Scrap Austen ms

‘Men may get into a habit of repeating the words of our Prayers by rote, perhaps without thoroughly understanding – certainly without thoroughly feeling their full force & meaning’

Dear friends and readers,

You may recall two years ago now I worked on a review of one of the new Cambridge volumes of Jane Austen texts: The Later Manuscripts. What I did was study the state and circumstances surrounding those manuscripts of Jane Austen that have survived. Manuscripts can tell us much, and few of them are on the Internet. Last week I read Darnton’s review of Arlette Farge’s The Allure of the Archives and this week the first chapter of Suzanne Keen’s Romances of the Archives in Contemporary British Fiction. The Net does not replace archival research — well, duh … Farge’s Fragile Lives comes from her archival research; Keen writes about the historical turn which good contemporary novels have taken in our time, how researching based on a belief in the truthfulness of what’s found in the archives becomes part of a plot-design which recreates an earlier time in history to parallel the modern story.

This week Sam Marsden in The Telegraph and Alison Flood in The Guardian reported that a brief manuscript scrap in Jane Austen’s handwriting where she copies out a line from one of her brother’s sermons written in 1814 has been found:

‘Men may get into a habit of repeating the words of our Prayers by rote, perhaps without thoroughly understanding – certainly without thoroughly feeling their full force & meaning’

It was glued onto a first edition of James-Edward Austen-Leigh’s memoir, attached to a letter to his friend; the people investigating the paper are looking at the as yet unfree reverse side of the page to try to decipher the lines discerned there: did she copy out any further passages from this sermon (if it is a sermon by James), or from another text, or her own comment.

Several thoughts come to mind:  how desperate we are for some new material from Austen that we latch onto the smallest copying out of a text. We have to guess what she thought of it — what she meant by it. It does not read like a text that would be parodied. From her letters it seems to me in character that she not expatiate — she often does not, she seems not to want to, or not be critically reflective in a calm reasoned way unless she’s writing her novels and then another Jane Austen, another deeper quieter contemplative writing self emerges.

But the passage is one which invites this kind of contemplation. 

So second, people looking to see what she read and bringing that to bear have now to realize she read her brothers sermons. (Moan groan … now we will have to read them …) And she took them seriously. Hawthorne says (half-ironically) that people read this “soporific” literature in the 18th and early 19th century until novel reading completely superseded sermon reading. We know she read Sherlock upon Death; so now we can look to South, Tillotson and some other readable divines for context too. She did not stop respecting her brothers. I am one who thinks there is more than the letter by “Sophia Sentiment” by Jane in the Loiterers and we can see that the family kept up a shared literary culture they created together.

Third, is an interpretation possible. Marsden and Flood are right: Austen is articulating a theme we see in MP: when Fanny is down in the Mansfield Park chapel and clearly for spending time in church, praying, and thus implied thinking about God, religion, morality, she is one of those who thinks about the words of a sermon. Mary Crawford suggests most people don’t even listen, much less think about what’s said.  Mary may be right — George Eliot (who I have been reading about this morning) seems to have agreed with Mary.  MP dramatizes a series of religious themes: one is, Oought one to join the church for a career; and if so, and one makes a living, one ought to be an active clergyman, living there and trying to do good, caring for parishioners. or let someone else do the job genuinely.

Not very controversial to us, but maybe an irritant to all those who used it as a career, as sinecures, who wanted to be hunting, drinking, socializing parsons. Jane Austen is evincing the serious mid-Victorian attitudes towards clergymen and the church — Stanier Clarke must have seemed sincere at least in his religion to her. Her brother had been a hunting kind of parson when he was young; her father, Henry eventually and several males in the next generation were clergymen (“all clergymen together” is how Mary Crawford describes the many young men in MP headed for the clergy for a career).

More generally she might be thinking she wants the readers she cares about to thoroughly understand her words, to think about them, to feel their full force and meaning. The words and their tone suggest she regarded her six later novels, and perhaps her mid- and late career fragments (e.g. The Watsons, Sanditon) as serious reading. I like to believe she does not regard her books as “light reading” herself — that she could apologize for sending a copy of her Emma as “light reading” to Catherine Prowting shows how she was forced to pretend not to respect them, and sometimes by the people around her — she was forced sometimes to make little of what was her life’s work: who could it have been in the house? we hope not Cassandra who gave her time and space. Perhaps as Gwyneth Hughes in Miss Austen Regrets has it, Mrs Austen. We know there was tension. Claire Harman quotes some verses by James which shows his jealousy and how he would want to be dismissive of women’s writing (his sisters): James’s poem about S&S suggests the book is to him autobiographical with Marianne and Elinor being aspects of his sister.

If we needed it, this brief passage can justify give close and serious reading of S&S, P&P, MP, and Emma. There is much literary talk in the draft of Sanditon (one sign it’s an early draft) Charlotte divides texts between the “very striking and very amusing” (say the Juvenilia or Northanger Abbey) or “very melancholy” (S&S, MP, The Watsons) “just as satire or morality might prevail.”

On the other hand, she might have no such general meaning in her mind, but just mean the literal criticism of those who don’t attend in church. Doesn’t seem all that likely.

We may also guess Austen kept common place books; she copied out favorite lines and these are lost. Now imagine if we had a book full of lines she copied out — oh then we might just have something to go on to see her views of issues — taken together the choices would add up.

But we don’t.

Ellen