austen’s letters, she rewrote it for publication as Susan in 1803, and had a copy by her in 1809, and then was revising again in 1816 when she put Miss Catherine, on the shelf for now as she remained unsatisfied with the text as we now have it in some fundamental way.

I have had to revise my use of the terms determinate and indeterminate time. For S&S and P&P I called anything indeterminate which did not closely follow a hour, day, date sequence that could be consistently even if approximately reckoned because determinate time was the predominant rhythm of the books and with a couple of tiny exceptions (Mr Gardiner’s express letter to Mr Bennet) consistent throughout. As in S&S and P&P, MP has periods of time which are not indeterminate, but are yet reckoned by year, and within that, a season, and then we come upon unmoored conversations tied to a tick-tock paying attention to days. But determinate time is not kept as consistently nor as obsessively; time floats, and passages reflect a feeling of time passing, sometimes longer than the actual time passed in the novel (as when Austen refers to the autumn play-acting time in December in terms that make us feel it was long ago probably because she wrote the play-acting parts long before the aftermath).

So, following Austen’s art, indeterminate time is time remembered in the past when the characters are in the present. These periods are made consistent with one another and the determinate periods. I call determinate time within indeterminacy when the intervals of time come close together (within the same year), when she is following time within a month or season and indicates the relationship of the days to one another (so we follow along as she moves along her almanac). Determinate time are those parts of the novels where (as in P&P and S&S), we can know what months we are in and approximate or nail down securely precise dates in a month and weekdays, and much is compressed within a small amount of time. Indeterminacy brings us back to periods where we cannot know the relationship of the days to one another. There are also sudden unmoored conversations and the novel’s many letters in the Portsmouth section are undated.

The main action of the book between 1808 and 1810 is only one year off: it’s 1807-09 that is consistent with the portions of time in the novel dovetailed into hours, days, weeks, and months of a couple of years. December 22nd, the night of the ball, fell on a Thursday in 1808. The first pages when the Bertrams and Mrs Norris determined to adopt a Price child makes most sense set in 1796-97. When Austen finally landed in what she hoped would be a permanent home for a while (Letter 49, 7-8 January, 1807, with Frank as her brother, and Martha, the beloved friend, and her sister with her), it was 1807, and that’s the year Mansfield Park begins its central dramatic action in. Between 1807 and 1809 she took some brief drafts she had written during the time of the Steventon theatricals in the later 1790s, had developed further between 1805 and 1807, and extended these into a first complete version of the novel, but not a finished polished one. But then in the final portion of the novel (as Chapman said), nothing less than April 16th for Easter makes sense and since in both 1809 and 1797 key days (e.g., the meeting of Crawford and Maria at Mrs Fraser’s) by chance occurred on Tuesdays) Austen slipped back to some previous draft she had made early on.

Young Fanny (Katy Durham-Matthews) now in Mansfield Park, sitting down to write her first letter to William at home in Portsmouth

What form did this 1808-09 novel take? I am not sure it was wholly epistolary. The long section at Portsmouth in the later part of the book reveals the more complicated interactions of letters and events and character presentation typical of multi-view epistolary novels, but the earlier part of the novel does not read this way. Would Fanny write detailed letters to William about the goings on over Lovers Vows? A lonely girl might keep a journal. There is also the problem of the Sotherton episode which is written in self-reflexive play-like manner and where the whole disposition of space at Sotherton and its grounds are worked out in a stage like manner. Nabokov has gone so far as to drew outlines of the Mansfield mansion as well as Sotherton and its grounds just as a realtor might who was intent on selling or renting the places to someone.

Nabokov: Layout of rooms at Mansfield house

The time sequence of the present book becomes indeterminate and inconsistent at those points where we have old material interwoven in, e.g., the theatricals, and the visit to Portsmouth (a reflection of the desperate conditions the Austens lived in in Bath after Mr Austen died) and elopement of Maria and Henry whose liaison is rooted in the psychological events of the theatricals (so 1796-98 and 1805-07). The sequences of determinate time in the novel are newer material, e.g., the visit to Sotherton, and the time leading up to the ball, William’s promotion, Fanny’s refusal of Henry & Henry’s courtship.

Catherine’s (Felicity Jones) first sight of Northanger Abbey, another Henry (J.J. Fields) next to her (from the 2007 WBGH/Granada NA, scripted by Andrew Davies)

This represents a parallel re-weaving procedure to what she did for Northanger Abbey. At the opening of NA, we have a Bath sequence which is resumed after the later middle Gothic sequence; it has been suggested these parts were written at different times. So in Mansfield Park, after the opening of a much more complicated book, we have the theatrical sequence whose consequences (elopement and aftermath including Tom’s illness) are picked up after the curve which includes Fanny as central daughter, the ball, the proposal, and her punishment for refusing the good marriage (in the middle and later parts of the book).

Like others I’m already noticing oddities: such as for example, there are no dramatized scenes of the first meeting of Henry Crawford and Maria Crawford (which by the way is labelled a Tuesday by Austen). There are only letters afterwards recording the results from subjective points of view; Rozema tried to men this by using voice-over, flashbook within flashback and notes within the sequence:

Maria (Samantha Bond) reads Henry’s note setting up an assignation outside the ballroom (1999 Miramax MP, scripted by Patricia Rozema)

That much of the Portsmouth sequence is written as a semi-epistolary novel: Maggie Wadey dropped Portsmouth but she couldn’t resist the rich feel of epistolarity so her deprived left-out Fanny writes the family who have gone to Bath from Mansfield:

Fanny Price (Billie Pipe) writes to Edmund or William (2007 BBC MP, scripted by Maggie Wadey): in the novel she keeps up 3 correspondences (with Edmund, Mary and Lady Bertram)

I’ll conclude with the important overlooked reality since the chronology of Austen’s novels is not paid attention to or denied): This book is Austen’s sixth novel. By 1808-09 she had written 1) a First Impressions, and partly rewritten it in 1799 and 1802; 2) a rewritten Sense and Sensibility, possibly still epistolary; 3) a version of Northanger Abbey, she called Susan whose copyright she had (mistakenly) sold to an unscrupulous man; 4) a firm thoroughly worked out version of the opening part of The Watsons, and 5) an apparently untitled wholly epistolary satiric book she wrote for the first time or rewrote starting in 1805. (In 1804 Stael’s Delphine, an epistolary novel with a vicious heroine named Madame de Vernon, a cruel mother who succeeds in coercing her daughter into a marriage wholly unsuited for her was published and Austen knew and admired Stael’s work: “I recommended him to read Corinne” she says in a letter). This book is so openly iconoclastic that she knew her family would not be permit her (a maiden lady to publish it), so she had made a fair confidential copy and circulated it (in the way of Renaissance women) among family and friends. Whatever working title Austen had originally given it we do not know; her nephew James-Edward Austen Leigh has titled it Lady Susan.

Two of these five were not epistolary: Northanger Abbey and The Watsons. The other three were. She could have gone back and forth between these forms as she did not think at the time she was anywhere near publication.

These are just my first findings, gentle reader. I’ve only begun my new and improved calendar and clocking the Tuesdays. I know Fanny and William arrived at Portsmouth on a Tuesday evening (Austen is clear on that) and have here recorded another bad or important Tuesday: the night of Mary’s friend, Janet Fraser’s party where Maria and Henry meet again (March 14th, a Tuesday in both 1797 and 1809).

Ellen