What’s in a pseudonym? a shared attitude of mind. Francesca Scriblerus & Mrs Ashton Dennis

The 9 Living Muses by Richard Samuel (1779).

What’s in a pseudonym? I’ve discovered that Frances refers to herself as Francesca Scriblerus — and more than once. In the first context Burney (at the time, 1778) is inserting herself into the male satirical culture: in a letter she mocks and distances herself from Bluestockings who are said to be authorities and commenting on women she, Burney, has met and commented on. Gossip gets about.

We might think of Burney’s (dangerous, insulting her father and Crisp thought) turning the Nine Muses into Witlings as her form of Dunciad.

Recent production

In 1809 Austen used a pseudnoym too. She signed herself MAD, Mrs Ashton Dennis. In context her letter is written in hot indignation to the publisher holding onto a fair copy of NA as Susan. In contrast to Burney, the awkward insider, Austen is the outsider, she who cannot get published, writhing figure excluded from the popular publications that the Scriblerians had trashed.

Austen’s whole career may be seen as that of a woman battling with ridiculous windwill heroines. She turns Lennox’s Female Quixote

Illustration to an edition of Lennox’s Female Quixote: Arabella deluded

into Love and Freindship:

Joan Hassall illustration (1973)

Francesca Scriblerus and MAD did not see themselves as writers of romance. When we satirize though it has many motives, and one of them is to feel powerful over those who alienate us. It has it real limits. Frances was not permitted to stage or even share The Witlings. The publisher wrote a sneering threatening letter and the NA manuscript was not returned until years later when Jane’s brothers turned up and paid the man back his ten pounds.

Ellen

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Austen’s letter 96, Sat-Sun, 6-7 Nov 1813, Godmersham to Cassandra, in Henrietta St

Fanny (Imogen Poots) and Jane Austen (Olivia Williams) having frisks at Godmersham — drunk and running about garden (Miss Austen Regrets 2008)

Dear friends and readers,

The second of the two letters we’ve discussed this month on Austen-l (see letter 95). Very long, written within 3 days of the first, it represents the actual rhythm of exchange, and is (further typically) filled with people of whom we know nothing and LeFaye is disinclined to give away; there are many tiny vignettes, if incisive still half-formed, so to close read is quite a job. On the first week Diana Birchall took us but 1/3rd the way in.

I’d like to try as an experiment a different way of proceeding than we have been doing lo these weeks, months, and years. I will for a change do a general reading zeroing in on themes — because I feel I am ready to see larger patterns now (having gone through 95 letters just about all by Jane Austen), and get them right as I was not when we began. I will scan the whole letter and place it into the comments for reference. As Diana remained faithful to our proceeding all along, she has the last word.

Gentle reader, if you feel you can, comment on this different way of proceeding and say which you prefer.

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18th century print of Streatham

There’s Jane’s view of herself. It is clear she does not get many compliments and is inclined to think she is not valued, and is sceptical about all such utterances. Towards the end we get a strong statement about how she values Cassandra and the Bigg sisters. She likes being with them better than being at Streatham or Bookham (you can have these fancy houses you see). She says she can’t get used to seeing them in Henry’s carriage. What a view she has of herself. We saw how she couldn’t get over seeing herself in a carriage. She comes back to the weather several times. It’s apparently nice for November. She does this to say to Cassandra that she knows Cassandra is making the most of this in order to enjoy life as best she can. “I was in hopes of your seeing the illuminations and you have seen them.” It’s here an association comes which makes her remember Frank’s use of the past participle or country accent as a boy so fondly. I see an important undercurrent here, which leads me to …

Austen as reader and writer. From the standpoint of books Austen read and admired and her work as a writer: again there is the liking for Crabbe; she’s pleased that the conservative (anti-Jacobin is the phrase used) Elizabeth Hamilton admires her work sufficiently; she does not care if the people at Cheltenham really don’t like her books if they are willing to buy them (“a disagreeable duty”), still “so as they do it” makes her happy. She is working on the 2nd edition of S&S — those long mornings we’ve observed mentioned in other letters must be when it’s done. There is a reference to Madame de Sevigne which suggests that Austen had read her letters. She likens Mrs Hamilton’s relationship with her daughter to madame Sevigne’s with hers.

Cheltenham, the 18th century spa era … again highly idealized

Her brothers: She wants to visit Henry and he has been ill (she says we rejoice sincerely in his gaining ground), and she is aware that the illness is his anxiety and his state of mind for the past year or so (so since Eliza’s death), but it’s clear she is not certain he wants her around. She may see that she’s an uncomfortable person in some ways to have around (she does not like social life, is part of it only it “bits and starts” either because she’s snubbed as older, single, poorer), but she would like to go to be there. I don’t think this is ironic as she repeats the idea more than once. Note she has these plans 3 letters ago to go to Henry quickly but not stay long and has yet to leave.

She also is remembering language as a child that Frank used, with a kind of cherishing — again that strong love for him, which we’ve had some evidence comes from their childhood. The remarks people make about Frank as a boy all come from her passing phrases. He apparently would use the past tense participle when he should not and she imitates this several times even to ‘draved.” It may be she is also imitating his country accent. Poor Mary in the last part of the letter is a reference to Mary Gibson Austen. She was pregnant again. Frank is stuck in the Baltic. Jane thinks of this, and feels for Mary vicariously.

Bath, the River Avon

Edward and she have become quite companionable since Elizabeth’s death: it’s worth remarking that the sharp asides about his miserliness, possessiveness over land, egoism have stopped. She notes that he hates to be around sick people in a previous letter with respect to Lady Bridges. I remind everyone in a previous letter Lady Bridges and her doctor (Parry) and coming to Bath were mentioned and Jane said Edward won’t go to Bath now rather than be around sick people — even if Louisa is going (Edward has had a letter from her we are told at the close). The Lady B seen here is the same sick lady of the previous letter that Edward wanted to avoid, e.g., “Dr Parry does not want to keep Lady B at Bath when she can once move.”

Edward (played very well by Pip Torrens, MAR 2008)

But no sharp comments about Edward over this — earlier much earlier she made fun of his going to Bath for his health and again there is no mockery of this type of him any more. Perhaps the absence of Elizabeth made her like him better. There’s only “you may guess how Edward feels.” He wants to avoid this sick lady and will bring back Fanny Cage (who we must assume didn’t like being around the sick either.) Again I see in John and Fanny Dashwood aspects of this brother and (now dead, mercifully I expect Jane would admit to herself) sister-in-law. Lady B has money and status; as Diana remarks when Lady B wants to leave, she ups and does — unlike Jane who must wait on everyone else. (Anne Elliot’s powerless has its source here.) And Jane admires the decisiveness. I rather suspect she really was so frustrated in the time she had to waste with dullards; the irritation is not so strong as it once was.

Jane and Fanny look through window at men playing cards (MAR 2008)

Jane’s niece Fanny whom we have to accept was her favorite by this time is not too keen on the aunt just now. She favors the younger people around her and Mr Wildman. Jane enjoys running about with them outside the house, sitting in a row for fun — this is used in Miss Austen Regrets (2009) we see Olivia Williams just with Fanny drinking a lot and running about (to be scolded by Edward Bridges in the person of Hugh Bonneville). She does find companionship with Mrs Lefroy’s sister, Mrs Harrison, but note the repeated self-consciousness. She cannot resist praising people who are not eager over the concert (Lady B). She kids about Miss Lee who likes Crabbe and talks up a ball too much — perhaps the woman was pompous.

Yes Jane does not like over refined and elegant people – or laughs at them, or tries to. They irritate her probably because of her own lower status and it must have grated knowing herself to be so much more gifted and yet so undervalued for this.

Notice how she is often paired with Miss Clewes. This is the common way at Godmersham, Aunt Jane and the governess.

On people important to Austen, people who are not relatives: The Hattons (some of whom she has a relationship with) come and go and so do the Bridges. There is another mention of Edward Bridges with an enigmatic statement about why he keeps coming “for more reasons than one.” Apparently Austen did not like him by this time at all. We’ve seen this growing since the beginning of a previous visit to Godmersham. I agree with Diana that Austen at Chilham must’ve met Mr Breton (spelt here Britton), an intelligent man would make it a decent party (“the pleasantest party ever known there”) but note she does not say so. It’s curious how she represses this kind of thing — Cassandra would not like it?

Tomalin remarks how loathe Austen was to mention First Impressions in her letters. This is the same reluctance. Harman sees this as the result of her literary work not being valued by her society or her family enough — or her fear they would think she was getting too full of herself.

The Sherers are really gone — remember last week’s letter (this is the problem with taking such time over these) how she lamented they were really going. She likes Mrs Sherer especially. Perhaps this woman and Mrs Harrison valued her for real somehow the others did not — parts of her personality no one else responded to.

I think by this time she has become cool with Martha altogether. At Worthing might have been a high point for them, but life has intervened. Martha persisted in wanting to marry; is a poor dependent who must sell herself as a companion. They are apart too much and she expected too much of Martha. She expected less of Miss Sharpe and consequently the friendship stays easier — we lack many letters they apparently exchanged.

As will be seen I did this letter differently. I’ve deliberately picked out what is important here.

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A costume used in the 1995 S&S film

Now for the minutiae which make up style and tone. In her first posting on this letter, Diana admired the sweep, concision of “very snug, in my own room, lovely morning, excellent fire, fancy me” — it shows a confidence with language found and way with words like Dickens’s in Pickwick Papers, the famous passage ending “sagacious dog, very.” Austen does the same thing with Mrs Elton only then the style is to send Mrs Elton up. I agree there is a feel of bitterness in her references to the Fowles’s buying her book reluctantly.

Authorship is not paling, but she has not the same first elan and ecstasy after 30 years waiting. It’s only human when you have felt your 2nd edition staring you in the face. The truth was she was not independent, far from it, not making anywhere near enough money to effect a life change.

She is though in the same letter genuinely pleased to be older, to be out of the “rat race” of procuring partners, and looking attractive to young men: “as I must leave off being young I find many Douceurs in being a sort of Chaperon. I am put on the sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like.” she does not want to be old but as time has enforced age upon her, she finds real compensations.

She finds some of her guests dull, but some she takes real pleasure in and there’s are these strong utterances:

“We had a beautiful night for our frisks.” Like lively horses.

“Dog-tired” the next day. (Why are dogs proverbally tired?)

“The shades of evening are descending, & I resume my narrative” is an interjection between a list of people’s names who might be a “a good ball next week, as far as females go.” Maybe the local area didn’t support assemblies, book circulating libraries.

Jane Austen no longer goes to balls to find male partners. Company, good female company is what she wants — and we see this in this letter from her enjoyment of Mrs Harrison, to her gratitude to Mary Plumptre whom Jane would hardly have known but “was delighted with me, good Enthusiastic Soul!” By contrast, men are “useful” (Mr Gibbs), provide carriages (Henry) or they are “unsteady” (Mr Paget). A rare sort of proto-feminist quip Diana overlooks: “what is wrong is to be imputed to the Lady — I dare say the House likes Female Government.”

Rex Whistler (1905-1944) painting bought by Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tritton at Godmersham is now in the possession of Mrs. Sam Hood (daughter of Mrs. Tritton)

Diana picks up on the quip about Sophia as “comer” (more comments on women) and how Jane disses the Hattons — she is always dissing them, if not the women, then George. This is not the first came and sat and went about them. They were above her socially, lived in far greater luxury, with a bigger library … but now I’m looking for phrases, style, tone that matter I am struck by this:

“Dear Henry! what a turn he has for being ill! & what a thing Bile is!” This attack has probably been brought on in part by his previous confinement & anxiety.”

She hopes it is going fast and then resorts to that time-keeping one sees in her novels: she will look for a good account from Cassandra on Tuesday, but since letters come on Wednesday she can’t hope for the letter written on Tuesday to arrive before Friday. I don’t know why a letter to Wrotham would make Henry feel better. Jane is concerned. When I read this passage and think of the undercurrents about him and his living over his business since Eliza’s death, I am not surprised at his later retreat to a plain woman and quiet curacy. He’d had enough.

Cassandra (Gretta Scacchi) at Chawton (MAR, 2008)

By contrast, Cassandra’s letter is “excellent sweetness … to send me such a nice long letter — it made its appearance, with one from my Mother, son after I & my impatient feelings walked in.’

Her impatient feelings have feet too. Diana ended on something not explained, well after she mentions her mother’s letter she writes; “How glad I am that I did what I did! I was only afraid that you might think the offer superfluous, but you have set my heart at ease.” This brings her back to Henry and her determination to stay with him whether he will or not, “let it be ever so disagreeable to him.” But she has not time or “paper for half I want to say.”

We cannot know what Jane did that she was so glad about and she thought Cassandra might find superfluous except it be her offer to visit Henry. In context it feels to me to be more about her mother. I take the above to be some of the more important tones and sharp memorable turns of phrase and minutiae in this letter.

For Austen’s text and Diana’s close reading see continuation in the comments.

Ellen

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Pierre Goubert: Etude psychologique de la romanciere Jane Austen (2)

Gainsborough, Wooded landscape with cottage and shepherd

Dear friends and readers,

In my first of two blogs on Goubert’s book I reviewed his presentation of Austen’s first impulses in writing, and her work looked at from the point of view of her as a woman writer reacting against the stereotype of heroines in romances of the lending library. This second blog is how Goubert sees Austen dramatizing on heroines in society, the problems heroines of sensibility face vis-a-vis the codes of their society and other characters. He then goes on to her typical categories of thought and moral and personal concerns, concluding with her motivations for writing, major stances, writing life and a coherent vision at the center of her work.

I again pick out good insights scattered in the book: goubert says we glimpse across “Love and Friendship” the existence of a primary anarchist impulse or at least ideas that are in a ferment of trouble and thus that it is important for Austen to denounce. He finds her to be a very strong egoist in the sense that she judges and feels by her own case intensely in her novels. Source of profound bitterness: everything renders precarious and derisory the advantage that culture gives a woman? is it not desolating that a young woman like Jane Fairfax has for a future only an exhausting, obscure and thankless job as a governess (p 272) Willoughby has nothing, Elizabeth nearly so. Poverty it is which inspires Austen’s most vivid strong remarks rather than abundance, luxury (p 283)

She wants to rally the forces of people against a superiority assumed that has no solid basis she respects. It’s easy to read this as political when it may be a moral & personal outlook (p 307).

A tone lightly cynical makes the charm of P&P – yes and it’s rarely remarked (p 283). P&P and S&S are tales of liberation, a chant of victory over humiliation that derives from deep past (family). MP: emotional and thoughtful and imaginative lives are of great concern to Austen especially from the point of view of someone subject to others but the words she uses shows us a very different set of terms for how the mind works and a different set of values. The imagination is suspect, the fancy often foolish in her vocabulary. Austen distrust the intrusion of intransigent stubborn advice from others.

Persuasion was called so by Henry but it is apt and maybe he had authority for it. Anne Elliot allows herself to be persuaded out of doing what she wants and later comes to see she ought to have done. Women who are dependent are susceptible to pressure we’d call it; Austen in her novel recurs to relatives doing all they can to work on heroines (or heroes) to marry someone (Reginald in Lady Susan). We are told Bingley is persuadable — how convenient for you says Elizabeth. And one of the bitterer moments between Darcy and Elizabeth is discussing just the limits one should allow one’s friends to persuade one. We are told Henry means to work on Fanny’s emotions, put a hole in her heart he says.

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Abington gate, 18th century school

He first divides fiction of this era who tended either to exalt the moral virtues of sensibility and or recommended obedience to laws of taught conduct. This period saw a decline in parental authority and we see in novels the heroine who wildly opposes her parents’ insistence she marry X; she runs away with Y and we are not taught she was too hasty or too dependent on sensibility.

He turns to the Juvenilia where we see Austen reacting against the spirit of independence, mocking rebellion as silly, egoistic, unreal. There’s a striking need to dismiss rebellion and romance as hallucinatory. She derides her romantic heroes and heroines in Love and Friendship, but in P&P; OTOH, it’s Collins who upholds sanctity of parental authority; resistence in S&S and Lady Susan is the right thing to do. NA Henry Tilney resists the tyrant father with courage and determination (despite joke novelist on his side) — these are bad parents it must be admitted, and inadequate advice: Persuasion Lady Russell.

The theme of education important here. We have adults spoiled as children, but they improve (Darcy, Emma); we have Austen mocking the impossibly gifted and talented and knowledgeable heroine (p. 256) There is a class bias here: the woman should not educated herself inappropriately, Sir Thomas wishes Fanny to forgive her aunt for “educating” her appropriate to her station (p 258); education must be in ethics and ought to be equally dispensed when together; Mary Bennet represents a cruel portrait of ugly pedantic girl (P&P). Austen was not highly accomplished, played for herself, hardly drew, could not speak French even if she could read it. Fanny Price knows no music. Anne playing for others is Austen. Jane Austen knew how to and loved dancing so that’s fine to do in the novels (p 263). It’s telling to find her hostile to what she doesn’t know how to do (p 264).

One might say the abandonment of one’s authority as a parent is more denounced than parental tyranny (Mrs Dashwood, Mr Bennet); Austen returns again and again to the favored child unjustly favored (p 251). This is so frequent and two together presented as an abuse of the child that he feels Austen is mirroring her own situation — not the literal experience (though the present brought back to Anna recalls present brought back to Anne Elliot), rather they dramatize a complex of feelings of inferiority: her brothers could have careers and did not experience the poverty she did, the lack of freedom of movement (p 252). He feels the derision we feel in her letters to Clarke come out of her sense of her superiority but it is he who has the respect of classical learning and an income he can live on well (p 272)

In her novels the men are given far more responsibility and thus knowledge to deal with the world, the women are not famously educated or skilled; there is an equality of apprehension, of capability were they only asked. p 349 Elinor seems more capable than Edward; Wentworth can rely on Anne; we know Fanny smarter than Edmund. An intellectually gifted young man is married to a fool; a decent capable man married to a neurotic silly drag

She is for close surveillance of children; vanity, pride, egoism, arrogance, indifference to others must be controlled.

Goubert does not want to admit that the lack of religion in the plan of education in the novels is striking, nor that Austen is strongly influenced by Genlis. He likes to quote the minor conservative English novelists.

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Early 19th century illustration: Bath, Portman Square

Austen early on very irritated by heroines who scorn money. In S&S we have Marianne appearing to scorn opulence but we see that she wants a great deal and her eyes sparkle at the thought of a fortune. Mr Elton: “Elton may talk sentimentally, but he will act rationally.”

The angle of vision we are given permits us to see how money is so important, made precise and why. Juvenilia: I had rather work for my bread than marry him (p 354)

The theme of a heroine poor or humiliated in her poverty stretches across Austen’s work (283); Austen uses wit to separate herself but in Catherine or the Bower we recognize immediately elements in Austen’s family. Her experience after her father died analogous and direct. A sentiment of humiliation takes body in her heroines and the stories take a kind of revenge in erasing the heroine’s humiliation against the machinations of others (Tilney,the Dashwoods, Lady Catherine, Mrs Norris, Lady Denham probably, Sir Walter too). Lack of money gives characters and experiences that supply fundamental view of society.

Her characters’ parents also want heroines to marry for status, rank, not to lower theirs. We see the solitude, the negligence of the ignored; no one realizes or admits what is happening. Goubert feels she is superior to other romancers whose heroines meet pride with fierce pride by engaging her heroines in a humbling process themselves. This moral humbling is not what destroyed her possibilities in life. Even a spirit as cool and collected as Elinor Dashwood’s does not listen without being profoundly pained, grated on as Lucy exults over her. A word that repeats in Austen is “triumph’: let them triumph at a distance (p 300). Her characters who are judged fools show a love of the hierarchy itself: Collins exulting over his connection to Rosings (p 300). Just the proximity of being in this milieu makes him swell (p 300-1). Hierarchy cannot be ignored: his includes Mr Bennet towards Darcy: “he is a man I can’t refuse.”

In her novels intelligence given moral victory over rank and money. Who does she respect: Wentworth, Mr Knightley, Colonel Brandon, Sir Thomas Bertram. What individuals what groups does she defend? Gardiner respectable tradespeople. Clergymen in MP. Tenant farmer like Mr Martin who by end we agree could have done better than Harriet. Austen seems not to seek social ascension but social intermingling (p 317) “croissance”.

She’s against having to submit to the effects of prejudice which tend to refuse people a place in the society to whch he or she has a right. She shows us an indolent selfish clergyman in Grant but that does not mean all are; outlines their duties in the novel (p 319); Collins is a man who demeans his profession, acts it out in a demeaning way; he is a toady (p 320). Sh was daughter, sister, niece of clergymen.

He notices her interest in navy, her two brothers the older of whom, Frank, she takes a lot more notice (p 320); she employs all her talents to put their merits before us; we don’t see them at sea any more than we do most of the men at their work; the point is made they do it for money not to conquer an enemy (p 322).
She does not think that the order itself should change; only country gentlemen and their families and hard working middle people not be despised and cut off, be recognized for their real value when they have any

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Emma’s dream of Harriet marrying Mr Elton not herself (1996 Emma)

Garrow. a rare hostile reviewer: where the principle action of novels is a husband hunt I refuse to call edifying works which accept not only as natural but good worn and shabby institutions like simony, nepotism, the marriage of convenience.

To the contrary, says Goubert: what we find in the novels is a willing refuge in self dependence freely and proudly accepted on whatever terms forced, and this indirect way of condemning the husband-hunt from the get-go of the books seems to him central to understanding them, even the late semi-finished book, Persuasion or the one begun so early with the naive non-desperate Catherine (p 354).

Leading up to, considering marriage: Word “misery” has a very strong meaning for Jane Austen (p 338); real hostility in the later 18th century in women’s novels where the girl is sold for rich marriage; even Mrs West calls it legal prostitution. Don’t marry w/o affection — this is what Charlotte Lucas does; do anything, be anything but this (pp 239-40). Her language is so strong that one feels she must have experienced or seen such a marriage. She needs to justify herself to herself for having refused the “good match” in her solitude, near destitution w/o relatives for such a long time; he feels this strong intensity of emotion comes from her understanding the grave consequences of her decision.

Sexual angle: He recognizes the significance of the incident in the letters where she is by the door and becomes so nervous about a male’s aggressiveness. Some intense anxiety.

Marriage, when it occurs in the books: Jane Austen does opt for prudence over an heroic independence; Lydia’s conduct is one of high selfish stupidity. Elizabeth cannot listen to Darcy say to ask her to marry him is an act of degradation. Except for Emma all the women in Austen who look forward to future will be impoverished if they do not marry; part of this obsession is her ensconcement in a certain class, gentry (p 352): marriage or governess/teacher/companion. Something deeply wrong where someone seeks a husband no matter what his nature. Austen seems to call on the contrary for her heroines to be willing to accept celibacy out of strong pride and selfhood rather than no matter what husband. He finds “poor Miss Taylor” the woman whose marriage is closest to that of Austen’s possibilities.

The spectre of destitution, the humiliation it brings are essential in understanding the psychology of Austen; she makes us feel the manner in which she feels her fate, tries to counter the notion of inferiority of women not married. The rigor with which P&P condemns or exposes Charlotte Lucas’s choice (p 358): a fierce outrage underlies this. Emma’s choice clearly assumed, not imposed is important part of character.

The fact that these comic characters must live together is not funny (p 358); marriage a grave act. Miss Bates funny but all funny traits are those of older poor single woman: Knightley: how could you have treated a woman of her age, character, situation …

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Joshua Reynolds’s niece, Theophila Palmer studying the book of reflections and morals taken from Clarissa

Goubert then goes over the lines of thought about human psychology in the novels. How does Austen regard imagination, judgement, reason common sense.

Each novel does seem to him to have its lesson: NA an imagination unbridled; S&S emotionalism cultivated without restraint, P&P prejudices complacently cultivated, Emma liberating herself from judgement and reason. Persuasion not a lesson but an attitude: remarkable statement about the knowledge and understanding of Nurse Rooke (p 376): women can know as much that matters as anyone with rich stores of prestigious knowledge.

Imagination and judgement: Philosophers showed the importance of the imagination,but commonality distrusted any truths rooted in imagination. At extreme end we see fear of madness — from Shaftesbury to Johnson; Burney’s Cecilia made dangerously ardent; the centrality of the Don Quixote theme — as deluded and at risk and hurting others too. We could say Marianne confuses the ideals she reads about with the man in front of her, she does not see him p 382; theme with different permutations until and including Sanditon (384). Austen speaks to author she has been reading: “my dear Mrs Piozza all this is … flight and fancy and nonsense.” She took over Locke’s ideas.

Judgement and prejudice: first impressions comes out of the this continual finding of prejudice at work — part of era too (p 396). Emma wrongly prejudiced against Jane Fairfax (p 39)6; with Anne Elliot a turn-around not to dismiss a first impression — of open heartedness. Prejudice a cloud, a veil over the mind, keeps you from lucidity, from open day. Loiterer has as its aim to demolish preconceived ideas. She is for candour, for seeing the best, interpreting something in the most charitable way (p 401); it’s detestable to be constantly on your guard, something seriously awry with someone who is. Pride is a great enemy of judgement. Elinor reflects on the validity of her judgements, tries to get outside self.

Persuasion: vulnerable relatively powerless person can be over-persuaded. A repeating event throughout the novels. Lady Susan: A joke (not kind) made out of persuading Reginald to love and marry Frederica, it’s people playing on one another’s weakness. MP: Henry cannot work on Fanny as she already loves and she has strong judgement (so his appeal through his tenants doesn’t quite work. Persuasion: thus Lady Russell insinuating Anne should think of Elliot and our narrator says Anne’s “imagination and heart were bewitched” This is a scene probably meant to foreshadow great pain in a volume 3 never written.

Common sense has its place: Subtlety is not that important in some area of life; to decide sanely what is the best course of conduct. Mr Martin, Mrs Morland. People reasoning justly, discerning reality – not that easy to be someone “sensible” (p. 430) Key is see through improbability; such insight enables the author to ridicule characters or show us what’s ridiculous and untrue (p. 431-32). He is too purely for here: He forgets real context of the time: why should people not grieve when they are forced apart; it’s not true that violence is far from us and so on. H is too dismissive of gothic, but he does see that safety is an important concern to Austen and she perceives it as founded on discerning true as opposed to false dangers.

Rest for the mind; the word comfortable resonates in the novels. Austen’s characters want to be comfortable; the spirit at ease with itself, free from care; she does not present ambitious characters as exemplary, pp 440-441. An absence of agitation is an ideal:

By implication Jane Fairfax’s is not a truly happy ending for her. Her internal peace matters to her and she’s marrying a man who likes to tease meanly, who is not above getting back to her in public at Box Hill by humiliating her (in her and his eyes at least). Jane Fairfax seems to assert there she does have strength overcome the attachment which will lead to a marriage that may bring her much emotional hurt. But we see she does not. She cannot bear the future she will have as a governess. she goes into deep migraine, can’t sleep, So she caves in when Mrs Churchill dies and Frank can offer her a good and safe home, far from the patronizing servitude she’d know under Mrs Elton’s friend. It’s important to grasp she’s as sensitive as Marianne Dashwood, Fanny Price, Anne Elliot. That’s why governessing would be such a torture. A common type woman in Austen; Emma Watson the same.

But Jane is also much attached to Frank and actually enjoys his transgression when they are not aimed at her. She can’t resist what is poison for her. There’s a line in Chaucer and Shakespeare about how we drink down poison in part of what we are allured to in passion. (Emma does notice Jane’s enjoyment of this sort of thing but is too egoistic to realize what it’s all about.)

So it’s as complicated as life in her need for him financially but without feeling as strongly against him as Mr Knightley (who concedes he overdid it – we see from jealousy) we are given enough in the novel to feel it’s not going to be a life as comfortable and without unkindness as Harriet will know (Mr Martin has more than enough money and property, he has common sense, kindness, dignity, treats Harriet with respect).

Emma does best in the lottery at the end — to my mind unfairly (I fear not to Austen’s as by the end fo the novel the distance she had maintained from Emma in the first two thirds of the novel seems to dissolve) but then she says she always expects the best and gets it. She did have an ample dowry. The properties adjoin. Who else would tolerate Mr Woodhouse.

Austen has strong scepticism about sincere compassion in the world — not someone who believes in benevolence (p 454). Austen has characters with delicate insight, tact, concern. They learn through their experience what it is to be good or generous – Anne’s love “all generous attachment,” rarely see in sickroom “generosity and fortitude’ This is a quality that does not deny the basic selfishness of people but sees some that can get beyond this in some instances, p 455. Self-denial in Austen’s perceived world is also a strong virtue. Fanny Price shows this latter trait because she has been humbled and had to submit to invisibility so accustomed despite her strong selfishness to deprivation. Part of this he finds a solid resistance to evangelism (p 468) not one word of sympathy or compassion for Maria Bertram; presence of Eliza Williams annihilated by fault; we to rejoice Eliza Brandon died (471). A brutality of judgement even features in Elizabeth Bennet at close (p 473)

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

Fanny Price (Sylvestre Le Tousel) writing and imagining in library at Mansfield Park (1983)

So how shall we describe her typical way of thinking? the first thing she writes about is within the worlds of art, she reacts to romance. If they censored her, she did live in a writing family family with a number of highly intelligent people. She is a woman and writes as a woman too. We see how women of her class and type lived. Her characters are judged according to innate ethical merit.

Henry her brother and James Edward the nephew present her as having confidence in her own judgement. Jane something of an introvert and like other introverts badly understood and ignored or her desires neglected (489). Austen clearly meant to be a moralist — if ironically or caustically so. Spent long hours writing and revising for years.

He sees a coherence between the presence at the center of the novels and how she led her life. A desire for clarity and reason holds it all together; simplicity of her style with this. She gives us a solid bedrock of words founded on observation. And it’s a gain precious of balance what she felt while writing. She had not resigned herself

Ellen

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Pierre Goubert: Jane Austen: etude psychologique de la romanciere (Part 1)

Emma Woodhouse as drawn in Isabelle Ballester’s Les nombreux mondes de Jane Austen

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been wanting to bring together my notes in English on this useful study of Austen’s psychological and ethical ideas in her fiction. Pierre Goubert has also translated Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (La Coeur et la raison), Lady Susan and Austen’s early History of England. He is the general editor of Volume 1 of the Austen Pleiade. In his etude psychologique he studies her texts with the greatest care, beginning with the novels as coming out of her reaction to the romance heroines of her era.

The book is a successful attempt to describe the fundamental mentality of Austen. In this he succeeds even if you might disagree with that or that particular point. for myself I find the usual flaws which result from hagiography; it’s also a very conservative take on Austen (so there is the usual tendency to excuse, defend, explain away & ignore things that make him uncomfortable).

There are many good insights as he goes along: for example, in her books he finds a strong “feeling she is not completely accepted by those she’s surrounded by, and that the heroines nourish a sorrow coming out of a secret love with which the reader alone is complicit.” He also senses “La solitude et sa detresse qui donne l’atmosphere de cette reflexion. C’est encore une impression de solitude and abandon qui provoke l’elan de” her characters (p. 200).

Prologue: He sees the Juvenilia, her contributions to The Loiterer and an engagement with Grandison as the first stages in her growth as an artist as a girl. He claims, contrary to what is thought, that the Juvenilia have sources in two novels, and thus in this early work she is imitating others as well as parodying romance in general too.

This is the first blog of 2 blogs on this book. The first part of Goubert’s book is about Austen’s response to the heroines of romance which he thinks is the core of her first impulse. As a woman she was intensely bothered by this stereotype; it was what was put before her as a model, and she worked to produce a heroine she preferred and reasons why this heroine’s traits and behavior will produce happiness. The second blog will be on how she presents that heroine coping with the world and her perception of her era’s understanding of the underlying psychology of ethics: how does she see imagination, judgement, sensibility, reason.

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

Chapters 1 & 2: He begins with her fierce literalist verisimilitude theory and moral doctrinal core. These , he thinks, are her way of justifying an art she was devoting her life to. They are a cover. She knew novels were despised and she had no other articulated justification. He is aware how minutely and intensely she keeps time and arranges space, but he thinks the present P&P does not show it was originally epistolary (p 38). Goubert’s idea is brilliance of her psychology stems from scrutinized use of verisimilitude; rather the two (her content) with this emerge together. She employs gradualism in time as one of her main resources.

Her style is simple, clear, natural; her vigor depends on concision. No cant, no cliches, nor pretension to culture she doesn’t have and a refusal to yield to what’s popular. She is hostile to the language of emotion and we feel in her an embarrassment when she is called upon to be emotional.

He ignores the content of the Juvenilia — and generalizes to see a parody of romance. He does not see where she does use the language of picturesque however restrainedly in NA, and gothic too, though he recognizes a change in Persuasion: pathetic lyricism becomes less singular.

Fanny Price as drawn in Isabelle Ballester’s Les nombreux mondes

Chapter 3, Her reactions to heroine of romance:

Austen from the beginning prefers to place women at the center than men, but she mocks the typical heroine of the lending library book as does Mary Brunton. He sees her books, her writing as coming out of reactions against heroines of the lending library. This was what 1818 an early reviewer reacting to when he singles Austen out for no “deep interest, uncommon characters, vehement passions.”

Center of Austen’s novels is a reaction against the heroine type: someone in distress, of strong sensibility, fragile (delicate); people whose nerves are shot (Anne Elliot’s are though). He remarks on how many hypochrondriacs we have; all abuse the patience of the other characters. This repeated protest against their egoism (Mr Woodhouse, Mary Musgrove) makes him wonder if there is a source for this in Austen’s private life. He thinks the source Mrs Austen in the letters, uses word romantic disdainfully. Also an absence of tact is intensely important to Austen (Collins has none); Darcy’s 1st proposal lacks tact. Brandon has exemplary discretion, marvelous tact.

Austen uses the word romance and romantic disdainfully. Word passion is used ironically; she does not call what Marianne feels “passion;” the word is used acidly in Sanditon. She sees people’s assertions of strong passion as hypocritical. She is not against strong emotion, but how these assertions are used to justify actions and behavior, as for example Edward Denham’s “Man’s determined pursuit of Woman in defiance of every opposition of feeling and convenience.”

Kate Winslet as Marianne Dashwood looking at Brandon reading poetry (1995 S&S)

She uses phrases for sincere feeling like “strong feeling,” “strength of feelingg,” “strong attachment”; a stability of sentiments accompanies an acuity of perception. Characters who manifest this include Brandon, Darcy, Mr Knightley; Jane Bennet; Elinor Dashwood, Fanny (who feels these things too deeply), Marianne Dashwood too; Emma does not think Harriet nature of “that superior sort” in which “feelings most acute and retentive.”

Lending library heroine an enemy of reserve, has a seductive vivacity, willed enthusiasm. Austen treats with irony these pretensions of no reserve, to act this way is to offer yourself up as a victim (Marianne). She concurs with era’s ideals of openness (ease in society), but “popular manners” like Crawford and Mr Elliot’s should put us on our guard. Goubert thinks Austen admires “good manners”; Darcy not timid but not willing to make himself appear to care so quickly. She feels for timid and reserved people and rejoices when feelings liberated. She is weary of the sympathy that attaches itself to the gay and animated person.

It’s not the ardour or warmth Austen objects to but the lack of constraint, moderation, a blindness to the “prosaic realities of existence. He quotes passages showing Austen’s delight in ardour and warmth, she “prizes” them. Marianne recognizes that she brought her griefs and near death upon herself; it’s the pose that bothers Austen. She does allow as credible Anne Elliot’s desire to stay in country and enjoy the melancholy of the season, does create in her work an atmosphere of melancholy. Across her career she moves from being against abandoning oneself to this, to finding liberation in ardour.

Catherine Morland in Isabelle Ballester’s Les Nombreux Mondes

Heroines of lending libraries make professions of friendship and these Austen repeatedly distrusts. Real friendship discriminates based on inner sincerity. Friends must be intellectually alike (p 202):, there must be reciprocation (Bingley, Darcy), but one should not use a power of age or authority over the other (Lady Russell over Anne (p 203). There is a hardly a friendship in all the works which is not weighed, balanced, judged. He does feel her interest in real friendship among women needs explanation: Mrs Weston talks of the need for solid companionship with another woman (the comfort of it).

Goubert thinks the celebration of female love/friendship the result of her solitude; he thinks critics have denied her desire for erotic love with man because she wants to found love on reason. Nothing stops us from believing JA perfectly sincere when she says Marianne learned to love Brandon.

Supposed Elizabeth Bennet, from Les nombreux mondes

Her favored characters do not fall in love because someone is sick or another falls; they appreciate qualities that make good husbands and wives. Emma very impressed with Knightley’s humanity; Darcy with Elizabeth’s concern for her sister; Henry Crawford notes Fanny’s unselfishness. They recognize the riches of another’s heart — Willoughby revealed “un homme au coeur dur” Characters evolve and change in their feelings.

While love a central preoccupation of the novels, Austen doesn’t produce romantic lovers. Love grows from gratitude; from being liked by the other, from their position in the world too. She want to provide a stable reasonable constructed love.

A French distinction at the heart of Austen’s understanding of love: there are men who respect women and men who use them as toys and objects of use (p 223); she wants to separate the egoistic passion from the generous one. But the lover who watches over and teaches the heroine (Knightly, Bertram, Tilney) belongs to Female Quixote school of novels.

Seducers in Jane Austen hurt themselves. Genlis says it’s a cruelty to try to inspire feelings in someone that you do not reciprocate. Really male coquettes. This type does bother her: Stanley, Tom Musgrave. That Frank Churchill attempted to make Emma like him on false pretenses is condemned … She seems to think such men charming.

She stays away from world of seduced women, fallen women seen onl from afar.

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

Anne Elliot, again image from Les Nombreux Mondes

Goubert says Austen felt one must make quick rebound after death. (He does not say this but I’d add perhaps she did not approve of Henry’s grief after Eliza’s death and made him uncomfortable). She endorses the social duty not to stay alone and to confide in another. Se does look to find distraction in the outer world, to mix, openings to world exterior, but no more. People must struggle to overcome grief — lacks dignity for a start, you lose respect of others to show such need and vulnerability (Emma to Harriet). Cassanda’s attitudes reinforced this. Compassion a religious duty, yet Austen hardly believes it’s really possible. Her better heroines simply act to help others.

He suggests there is something abusive of individual in the accent of determination and repression that Austen insists on in all but her last two books. He excuses her on the grounds that families really had to live with one another, on one another, and her experience of not being able to break off from them at all. And we see her sympathy for Anne Elliot.

She is sympathetic to a need for interior peace. Austen herself does not like noise, especially that of children nor commotion; does not want to seek attention on the self. He feels she was a stranger to melancholy; she looked upon it as strange. I don’t know. I feel he’s wrong here. I feel he’s ignoring the depressive Fanny, Anne, Jane Fairfax, Eleanor Tilney: they control themselves. Elinor is not exactly gay and lighthearted.

She will not show full depression lest we reject the heroine; she protests against hypocrisy of showing depths of feelings, not that these do not sometimes exist. He says she is without pity for Charlotte Lucas’s lack of delicacy in marrying Collins. Later she’s more willing to grant portrayals of melancholy, sensibility, cordiality, spontaneity as valuable. How to appear before the world seems to be a question in the last two novels begun & reaching some degree of finish: Emma and Persuasion

Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood (2008 S&S)

Necessary to be patient and to endure. The point is to establish the precious interior peace. Austen does not seek refuge or a rampart; she does not believe this exists in the modern sense, but reason: acceptance of the world as it is. She is aware of the importance of the qualities of the heart; a sensibility generous really concerned for the well being of another insofar as we are able, but she is drawn to characters who contain their depth of feeling; to characters ardent and spontaneous.

Ellen

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Austen & 18th century views of Richard III: Wallace’s Digging the Dirt: what the archeaological imagination turns up

Archeaology often unearths grim stories

Dear friends and readers,

As you probably know the bones of Richard III were unearthed this past Monday in a Leicester parking lot; the skeletal remains show a small man with a twisted spine, some who had suffered scoliosis; dreadful wounds from a weapon made of a hatchet axe and spike had been delivered to his head and shoulders; his body was covered with humiliation wounds. It seems the parking lot is where there was once a friary, later closed by Henry VIII. The friars rescued the body (all but the feet) and buried it.

As I’m sure you also know Richard III has been portrayed as a villain, twisted in mind by his ugly body — said to be that of a hunchback. This portrayal goes back to Thomas More’s life, a political document supporting the Tudor claim to the throne; and it was carved in the English imagination and memory from the time of Shakespeare’s plays, with a long tradition of great actors admired in the role, from Garrick to Olivier who did it part farcically, to the most recent Ian McKellen who lent humanity to the role.

Less well-known Kevin Spacey and Annabel Scholey in lead roles at BAM

I’m not sure you know that the first objections to this portrayal occurred in the 18th century and were bought together by Horace Walpole who took the side of the Yorks and said it was Henry Tudor who murdered the two young boys, heirs to the throne, and in our time there are groups of people who join together to defend Richard III: The Richard III society has put the whole of Walpole’s Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III online. One such person, Robert Fripp ‘s Dark Sovereign will sell more widely now: he was a guest blogger on my Ellen and Jim have a blog two after I wrote a posting in praise of a local WSC Shakespeare company’s production of Richard III where the production brought out telling parallels with contemporary politicians.

Austen took the Walpole and Fripp side of the question in her wildly parodic History of England (dated November 1791) where she plays upon Goldsmith’s History of England (either 2 or 4 volume version) and history in general. Her family library and brothers’ reading suggest she could have read anyone from Robertson to Hume too; and she’s read Shakespeare’s history plays:

RICHARD THE 3D

The Character of this Prince has been in general very severely treated by Historians, but as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a very respectable Man. It has indeed been confidently asserted that he killed his two nephews and his Wife, but it has also been declared the he did not kill his two Nephews, which I am inclined to beleive [sic] true; and if this is the case, it may also be affirmed that he did not kill his Wife, for if Perkin Warbeck was really the Duke of York, why might not Lambert Simnel be the widow of Richard. Whether innocent or guilty, he did not reign long in peace, for Henry Tudor E. of Richmond as great a Villain as ever lived, made a great fuss about getting the Crown and having killed the King at the battle of Bosworth, he succeeded to it.

Austen gets a kick out of shocking the reader, startling us and mocking in this history and sometimes it feels like 1066 and all That. But she does seem to sympathize with Catholics rather than Protestants — she and two neighbors are fervent adherents of Mary Queen of Scots no matter what anyone says. Alas, she has an anti-learned lady quip on the beheading of Lady Jane Grey’s death, suggesting the same kind of odd detachment we find in her letters. So I am not sure she is seriously “on the side” of the Stuarts — or anyone in this parody. It resembles 1066 and All That, with the hits at history as much as the way it is taught and presented. She’s still dwelling on this Northanger Abbey, the conversation during the country walk between Eleanor Tilney and Catherine which ranges from history as such to the Gordon Riots to the connection (or not) of all these to gothics , viz.,

Catherine: ‘But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?’
Eleanor: ‘Yes, I am fond of history’”
Catherine: ‘I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs–the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.’
Eleanor: ‘Historians, you think … are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest. I am fond of history–and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence
in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one’s own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such. If a speech be well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made–and probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great.’ (NA, I:14)

And yet (as we have seen in our journey through her letters), we find the adult Austen in 1813-14 at Godmersham reading Paisley’s book defending aggressive ruthless imperialism (a sort of politicized history), and with her niece Fanny, Bigland’s Letters on Modern History and Political Aspect of Europe (aloud).

Turning to her references in her novels to Richard as an unlucky name, which (as used) feels like a family joke, it’s not clear that the idea the name is unlucky comes from connecting the name to this king or not, but details like “he had never been handsome” incline me to think the reference in Northanger Abbey does refer to Richard III. So Catherine Morland’s

father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard — and he had never been handsome.

It’s possible too that in one of her unkind jokes in her letters she has latently Richard III in mind: she says in a 1796 to Cassandra of of Richard Harvey whose marriage was put off

till he has got a better Christian name, of which he has great Hopes.” [Letters, p. 10]

An intriguing reference to Richard III in Mansfield Park has one Henry Crawford professing how he longs to enact Richard III (MP 1:13):

I really believe,” said he, “I could be fool enough at this moment to undertake any character that ever was written, from Shylock or Richard III down to the singing …

By Persuasion there is a turn-around (as there often is in this penultimate of her novels), and we are into “poor Dick,” and find Austn harsh on her Richard. The Musgroves have been displaying the common sort of sentimental fantasies people do when someone is safely dead:

The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before.
     He had, in fact, though his sisters were now doing all they could for him, by calling him “poor Richard,” been nothing better than a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done anything to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead. (Persuasion I:6)

Moving outside Austen & 18th century Richards, I seriousl recommend Jennifer Wallace’s magnificent Digging the Dirt: the Archeaological Imagination. Two passages from my earlier book review:

Wallace’s book is a work of deep poetic insight into the subjective
basis of modern archeaology. She points out that the site for geologizing and archeaologizing is no longer external merely or even primarily. Instead of running off to the desert sands, caves, or delving frozen mud, Cavalli-Sforza and his followers take blood samples. We carry our history in our DNA. It’s a fine book which were it taken seriously and read by many common readers could help reshape the popular understanding of what scientific and literary writing together can explore.

Science turns gothic here too in her meditation on sacrifice rituals and freak-show modern tourist places (the realities behind Carter’s mausoleum in her Nights at the Circus) in modern London and malls too around the world. She shows how quite a number of sculls and corpses we happen to find where put there as a result of cruel sacrifice rituals. These included depriving the then living person of certain kinds of food for months, of tying them up in certain ways, killing them slowly.

A later 18th century print of an excavation at Herculaneum

She includes a long section justifying the archeaologist and Druidical Stuckeley’s work and insights about Avebury in Somerset, and a section on later 18th century archealogical digs in Pompeii. A central map for Robert Wood, an antiquarian, member of the Society of Dilettanti and its first director of Archaelological Ventures, who came to Pinarbasi, a village near Hisarlik (now thought where the citadel of Troy was), determined to discover “concrete facts” was Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Ilidad, notes, and especially, Pope’s map of Troy. In 1720 Pope drew a map which Wallace describes as “bizarre and geographically-impossible,” “exuberantly fanciful, people with warriors and ships and tents and other characters from the Iliad, busily doing things.” This map it was which became the guidepost for the people who first poured over the site “scientifically.”

Poetry and snatches of prose from letters by Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth even are shown to be prophetic and explanatory of archaeological insights today too. To turn back to the grim photo with which I began this blog: such is what these powerful people turn into, as in Shelley’s Ozymandias.

I MET a Traveler from an antique land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.”
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ellen

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Andrew Davies’s Austen movies in full context

Edward Ferrars (Dan Stevens) upon seeing Elinor Dashwood (Hattie Morahan) in the library (2008 JA’s S&S)

Dear friends and readers,

Having return to my chapters towards a book on Austen films, working title: A Place of Refuge, you can expect many more blogs on Austen and film adaptations for quite a while.

To begin with, a list:

Davies’s films

Seven of the above are Jane Austen movies: Davies has scripted more of them than any one else. One, the 2007 A Room with a View, from E. M. Forster’s novel, as yet unrecognized as a rewrite of Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Davies was a crucial contributor to the two Bridget Jones movies, like the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, were so commercially successful that they became significant much-discussed sociological events. All seven are revisionist re-tellings of Austen’s novels dependent on his sharply perceptive engagement with the texts.

Elinor (Hattie Morahan) coming into the library, she returns Edward’s gaze

With their Austen matter producing recurring motifs, these seven films form a consistent fabric whose underlying patterns are found across and actuate Davies’s huge corpus. I have tried to write about some of these, especially romance, since Sarah Caldwell’s otherwise excellent study (Andrew Davies marginalizes his romances. As a script-writer of all these various mini-series, Davies is of enormous importance in shaping how modern viewers will see many 19th century and Neo-Victorian novels too.

Rosamund (Trevyn McDowell) showing Lydgate (Douglas Hodge) her Keepsake album: “Beautifully idiotic” he pronounces (Middlemarch)

Molly and Squire Hamley (Justine Waddell and Michael Gambon) and read Roger’s letters from Africa (Wives and Daughters)

Davies’s movies include a considerable body of melodramatic romance, and a number of predominantly satiric films whose crowded scenes explore capitalism and class structures, wars and political regimes, specific regions (where the story is set) and niche worlds: academic, medical, journalistic (the writing career), archaeological, parliamentary, commercial, financial, and (continually) familial. At least half of these are TV mini-series, and, often of pre-mid-twentieth century books, much is adaptation that functions to speak to our own era in the manner of historical fiction. Yet varied as they are, and products of team-work, most of these films may be studied as complicatedly artful film that dramatizes and pictures Davies’s individual consistent world view, one which exposes realities of human desires (especially sexual) and losses that matter in a sensitively intelligent way, to, in so doing, question the soundness of our sexual and social, and by extension, political and economic arrangements.

If you study the plot-design of many of Davies’s melodramatic romances other than those based on Austen you repeatedly find a story of one or more significantly vulnerable heroines caught up in a jealous rivalry, often Oedipal between two men. One of this pair or another male character is susceptible to abjection or (startlingly conversely) seemingly coolly malevolent and/or contemptible. An agon which may take the form of a dark night of self-examination, or cowardly flight or long siege of drunkenness (not always on-stage), ensues. We experience an unusual triangulated quest for identity because most of the time Davies’s males do not end up clearly in charge, but rather dependent on the strength (or money) of heroines whose favor they have had to actively solicit and who seem free actively to choose or reject them.

The continuum includes male types outside Austen’s range, from the tragic (e.g., John Leigh played by Kevin McNally, 1984 Diana), to the psychopathic (Henry Kent played by Michael Kitchen, 2005 Falling), but who nonetheless function in the stories in ways that connect them to the lighter variants within Austen’s range, from introspective sensibility figures, strong depressives (Colin Firth as Fitzwilliam Darcy, Dan Steevens as Edward Ferrars), to shallow and (for a young girl) dangerous cads (Raymound Coulthard as Frank Churchill, Mark Dymond as Captain Frederick Tilney).

From the 1984 mini-series Diana Jan (Kevin McNally) watching Diana

Diana bathing (Jenny Seagrove)

From the earliest of his films (when it was even discreditable to do so), Davies’s scripts called for frequent use of flashbacks for both male and female characters to show us the inner evolution of characters during the story: we are confronted with memories, dreams and fantasy, dramatized moments from the past, sometimes with the image of the past having the present older character doing the dreaming turning up in place of the younger person who was there at the time. Continuity and strong emotions are kept up by much voice-over and pulsating non-diegetic music.

In the five Austen movies written wholly by him, and in a number of romance movies not from Austen but from a text susceptible to transformation into a women-centered movie close in mood, perspective, character types to his Austen set (e.g., 1999 Wives and Daughters, 2004 He Knew He Was Right, and 2007 Fanny Hill), we find a continual balancing counterweight of movement-images or sequences of scenes placed across the movie (yet not closely plot-driven) which dramatize aspects of intimate supportive and/or false women’s friendship (sisters, potential sisters-in-law, cousins, friends, maternal or governess figures), interwoven with the Oedipally-understood heterosexual romance plot-design.

Many Davies’s movies, including political and satiric movies and thrillers, manifest an equivalent male counterbalance: intertwined second stories dramatize ambiguous homoerotic male friendships (1992 Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, 2001 Othello and The Tailor of Panama [Andy and Harry unexpectedly go dancing in a gay bar], 2005 Bleak House [Sergeant George and and Phil Squod], 2008 Little Dorrit [Miss Wade and Tattycoram], 2009 Sleep with Me). Further movies dwell on the absence of this psychologically-needed relationship (a mother, a distanced father) as central to the movie’s tragedies (Wives and Daughters and the 2005 Bleak House).

Amanda Ooms, from the extraordinary werewolf film

If we add to these, movies which substitute homosexual for heterosexual romance (2002 Tipping the Velvet, 2006 Line of Beauty) or include episodic homosexual romance and incestuous familial relationships (1996 Emma and Moll Flanders, 2007 Fanny Hill), movies which depict naturally indifferent or hostile mothers and protective mother-governess figures (1984 Diana, 1989 Mother Love, 1995 Pride and Prejudice, again Moll Flanders, 1996 Wilderness, 1998 Vanity Fair, again Little Dorrit), we see the Davies’s Austen films belong to a set of movies which insist on the centrality of friendship in people’s lives, break the ban on dramatizing the ubiquity of homoerotic relationships, and look equally at loving support and fierce incestuous possessiveness and rivalries within families.

Ellen

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Austen’s letters 93 & 94, Mon-Thurs, 18-21, Tues, 26 Oct 1813, Godmersham to Henrietta Street

I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter (Letter 29 dated January 3-5, 1801):

Dr Johnson: ‘Ay, never mind what she says. don’t you know she is a writer of romances? Sir Joshua Reynolds: ‘She may write romances and speak truth,’ quoted from Claire Harman, Fanny Burney: A Biography, p xvii

Gainsborough’s daughters, Mary and Margaret, 4 years apart, but not much older than Lizzy

Dear friends and readers,

Austen continued to write in journalizing fashion to Cassandra for the whole of her 2 month stay at Godmersham (see letters 91 and 92). Jane is in much less irritated spirits; she remains as alertly critical and alive to mocking as the previous week, but she has more to enjoy (she likes Harriot Moore and enjoys walking in the park and at Canterbury one morning with her). There do seem to be less people at Godmersham, and we may surmize Austen was less interrupted and got on with Mansfield Park more.

The real interest of these two packets sent to Cassandra is half the first is a letter written by Elizabeth or Lizzy Austen (who had asked for permission to write in her aunt’s letter last time) who produces a surprisingly humane letter which unlike her aunt’s contains a depiction of servants and desperate agricultural workers on the Godmersham grounds at once unsentimental and good-natured. Lizzy was born in 1800, 7 years after Edward’s oldest daughter, Fanny; she married for love (though Margaret Wilson describes the courtship as “uneasy”) at the relatively young age of 17, the entirely suitable Edward Lloyd Rice, then age 27; they had 15 children and a happy life together. She seems to have been cleverer than her older sister, Fanny and despite the age disparity kept up with her sister and they were close.

This pair of letter-journals (with Lizzie’s overt perceptive kindliness as an instructive contrast in temperament) do seem the equivalent of phone conversations and bring home to us the life of the gentility of this era. Here and there (like Anna’s problems) Austen touches on serious matters. Austen’s purpose is to tell her sister what was happening (and Lizzy follows suit) and keep herself company with an imagined presence.

Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen writing to Cassandra (Becoming Jane 2009)

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Photo of barn in England today

Letter 93, Mon 18 October 1813, Eliza to her aunt Cassandra

The letter shows how confined and close to the family a thirteen year old gentleman’s daughter was kept. Lizzy’s incessant interest in small animals would be more appropriate for 8 say; she has not been permitted any associations outside the family except the servants and poor people no one could avoid. If she has an average child’s mind, the learning she’s given (kings and queens) will not give her much adult insight into her world’s order. And yet if we look we find she’s alive to money, bullying, class and things she will have experienced. Eliza married at a young age, a long successful one with many children. In Margaret Wilson’s book on Fanny, she emerges as no fool.

I am very much obliged to you for your long letter and for the nice account of Chawton. We are all very glad to hear that the Adams are gone, and hope Dame Libscombe will be more happy now with her deaffy child, as she calls it, but I am afraid there is not much chance of her remaining long sole mistress of her house. I am sorryyou had not any better news to send us of our hare, poor little thing! I thought it would not live long in that Pondy House; I don’t wonder that Mary Doe is very sorry it is dead, because we promised her that if it was alive when we came back to Chawton, we would reward her for her trouble. Papa is much obliged to you for ordering the scrubby firs to be cut down; I think he was rather frightened at first about the great oak. “Fanny quite believed it, for she exclaimed ‘Dear me, what a pity, how could they be so stupid!’ I hope by this time they have put up some hurdles for the sheep, or turned out the cart-horses from the lawn. Pray tell grandmamma that we have begun getting seeds for her; I hope we shall be able to get her a nice collection, but I am afraid this wet weather is ‘very much against them. How glad I am to hear she has had such good success with her chickens, but I wish there had been more bantams amongst them. I am very sorry to hear of poor Lizzie’s fate

On being happy the Adamses are gone she’s repeating Aunt Jane without realizing quite what this means: Jane Austen then did not keep silent on how she wished the guests out of the house, and the child just take the same attitude as the one to have.

So I find her no more unfeeling than the world whose values she is reflecting (which includes Deirdre LeFaye), when for example she talks of a “deaffy” child. Indeed the child seems alive to poverty and lack of power of those around her immediately. The note by LeFaye almost sniffs: Dame Libscomb’s baby is illegitimate, and the mother marrying just now another man. While the Lizzy (she is not adolescent despite her age) is not alive to what partial deafness means, the child says the old woman will be “happy” to have the deaf child with her only that she will soon have a boss– “not be sole mistress” The child is aware the woman’s daughter will boss her. The woman might have conveyed this or the child seen it.

She’s aware of what money and salary mean. “Mary Doe” is “very sorry” the animal entrusted to her is dead. Why: “because we promised her that if it was alive when we came back to Chawton we would reward her for it.” Not a sentimental view, is it? when Fanny says “how could they be so stupid,” of the workman who mistook and cut down a tree, we are getting a sense of someone getting in trouble though Fanny doesn’t care so much as just complain condescendingly.

She does know the sheep are in danger without hurdles and the grass from the horses. She seems a sweet child. She is trying to please the grandmother: it’s so wet Mrs Austen’s Seeds will go to waste, and she has been told the number of bantams so despite the upbeat information that “grandmamma” has so many chickens, again Eliza has noticed many died.

Then the abysmal world of the poor:

I must now tell you something about our poor people. I believe you know old Mary Croucher, she gets maderer and maderer every day. Aunt Jane has been to see her, but it was on one of her rational days. Poor Will Amos hopes your skewers are doing well; he has left his house in the poor Row, and lives in a barn at Builting. We asked him why he went away, and he said the fleas were so starved when he came back from Chawton that they all flew upon him and eenermost [sic] eat him up. How unlucky it is that the weather is so wet! Poor uncle Charles has come home half drowned every day. I don’t think little Fanny is quite so pretty as she was; one reason is because she wears short petticoats, I believe. I hope Cook is better; she was very unwell the day we went away. Papa has given me half-a-dozen new pencils, which are very good ones indeed; I draw every other day. I hope you go and whip Lucy Chalcraft every night.

(By the way for semi-haters of Downton Abbey, of which I am one, this is the world of Downton Abbey we are not permitted to see). An old woman madder and madder: Austen goes to see her. Score one for Aunt Jane. A homeless man lives in a flooded barn with fleas. That Uncle Charles comes home soaked every day means that man is wet too. Lizzie seems aware that the old man is very wet as her sentence about Charles follows one right after the old man, what a shame it is such wet world. I believe the bit about whipping. The upper class did whip servants, older people children. We may assume Cassandra didn’t do it every night, but maybe did it one night.

I agree with Diana Birchall that there is much noticing of how pretty a girl is. Charles’s daughters are judged this way. Little Fanny is one and is up to muster with her petticoats. Cassy, who is only 5 and would be a worry to me if she was looking as thin and bad as Jane Austen said in the last letter is not mentioned.

Then the polite close:

Miss Clewes begs me to give her very best respects to you; she is very much obliged to you for your kind enquiries after her. Pray give my duty to grandmamma and love to Miss Floyd.’ I remain, my dear Aunt Cassandra, your very affectionate niece.

Miss Clewes keeping in good with Jane Austen. Remember a couple of letters ago Jane Austen said it was Miss Clewes she was placed with.

What’s the difference between duty to the grandmother and love to Martha? Probably that Martha is not a relative; Eliza knows she actually owes her nothing as the norms go, but Martha is one of the family group and “love” is probably a cliched word there. She may be trying to please Aunt Jane with that one but I doubt she would recognize anything untoward in the relationship.

The letter tells how women were kept in, and down, how wretched the poor’s lives and how a child with brains sees more than we realize. If we get no talk about gender, it’s that she never heard that category. She’s heard a lot about money and knows all about class by this time.

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And now for Austen’s match:

Pre-20th century shop

Letter 93, Thurs 21 October 1813, Jane to Cassandra

She thought Eliza’s letter of interest but does not say why:

Thursday. I think Lizzy’s letter will entertain you. Thank you for
yours just received. To-morrow shall be fine if possible. You will be at Cuildford before our party set off. They only go to Key Street,’ as Mr Street the Purser lives there, and they have promised to dine and sleep with him. Cassy’s looks are much mended. She agrees pretty well with her cousins, but is not quite happy among them; they are too many and too boisterous for her. I have given her your message, but she said nothing, and did not look as if the idea of going to Chawton again was a pleasant one. They have Edward’s carriage to Ospringe. I think I have just done a good deed-extracted Charles from his wife and children upstairs, and made him get ready to go out shooting, and not keep Mr Moore waiting any longer. M’ and M” Sherer and Joseph dined here yesterday very prettily. Edward and George. were absent-gone for a night to Eastling

Charles Austen and his wife making up to the purser, socializing to keep things fine. A purser counted on board.

It seems that Cassy is looking better from her rest at sea. Alas, the lines could be as much about whether the girls looks “good (pretty, socially acceptable) or less ill. I see Cassandra has offered to take her. The rooms below the deck even for an officer were smelly, low ceilinged, and there was much disease aboard ships. But the child is not keen. Aunt Cassandra did perhaps seems stern. If she didn’t whip Lucy Chalcraft she had made a joke of it, which to a child shy could be just as bad. I had thought a description of Caroline vis-a-vis these Godmersham children suggested Caroline as a child an original for Fanny Price, but now Cassy has the same response. I imagine they were rich children let have their way. The boys seem to be that. I note the governesses come and go.
Jane’s good deed in giving Charles a day off from this family. Vacations are often just work in another place if you have to take all your troubles and cares with you. Better to shoot birds it seems.

We next see Jane Austen indulging in favorite activity of hers. Not socializing but going for long walks with someone willing, this one with Harriot Moore while her husband goes shooting with Charles. Then family news (Henry) and worries (Edward):

The two Fannies went to Canterbury, in the morning, and took Louisa [Edward’s youngest) and Cassy to try on new stays. Harriot and I had a comfortable walk together. She desires her best love to you and kind remembrance to Henry. Fanny’s best love also. I fancy there is to be another party to Canterbury, to-morrow and Mr and Mrs Moore and me. Edward thanks Henry for his letter. We are most happy to hear he is so much better. I depend upon you for letting me know what he wishes as to my staying with him or not; you will be able to find out, I dare say. I had intended to beg you would bring one of my nightcaps with you, in case of my staying, but forgot it when I wrote on Tuesday. Edward is much concerned about his pond; he cannot now doubt the fact of its running out, which he was resolved to do as long as possible. I suppose my mother will like to have me write to her. I shall try at least

I note again that Henry is again saying he is so much better. He too taught to put the best face on it. and that Jane cannot depend on him as close confident. She will have to depend on Cassandra discovering whether Henry wants Jane to visit or not. Edward still worried about his property, now the pond.

You can indeed see Austen’s pursed lips when she concedes she will knuckle to her mother’s pressure and write some woman, but who it is I cannot figure out. Mrs Moore comes too early in the paragraph. Or is it Mrs Moore.

And then the casual supercilious comment about Mrs Crabbe: a rightly notorious comment by Jane Austen on the death of Crabbe’s wife:

No; I have never seen the death of Mrs Crabbe. I have only just been making out from one of his prefaces that he probably was married. It is almost ridiculous. Poor woman! I will comfort him as well as I can, but I do not undertake to be good to her children. She had better not leave any.

Now I understand why the family was embarrassed by this. Before reading the letters I had countered their embarrassment with another of their favorite excuses: she was laughing, and here indirectly I thought she was signaling her affinity with Crabbe. She may be, but she knows the woman died, and probably knows she died in a depression, breakdown, and poverty. Yes there were children. We again see how disconnected she can be to reality, how people become counters to her. And LeFaye’s notes (which seek to distract us) point us to where Crabbe says his poems are like children to him. If this were the Burney editor, we’d be told straight how Mrs Crabbe died and given the lines from the preface by Crabbe on his wife’s death if they were germane.

Edward and George set off this day week for Oxford. Our party will then be very small, as the Moores will be going about the same time. To enliven us, Fanny proposes spending a few days soon afterwards at Fredville. It will really be a good opportunity; as her father will have a companion. We shall all three go to Wrotham, but Edward and I stay only a night perhaps. Love to Mr Tilson.

The Moores live at Wrotham and after they leave it seems Fanny, Jane and Edward mean to visit. The love to Mr Tilson is for Henry’s sake as a business man.

The niece, Lizzie’s letter seems to me kind, alive to what matters beyond self, the aunt’s distanced.

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Tues, 26 October 1813, Jane to Cassandra

Canterbury Cathedral today

As this letter is too long to scan in, this time I’ll take the liberty (with permission) to print Diana Birchall’s paraphase with quotations and then add my comments on hers and further quotations as an efficient way of discussing it.

A Canterbury Morning. Jane is still at Godmersham, a week after her last letter, and Cassandra is still staying at Henrietta Street with Henry. She worries that she has not the “wherewithal to fabricate” a letter today. Then, interestingly, “I amnot at all in a humour for writing; I must write on till I am.” Perhaps she used that technique of pressing on, with her novels too, at times. Thatspeaks of a long-practiced discipline.

Then bits of news – Mrs. Tilson has had a daughter, and Mr. Deedes and Sir Brook Bridges have arrived (in that order as she likes Deedes better). Sir Brook, baronet of Goodnestone Park, was related to Deedes, who had married his daughter Sophia, and was a brother-in-law of Edward Knight. It was their “fair and accomplished” daughter, Sophia, who intriguingly served coffee to the Tsar of Russia when he passed through Hythe the following year(1814) when in England for the peace celebrations.

Jane’s brother Charles and his family have returned to their ship the
Namur, and she hopes the best for little Cassy aboard ship. A Canterbury scheme takes place, named by Jane as pleasant, with the Moores. Rev. George Moore, son of a late Archbishop of Canterbury, was a local vicar, and if we liked, we could look him up in the Reports, where there is an article. Deirdre quotes a Kentish historian as saying that Moore was so universally hated,when he took Harriot-Mary Bridges as his second wife in 1806, a funeral hymn
was sung instead of the nuptial psalm. Be that as it may, on this visitMoore is taking his little boy George to “Taylors & Haircutters.” Jane writes that “Our chief Business was to call on Mrs. Milles, and we had indeed so little else to do that we were obliged to saunter about anywhere & go backwards & forwards as much as possible to make out the Time & keep ourselves from having two hours to sit with the good Lady. A most extraordinary circumstance in a Canterbury morning!” Mrs. Milles was a very elderly widow, then ninety years old, and lives in rented houses with her daughter, who is quite the garrulous one, a regular “Jane Austen character”:

“Miss Milles was queer as usual & provided us with plenty to laugh at. She undertook in three words to give us the history of Mrs. Scudamore’s reconciliation, & then talked on about it for half an hour, using such odd expressions & so foolishly minute that I could hardly keep my countenance.” No, Jane’s kind side isn’t showing, but her observant and amused one is, and perhaps here we are seeing her at the work of coolly examining her neighbors, which helps her to obtain “two strong twigs and a half” toward a work of her own.

Now a mystifying phrase, “Old Toke came in while we were paying our visit. I thought of Louisa.” Sounds like a servant, but no, according to Deirdre, “old Toke” was a former High Sheriff of Kent, about 75 years old, whose son the Rev. John had a daughter, Mary, who had just married Edward Scudamore MD. So that is who Miss Milles was gossipping about (though I don’t know who Louisa is).

Jane notes that “the death of Wyndham Knatchbull’s son will rather
supersede the Scudamores.” Wyndham was a London merchant, and his son Wyndham, Ensign in the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, had just died, age 18. Jane says she told Miss Milles that the young man was to buried at Meersham Le Hatch, the Adam-designed home of the Knatchbull family, but Miss Milles “had heard, with military honours, at Portsmouth.” Amusingly and with a touch of exasperation Austen comments, “We may guess how that point will be discussed,
evening after evening.” We may hear an echo of Mrs. Elton’s decided statement of (wrong) fact: “‘No, I fancy not,’ replied Mrs. Elton, with a most satisfied smile. ‘I never heard any county but Surrey called so.’” Or perhaps the interminable argument in S&S between the two mothers about the respective heights of their children!

“Oweing to a difference of Clocks,” the carriage is late, and Jane Austen watches the anger of Mr. Moore with great interest. “I wanted to see him angry – & though he spoke to his Servant in a very loud voice & with a good deal of heat I was happy to see that he did not scold Harriot at all.” So perhaps the rumors about Moore’s being universally hated, are known to her by his ill nature. In any case she is observing him as an author. She concludes about the marriage that “he makes her – or she makes herself – very happy,” which sounds rather like Mr. Collins and Charlotte. We have no difficulty in believing, “They do not spoil their Boy.” Yet Jane likes Mr. Moore rather better than she expected, or at least sees “less in him to dislike.” She will not be sorry to visit Wrotham with them; Moore was former rector of the place.

Jane will send her letter by a visitor, though she thinks that is “throwing it away,” as the Visitor can tell the news, but then there is a saving of postage. “But Money is Dirt,” she says insouciantly. About these arrangements she concludes, “Whatever is, is best,” and seems to find this philosophy agreeable, for she adds, “There has been one infallible Pope in the World” (and she is quoting him). Then a George Hatton called, and talked, and Bowed, but she was “not in raptures.”

An interlude of talking about finery, flounces and bombasin and morning gowns – they are so very sweet by Candle light,” she says in a mocking tone, and quickly adds more truthfully, “in short, I do not know, & I do not care.”

Some of Fanny’s arrangements have changed – she is not to visit Mary
Plumptre, as an uncle by marriage, Mr. Ripley, has died, and Jane Austen writes with some sympathy, “Poor Blind Mrs. Ripley must be felt for, if there is any feeling to be had for Love or Money.” Edward Bridges has just paid a Sunday visit, and she sarcastically notes, “I think the pleasantest part of his married Life, must be the Dinners & Breakfasts & Luncheons & Billiards that he gets in this way at Godmersham. Poor Wretch! He is quite the Dregs of the Family, as to Luck.” Not sure what his ill luck consisted of, but he was the “dregs” in birth order, being tenth of thirteen children.

Jane sends remembrances to Madame Bidgeon and Mrs. Perigord – she did seem to have a special regard for them – and then she wittily instructs Cassandra to “be sure to have something odd happen to you, see somebody that you do not expect, meet with some surprise or other, find some old friend sitting with Henry when you come into the room. – Do something clever in that way.”

A final bit of news concerns Ben Lefroy, and it is “baddish,” for he has declined an eligible curacy on the grounds that he does not want to take orders so early, and if James makes a point of it, he “must give Anna up rather than do what he does not approve.” Austen’s comment is, “He must be maddish.” She concludes, after an apology for the letter, “I find time in the midst of Port & Madeira to think of the 14 Bottles of Mead very often.” Mead, made at Chawton, was more homely than the elegant wines of Godmersham, but she obviously liked it and probably helped make it.

I can’t disagree with anything Diana said, and am puzzled in a couple of the same places (e.g., Who is Louisa?)

Anna and Ben Lefroy’s marriage license — by the following year they will be married

So, Austen is not at all in the mood for writing a letter is what she said. I take her writing of novels to be different. She need not “fabricate” new matter as she goes along the way she does for a letter. Cassandra has gone to Henrietta Street, and I take the line to indicate that Henry is not in good health – as I’ve been suggesting. I put it down again to the loss of Eliza, and strain at his occupation as banker: “I trust you are seeing improvements in him every day.” Cassandra’s presence should buck him up and provide a helpmeet (which he seems to need.)

The business about the squires from East and West Kent going in “one barouche” together “to their Sittingborne Meeting, East & West … ” In those few local political issues I’ve read about occurring in Kent there seems to be a faultline between East and West Kent. The men on the different sides felt they had different interests.

On the Charles Austens: Austen does write that “Cassy had recovered her Looks almost entirely” and she cites the parents’ taking this to justify taking the girl aboard again: “They do not consider the Namur as disagreeing with her in general — only when the Weather is so rough as to make her sick …”

This reminds me of Mrs Allen saying how nice it would be if only it were not raining. Austen is pointing out by this language that the Charles Austens want to take Cassy on board with them, period. We saw that Cassy did not want to stay with Aunt Cassandra. Apparently Edward and Fanny Knight were not willing to take Cassy on, but also in an earlier letter Austen reports that Charles wanted the girl with him. To me this is strange, but I take it to be part of the male desire to own all the women and all of his family members. We saw much earlier how when Edward came home one night he demanded his daughter get out of bed so he could have his (exhausted) wife immediately available. This is the same mind set — to give him his due once the parents founds the girl would not stay at Chawton. Austen allows herself the wry parodic sentence over it.

A very pleasant time at Canterbury. This is where Austen and the Moores visit Miss Milles and I concur with Diana that Austen is anything but decently human here. The sentence or so vignette of her and Harriot and little George and her brother coming on the carriage is pleasant, but she laughs at the old woman meanly. Yes maybe it was from such people Austen got some of her details for her satire; if so, her satire seems softer where the character is fictional. So, she laughs at how many details the woman included. She could hardly keep her countenance. I hope the old woman didn’t notice. Perhaps Austen was remembering herself when she has Emma treat Mrs Bates similarly.

I am interested in Austen’s relief that Mr Moore is not raging at Harriot. The first letter where she mentioned them and we had a note then about how Mr Moore was hated had a sense that she was afriaid for Harriot. I see this as a covert statement that the man is not physically or emotionally abusive of his wife which he could be. It’s a rare reference on Austen’s part to men’s violence inflicted directly on women. So I don’t see him as a Mr Collins but a type of male we don’t find in the fiction unless we feel that there’s enough in NA to say General Tilney was indeed abusive

She feels silly writing a letter which will be delivered by someone whose news will make it obsolete, but she knows Cassandra does want the letter (as she did Cassandra’s) and gets a kick out of saying she couldn’t care a less about the price of postage: “but Money is Dirt.” (She doesn’t think so.)

Another mention of George Hatton again deprecating him. “There is no one brilliant today.” LeFaye thinks her “I discerned nothing extraordinary in him” comes from Fanny Austen being attracted; I think rather she is denying that he is attractive in general which is what she did before despite admitting he’s intelligent, likes to read, is fine to have in the library with them when it turns out he does not want to go to an inane fair either.

Flounces. Remember how Austen begged Cassandra to have some since all the guests at Godmersham did three weeks before. Does Cassandra like hers? In fact “I do not know” (much about flounces) and “do not care.” Fanny cannot visit a friend because a relative died.

And then another of these extravagantly antagonistic remarks aimed at Edward Bridges. He’s paid “another of his Sunday visits — I think the pleasantest part of his married Life must be the Dinners & Breakfasts & Luncheons & Billiards that he gets in this way at Godmersham. ” I take this like “a poor honey” to be a stab at Bridges’s wife. Only when he’s away from home and at Godmersham is life pleasant. That he’s the “Dregs” of the family when it comes to luck” is undermined by her “Poor Wretch!” I don’t feel much sympathy there.

Jane says she wants to know what purchases Cassandra is making in London, to have her regards sent to Mme Bigeon and her daughter, Mme Perigord (yes she does not forget them), then a man who talks about books and is Austen’s friend whom Cassandra will meet and an order to Cassandra to be sure to do something “odd” or meet someone new or unexpected or some surprise so something will have happened to her! This is polite but there is the warmth towards the French servants.

The note about Anna’s fiance by her granddaughter justifies Ben’s reluctance as an act of integrity. I remember Austen’s oldest brother, James did not want to take up a sinecure but was bullied into it by his wife, LeFaye says Anna does not want to return to Chawton lest she be harshly censured too. Not a kind family and shameless about imposing their ideas on someone vulnerable.
Apparently the Scudamores prescribed for Miss Clewes (the governess Austen was lumped with) some medicine. This by association calls to mind how Austen loves Port and Madeira (so do I) but while in their midst can remember the Mead they brew at home in Chawton.

This time she finds the Finch women pleasant. And ends on Harriot and Fanny’s best love; they are just now Jane Austen’s female support group

I have been asked to review the fifth volume of Fanny Burney’s Early Journals and Letters (1782-1743) (ed Troide and Cooke) and these make a striking contrast to Austen’s. Both journalized, both wrote confidingly to sisters and friends and relatives. But Fanny’s are self-concious acts of art; if written quickly carefully crafted, even (as Claire Harman puts it) “attention-grabbing.” They are heightened, and it seems to me a good deal of what she writes if based on truth, or approximately to something that happened that day, they contain a large amount of imaginative heightening. Austen’s letter journals are attempts to get down what happened, to capture actuality — as she felt and saw it of course.

Ellen

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From Prada to Nada: published at BSECS; Lorca’s House of Bernardo Alba

A crucial moment in all 6 S&S films: Elinor (Nora, Camille Belle) and Marianne (Mary, Alexa Vega) told they are disinherited and must leave what was their home (From Prada to Nada 2010)

Dear friends and readers,

A quick note to say my blog-review of From Prada to Nada: Making A Case for Spanish-American Culture, has been revised to conform to scholarly citations and published in the Media Reviews of the British Society of Eighteenth Century Studies (BSECS).

From Prada to Nada, BSECS, Media Reviews

This was nearly a month ago and I know I should have announced it much sooner.

The matching still to the above: John (Gabriel Dominguez, Pablo Cruz) and Fanny (Olivia, April Bowlby) Dashwood inform the sisters, she callously, he ashamed

A more recent careful study of From Prada to Nada is showing me that the film-writer and director made an integral use of Lorca’s House of Bernardo Alba in the film, and it’s also a means on commenting on the repressed sexuality of Austen’s S&S. There are several musical intertextual allusions which links the movie to Spanish culture films and also comment on Austen’s book — about sexual awakening and disillusionment we recall.

I mean to read the play and report back.

This morning I learned of a recent good Portuguese (Brazilian) translation of Northanger Abbey:

Jane Lucia Ferreira Paiva, recomendo esta tradução de Lêdo Ivo que foi publicada pela Francisco Alves e é mais fácil de achar, veja a capa: http://bibliotecajaneausten.com/2010/01/a-abadia-de-northanger/Jane Lucia Ferreira Paiva, recommend this Lêdo Ivo translation which was published by Francisco Alves and is easier to find, see the cover: http://bibliotecajaneausten.com/2010/01/a-abadia-de-northanger/

Ellen

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Heroine reads P&P while having her abortion: Rosamund Lehman’s ground-breaking The Weather in the Streets

Dear friends and readers,

So 200 years ago today precisely Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was finally published. This 17 years after her father first sent it out for publication when it was an epistolary novel called First Impressions; this after probably at least 2 wholescale revisions and one “lopp’d and chopp’d.” On the 29th she wrote to her sister: “I have got my own darling child from London,” and asks whether there are hedgerows in Northamptonshire because she was ever anxious about the literal verisimilitude of her portraits of settings and was writing Mansfield Park.

It really is not clear that the text had been improved. But it was given to the public in its truncated state. Since others are celebrating this day by imitating Bloomsday: where Joyceans read aloud as much of Ulysses over the course of a day as anyone could stand, so people were reading P&P today, perhaps with greater ease.

I’m thinking its wide dissemination, its licensing other texts by women might serve as an aspect of why we remember this day. Austen’s texts provides sociological events — on TV starting with the 1995 BBC/WBGH Pride and Prejudice. This Sunday, Downton Abbey (built partly out of the initial situation of P&P, a man with too many daughters and not enough money to support his estate) dramatized the centuries-old profound pain and death of women of women in childbirth in the story of the third daughter, Sybil (Deborah Findlay-Brown). Not very shocking any more, but once upon a time showing parturition in this way was taboo.

Well the first text to depict the realities of an abortion may also be said to have been authorized by Austen’s P&P. Rosamund Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets. The careless hero, married, indifferent to a coming child of his mistress (a term Olivia cringes at), Olivia ends up having her abortion alone. She must not have a child or she’ll be out of a job forever, “ruined” if found out. (Like Ethel in DA.) We are spared none of the banal sordid details, including her time in the bathroom when she returns to the flat afterwards.

To support herself or just by chance during her ordeal Olivia reads Pride and Prejudice while recuperating from her abortion. We as readers are left to take this as ironic or read it as straight (she really takes comfort in the romance figure of Mr Darcy, all teh while knowing better). In Pilgrimage, another courageous novel, Dorothy Richardson’s powerful cyclical novel no one reads aloud over the course of a day dares to hint at an abortion by its heroine, Miriam, who also favors Austen’s novel. And Miriam, like Elizabeth Bennet, is visited by an older authority female figure, the cad married lover’s mother, who comes to persuade her to give him up, only to have Miriam not only refuse but give away she’s pregnant, upon which the cad married lover’s mother breaks down and flees. This is replicated in The Weather in the Streets, and of course it all descends from Elizabeth standing up to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, though Austen probably read such scenes in Smith and Radcliffe (more explicit and radical) earlier. In Invitation to a Waltz, Lehman’s heroine declares Austen is one of her favorite authors.

Lehmann wrote one of the great novels of this century by any gendered-person and by women: The Echoing Grove (badly titled, the title chosen by her publisher). The story is of two sisters, both aging: Madeleine, now a widow who lives alone, and Dinah, also a woman whose husband is dead (he died in WW2 fighting in the International Brigade in Spain). Dinah has come to visit Madeleine, an attempt at a reconciliation after an estrangement of perhaps many years. Madeleine has a grown daughter, one Clarissa, who loves cooking and has not yet appeared. There is a dog, Gwilyn. So another of these novels centered in women’s lives.

Early in the story we discover that the two heroines who are sisters were rivals for the love — or perhaps lust is the better word — of the husband of one of them. Madeleine’s husband, Rickie Masters, became the lover of her sister, Dinah, and Dinah became pregnant by Rickie and gave birth to a stillborn infant. This paradigm is suggested in the first chapter (why they became estranged) and the still birth is recounted early in the second.

Two women closely vying, rivals, for the love of a man: sometimes wife and mistress, sometimes two girlfriends, sometimes mother and daughter; in non-western cultures, two wives, and sister non-married and wife. As I recall Penny Richards (the moderator of WWTTA at the time) suggested this paradigm was central to women’s novels frequently and came out of the structure of our male hegemonic societies.

Lehmann treats this woman-on-woman relationship with great and intense power. We see how central is who or what a woman’s mother is and how she treated her daughter is central to the daughter’s personality and outlook and expectations and goals, for Madeleine and Dinah’s mother has recently died (as well as Madeleine’s husband, Rickie) and this brings the two women together — to divide the inheritance or at least discuss their futures. They visit the room of Madeleine’s grown unmarried daughter, Clarissa, a place which shows Clarissa gathering her history out of artefacts and sites of memory. Clarissa does not want to create a home apart from the house her mother lives in or the things she’s taken from her mother’s history, her two brothers, and her grandmother. An allusion to Richardson’s heroine? probably. And Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

The inward style allows Lehmann to move back and forth in time swiftly and the use of nuance and subtleties bringing out a depth of passion to the surface as what is there if only we will look reminds me of Elizabeth Bowen and (more recently) Elizabeth Janeway. “The lineaments of ungratified desire.”

I could cite women writes endlessly here. Annie Ernaux reading Lehmann’s Dusty Answer is my most recent. A friend reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend discovered the book that counted for that pair of women was Alcott’s Little Women.

Unfortunately the film adaptation, The Heart of Me, turns the story into something misogynist with the wife (Olivia Williams as a sterile witch-like frustrated women) and her sister (Helene Bonham Carter) a self-indulgent mindless Marianne. But it’s telling that Carter played the Marianne role in E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, where we find Emma Thompson in the Elinor role.

Olivia Williams

It’s not a coincidence that Williams also played Austen in Miss Austen Regrets. The general culture at large has a strongly ambivalent attitude towards the intellectual self-sufficient self-controlled woman. All these part of the general legacy of Austen and the specific trajectory inherited through her novels.

200 hundred years ago today,

Ellen

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Francophone Jane

Modern drawing of typical rural vicarage like Deane house, not far from Steventon, from Les Nombreux mondes de Jane Austen, Isabelle Ballester

Dear friends and readers,

Some sad news for me: my proposal to do a paper on Anne Radcliffe in French translation, with the emphasis on Victorine de Chastenay’s Mysteres d’Udolpho was turned down for the coming Chawton (this July) festival of 18th century women writers of Austen’s era. I’ve put the proposal on line: “To translate seemed to me a beautiful thing to do: Translation as Matching Creative Act”. I’ve at least done myself that much justice.

I’ve decided to rejoin the American Literary Translators Association of the US I belonged to in 1989-1990, and take the proposal in an altered form (not centered on the later 18th century and women writers as it is now) to a conference on translation studies or an 18th century conference which has a panel on how the novel in the 18th century was disseminated. Through translation. In the meantime (tomorrow or this weekend), I’ll put the proposals on line and link them in here. I’ve found one way not to lose sight of my written work meant for perusal by others or publication, is to put it on-line. I get to share it with others and not lose track of it myself.

I had also again become interested in studying Jane Austen in translation and was perplexed about which direction to go in. I find that close study of the same text in two languages where I know one by heart (so to speak), English, and a good French text (where I’m competent to read at any rate) teaches me so much about a text and its culture. I may in the months ahead study Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest against Soules’s La Foret ou l’Abbaye de Saint-Clair or another of the Austen Francophone texts. I’m especially interested in Isabelle de Montolieu’s. I might like to do that and just read Chastenay’s 3 volume memoirs, which I’ve not yet read. The truth is I had gone past Chastenay’s first into her second volume of Udolpho and actually have enough for a paper on comparison of the two texts now. What I was doing was trying to ascertain if as a woman she translated Radcliffe differently than the others who have translated Radcliffe into French which in French have been otherwise all men.

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Montolieu was reprinted

In thinking about this I got up a list of books of Austen in French translation readily available and those I own for future use. This is not to be taken as any kind of definitive list, only a list of the earliest translations of Austen into French and the most recent which are readily available. I put it here in the same spirit as my handy list of the year of Austen’s novels first publication (along with the years a first full draft was produced where we know that). It’s a checklist for myself (and now others interested in this area of study):

Sense and Sensibility

Montolieu, Isabelle de, trans. Raison et Sensibilite. 1 volume. typed. Bookss LLC! Classics Series, Memphis, USA 2011. ISBN 981232895411. 1815

Montolieu, Isabelle de, trans. Raison et Sentiments, revue par Helen Seyres. Intro. Helen Seyres. Paris: Archipoche, 1996 ISBN 9782352870173 Originally titled Raison et Sensibilite 1815. It’s almost the same text as above; names back (Maria now Marianne, Emma now Margaret) changed and corrections.

Privat, Jean, trans. Raison et Sentiments. Note biographie de Jacques Roubaud. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979 IBSN 2264023813 1979

Goubert, Pierre, trans. Le Coeur et La Raison, trad, intro. notes Pierre Goubert. Oeuvres romancesques completes I, Paris: Gallimard Pleiade, 2000 ISBN 207011323X 2000

Pride and Prejudice

Perks, Eloise, trans. Orgueil et prevention. 1 volume. typed. Books LLC, Classics Series, Memphis, 2011ISBN 978-123256125 1822

Anonymous, trans. Orgeuil et prejuge. 4 volumes. Geneve: J. J. Paschoud, 1822. In Bibliotheque Nationale de France, all 4 volumes in pdf. 1822.

Leconte V and Ch. Pressoir, trans. Orgueil et prejuges. Preface by Virginia Woolf, trans. Denise Getzler. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979 IBSN 2264023813. First published Librarie Plon, 1932

Privat, Jean, trans. Orgueil et Prejuges. Paris: Archipoche, 2010. ISBN 9782352871682. n.d. (1970s?)

Pichardi, Jean-Paul. Orgueil et Prejuge, introd. Pierre Goubert, notes Jean-Paul Pichardie. Oeuvres romancesques completes I, Paris: Gallimard Pleiade, 2000 ISBN 207011323X 2000

Mansfield Park

Villemain, Henri, trans. Mansfield Park, ou Les Trois Cousines, revu, completed by Helen Seyres. Paris: Archipoche, 2007 ISBN 9782352870227 Originally titled: Le Parc de Mansfield, ou les trois cousines. Paris: JG Dentu, 1814

Getzler, Denise, trans. Mansfield Park. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1982 IBSN 2264024704 1982

Emma

Anonymous translator. La Nouvelle Emma, ou Les caracteres anglas du siecle. 3 of 4 tomes, the 1st in print, the others available at the BNF as pdf. Paris: Harchette Livre, n.d. Text from Bibliotheque Nationale de France; one printed volume, two pdf files. 1816.

Salesse-Lavergne, Josette, trans. Emma. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1982 IBSN 9782264023186 1982

Seyres, Helene, trans. Emma. Paris: Archipoch, 2009. ISBN 9782352871224 1997.

Northanger Abbey

Ferrieres, Hyacinthe de Ferrieres, trans. L’Abbaye de Northanger. Paris; Pigoreau, 1824. In Bibliotheque Nationale de France, all 3 volumes in pdf. 1824

Feneon, Felix, trans. Catherine Morland. 1898-99; Paris: Gallimard, 1945. 1898-99

Salesse-Lavergne, Josette, trans. Northanger Abbey. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1996 IBSN 2264023805 1982

Arnaud, Pierre. L’Abbaye de Northanger. introd., notes Pierre Arnaud. Oeuvres romancesques completes I, Paris: Gallimard Pleiade, 2000 ISBN 207011323X 2000

Persuasion

Montolieu, Isabelle de. La Famille Elliot; or, L’Ancienne Inclination. Paris: Nabu Press, 2012. ISBN 9781273394805. With original preface, 18th century book xeroxed on larger pages. 1821.

Belamich, Andre, trans. Persuasion. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1980 IBSN 2264023805 1945

Lady Susan

Salesse-Lavergne, Josette, trans. Lady Susan. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1996 IBSN 2264023805 (from Margaret Drabble’s text) 1980

Goubert, Pierre, trans. Lady Susan, introd., notes Pierre Goubert. Oeuvres romancesques completes I, Paris: Gallimard Pleiade, 2000 ISBN 207011323X 2000. Reprinted without introd. or notes: Paris: Gallimard Folio, 2000.

Les Watson

Salesse-Lavergne, Josette, trans. Les Watson. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1996 IBSN 2264023805 (from Margaret Drabble’s text) 1980

Pichardie, Jean-Paul, trans. Les Watson. introd., notes Jean-Paul Pichardie. Oeuvres romancesques completes I, Paris: Gallimard Pleiade, 2000 ISBN 207011323X 2000

Sanditon

Salesse-Lavergne, Josette, trans Sanditon. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1996 IBSN 2264023805 (from Margaret Drabble’s text) 1980

Amour et Amitie [Love & Friendship]

Goubert, Pierre, trans. Amour at Amitie., introd., notes Pierre Goubert. Oeuvres romancesques completes I, Paris: Gallimard Pleiade, 2000 ISBN 207011323X from Chapman I assume) 2000

Histoire de l’Angleterre

Goubert, Pierre, trans. Histoire de l’Angleterre. introd., notes Pierre Goubert. Oeuvres romancesques completes I, Paris: Gallimard Pleiade, 2000 ISBN 207011323X 2000

The essays or books to read about the history of Jane Austen in translation which includes more items are:

Valerie Cossy, Jane Austen in Switzerland [i.e., in Swiss French]: A Study of the Early French Translations. Geneve: Slatkine, 2006.

Bour, Isabelle, “The Reception of Jane Austen in France,” from The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe, edd. Anthony Mandel and Brian Southam. Continuum.

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Brief historical perspective:

In a nutshell, for much of the 19th century after the first flurry of intense interest and translation of Austen into French (and as a vehicular language, her spread into Europe), Austen texts did not sustain themselves as popular or as material for elite study. They were seen as “too English,” too much a spinster’s romance, or too much a woman’s novel (George Sand was also excluded from the French curriculum while Balzac was worshipped).

In the later 20th century the popular mid1990s films prompted a renewed real interest in Austen from a popular audience, and this gave rise to a few academic studies as well as fine translations. Pleiade came out with a beautiful edition of the three supposed “Steventon” or novels first written 1795-99, together with Lady Susan, History of England and Love and Friendship. This was thus a “Steventon” & Bath volume rather than a first three published novels volume (which would have included Mansfield Park, a major challenge).

The flurry and whatever increased respect for Austen resulting from the academic studies didn’t sell enough books, for the Pleiade people did not go on to Volume 2, or at least there’s no sign of it.

During this time and again since the 2007-9 movies there has also been an attempt to reprint the older and first translations. One can see signs this is facing too, such as only one volume of the 1816 Emma, the quick falling of print of the Archipoche set.

What I hope to do in the next few weeks and then months is post a good synopsis of one fine study of Austen: Pierre Goubert’s JA: Etude Psychologique de la Romanciere, which is so good in itself I fully expect his translations to be wondrous. Perhaps others (Ballester cited above, Catherine Bernard’s JA: Pride and Prejudice: Dans l’oeil du paradoxe and the older Jane Austen by Leonie Villard) and emerge with an idea of Austen as found in Francophone readers.

Then I’ll do the same for Austen criticism in Italian (Beatrice Battaglia’s La Zitella Illetterata: Parodia e ironia nei romanzi di Jane Austen) and look at little at a recent translations of each of the six best known novels to see how they reflect a view. I’ve more time to translate Elsa Morante’s Italian poetry to her cat through a French intermediary vehicular language.

Francophone Charlotte to follow. I’ve become aware the published list of French translations of Charlotte Smith’s novels is incomplete: Isabelle de Montolieu did one of Smith’s Solitary Wanderer tales so I’ll also put together a list for Smith in French. Smith was herself so influenced by the French, as I hope to suggest in my etext edition of her Ethelinde (even if the influence is seen more in her Emmeline, Desmond, The Banished Man and Montalbert.

The above will be threaded in with my reports from the MLA on eighteenth-century topics, and the usual cultural life-writing, and novels as we imagine them today.

A somewhat misleading map because French is also important as a vehicular language in Africa, the Middle East; it omits Louisiana too (a secondary place).

Ellen

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