Foremother Poet: Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

Alice Meynell, around 30 by Tristram Ellis, etching (1879) after water-color portrait by Adrian Stokes

Dear Friends and readers,

Let me spend this night remembering Alice Meynell, how I “met” her: I found a book of her poems in a used bookshop, and then in another bout of looking and buying, a memoir of her by her daughter, and my knowledge of her since coming on line.

I like her longer blank verse and triple rhyme poems best. This is my favorite. It’s an experience I often re-enact, especially in the bleak dark days of winter. It’s the opening of a long three-parter:

A Study

In three monologues, with interruptions

I
Before Light

Among the first to wake. What wakes with me?
A blind wind and a few birds and a star.
With tremor of darkened flowers and whisper of birds,
Oh, with a tremor, with a tremor of heart –
Begins the day i’ the dark. I, newly waked,
Grope backwards for my dreams, thinking to slide
Back unawares to dreams, in vain, in vain.
There is sorrow for me in this day,
It watched me from afar the livelong night,
And now draws near, but has not touched me yet.
In from my garden flits the secret wind –
My garden — This great day with all its hours
(Its hours, my soul!) will be like other days
Among my flowers. The morning will awake,
Like to the lonely waking of a child …

It’s really very beautiful and deeply uneasy verse with a lot of repetition in rhythms, imagery. A rich lush description of the garden follows with the disquieted child in it, whose mother “had come and wept and gone …”

One of the latter:

A Letter from a Girl to her own Old Age

Listen, and when the hand this paper presses,
O time-worn woman, think of her who blesses
What thy thin fingers touch, with her caresses.

O mother, for the weight of years that break thee!
O daughter, for slow time must yet awake thee,
And from the changes of my heart must make thee!

O fainting traveller, morn is grey in heaven.
Dost thou remember how the clouds were driven?
And are they calm about the fall of even?

Pause near the ending of thy long migration,
For this one sudden hour of desolation
Appeals to one hour of thy meditation …

Listen: — the mountain winds with rain were fretting
And sudden gleams the mountain-tops besetting
I cannot let thee fade to death, forgetting.

What part of this wild heart of mine I know not
Will follow with thee whre the great winds blow not
And where the young flowers of the mountain grow not ..;

Oh, in some hour of thine my thoughts shall guide thee.
Suddenly, though time, darkness, silence, hide thee,
This wind from thy lost country flits beside thee, –

Telling thee …

And we, so altered in our shifting phases,
Track one another ‘mid the many mazes,
By the eternal child-breath of the daisies.

I have not writ this letter of divining
To make a glory of thy silent pining,
A triumph of thy mute and strange declining …

O hush, O hush! Thy tears my words are steeping.
O hush, hush, hush! So full, the fount of weeping?
Poor eyes, so quickly moved, so near to sleeping?

Pardon the girl, with strange desires beset her.
Poor woman, lay aside the mournful letter
That breaks thy heart, the one who wrote, forget her.

The one who now thy faded features guesses,
With filial fingers thy grey hair caresses,
With morning tears thy mournful twilight blesses

Yes, this is another foremother poet blog, this one linking to last week’s of Adelaide Anne Proctor: they linked by era, by the importance of Catholicism to them and by the lyrical nature of their poems and their social idealism.

Meynell’s most famous poem reprinted poem:

Renouncement

I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,
          I shun the thought that lurks in all delight –
          The thought of thee — and in the blue Heaven’s height,
And in the sweetest passage of a song.
Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng
          The breast, the thought of thee waits hidden yer bright;
          But it must never, never come in sight;
I must stop short of thee the whole long day.

But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,
          When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,
          And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,
Must doff my will as raiment laid away, –
          With the first dream that comes with the first sleep
          I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.

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John Singer Sargeant, a sketch of Alice

I first came across Alice Meynell in Alice Meynell: Prose and Poetry: Centenary volume, edd. F.P, F.M., O.S., F.Ma. (London: Cape, 1947), a book of selections from her work in a secondhand book shop in Alexandria, Va (the kind that in the US where I live has been killed by the Internet). F.P, F.M., O.S., F.Ma are her hostile non-legatees, family members who turn up at funerals and not otherwise. The book contains also a biographical sketch and critical introduction by Vita Sackville-West.

I was drawn much more to her prose, which is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s: sketches of literary and artistic people, belletristic descriptions with philosophical and literary critical undercurrent, with an accent on women (Johnson’s wife, Christina Rossetti, the Brontes, Joanne Baillie, Elizabeth Inchbald, Arbella Stuart), but also the famous poets of her day (whom she knew and who read and praised her work, including Tennyson, Browning) and
depictions of places: Walls, Wells, the Colour of Life. I like all the above very much, especially the ones on “minor” unknown or outcast women, and places.

Here is a poem showing her doing justice to her foremothers, combining memories of a court 17th century poet with hatred of war:

A Father of Women

Ad Sororem E.B.

“Thy father was infused into thy blood..”
          Dryden: Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew

          Ou father works in us,
The daughters of his manhood. Not undone
Is he, not wasted, though transmuted thus,
          And though he left no son.

          Therefore on him I cry
To arm me: “For my delicate mind a casque,
A breastplate for my heart, courage to die,
          Of thee, captain, I ask.

          ”Nor strengthen only; press
A finger on this violent blood and pale,
Over this rash will let thy tenderness
          A while pause, and prevail.

          ”And shepherd-father, thou
Whose staff folded my thoughts before my birth,
Control them now I am of earth, and now
          Thou art no more of earth.”

          ”O liberal, constant, dear,
Crush in my nature the ungenerous art
Of the inferior; set me high, and here,
          Here garner up thy heart!”

          Like to him now are they,
The million living fathers of the War–
Mourning the crippled world, the bitter day–
          Whose striplings are no more.

          The crippled world! Come then,
Fathers of women with your honor in trust;
Approve, accept, know them daughters of men,
          Now that your sons are dust.

As an essayist and biographer she’s interested in childhood private lives and especially women. (Meynell’s relatives watched her on the shore from the safety of their houses. Her world seems very like that of the Stephens family, Mary Ward, the Stracheys.

She is presented as marrying at age 30, having had a pack of children (8) who, together with her disciplined adherence to journalism, engulfed her days until the last twenty when she was at last free and had some money and went to Italy. I feel this sonnet reflects her Italian studies of Renaissance poetry:

To One Poem in a Silent Time

Who looked for thee, thou little song of mine?
This winter of a silent poet’s heart
Is suddenly sweet with thee. But what thou art,
Mid-winter flower, I would I could divine.
Art though a last one, orphan of they line?
Did the dead summer’s last warmth foster thee?
Or is Spring folded up unguessed in me,
And stirring out of sight,–and thou the sign?

Where shall I look–backwards or to the morrow
For others of thy fragrance, secret child?
Who knows if last things or if first things claim thee?
– Whether thou be the last smile of my sorrow,
Or else a joy too sweet, a joy too wild.
How, my December violet, shall I name thee?

She apparently had a way of addressing them all indiscriminately as “child.” From the book I originally found (and which was all I had) I learned how much she loved Italy late in life. There are quite a number of poems which show how much the experience meant to her, how fulfilling she found it. As someone at the time embarked on a project to translate Italian women’s poetry this attracted me too.

In those days (early 1980s), for me to find anything like this
was a tremendous treat.

Years later, the early days of my time on the Internet I leapt onto a life of Meynell, A Memoir written by her daughter, Viola Meynell. There is nothing compares without seeing people in their milieu.

Drawing Room, Granville Place, where she lived later in life

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Alice Meynell, a portrait photograph

Now with the Net and finding circles of people like myself I realize much more about her beyond her family, famous friends and conversion to Catholicism and supporting of the religious Catholic poet, Francis Thomson. For example, she was politically active, a staunch supporter of non-militant suffragists. However, although she detested war, as far as I can see from her poetry, when it came to a particular one (WW1), she supported it in public and print. There’s one poem encouraging the “conscript” among those I have in my book.

Her poetry remains mostly personal and lyrical. She treats motherhood as oppressive, and children with unsentimental control: Leighton and Reynolds in Victorian Women Poets say her poems about family life “bring to the topic a notably modern sense of uncertainty and foreboding.” (They include a small well-chosen selection.) She has Victorian currents: guilt, shame, meditation about God, Doubts, a poem on the theme of the sexually “fallen” woman. This one is unusual though because she shows a relationship between a mother and son. Her interest in childhood moves away from the older treatment of neglected, outcast, over-disciplined, miserable traumatized children we find in the Victorian books. The loss of childhood is a loss to be regretted and she bathes her memories in a Woolfian way. The real problem with her poetry is she uses clichéd language. That last poem, “A letter from a Girl to her own Old Age” to think with (!), seems to me like Swinburne, and while others sound like the imagery of the fin-de-siecle, “The Study” is more like Caroline Bowles Southey.

There has been a biography: June Badeni’s The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell, with a publisher which suggests it’s a sort of semi-private or vanity publication.

My life on the Net has enabled me to go to conferences, and at an MLA conference I heard a paper about Meynell: Stephanie Johnson’s paper on her poetry; Meynell was said to look upon her poems as her children, to connect women’s poetry to domesticity, to regard poems as creating an order of beauty (reflecting the “divine” world?). Johnson rehearsed religious ideals she found in Meynell’s life and poetry. I connect her adherence to Catholicism with her depressions which are central to her poetic mood, e.g.

To Sleep

          Dear fool, be true to me!
I know the poets speak thee fair, and I
          Hail thee uncivilly.
O but I call with a more urgent cry!

          I do not prize thee less,
I need thee more, that thou dost love to teach—
          Father of foolishness—
The imbecile dreams clear out of wisdom’s reach.

          Come and release me; bring
My irresponsible mind; come in thy hours;
          Draw from my soul the sting
Of wit that trembles, consciousness that cowers.

          For if night comes without thee
She is more cruel than day. But thou, fulfil
          Thy work, thy gifts about thee—
Liberty, liberty, from this weight of will.

          My day-mind can endure
Upright, in hope, all it must undergo.
          But O afraid, unsure,
My night-mind waking lies too low, too low.

          Dear fool, be true to me!
The night is thine, man yields it, it beseems
          Thy ironic dignity.
Make me all night the innocent fool that dreams.

To the Body

          Thou inmost, ultimate
Council of judgement, palace of decrees,
Where the high sense hold their spiritual state,
          Sued by earth’s embassies,
And sign, approve, accept, conceive, create;

          Create–thy senses close
With the world’s pleas. The random odours reach
Their sweetness in the place of thy repose,
          Upon thy tongue the peach,
And in thy nostrils breathes the breathing rose.

          To thee, secluded one,
The dark vibrations of the sightless skies,
The lovely inexplicit colours, run;
The light gropes for those eyes.
O thou august! thou doest command the sun.

          Music, all dumb, hath trod
Into thine ear her one effectual way;
And fire and cold approach to gain thy nod,
          Where thou call’st up the day,
Where thou awaitest the appeal of God.

Here is an edition of her poems online. See also Beverly Ann Schlack, “The Poetess of Poets: Alice Meynell rediscovered: Women’s Studies 7 (180):111-126.

See also foremother poetry.

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Adelaide Anne Procter (1825-64)

Luke Fildes (1843-1918), Applicants for Admission to a Casualty Ward (1874)

Dear friends and readers,

I write this foremother poet blog to be able to present a poem (by Proctor) because yesterday morning it came to mind upon my reading and watching on DemocracyNow.Org the early dawn destructions of the Occupy encampments at San Francisco and Cleveland:

Homeless

It is cold dark midnight, yet listen
          To that patter of tiny feet!
Is it one of your dogs, fair lady,
          Who whines in the bleak cold street? –
Is it one of your silken spaniels
          Shut out in the snow and the sleet?

My dogs sleep warm in their baskets,
          Safe from the darkness and sow;
Al the beasts in our Christian England,
          Find pity wherever they go –
(Those are only the homeless children
          Who are wandering to and fro.)

Look out in the gusty darkness –
          I have seen it again and again,
That shadow, that flits so slowly
          Up and down past the window pane: –
It is surely some criminal lurking
          Out there in the frozen rain?

Nay, our Criminals all are sheltered,
          They are pitied and taught and fed;
That is only a sister-woman
          Who has got neither food nor bed –
And the Night cries ‘sin to be living,’
          And the River cries ‘sin to be dead.’

Look out at that farthest corner
          Where the wall stands blank and bare: –
Can that be a pack which a Pedlar
          Has left and forgotten there?
His gods lying out unsheltered
          Will be spoilt by the damp night air.

Nay; — goods in our thrifty England
          Are not left to lie and grow rotten,
For each man knows the market value
          Of silk or woollen or cotton …
But in counting the riches of England
I think our Poor are forgotten.

Our Beasts and our Thieves and our Chattels
          Have weight for good or for ill;
But the Poor are only His image,
          His Presence, His word, His will –
And so Lazarus lies at our doorstep
          And Dives neglects him still.

Charles Dickens who was one of her mainstay publishers, wrote a touching obituary upon Proctor’s death, that has been placed on the Internet as part ofan excellent website about Proctor as a social reformer in the context of the harsh lives of her era. In a session at a January 2008 MLA meeting, I went to a Victorian women’s religious poetry session, and discovered that Cheri Lin Larsen Hoeckley spoke about Adelaide Proctor’s use of devotional sentimental poetry to focus on poverty, exile, homelessness, female communities; Proctor used the profit she made from Chaplet of VersesM to benefit women. Proctor saw women’s lives were a target for exploitation, & she attacked the way respectability became a way of excluding women from social help ruthlessly. Her philanthropic activities probably led to her early death: she contracted TB. Proctor’s best poem seems to be the dramatic narrative, “A Legend of Provence”

I can also respond to the thoughts and feelings of her poetry of sensibility:

My Journal.

IT is a dreary evening;
          The shadows rise and fall:
With strange and ghostly changes,
          They flicker on the wall.

Make the charred logs burn brighter;
          I will show you, by their blaze,
The half-forgotten record
          Of bygone things and days.

Bring here the ancient volume;
          The clasp is old and worn,
The gold is dim and tarnished,
          And the faded leaves are torn.

The dust has gathered on it—
          There are so few who care
To read what Time has written
          Of joy and sorrow there.

Look at the first fair pages;
          Yes—I remember all:
The joys now seem so trivial,
          The griefs so poor and small.

Let us read the dreams of glory
          That childish fancy made;
Turn to the next few pages,
          And see how soon they fade.

Here, where still waiting, dreaming,
          For some ideal Life,
The young heart all unconscious
          Had entered on the strife.

See how this page is blotted:
          What—could those tears be mine?
How coolly I can read you,
          Each blurred and trembling line.

Now I can reason calmly,
          And, looking back again,
Can see divinest meaning
          Threading each separate pain.

Here strong resolve—how broken;
          Rash hope, and foolish fear,
And prayers, which God in pity
          Refused to grant or hear.

Nay—I will turn the pages
          To where the tale is told
Of how a dawn diviner
          Flushed the dark clouds with gold.

And see, that light has gilded
          The story—nor shall set;
And, though in mist and shadow,
          You know I see it yet.

Here—well, it does not matter,
          I promised to read all;
I know not why I falter,
          Or why my tears should fall;

You see each grief is noted;
          Yet it was better so—
I can rejoice to-day—the pain
          Was over, long ago.

I read—my voice is failing,
          But you can understand
How the heart beat that guided
          This weak and trembling hand.

Pass over that long struggle,
          Read where the comfort came,
Where the first time is written
          Within the book your name.

Again it comes, and oftener,
          Linked, as it now must be,
With all the joy or sorrow
          That Life may bring to me.

So all the rest—you know it:
          Now shut the clasp again,
And put aside the record
          Of bygone hours of pain.

The dust shall gather on it,
          I will not read it more:
Give me your hand—what was it
          We were talking of before?

I know not why—but tell me
          Of something gay and bright.
It is strange—my heart is heavy,
          And my eyes are dim to-night

See the much longer feminist “Three Evenings in a Life”

She was wildly popular, Queen Victoria’s favorite poet it was said; I have de-emphasized her Catholicism so should say a good deal is to be found out about her when her name is linked to Catholicism and Catholic causes: see wikipedia, which also has a large and rich bibliography. Of the cited anthologies, I recommend Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds’s (edd.) Victorian Women Poets, An Anthology. She exchanged letters with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. These two seem worthwhile: Gregory, Gill. The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter: Poetry, Feminism and Fathers. Aldershot, Hants., England: Ashgate, 1998; Gray, F. Elizabeth. “Review of The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter: Poetry, Feminism and Fathers”. Victorian Studies 42 (1999): 682–684, and “Adelaide Procter’s ‘A Legend of Provence’: The Struggle for a Place”. In Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader. Ed. Angela Leighton. New Jersey: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

Ellen

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Sarah Fielding’s The Governess; or, Little Female Academy

Helen Allingham (1848-1926), Aitre, St Maclou, Rouen (1890s, a French girls’ school)

A colorized version of an 18th century French rococo print of Madame d’Epinay visiting Voltaire on his Swiss country estate

Dear friends and readers,

Earlier this year (February to be exact), a very few of us on Eighteenth Century Worlds at Yahoo, read and posted together on Sarah Fielding’s David Simple and then her The Governess; or Little Female Academy. I’ve been meaning to blog at least about The Governess and am now prompted to as it appears one evening at Godmersham, Jane and Cassandra and a few friends (with Anne Sharpe looking on) acted some version or playlet taken from this text out. Imagine that. Wouldn’t we love to have that fragment? (I’ll write about this in a separate blog and if I have time also about our group read on Eighteenth Century Worlds of Sarah Fielding’s David Simple.)

Mary Cadogan’s preface sets the book in the context of stories of girls’ schools, and says it’s among the first, perhaps the first to offer a realistic account of the experiences of children everyday — and here i School. So it’s the great-great…. grandmother of Katy Did books. Fielding shows us the world of girls’s peer groups. The first book for boys in this vein was also by a woman, Harriet Martineau The Crofton Boys. Fielding entertains with little biographies, stories, fables (her preface has two of these).

Fielding’s dedication and preface has the same strong austere stance we felt in David Simple and there is even towards the end of the preface a rather darker comment which brings us into DS’s world when she warns you against certain behaviors of people who say they are your friends but are “not your real Friend,” and if you don’t have “resolution enough” to break from them “in the end will fling you to death.”

The plot-design: as the extended title says it’s book about girls’ schooldays: at the center is Mrs Teachum; each of the chapters is named after the day of the week on which each of the girls tells a story, sometimes autobiographical, sometimes about characters given type names and sometimes fairy tales. The book opens with a dedication, preface and opening: we are told how Mrs Teachum came to have a school, how it’s small and exclusive, the nine young ladies are presented and we learn of them each through their fight over the apples.

The book’s problem is Fielding thinks she has to produce good girl messages. Children’s literature when seriously considered is a problematic genre because of who writes the books, what they are sold for. They are said to be “children’s books,” but they are written by adults with adult interests in mind. It emerges as a popular genre in the 18th century: see Defining her Life: Conduct and Courtesy.

Another variant of the type; so too Swiss Family Robinson

The one thing that made be said for good girl messages as delineated by Fielding is at heart it’s a quietist view — resignation and compromise for peace of mind (common in women’s books in a way):”Remember,” Mrs. Teachum warns, “that Innocence of Mind, and Integrity of Heart, adorn the Female Character; and can alone produce your own Happiness, and diffuse it to all around you.” This is how Jane Eyre ends; her innocence of mind and integrity of heart are now going to strengthen and rejuvenate her “master’s,” Rochester’s, bringing him back from his brink of bitterness and despair. “Le repos” at the end of French 17th century romances like LaFayette’s La Princess de Cleves takes us along the same route.

See also my blog, Felicite de Genlis, writer, educator, mother.

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From The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969): her girls

Dedication and preface:

The dedication and preface appealed to me for their high-minded tone. Yes our “true Interest is concerned in cherishing and improving those amiable dispositions into Habits.” On the fray over the apples: I’d like to suggest Fielding begins with an insuperable problem in education, one Felicite Genlis confronted quickly too — and it’s the one I pointed out that engaged me. What do we do about how people have bad natures? Today it might be put as the problem of bullies and society’s acceptance of this. I don’t know how better to put it. Fielding goes into the minds of the girls and shows that the moral teachings and appeals that Jenny Peace make have no echo in the minds of the girls; they just feel more resentment.

Each time Jenny seems to make a dent in the girls, it emerges that the girl is just thinking another version of resentment, ago, aggression and how to get back, about her pride and so on. Genlis presents herself as overcoming this in the individual case by moral blackmail, absolute repression, punishment and reward but (as I said) I didn’t believe it and when Genlis’s real daughter (upon whom Adele is modelled) grew up if you read her letters you find she seethes with resentment, alienation &c&c

I can see how Sarah Fielding would regard marrying for survival (not just money, but house, food, everything that came with it) is a form of prostitution. It’s a good analogy as in this period women had few options but marriage to maintain themselves in safety and decency; many did resort to prostitution and then they were treated terribly. This was enough to drive women into marriage — despite the loss of their control over property, that a man could beat, eject, basically do with his wife as he wished if he was prepared to abuse and threaten her. We see women’s lack of control or custody of their children (after 7).

I and a friend, Diana, were upset by the story of the wanton killing of Jenny’s cat. Here’s the passage:

When I was about Eleven Years old, I had a Cat that I had bred up from a little Kitten, that used to play round me, till I had indulged for the poor Animal a Fondness that made me delight to have it continually with me where-ever I went; and, in return for my Indulgence, the Cat seemed to have changed its Nature, and assumed the Manner that more properly belongs to Dogs than Cats; for it would follow me about the House and Gardens, mourn for my absence, and rejoice at my Presence: And, what was very remarkable, the poor Animal would, when fed by my Hand, lose that Caution many Cats are known to be possessed of, and take whatever I gave it, as if it could reflect, that I meant only its Good, and no Harm could come from me.

I was at last so accustomed to see this little Frisk (for so I called it) play round me, that I seemed to miss Part of myself in its But one Day the poor little Creature followed me to the door; when a Parcel of School-boys coming by, one of them catched her up in his arms, and ran away with her. All my Cries were to no Purpose for he was out of Sight with her in a Moment, and there was no method to trace his Steps. The cruel Wretches, for Sport, as as they called it, hunted it the next Day from one to the other, in the most barbarous manner; till at last it took Shelter in that House that used to be its Protection, and came and expired at my Feet. I was so struck with the Sight of the little Animal’s dying in that manner, that the great Grief of my Heart overflowed at my Eyes, and I was for some time inconsolable.

What bothers me in the cat story is the mother of Jenny then uses it as a lesson to teach Jenny to accept misery and cruelty in existence — without so much as admitting the foundation of her preaching is that the creature is just a cat. And all Jenny tells us she learnt to control her grief and accept, nothing about the cat. This erasing of the particulars of the incident is fatal.

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A dialogue about Monday:

Shot from Cocteau’s La Belle et la bete

Caroline wrote:

Since I teach fairy tales, I was delighted to reach the “Monday” chapter, with “The Story of the cruel Giant BARBARICO, and the good Giant BENEFICO, and the pretty little Dwarf MIGNON.” This is a fascinating fairy tale and certainly illustrates how Sarah Fielding influenced Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in her imitation, Magasin des Enfans, which includes “Beauty and the Beast”

For this list, however, what really interests me is the way in which this tale revises the first two volumes of _David Simple_ in the genre of the fairy tale. One clue to this revision is Mrs. Teachum’s explanation of how to read the tale
symbolically: “For a Giant is called so only to express a Man of great Power; and the magic Fillet round the Statue was intended only to shew you, that by Patience you will overcome all Difficulties.”

Here we have another tale of the powerful abusing the weak. Barbarico hoards his wealth and torments the more vulnerable (little) people. He snatches Fidus. However, we also see the power of friendship: Fidus is befriended by Mignon, while elsewhere the kind and wealthy Benefico befriends Amata, who is betrothed to Fidus. The patience of Mignon and others frees them; and the giant Benefico slays Barbarico, takes the wealth, and redistributes it among Barbarico’s
victims. He also (like David) takes the key characters into his castle. Lovers and siblings are reunited. The little community lives happily ever after

What struck me about Monday is how adult the emotions are that Sarah Fielding attributes to the fairy tale figures. This is not general language, but filled with subtle psychological motivation and a desire to torment and inflict pain and power I’d expect to find much more in say a Kafka short story. The fairy tales I’ve read — or remember reading — do not delve one figure’s love of tormenting another. As a consequence of this depth of psychological acuity and particulars, I felt the “burden” of the experience went far beyond what Sarah Fielding consciously presented as the moral.

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Tuesday into Wednesday:

This day opens with the girls learning much better lessons from the fable they heard than talk about what they liked best. I was amused by the characterization of their dialogue as simply seeking for pre-eminence and how Fielding saw going down to particulars and keeping talking about them will eventually end in quarrels. She would have not been surprised as quarrels on listservs.

We have two girls described and a brief resume of each one’s life by her. The concision of the treatment a little disguises how this is novel matter put into didactic form. Sukey Jennet’s life also shows us how a child can be brought up to be a domineering heartless person if she is taught repeatedly others are not equal to her as human beings — and she is to have her own way in everything.

I was troubled in Sukey’s story where they see the woman beating her daughter for lying. I know that maybe Fielding felt she was showing this is not the way to stop someone from lying but it seemed to me the text half-supported the woman doing the beating. It’s suggested in a way that for some only beating will stop lying. That may be so — for a while. When the person grows up, they have no reason not to revert; worse, they have been taught to beat others this way, that it’s acceptable.

We see how authority is based on physical size; I’m not sure that Fielding meant me to see it this way but I do.

Not that I’m keen on lying; it is a real problem in life — Fielding has focused on a second insoluble problem in trying to educate someone to be moral. The first was the intransigence of “bad” elements in our nature; the second is this resort to lying to cover up, manipulate, defend one’s pride &c

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Maggie Smith as the less than truthful Miss Jean Brodie

Wednesday and Thursday

I found myself really troubled by the moral lesson drawn from the story of Chloe and Caelia. Sarah Fielding does not appear to recognize the treacherous character who causes the mischief is Sempronius. If someone thinks that Sarah Fielding does see it’s he who nearly breaks this family up permanently, please to argue this point with me because it’s important. In the early phase of David Simple, it may be remembered that David does not marry a young woman who he falls in love with but whom her father first pressures to marry someone else, and when that falls through, partly because she does not want to marry simply for money, David still walks away from her as someone horrible. He cannot allow that she could be tempted or pressured.

Sempronius lies to Chloe. He pretends he is thinking of marry Caelia and coming to her for advice; he implies if she will tell him Caelia is no good, he won’t want her and will want Chloe.

This is a strong temptation. We are told these girls are broke; they need to marry; the aunt won’t live forever, plus unmarried women even with an income were at all sorts of disadvantages in the communities of 18th century England. So she lies and says Caelia is artful and envious.

Then what does he do? he goes to Caelia to try the same trick on her. Caelia is self-sacrificing and presented as abject, and goes out of her way to overpraise the sister. So he decides he’ll take Caelia. But he doesn’t right away. Instead he lets them all stew and be miserable and wretched. Chloe who is humane feels bad already and confesses.

Then what happens. He gets to marry Caelia. We are told the moral of this is “the miserable effects of deceit and treachery” where the line is aimed at Chloe. The deceitful and treacherous person was Sempronius.

Why did Caelia marry him? We are not told it was that she needed financial support in a way that brings that motive out clearly. Rather we are left to think she likes this guy.

Fielding is telling a story which shows us the desperation of women and how men can play ugly tricks on them. She does not see this — or if she does, she doesn’t register this in the text.

Then we get two stories where the lesson is how wretched and miserable comparing yourself with others makes you. Dison dies of her envy. We are told that Patty Lockit didn’t feel this way when brought up in a large group and so much younger; but when she went to live with a Cousin who was smarter, she learned to hate her. The villain in this piece is the maid Betsy who sets Patty on.
To be sure Betsy is no friend to Patty; but the solution that going to live in this house filled with girls seems to me to ignore what has happened.

Is Fielding showing us the reality that social structuring such as we have in society and competition as a leading value is insidious and poisons our lives. No. She is blaming the victims — victims of their own weakness to be sure. What then is her solution? Living among all these girls. We have no reason to believe in their hearts the same kind of invidiouis feelings will not emerge — in the first story she did not at all convince me that Jenny Pearce’s preachings changed the nature of the girls she presented, and in these two tales we have enough to show us that people tenaciously hold on to their egoistic passions.

Now the life of Lucy Sly intervenes as a story where a girl learns of the misery of a life of lying which leads to hatred of those around her. Now I agree with the thrust of this one — partly because it’s so short Fielding does not go on to make inferences. Yes the person who lies in this way often does it out of intense envy and when they can’t break out of it, and see how they are fooling you, they can see how inferior and hypocritical they are, and hate the person lied to all the more, despise him or her as someone easily fooled. The emotions here the person is habituated to are probably part of why our society is such a seething place. But I cannot help but point out, Fielding does not reform Lucy. If anything this parable undermines all the others about the schools’ efficacy.

Lying by the way is a way of getting through life for many as long as the lie is superficial (student with a late paper, student who cut a class, contractor who pretends he will start work earlier than he means to) or in business (ah ha) where it’s a matter of money and property and vying for position. When it comes to the private lives Fielding depicts here people are found out when it goes on for any time especially when it concerns something important They stay together as a ritual or convention to keep the peace but are not fooled after a while. And lying is a pain: you have to keep your stories straight and after a while will contradict yourself.

From Caroline, a rejoinder:

“I also find “The Story of Caelia and Chloe” troubling. This tale insists that Chloe’s envy and lies are wrong not just in themselves but because they upset the community: Caelia is unhappy, Sempronius is angry, and Amanda is bewildered by the confusion in the household. In other words, it’s important to be a good girl not just because it’s the moral thing to do but because it’s the socially acceptable thing to do.

This point again reflects Sarah Fielding’s position–the genteel woman dependent
on a community for support–and she takes it to a disturbing level by showing the potential consequences: death. Chloe’s deceit nearly brings her to the grave, and the near-death is not just an excess of sensibility but a sense that she no longer belongs: “For she thought within herself, I shall now make my dear Cousin happy, by removing out of her Way an Object that must imbitter all her Joy.” This is the ultimate good-girl lesson. Behave, or you won’t be wanted any more.

This lesson does seem harsh for children because it’s presented in a realistic tale.

For more on this tale, see comments.
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Friday through Saturday:

I’ve now read Hebe’s — or Sybella the fairy’s — tale too. In fact there are at least three mothers and several different natured daughters. I agree that the women are made all powerful in this story, but what struck me — perhaps from memories of Genlis’s book (which this one is perpetually bringing to mind — is the moral: a daughter must obey her mother. As Caroline says, these morals that are derived from these tales cannot begin to control the details and probably Fielding knew it, but to me this disconnection or forced connection is both funny and important. The larger “submit” Before authorities is in Genlis too.

Again Caroline:

It seems to me that Fielding continues with these conservative messages in Mrs. Teachum’s “The Assembly of the Birds. A Fable.” The fable focuses on a contest to see which bird is happiest. The first bird, a Parrot who lives in a golden cage as the pet of a fine lady, replays the moral of David Simple: dependence on the elite leads to misery. The second bird, a daw, is exposed for its borrowed plumes, while the gorgeous peacock nearly expires from envy of the nightingale’s beautiful voice. The nightingale is vain and therefore prey to the hawk, etc. True happiness, we discover, is exhibited by the dove. While these morals do not warm my very modern soul, I do like the way that Fielding teaches another valuable lesson: how to read. Again and again, her characters model reading, summary, analysis, and reflection. So while the book PREACHES some conservative messages, it DOES a very progressive thing: it takes seriously the life of a girl’s mind. It insists on true understanding and application of readings, and to demonstrate those points, it shows the girls relating their life-stories. Simply telling those (fictional) life-stories affirms their value, which could be seen as empowering to girls. You, [insert reader's name], matter.

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Sunday and Monday again:

From 2oth century production of Steele’s The conscious Lovers

Fielding offers two characters who come to visit the school, girls recently raised to the peerage as daughters: Lady Caroline who has turned into an utter snob, and Lady Fanny who paradoxically ugly prides herself ridiculously on her beauty. They are matched by descriptions and life stories of girls similarly making themselves ridiculous — and miserable — due to their overvaluation of status and non-existent beauty (Nancy Spruce and Betty Ford)

I think again Fielding is reaching out to something fundamental she thinks gets in the way of genuinely ethical development of girls: the focus on their physical appearannce, and (I’d put it) in the light of the disvaluation of girls/women as such an egregious over-emphasis on social class and rank status. I am bothered by her presenting Lady Fanny and Betty Ford as ugly and not attacking the overvaluation of beauty in the first place and why it’s there. Maybe that’s asking too much, but Madame Genlis does go this far in her Adele and Theodore regularly.

Monday is more interesting. The girls do not play-act Steele’s Funeral; instead they produce moral readings of it. I’m struck by a kind of transvaluation of values I came across when I read Catherine Trotter on The man of Mode. Far from amusement, Trotter saw in the central male a figure who spelt misery for women, a man bad to women and not just getting away with it, but of high status because of this. The girls do not read Steele to laugh or say they laugh but as a psychologial inner history. The reading is misogynistic — blaming Lady Brumpton. As I recall Anne Oldfield played Lady Harriot, and recently this play and Steele’s work in general has been praised as sentimental and sentimental comedy seen as bringing in a pro-woman’s point of view, but that was for The Tender Husband and Conscious Lovers. Still I’m struck by how if Fielding reacted with adverse dislike to the cruelties of the play, as I recently did to Murphy’s The Way to Keep Him, and Trotter to The man of Mode why or if she missed totally this vein of feminism.

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To conclude: Maybe I’m reading too much into the text, perhaps as a result of having read other of these books supposedly just on education, but I see it as a serious book meant for adults beyond literal advice on how to teach children. For example, the first phase showed us the girls’s bad nature and how hard it was to improve, even to reach. Tuesday brought in lying, another serious obstacle if you are intent on teaching girls how to live ethically, grow up to be decent happy people, indeed what is the good life. Then there is corporal punishment — and I still think Sarah is not against it. The fairy tale itself had a burden of adult perception: for example the enjoyment of tormenting of one person by another. I don’t remember that being analysed and brought out in any thing like this way by any fairy tales I read when young.

It is true that unlike Locke’s treatise or Rousseau’s Emile, Fielding’s book is obviously meant for children to read too, but Genlis’s Adele and Theodore can be read by adolescents at any rate and Epinay’s dialogue had it been published and disseminated (I’m not sure it was) are dialogues children could read. Genlis’s resembles Fielding’s in the austerity and disciplinary approach it takes. Epinay is much kinder, more aware of the necessity of following individual needs rather than repressing them

Women wrote these sorts of books. Charlotte Smith’s is relieved because it’s about the natural world, stories of animals, botany, nature at the same time, filled with poetry. Genlis’s is at its most powerful when she inserts novels. Mostly though the books are didactic morality on the surface. Later famous ones include Hester Chapone’s letters. I’m not sure how many children really read such books but they are readable by younger people. And it’s true that this one is situated in a school so you could say we have the first glimmerings in this book of What Katy Did.

What Katy Did Next by Susan Coolidge

And Austen’s own novels, with their emphasis on education, and direct allusions (at least in Emma) to some of this previous literature are another kind of legacy.

Ellen

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Women’s liberty: On Being Answerable with Her Body

Said to be a woman strike leader

Dear friends and readers,

A couple of days ago, as a result of thinking about Austen’s lack of power in her letters (she can’t travel anywhere, she can’t say where she’ll live) and because I had been reading some superb papers on liberty in connection with the paper I’m working on for the coming EC/ASECS conference: “‘I have the right to choose my own life:’ Liberty in Winston Graham’s Poldark novels,” I’ve been thinking about the concept of liberty as connected to women.

I noticed most of the literature, older and classic (Benjamin Constant, John Stuart
Mill) and more recent (Isaiah Berlin and Quentin Skinner) treat the concept as if it’s experienced exactly the same for women as for men. This is not quite fair to Mill because he does have a separate treatise On the Subjection of Women where he argues that women are not at all what they might possibly be because they have been so pre-shaped by norms and values hostile to them.

Still when Mill writes of liberty, he writes of “mankind” as if women were to be understood understood under the same rubric in the same terms. What I’ve been thinking about is how one central difference when it comes to liberty is that women have lacked it because they are made directly answerable with their bodies in ways not enforced on men.

Again in Jane Austen’s letters (which I’ve been reading) one repeatedly comes across her inability to travel anywhere beyond where her feet will take her (walking). She is obstructed by her brothers and father who will not permit her to travel alone — without a man or chaperon; she acquiesces in this and agrees it’s necessary that she not travel in conveyances which carry people beneath their gentry class. So she lacks negative freedom to travel. But she writhes as she waits until it suits the convenience of a brother to come pick her up and take her to where she wants to go. She has no area where she can act unobstructed to get onto a carriage to travel. But if they didn’t forbid, could she go where she wanted? No. She lacks the money. She is not free in a positive sense since all the arrangements around her have been set up to prevent her from earning enough; she has no self-mastery, she lacks the wherewithal.

Now both her lack of negative and positive liberty are connected to another aspect of our experience of liberty discussed by Berlin: our status. Just as one might expect he never brings in gender among the things that affect status: religion, race, ethnicity, class, but gender, no. It’s her gender that forbids the traveling alone and her gender that the society has refused to provide a way of earning a real living for. It’s that inflection of negative and positive liberty that totally hems her in and makes it impossible for her to travel. A modern instance is Saudi Arabia where it’s forbidden to women to drive.

To cut to the quick, all of this swirls around the demand a woman be chaste (or a virgin), be pushed into marriage, motherhood. The key problem for women and liberty is they are still answerable with their bodies centrally. It is okay to rape a woman — we’ve seen that this summer and seen how rules of evidence demands work against her, how her reputation is everything; if she’s not an angel, then she wanted rape and the man had a right to (I speak of several women who were raped and whose cases were dismissed; the men did it with impunity and the women were treated with suspicion and derision). This summer we’ve seen hatred of a young woman who did not conform to angel prescriptions for motherhood (I speak of Casey Anthony who a jury acquitted). Women are continually pressured to get pregnant, be mothers, breast-feed. I came across two cases in my research for a book on child murder which shows the suspicion women want to kill their fetuses or babies is still given play by permitting people who represent agencies (institutions, communities) to invade the pregnant girl’s body and if she hides her pregnancy, it’s evidence against her. If she’s pregnant she is to care for this fetus in her more than herself. The demand a woman look a certain way to attract a man — that came up in my use of the term spinsterhood and its negative connotations on my blog.

I know many societies have enforced conscription for military service for men, but this is a limited time frame and not sexual. I know many societies have practiced chattel slavery, which includes men. But few (a very few in Africa) have done so in more than a century. Women are today trafficked in Slavish Europe and Africa with impunity.

I was wondering if there is a book which treats of these issues directly. I
know that indirectly one might say that Carol Pateman’s Sexual Contract
and Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight assume this enforced servitude is the
center of women’s problems but they do not treat directly of the issue of liberty, of freedom of action and independence. Catherine MacKinnon’s books that I’ve read are centered on rape. You could say indirectly (way back) Mary Wollstonecraft centers her discussion “The Rights of Woman” when she gets to it to how women are sexualized, but she does not deal with the concept of liberty. I am wondering if someone can direct me to essays or books which treat of women’s liberty in the way say the classic studies treat of men’s.

For a summary of Mill’s argument in Subjection of Women, see comments.

Ellen

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Cleland’s v Davies’s Fanny Hill: comic original erotica turned into fairy tale ironic romance

Mrs Jones (Ruth Sheen) to Fanny Hill (Rebecca Knight): If she does not take Mr H as a keeper, and ends up on the streets, “It doesn’t bear thinking about” (2007 Sally Head Fanny Hill)

Dear friends and readers,

Last night I finished reading John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748/49), which has come to be commonly know as Fanny Hill; I read partly to understand the 2007 mini-series scripted by Andrew Davies, directed by James Hawes (credits as respectable as Davies), produced by Nigel Marchant. I was also curious to see what the text really is like and how it fits into the “heroine’s text” type of novel prevalent in the 18th century from novels of males in drag (La Vie de Marianne, Clarissa, La Nouvelle Heloise) to women-centered texts by women (from La Princess de Cleves to Austen’s famous six).

I find it a book which starts off very lively and meaningful in the heroine’s text pattern (as outlined by Nancy Miller), even highly original in what it dared to present to a middle class reader, and meaning to be humane, enlightened (anti- religious repressions and lies), but marred badly by a its cliched language, thought (sentimental and genteel) and finally in the second half losing all sense of plot-design and deliquescing from a delicate form of erotica into clinically detached pornography.

Its importance though is not derived simply from its content or aesthetic value: since it was prosecuted early on, and had a lingering reputation ever after (was kept in print) and was in the 20th century linked with Lady Chatterley’s Lover as unacceptable porn, it has a sociological importance other books of this type (erotic, porn) do not have (see Hal Gladfelder, “Obscenity, censorship, and the eighteenth-century novel: the case of John Cleland,” Wordsworth Circle, 35.3 (Summer 2004):134ff.)

By contrast, Davies’s rendition is a strongly plotted throughout, ironic fairy tale which concentrates on the importance of female relationships, how they are ambivalent (as two women teaming up together despite any dislike), necessary and what rare true empathies (Mrs Cole with Fanny — in Ruby in Paradise a similar pair) can do. The importance of Davies’s film is that of costume drama: that this kind of material should be included (however restrained) and that the actors who appear here can also appear in Austen films and the plot- and character parallels between an Austen film and this semi-pornographic one (we see women performing fellatio on men in positions that show they have no agency whatsoever).

What follows is a journal report of my reading experience, section by section where I compare book to recent movie as I go along.

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Esther Davies (Emily Stanfield) telling the orphan Fanny that she can survive by supporting herself in London; she need only travel there (Esther is a minor character, mentioned once or twice in Cleland’s novels; Davies turns her into a major character across the mini-series)

I began this novel this morning and it reads like a parody of novels in the mode of Richardson’s Pamela; perhaps it’s more like Marivaux’s Marianne with a specific allusion to Pamela (the use of the spelling “vartue” and a comic retelling of Pamela’s story as if it really happened). I find it more persuasive than Marianne who is immediately picked up by a protector. Fanny comes to London because after the death of her parents from small pox she receives only cold and minimal charity and a friend, Esther Davis, offers to take her to London — all the while using Fanny’s money (but minimally Esther’s vice is not expensiveness). Esther tells her where an “intelligence” office (=employment bureau is) and after crying a while, but putting her act together (as she had still several guineas and 17 shillings from the sale of all her parents’ things), she does take a lodging for the night and shows up at this haughty place.

Mrs Brown (Alison Steadman) choosing Fanny at the unemployment office — Steadman’s archeype includes Mrs Bennet)

I thoroughly believe it and am “into the book.” If I had time, I’d return to Therese Philosophe (some say by Diderot) for the flaw in FH is the narrator buys into the false values of her society and reiterates them. Not Therese, she is wittily subversive, more fun. The obviously French context of Cleland’s work reminds me of how much I like French materials in this era.

I’m having an experience similar to that I had last summer reading Sade’s novels — what is said about FH utterly distorts the reality of this novel — or overplays it. The next phase of the book is found precisely in the film adaption: Mrs Brown turns out to be a brothel keeper, Phoebe her chief aid, initiates FH into sexual experience and the two conspire to sell her to the aging brutal Mr Crofts. I’m just not finding anything shocking. I’ve read online — would anyone like to see this — the contemporary bookseller, Griffith’s defense of this book as hardly different from dozens others — and he’s right.

Phoebe (Carli Norris) selling the innocent Fanny: Davies’s movie emphasizes the sexual initiation of Fanny by a bisexual woman, Phoebe (a proto-typical shepherdess name)

Why did the authorities get so excited? Yes there have been a couple of passages more explicit than most things I’ve read but done in language that eschews all verboten words. I cannot believe they couldn’t stand the proto-feminist point of view — for that’s there too, played up to be sure by Davies:

In the film early after arriving at the brothel Fanny is sexually attacked by Mr Croft (Philip Jackson) with the collusion of Mrs Brown and Phoebe and remains a virgin

As with Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Prevost’s Manon Lescaut (and quite a number of works of the earlier 18th century), there are no chapter divisions in this book. It is set up as two letters, one ending p 126 of my Penguin edition by Wagner, and the other ending p 224. Each was printed as a volume.

As I read on, Fanny moved on to fall in love with the beautiful good young man, Charles (as in Davies’s film) and they flee the brothel together. At this point love-making does start and I have to say that it is arousing. The style is part of the success because it’s not crude. Now I see why it must’ve shocked for it’s on the face of it marketed for a middle class reader; it’s literate and implicitly a critique of the ancien regime’s customs, laws. The book supports Darnton’s thesis as do Sade’s and Diderot’s.

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Fanny and Charles initiating one another

An autobiographical verisimilar component

I continue to read this novel with real interest in it. I’m surprised at myself for this; that is, that it continues to hold me. Now that Fanny is in love genuinely and with a kind decent man — Charles (played in the film by the handsome sweet looking Alex Robertson, a kind of Tom Jones) whose last name we have not yet been told (again very like Moll Flanders and the fictions from the early part of the century) has a real history of his own which rings true. We are told that he was an only son whose father refused to spend any money on him beyond necessities in the house; paid for hardly any education and planned to purchase him an ensign’s commission (provided he could procure it with interest and not too much money). This is the only plan the man had; he kept a mistress. He did reprimand the boy when he got in his way. Luckily there was a grandmother who took a fancy to the boy and provided him with money. It’s money from her he uses to keep his and Fanny’s lifestyle up in Mrs Jones’s house.

It strikes me this is a real story, and if not Cleland’s one he saw or one he could identify his own rejected life with. This is not the only story of this type that suddenly emerges. The depiction of Mrs Jones, the quiet landlady cum-procuress is just such another as Anthony Trollope is more discreet language describes running a “boarding house” in a less salubrious part of London in Miss Mackenzie in the second half of the 19th century. Women have ever been desperate to stay solvent, in houses, with food and clothes and in days before jobs, what could they sell if the found themselves (as they probably did with frequency) outside some family system or could not endure what punishment was wreaked on them in return for being kept.

Mr H is a glamorous idealization of himself in conventional heterosexual terms — well, every author but has his weaknesses. Hugo Speer plays the part with real panache (he was super as Sergeant George in Davies’s rendition of Bleak House and I’ve loved him ever since he was so fiercely loyal to Phil, his homeless friend).

Mr H (Hugo Speer) enjoying Fanny’s candid company, proposes to teach her from books he knows, to make a lady of her

This part of the novel has veins of reality as striking as any in an 18th century novel, memoir, or tale. And in effect Davies picks up in this when he has his Charles’s father be a miser and tyrant and bigot, thought kidnapping and pressing might be too strong for most people (who knows, in French fictions families are ever throwing disobedient adult children into the Bastille or other prisons by lettres de cachet). He also depicts Mrs Jones more in the way of a Fielding caricature but this rock-bottom solid motivation (not in Fielding) is there in the film: Davies’s Mrs Jones tells Fanny what might happen to her (in the streets) if she refuses to accept Mr H as her keeper “doeesn’t bear thinking about.”

No it doesn’t.

The one strong contrivance and intertwining together that does not occur in the book that Davies uses is Davies he has Mr Croft who Mrs Brown (played by Alison Steadman, Mrs Bennet is here revealed in her archetype as desperate procuress) would have sold Fanny to (see above) no matter how old and vicious he is, turn out to be Charles’s father. That coincidence is too pat, but then less actors needed to be paid and the recognition scene is striking. Also the hypocrisy of the old man who would rape Fanny now utterly rejects her with vile words as appropriate for her!

Fanny miscarries the pregnancy by Charles, and accepts Mr H as her lover. Although she does not love him, he is capable of awakening her sexually even more than Charles. These passages in the book are strongly arousing and at the heart of what made this book prosecuted. Here we have a heroine who while depicted a literally unchaste (from her living with Charles) is nonetheless presented as a middle class avatar, reasonable, reasoning, acting in her own best interests. To show her as experiencing sexual pleasure without love (the demand for which is still used to bind women by women themselves) was as subversive of the social order as Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover’s depiction of sexuality itself (as in its buggery). Probably too I’ve been underestimating how original this text is — it is not a mad rant like Sade’s, not hectically lurid like so many of the English tansgressive fictions (say by Haywood or Behn or Manly Delaviere or The Nun on her Smock) I’ve read.

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The movie sweetens the mixture by keeping the sex tasteful and emphasizing how Mr H is teaching Fanny important text: here they are doing Shakespeare’s great sonnet 94 (“They that have power to hurt and will do none”)

The long descriptions of Mr H making love to Fanny, arousing her against her conscious will are remarkable. They are (as far as I can tell) just about wholly original in the manner of Richardson’s Pamela. There were novels before Richardson’s of types like Pamela, there were epistolary novels, but no one put these two together for quite this story at this length with a persuasive presence. So there may have been erotica (a good term for this part book) before FH, but nothing as plain yet elegantly styled, thorough, frank, emotional in this direct way with just such a persuasive presence as this narrator. (Aretino is cold muscular stuff; Crebillon fils is indirect and prurient, much of the English stuff I’ve glanced at crude, silly, hectic).

The fiction is also again fuelled by autobiography. When to take a (foolish as she says) revenge on Mr H for his casual infidelity with her maid, she seduces a young man from the country, the long sequence is obviously a male in drag (Cleland) seducing a male. Fanny’s descriptions of the handsome body and beauty of Mr H is clearly the same sort of release for the author.

I wish I had time to read Therese Philosophe to see if it is done there or Diderot’s Bijoux Indiscrets. It cannot be a matter of influence since both were published in the same year: 1748. Therese Philosophe is (as I’ve said) superior in outlook in the sense that the discourse of Fanny contradictory will be ever so pious and moral now and again and she is quite a snob. She scorns her maid as hypocritical and coarse when Mr H goes after her. Fanny’s strictures against Mrs Jones, presented as corrupt and awful (beneath her) are absurd in this context. Davies (needless to say?) drops all this and picks up only on the more intelligent stream of comment where Fanny argues that her behavior is what she had to do under the circumstances: indeed this line from this section of the book is moved by Davies to the end of his film adaptation to be its moral lesson: “our virtues and our vices depend too much on our circumstances … (p. 98)

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In the film Mr H discovers Fanny and her country bumpkin lover: it’s not really a comic scene as Mr H becomes passionately upset, jealous, out of male pride ejects Fanny (though it’s quite all right for him to be unfaithful is the point of the movie)

I said that in Cleland’s book Fanny’s affair with the young country servant, an act of revenge on Mr H for his infidelity to her is a different kind of release for the author than his descriptions of Fanny’s physical encounters with Mr H. It is clearly a long homosexual series of passages. The alert button here is that Cleland knows it is unrealistic for Fanny to take such chances — that is, to have more than one encounter with the young man. Also Fanny is presented as not particularly promiscuous and even moralistic. Now Cleland must change her character to reckless and not so much promiscuous as self-indulgent, sybaritic. But it’s clear that Cleland wants to write these passages. Now they are as innovative (so to speak) as the heterosexual encounters, probably as erotic (though not to me). He breaks with verisimilitude and what’s more makes his book tedious (at least to me).

I mentioned that there is a certain interest and humor in reading all the different euphemisms Cleland comes up with to describe people’s body parts and what is happening. IN this section what is striking is the cool objectivity with which he’s determined to describe these body parts, really exactly. This too is new to the novel and I suggest this too led to the book being prosecuted.

It is prison literature too. It was first written as a draft a number of years (Cleland claimed) before he was put in prison, but it was while he was in prison, he perfected and extended his draft and made this publishable (well at least it adheres to aesthetic criteria of coherence and the conventions of these young-girl-from-county-enters-the-world transgressive fictions.

By contrast, in the film Davies allows only one encounter between Fanny and the servant, and that one Mr H interrupts — probably not probable but then there is not the problem of the improbability of Fanny taking so many chances and he does not have to present Fanny as promiscuous except when driven by a need to survive).

Book 1 of the novel ends not (as I thought it would) on the downfall of Fanny when Mr H catches her and her lover-country male servant in the act, but after she has secured a place at Mrs Coles’s millinery shop.

There is a real drive to keep this novel euphoric, upbeat. In the feature to the DVD of the film adaptation, the director, screenplay writer, some of the actors and production designer were all asked what they thought was the moral lesson of the novel. Did it have one? Only Samantha Morton who played Mrs Cole denied any. Most emphasized (especially Davies and the actress Rebecca Knight) that it was you, women too, do what they have to do to survive and (Davies) much moralizing is unreal. But the production designer was given the last word; he said it’s a fairy tale because it ends so happily and is continually moving into gaiety. I think that’s so. By contrast, Davies made part 1 end on Fanny losing her beloved Charles and being threatened with destitution with Mrs Jones telling her she must do something or will be ejected from her lodging place.

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Mrs Cole (Samantha Bond), a cool businesswoman in the film (her archetype, which is also the warm compromiser, includes Mrs Weston)

In Cleland’s Book 2 we have Fanny developing a real relationship with Mrs Coles. This is what Wagner in his introduction and Nancy Miller in her essay on the novel stress; the womens’ relationship. Mrs Coles is a kindly mother figure cum businesswoman. Fanny our narrator is sceptical of Mrs C’s professed motives (which Davies cuts from the film), that Mrs Cole lost a daughter and Fanny is a substitute, but it’s their talk, a genuine self-conscious novitiate (so to speak), with the nunnery analogy being meant (remember Diderot’s La Religieuse‘s more sexualized sections) that brings the text alive again.

The millinery shop is a front for a brothel, and again we have the obvious vulnerability of women before men, their need to serve men sexually, and the presentation of Mrs Cole is relevant to this: when unlike the landlady (Mrs Jones) Mrs Coles identifies with Fanny, the story becomes a sort of parable of the necessity of female friendship in this 18th century world.

This relationship does remind one of Moll Flanders where Moll has a governess-brothel keeper and chief theft who helps her (rather like Dickens imagines a Fagin does, minus the anti-semitism). Defoe’s character is vaguer and does not present these amoral arguments at all, but the implicit realities are the same. Davies did both films and has Rebecca Knight as Fanny interrogate the audience the way Alex Kingston as Moll did. The contrast is Moll is direct, angry at us, accusing with her hard life; Fanny writes from her standpoint at the end of the book as mistress of a lovely house, and rich and married to Charles so she is looking back and happy.

Nonetheless, like many critics say, Fanny Hill, the book, falls off sharply in Part 2. Fanny is now with Mrs Cole and the narrative stops for the different prostitutes to tell their stories. Things get still and if the separate stories were well-written or original or vivid, it’d be like say Millenium Hall or a number of popular novels from the era which I recall: Fielding’s The Governess is filled with story telling of this type; one about I recall: “The Histories of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1760) (anonymous).

But it’s not so. It’s the same story repeatedly: girl seduced, abandoned, probably a common story doubtless but this is art not life. Johnson’s two famous Ramblers about Misella are unforgettable. The point of several stories is to display and enact sex. In this second part the rationale of showing women’s lives (each one is taken advantage of in a different way, or ejected from poverty of parents) is a transparent excuse for long erotic descriptions, each of which presents different facets of sex (one centers on masturbation for example). It is here that Cleland’s book begins to become pornographic. If not openly violent, not openly rendering the women powerless (as in Reage’s Story of O), they are that because this is how they must make a living.

The real flaw in the book is an undistinguished style. Finally good books come alive because the language is not a string of cliched phrases, flung together and that’s what’s happening here. I began to doze

Davies cuts all this, and he inserts a new character: Esther is dragged forward from Volume 1 (she was the one who Fanny came to London with) and has incurred Davies’s Fanny’s suspicion and dislike as the woman who misled when she introduced her to Mrs Brown and then deserted her. Davies’s Esther is the person who hates someone precisely because she wronged her. So they are emotional enemies and the narrative line has antagonism as part of the suspense. Later Esther will bring back Mr H to the brothel … All this is Davies’s addition.

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Mrs Cole and Esther greeting Fanny

In this section I can see why I’ve reading postings by women on listservs and blogs where they described having to read this book in a classroom and discuss it as shaming and humiliating, one of the unpleasantness and most unfair experiences they can remember in a classroom. Three girls emerge (Harriet, Emily, and Louise) as the storytellers and then in accordance with their original stories they participate in an orgy — described by Fanny which she then participates in. The rationale is they must get rid of their modesty but to a female reader this is also an ordeal in humiliation which is presented as enjoyable to the woman. There is no sense of the physical reality in Cleland: he really does write like a distanced cold clinically detached male here enjoying power over a woman who gives up all her agency.

So the text does devolute, deliquesce (though that’s not the right word for it either) into long vignettes of sexual encounters of porn. Each is justified by some slender story line, which Andrew Davies has picked up. At first Mrs Cole sells Fanny as a virgin and we see Fanny’s efforts in the hypocrisy line — this may be meant as an exposure of false manners and manipulation. Mr Norbert, in the film a sweet young man, dying, impotent, has a version in the book, not so sweet, not impotent, but someone who submits, is not dominated, and as in the film, in the book Fanny first meets him in the marketplace and brings him home and they develop a genuine relationship.

One story is so precisely like that which caused such a sexual tremor (or was supposed to have) among women viewers of the 1995 P&P that it was imitated by several more Austen films (Lost in Austen, I have found it) and is referred to still: when Colin Firth stripped to his underclothes and dived in a lake to swim. The second story told by Harriet is strikingly like this story — the great lord of the mansion returns unexpectedly on a hot day, strips nearly all his clothes off and dives in a lake while Harriet (the narrator) is in a summer house. The pavillion or summer house is an important motif in women’s erotic literature — it’s a place apart where a girl escapes surveillance. what happens is she is drawn to watch him — but then he sees her and he rushes out and rapes her. Twice. We are asked to believe that after the first onslaught she likes it.

I find it telling that a rape is in this original scene (if it is the text that gave Davies the idea) and has been erased. The original Sleeping Beauty tales are rape stories, telling that it’s been inserted into a woman’s film and then asserted to be just what women want. A joke is now mercifully made of it. Origins tell us something surely?

Colin Firth as Mr Darcy about to plunge in

Cleland’s tone is as happy and cheerful and playful as it is during long sequences in Volume I (Fanny’s falling in love with Charles, the time with Mr H) so this is indeed very ambiguous stuff and anyone who does not admit this upfront so to speak is misrepresenting what’s here. Who is Cleland in this text? who does he stand for? well the powerful male who insists on this as okay and his right and refuses to see or imagine the complicated real life response of people paid to do this sort of thing. It’s an attitude of mind that would not see rape as rape.

Not that it’s moral or judgmental — as in the early parts of volume I. Cleland has forgotten all the moral lessons he wove in early on. Just shed them. No religion in sight either.

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Mr Norbert among the women

In the middle section of Volume II (and the first one two) Cleland is really inventing stories that enable him to write long sexually graphic scenes. Mr Norbert is introduced as feeble and seducible so we can get this long presentation of Fanny as utterly hypocritical in how she fools him into thinking she’s a virgin. Step-by step. By contrast Davies divides the “types” so in the film Fanny and Mrs Cole first fool the father of a young virginal man and the emphasis is not on the sexual scene but the delusions of these males and their false pride. Fanny remains Mr Norbert’s mistress for quite a time (we are told) so gets her reward in money and support. Alas, he dies without leaving her anything (just her ill-gotten gains so to speak) and she has to lend herself out again.

In the book she takes on a Mr Balville and we get two long scenes of fetishistic sex where the idea is she is to whip him and whip her. I wondered if this was the first time in a middle class novel (prose style) this kind of scene was ever written, especially the details of the pain. We are to admire Fanny for standing to her bargain and are invited to enjoy these scenes. I didn’t; I had to skim. These are pure porn, but I suppose they have the merit of perhaps being first in the middle class novel? if we think originality a virtue, and I presume we do.

We are now going to get scenes of further permutations of sexual experience. It seems that is Cleland’s aim in Volume II: from the opening swimming rape and other scenes to these.

Davies didn’t quite skip these; he has no Mr Balville but he does has a montage of sexual orgies going on, but he presents it as distasteful after a while — the girls have to keep at it, rather like someone in a factory, and after you’ve stamped one object you really don’t want to stamp another, much less keep going for hours on end — in other words it’s brought home all this is for money. There is enjoyment when there is dancing, exhilaration: there the director of the film brought out how the well-bred dancing is a kind of simulacrum, a controlled version of these more drunken rollicking scenes. There are no such dancing scenes in Cleland’s book. But the overall feel veers between the sordid and girls’ serving men and luxurious salacious moments.

This is a more tasteful shot for the blog (everyone is near naked in many of the scenes of Davies’s movie at this point)

In the film Davies then provides a strong plot-device by bringing back Mr H, involving him with Fanny’s arch-rival, Esther Davies (who is built up as a character across the films). Mr H cannot stand to watch Fanny with other men and there is an explosion of jealousy; he tells the magistrates on Mrs Cole and the house is broke up.

Hugo Speer as the angry hurt Mr H — I find him an attractive man in this film (his role as Sergeant George in Davies’s Bleak House aligns him with other characters who protect and in their perspective help the vulnerable — he teaches Fanny in the film)

In the film we see how helpless the 18th century women are against the men. Mr H is a magistrate himself; he need only complain and the house is destroyed. The women can do nothing. (This is not what happen in Cleland’s book, mind.)

Fanny is left to the streets, and very like Waters’s & Davies’s Tipping the Velvet (book and movie) soon falls to street prostitution and being raped and even beaten.

For the conclusion and some final remarks, see the comment.

Ellen

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A continuation of Reveries under the Sign of Austen

Olivia Williams as Jane Austen (Miss Austen Regrets) at Godersham

Dear friends and readers,

I’m opening a sequel to my Reveries under the Sign of Austen at livejournal (now retitled Under the Sign of Sylvia).  LiveJournal has been under attack for some weeks now and I find I can’t cope with the many outages and freakish working of their software. So this will be a continuation. I begin with the icon I used at the old Reveries under the Sign of Austen. My older blog will now be autobiographical, seasonal, personal, a story of my inward life.

Basically this blog is for all things about and related to Jane Austen. I take a generous view of all things Jane Austen all the time: under her sign I include women writers whose work connects to hers either through era (long 18th century), type (subjective novelistic), gender (so women’s historical romance or novels belongs), what she was influenced by and read and those influenced by her art (from Burney and Smith and Genlis and Radcliffe to Gaskell and Eliot and Oliphant to E. M. Forster and Drabble and Chantal Thomas).  I include film adaptations beyond those directly of her novels – costume drama specifically targeted to include women’s point of view as well as modern films made by and for women (so Saul Dibbs’s The Duchess comes in here).

My blog header for now comes from one of my favorite nineteenth-century painters, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Golden Light (1836-93); it is an idyllic view of the suburbs of Leeds in 1883. I lived in Leeds between 1968 and 1970. My icon is Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood standing on the cobb looking out at the sea, enduring what’s to come.

I will be working on categorizing all 207 blogs (which came over with 1198 comments) and putting in appropriate links where I can — probably for some time to come.

Ellen

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Women’s friendships and the Gothic in Davies Northanger Abbey film

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve just watched for what feels like an umpteenth time (though I am not at all as yet tired of it) the 2007 Granada Northanger Abbey, screenplay Andrew Davies, directed by Jon Jones, produced by Keith Thompson. I’m seeking to understand how pairs of women are used in the film. Is there a contrapuntal story here?

Happy eager faces of Mrs Allen (Sylvestre Le Tousel) and Catherine (Felicity Jones) upon arrival

Well, I’ve been taught once again that you don’t begin to know a film unless you go super-slowly through it, shot by shot, and line by line.  What I discovered is first that this film has a larger proportion of scenes of paired women in any of Davies’s Austen movies — I admit I’ve not yet finished Davies 1999 Wives and Daughters out of Gaskell or properly studied his 2007 Fanny Hill out of Cleland. Perhaps these have as many or more, especially if we include the in W&D step-mother and mother-daughter scenes and those of Mrs Hamley with Molly, Lady Harriet with Molly and in Fanny Hill madame-and-sex worker scenes.  At any rate the NA 94 minute movie has at least 22 scenes of female friendship! at least among the explicitly Austen films he made it’s the most dominated by the theme of female friendship.  If one adds Catherine and Mrs Allen (at least 4) and Catherine and her mother (one alone), there are 27.

Second it is the only of Davies’s films where he sets up two competing pairs of friends, so that we have two contrapuntal stories beyond the five main heterosexual romance stories (Henry and Catherine; John Thorpe and Catherine; James Morland and Isabella; Frederick Tilney and Isabella; Eleanor and Edward [the unnamed suitor from Austen's last page is given a name and even a presence). At the same time Isabella and Catherine's friendship is gradually replaced by Catherine's friendship with Eleanor Tilney; and there are scenes where the three presences are aware of one another and felt interacting. Davies also replaces Henry with Eleanor in key scenes from Austen and Part 7 (at Northanger Abbey while Henry is gone to Woodston) they are almost continuously the central plot-design.

By contrast, in the 6 hour P&P I counted some 17 scenes between Jane and Elizabeth; Elizabeth and Charlotte have six all alone scenes, which for meaning and emotional temperature are perhaps more interesting and at least as important as those between Jane and Elizabeth, but still just six. In the 3 hour S&S I counted 23 scenes between Elinor and Marianne; there are four full scenes of Elinor and her mother, one of Marianne and the mother; one each of Elinor, Marianne and the mother with Margaret.  In the 94 minute Emma, 13 scenes between Emma and Harriet, 3 or 4 between Mrs Weston and Emma (depending if you insist the women be alone) and two between Jane Fairfax and Emma. (Do not laugh at my attempts to count; it is so easy to mis-see a film, to remember it awry, that one can only begin to grasp them if you literally count shots and sequences of shots, and take careful notes on their arrangement.) And in none of these are the friendships interrelated -- though they could have been in an Emma.  For example, in the McGrath 1996 Emma, Mrs Weston remains Emma's closest friends, with scenes of friendship between them added, and scenes of advice replacing some between Emma and Mr Knightley. In the 2009 Emma Sandy Welch does make moves to try to form an implicit friendship through silent scenes and gestures between Emma and Jane; this needs more study before I can say more. In the more literally faithful the 1972 and Davies's 1996 Emma Jane Fairfax does not replace Harriet and Mrs Weston separates herself from Emma as Mr Weston's wife.

That the theme of female friendship is important in Austen's book is picked up in Victor Nunez's Ruby in Paradise. Ruby has to integrate herself into the community by getting a job; she is hired by Mildred Chambers (Dorothy Lyman) who eventually tells Ruby she hired her because saw herself in Ruby: The older woman becomes the younger one’s mentor and friend, eventually herself partly dependent on Ruby. Mrs Chambers runs a tourist souvenir and clothing store whose downscale nature does not deter people from buying sprees.

Ruby is also befriended by an African-American teenage girl who works in the store, Rochelle Bridges (Allison Dean): Rochelle is also taking a business course in a local college and looks forward to marriage. They eat together, go dancing, walk on the beach, share past memories, dreams and hopes. Rochelle functions like Eleanor Tilney in a number of the conversations, including one where she gives Ruby money when Ruby desperately needs it. A memorable moment occurs when they speak of “how to survive with your soul intact.” We get a continuum of young women who make different choices in life. Ruby helps and is helped by Debrah Ann (Betsy Douds), a high-school drop-out dependent on the two young men she lives with. They occasionally beat her, and when Ruby lets Betsy stay the night in her apartment, Betsy sees Ruby's picture of Ruby's grandmother and says one of her problems is as a child she had no mother or grandmother to be with her. Ruby is physically helped by the stronger older women who work at the laundromat, and cheered by a Southern Asian young woman who lives near Ruby and is presented as proud and contented to be doing menial housework as a member of a tightly-knit family of immigrants.

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So in the 2007 NA by Davies:  what themes emerge from this thicket of female friendship; how do they comment on or affect the main heterosexual romance stories? and how do they shape or reflect upon the gothic as reveled in and critiqued in the film? I noticed another repeating pattern:  Davies adds nightmare-reverie dream sequences, bookish scenes (where a voice-over indicates a character reading), and waking scenes in the morning to contrast with, and occasionally undermine his nightmare reveries

Group friend scenes (two Thorpes, and James) remind me of group scenes in Bridget: they lead Bridget astray.

One theme is that in real life many men abrasive, rude, coarse, lying; Henry is the ideal between this ugly reality and what Davies presents as innocent girls' misguided fancies about sex. Theme of kindness and courtesy and simple truth matter (the Thorpes and the bad gothic characters are rude coercive say anything). Probably consonant with Austen

By bringing Edward on stage in country walk scene changes whole shape of scene; a second walk by Northanger (Pt 5, Scene 11) with Eleanor holding back makes a parallel. Makes it much tighter; shows Henry and Eleanor's mutual support. Again consonant but also making Henry much less awkward figure than in the book, prepares for his virtuous rebellion (Ch 30, last 3 paragraphs).

Where it's not consonant is paradoxically a dismissal of the gothic, the trivializing of it at the same time as there's no deflation. A motif is General at top of stairs like some ominous all powerful Dracula. The sexy quotations from the Monk combined with Henry -- we may be expected to intuit that Catherine has some less than virtuous impulses when it comes to sex; this is confirmed by Eleanor smiling over Catherine's ashamed avowals of her dreams. This one using the Monk is the most daring sex scene in all the Austen movies and gotten away with under cover of Monk.  This is unlike Austen who is on the side of repression in this novel. The sympathy for Isabella who went to straight sex is Davies's extrapolation and not consonant if understandable.

I have listed of the gothic scenes in the comments to the blog. I have limited the list of women's friendship scenes to Catherine and Isabella and Catherine and Eleanor Tilney. I don't include Catherine and Mrs Allen or Catherine and her mother at the close because while these are changed from Austen (Mrs Allen is made into an affectionate well-meaning if occasionally mindless woman rather than a dull-nit who is there to provide suggestive jokes) they do not seem to me to have an original meaning beyond boistering the idealism and good feeling of Catherine's home life.

An interesting motif is Isabella and Catherine scenes are shot in parallel with girls seen as standing close, walking close, intertwined arms, and from the waist up, while Eleanor and Catherine are seen in their full bodies and again and again walking in wood and forest and by stream.

I love casual glimpses of worlds beyond, often suggestive of sex life of adults carried on through privacy one can get in the streets and no where else

Catherine looking out window, wants to know what are their stories but Mr Allen remains stoutly uninterested in anyone not eager or content to sit by a fire.  A different time of life is what Catherine and the people outside have. (Pt 1, Scene 7) Throughout Mr Allen kind, patient, sensible, looking out for Catherine as best he can, no need for too much given milieu

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The grid:

Part 1; Northanger Abbey,
Scene 6:  first happy encounter of Isabella with her fiance's sister.  Isabella comes on strong and Catherine presents fresh happy innocent face
Scene 7:  Two girls talking gothics. Curiously vacuous talk from Isabella; insinuating about sex as if it's all fun and games; seen through books. Again insinuating talk without actual content.

Scene 8:  tracking shots combine of them in pump room, Isabella bad-mouthing Tilneys (Catherine asserts against this what she intuitively knows to be so: "surely you are mistaken Mr Tilney could not have been kinder or more gentleman like"), quoting her brother, chasing after young men. Include gnomic presentation of theme from hypocrite Isabella: "appearances deceive ..."
Scene 11: first encounter with Eleanor, and (as opposed to book) Catherine assumes it's a girlfriend, relieved to find a sister; "Catherine: I"m very happy to meet you Miss Tilney. Eleanor: And I you . Henry has told me so much about you/ this melts into the two in a tete-a-tete. As with Isabella meeting through brothers.

Scene 12: Catherine and Eleanor becoming acquainted, feels like there was a cut of another scene Strong contrast in amount of simple emotional truth and facts gotten in.  "Our mother is dead." "More than anything" Catherine "likes long walks" but cannot persuade Isabella who finds long walks boring. "Yes I can see that she might."

Part 3: Deceived

Scene 4:  Catherine and Isabella in bed over Udolpho; false, flattery used to substitute for confidence; to Catherine's real discomfort and vexation over her failure to meet the Tilneys, Isabella offers lies about John finding her prettiest, liking her best; switches to have far have you gotten ..; titillating reference to black veil says what Davies thinks of it and then she can read The Monk; repetition of cant: John "spoke of it as really horrid". Horrid shocking thing in the world; lines from Udolpho suggest Davies never read it. Carey Mulligan's posture is continually hovering over Catherine and insinuating whispers and it seems to work; seducing scenes quite different from any in P&P, S&S, Emma. Does not like traditional female or male Gothic, but does not see as much harm as what it's used for

Part 4: The Next Dance
Scene 4: Kneeling scene of Isabella confessing her love -- curiously vacuous. Her conversation lacks content, is filled with cant assertions or specific kinds of lies intended to be manipulative
Scene 6: Isabella and Catherine bid adieu to young men, brothers and Isabella voices what is probably a genuine worry if tone and ecstatic euphoric adoring specifics of words are insincere: she has no fortune and were the position reversed her mother would not permit it..Catherine listens intently throughout and reacts as if the words have meaning, thus taken aback at Isabella's assertions if she had millions she would choose only James

Scene 7: Isabella and Catherine entering assembly, very short, how she is not going to dance and seeking out Charles Hodge. Catherine listening as if Isabella is truthful and for real; at end Catherine smiling happily at Isabella's loyalty

Scene 9: Carriage ride back, Isabella is transparent ("He is the eldest son you know ... the heir ... not that that weighs anything with me ...") and probably thinks Catherine a hypocrite and pretending not to understand her When Isabella says "John will say anything that comes into his head .. I hardly ever take any notice of him," Catherine: "how does one know what to believe .."

Part 5: The Invitation
Scene 1: Catherine (sour expression left over from what she saw in Isabella) with Eleanor walking in same wood supposed in Bath.

Generous assessment of Eleanor, identifying with Isabella, assuming sincerity. Beautiful moment with Henry just ahead. Eleanor lives with her loss, Henry depressed to the side.

Eleanor. I can well understand how she feels ... but at least she can marry the man she loves not everyone is so fortunate.
Catherine: I suppose not. How sad that is,
Eleanor is remembering herself. Yes. It is. But how many couples marry without love?
Catherine: I believed my mother and father love each other even more than they love us. And they love us very much. When I was a little girl I used to think it was like that for everyone, but it was only when I started to read novels that I realized it was not.
Eleanor: I shouldn't have thought one would have to read novels to find that out. I think you had quite a dangerous upbringing.
Catherine: Dangerous how?
Eleanor: Well it is as Henry says you've been brought up to believe [we see Henry ahead now] that everyone is as pure in heart as you are.
Catherine: I … I do not think I’m very pure in heart.
Eleanor: Really, why?
Catherine (whispering): I have the most terrible dreams sometimes [we are to recall previous one of Isabella in power of Captain Tilney] — Eleanor smiles. She does not ratchet up the experience and oh and ah, her face turns slightly away to hide. They laugh
Henry: What is the joke?
Eleanor: Nothing that concerns you …"

This is a good dialogue with a content suggestive of rich debates like in Emma, also P&P and S&S. Dialogues of Isabella and Catherine have this strangeness. Generous assessment of Eleanor, identifying with Isabella, assuming sincerity

Scene 3: Isabella and Catherine hard upon General’s invitation Isabella utters "Northanger Abbey." (Threading Isabella and Catherine scenes into Eleanor and Catherine ones now.) Very disturbing behavior in several ways: — trying to pressure Catherine over John, pretending not to understand her and then drops it because Frederick comes and who cares? she is as dismissive of Catherine as General Tilney was of John Thorpe and Frederick of Isabella: a characteristic of badness is dismissing people without compunction. This is scene where they part in film. In book we get Catherine’s protest to Henry and his reassurance and a final cosy apparently happy scene in Pulteney Street where the two friends bid warm adieu.

Scene 10: Eleanor and Catherine now in Catherine’s room at Northanger. Eleanor under great strain. Candle. Make as little alteration to your dress as possible.

Part 6: The Race
Scene 2: Catherine and Eleanor in the favorite walk; loves it now; how Eleanor misses her mother, how she was not there when mother died, the determination to show her picture..

Eleanor: This was my mother’s favorite lace. I used to walk so often here with her though I never loved it then as I have loved it since.
Catherine: Her death must have been a great affliction.
Eleanor: A great and increasing one.
Catherine: What was she like? Did she look like you?
Eleanor: I wish I could show you her portrait. It hangs in her private chamber.
Catherine; I suppose you were with her to the last?
Eleanor: No. I was from home when she died. Her illness was sudden and short and before I arrived it was all over.
Catherine: So you didn’t see her body.
Eleanor: No. I wish I could have done. Perhaps it would help me to think of her at peace.
Catherie: Yes. I should like to see her room if you are willing to show me.
Eleanor: We never go there. Tis my father’s wish.
Catherine: But to see her picture.
Eleanor. Yes. Why should not not see it?

Scene 3: later that night they climb the stairs. Scary music, hollow sounds of feet as they go up, high pitched music, faces meeting. Suddenly the general right there: why is he there in that part of the house. General: there is nothing to interest Miss Morland in this apart of the house.I am surprised at you, Eleanor. Here the same scene is gothic and women’s friendship. (this and above combine two different passages, one from NA, 2:7 or Ch 22, pp 156-57 and also p. 162; it must be admitted that throughout this sequence Austen is undercutting and making fun of Catherine at the same time as she leaves us to see Miss Tilney’s unhappiness and the general’s peremptoriness. Davies omits these kinds of frequent debunking interjections (combined with comments like Mr Allen said such characters were overdrawn).

Scene 4: Catherine writing Isabella is communing with her so another scene which the above “bled into”. Wholly invented letter so Catherine can express terrible suspicions she has as a result of previous two scenes. We are told that Isabella has written which implies Catherine has but we are shown no letter until James’s announces end of engagement. Several motifs brought together: letter writing, reverie, window, landscape, voice over. … “Oh, Isabella I fear that this house holds a terrible secret relating to the death of Mrs Tilney. (Now it’s Eleanor’s voice in lieu of Mrs Allen’s from down below): Catherine! … voice over resumes; … I cannot write more … send me your news …

Part 7: The letter(s)

Eleanor’s consternation

Scene 2: Eleanor walks up with brother James’s letter: In book Henry has not left and they visit Woodston (note without Eleanor) and this occurs afterward; the talk is between Henry and Catherine over her brother and Isabella; while in Davies’s movie Henry leaves and Catherine’s talk is with Eleanor from woman-centered point of view with no chance to talk to Henry again until after ejection.

While specific bits of language are taken over, the feel of this is quite different. The changes are interesting and perhaps that too will help me with my chapter: to compare subtle changes to see how he has altered these relationships too. I did not do that enough in the S&S. Here the emotional temperature is quite different.

Now to compare changes between Davies and Austen texts and then between S&S and other S&S bringing in Pivcevic and Alexander will do for the two chapters.

Eleanor. “Look Catherine” (coming over, we watch her walk, she is happy with news but then she catches sight of her friend’s face and becomes upset herself (are we supposed to feel that Catherine is overdoing the upset and has reacted too strongly — it’s an index of her fine nature that she’s done so but is self-flagellation). Catherine turns away. In this way Davies critiques Austen. Several shots of Walker as Eleanor coming over.

It is a long sequence of the two girls, Catherine’s walk, then Eleanor, then the talk, then the letter, overvoice with flashbacks, and then more talk. Eleanor’s smile goes utterly. “Oh whatever is the matter?
Cath: I cannot tell you. Please don’t make me. I’ve been so wickedly foolish and your brother knows of it and now he will hate me and so will you when he tells you.”
Elean: “Oh my dear Catherine, I am quite sure that nothing you could do could make me hate you or Henry either.”
Cath: I saw his face. I know he will never ever respect me again.
Elean. Oh! come come perhaps it’s not as bad as you think (rubs her) look here, is a a letter for you.
Cath: It could be from Isabella. Oh no it is my brother’s handwriting. (They are looking down at letter as Catherine unfolds it.)

Overvoice with flashbacks running: James and Isabella at the dance, Tilney stalking and she pretending not to be alluring him with all her might which she is. “Dear Catherine, I think it my duty to tell you that everything sis over is at an end between Miss thorpe and me. I shall not enter into particulars. I am ashamed to think for how long I bore it. Dear Catherine, I hope your visit to Northanger may be over before Captain Tilney makes his engagement known.

Elean (puzzled): Captain Tilney .. Frederick …
Cath: Yes it’s just what I feared. Oh poor poor James he loved her so much.
Elean: But Frederick … and they are engaged?
Cath: Yes
Elean. No I cannot believe that.
Cath: Look here (reads aloud) Dearest Catherine beware how you give your heart.
Elean: My dear Catherine I am sorry for your brother sorry that anyone you love should be unhappy, but my surprise would be greater at Frederick’s marrying her than at any other part of the story
Cath: why do you say that?
Elean. “What are Miss Thorpe’s connections? What is her fortune? Are they a wealthy family” (it is we are told by narrator Eleanor who does ask these questions, even if only Henry’s words are dramatized)
Cath: “No not very. I don’t believe Isabella has any fortune at all. YOu think your father will forbid the match.
Elean. “I doubt if the matter will reach his ear at all. (mouth stretches)
Cath: “Why? whatever do you mean?”
Elean. “Catherine your friend has dealt badly with your brother but I fear she is far too out of her depths with mine”

So we get important flashbacks of Tilney leading Isabella through brothel, going in, she waks and loud laughter in next room, and he stands by fireplace, she rouses herself, on her elbow: “And are we engaged?” He hears, walks over, “Make yourself decent Miss Thorpe. I must return you to your friends before you are missed.”

Flash within flash, and now it’s Isabella to Catherine, and a voice over of Isabella

“My dearest Catherine thank God we leave this vile place tomorrow since you went away I have no pleasure in it and everybody one cares for is gone (now we see her writing the letter on her bed). I am quite uneasy about your dear brother and am fearful of some misunderstanding. You will write to him and set everything right. He is the only man I ever did or could love (mother taking something, and Isabella snatches it back) and I know you will convince him of it …

Scene 6: a new day, new outfits and Catherine answers letter: “I most certainly shan’t.” Catherine now holding this letter.

Elean. “So Frederick is safe from her. I cannot say I am surprised.
Cath: Can’t you? I am very. I wish I’d never known her.
Elean. “It will soon be as if you never had.
Cath: “There is one thing I can’t understand. What is Captain Tilney been about all this time. Why should he pay her such attentions and then fly off himself?”
Elean: “He has his vanity as well as Miss Thorpe and he is accustomed to having his way [this accustomed to having his way is added and it is specifically sexual in connotation) though I am surprised he should have stooped to such an easy conquest.”
Cath: “Really. hen I am sorry for Isabella”

Elean. “I am sure she will be over it soon enough.
Cathering looks perturbed and sorry for Isabella.
Elean. “I hope I do not need to tell yu that his brother is a very different character. Henry has the best and truest heart in the world.
They smile together.

Then crashing dark carriage.

Scene 9: It is a shortened version of the scene in the book (2:13, or Ch 28). Differences are that Catherine attributes the General’s crazed animosity (unlike Austen where Catherine must leave before the General gets up; he demands she be ejected that night) to Henry telling about what suspected, Eleanor then tells a little truth: “You are wrong. I know my father’s reasons. They do him no credit.” Eleanor in extreme distress throughout, harrowed. Fear for journey, provides money. Catherine insists “journey’s nothing,” disgrace all, she deserves this going home in disgrace. Ratcheting it up to make it occur at night and makes the next scene of Eleanor climbing the stairwell (in white) classic gothic one) dissolves into

Scene 10: two girls at bottom of stairwell, Eleanor heard: “Catherine I implore you … please … Eleanor’s climb up to terrifying man – real implication of sex. Catherine’s eyes look up, she is a bit relieved it’s not her and walks out

the denouement centers on the heterosexual romances.

Looking over the gothic scenes in the comments I am most impressed that if I had not defined the gothic so literally, by the end of the film, the girls’ scenes could be defined as gothic (the flashback of Isabella’s memory of being taken through the brothel and the aftermath; Eleanor and Catherine’s conversation in Catherine’s bedroom, later that next at the foot of the stairs).

I’m also impressed that the tendency of all the add-on scenes is to validate male sexuality when it is controlled by humane moral values. If I were to bring this together with the women’s friendship scenes in P&P and S&S and Emma, it would in some sense become an ideal that we find in Mark Darcy in both Bridget Jones Diary films.

Ellen

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Jane Austen’s Letters: Letter 35, Tues-Wed, 5-6 May 1801, from the Paragon

Dear friends and readers,

Jane and her mother are now in Bath (see letter 34) and living with Mr and Mrs Perrot at the Paragon.

Paragon, the view towards Walcot (1940s photo)

We see Jane accepting the situation, even at moments enthusiastic.  She has been allotted her own room, up two flights of stairs, so private — so this is helping. She does go out and about which is another sign of entering into the life.  There are jokes about food, and some aesthetic irony: "The first view of Bath in fine weather does not answer my expectations; I think I see moe distinctly thro’ the Rain …" Her uncle mentioned twice and a kindly presence felt, but nothing of the aunt.   We must remember the strains between Mrs Austen and Aunt Jane Perrot had not been resolved. Cassandra at the kindly Mrs Lloyd’s in Hampshire.

Three and one half months are missing. We are giving nothing about Mr, Mrs and Jane’s last months or weeks at Steventon, nothing about the exact leave-taking. The clear bitterness Jane felt towards Mary and James suggests a hard scene; Mrs Austen had not forgiven the aunt in the last letter we had for the aunt’s attempt to leave Jane behind and inflict austerity measures (so to speak) on her and her family; and of course we have no idea how Mr Austen felt only that he had had a very hard time getting those he left in his place to treat decently the people who had served him. When they come they still have not taken a place but are contemplating Green Park buildings.

Green Park Bulldings, the surviving block, 1940s

They did move there: these are south of the main center and low — so at the time damp — but they were near a park and the river (so perhaps prettily situated). They are staying with the aunt and uncle. Mr Austen though is not with them, it’s just Jane and Mrs Austen — maybe he couldn’t face the aunt and uncle quite yet. He and Cassandra are apparently delaying coming. Who wouldn’t — the aunt was not reassuring, only yielded when the Austens would not give in.

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

The London Road, from London to Bath, 1823 print — this is not the road the Austens took but it gives an idea of what was experienced, at least a quarter century later (before the railways)

The letter begins cheerfully as she is in a room of her own, with "own" italicized. She is glad to control her own space (at last?). She seems not to mind the two pairs of stairs 4 flights) Everything is comfortable about her in the room.

Then a paragraph about the trip. Free from accident or event (untoward is what she means), horses changed at every stage. They went in style. She uses the word "magnificent" for this support.  As usual she is glad of her meal: "we made our Grand Meal."

But despite this posing or presentation of themselves, the atmosphere between them left a great deal to be desired:  they "were exceedingly agreeable, as we did not speak above once in three miles." Had they spoken more than they would not have kept up this "exceeding agreeableness." They didn’t talk; perhaps that leave-taking scene had turned ugly and they were doing their best to forget and/or pretend in front of one another it didn’t happen.  I must have happened between Letters 33 and 34.

The next line reminds me of Charlotte Luttrell (Lesley Castle): told that her sister’s coming marriage “is broke off” because the groom “had fractured his Scull, and was pronounced by his Surgeon to be” near death, “’Good God! . . . you don’t say so?  Why what in the name of Heaven will become of all the Victuals?” Charlotte is in a fever of anxiety and works very hard and plans for each to eat this or that lest anything be not eaten (spoilt), and it’s partly money. So we have the two Austens trying to consume their food, working at it. "We could not with the utmost exertion consume above the twentieth part of the beef." In this context, it may be the meaning is also that the Austens bought such a big amount. This is a form of showing off. See what big portions they gave us.

That money is on her mind comes out in the next sentence where she worries the price of a cucumber. The uncle had been told the price of one (you’d think they were talking of valuables) and it was shilling. Thus Cassandra’s plan to bring or send a cucumber as a present will be very acceptable.

I’ve come to think the economizing we see in the 1995 and 2008 S&S’s is not exaggerated.

1995 S&S: economizing, Emma Thompson as Elinor goes over food budget with Gemma Jones as Mrs Dashwood

Meanwhile she and Mrs Austen do all they can to appear richer than they are, of a high class:  So they hire a "very neat Chaise" from Devizes (a place) and "it looked almost as well as a Gentleman’s" (that means not quite) and then she drops down to a lesser criteria: "at least a very shabby Gentleman’s.

Now she is sarcastic: "in spite of this advantage however We were above three hours coming from thence to Paragon." And it was "half after seven by Your [italicized] hours before we entered the house.

So the traffic was heavy or there was some kind of rigmarole of social life between arriving in Bath and reaching and entering and taking their stuff into the Paragon.

Thus did they enter Bath.

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From Amazing Grace, (Youssou N’Dour as Olaudah Equiano)

But then a note of cheer, and I’m really glad to see again that Austen has feelings for the servants.  This is an aspect of her in these letters I had not expected. I wonder if Frank is a dark man or was African, an ex-slave (I assume ex). LeFaye only offers the obvious non-information Frank was the uncle’s manservant. Well, duh. He received them kindly.

So someone was glad to see Mrs Austen and Jane. I like this.  What a human reality. I’m reading a book called The Servants Hand: English fiction from Below and Robbins opens with a scene described by a Victorian diarist where the diarist gives us a rare sense of the servant’s presence near the carriage such that the servant seems the more deep presence than the mistress described in the usual fatuous cliches. Well here is Austen doing the same thing. Franks’ subjectivity is registered.

And Mr and Mrs Perrot were not less cordial. So there we are.

She goes on to say they look well, all drank tea immediately (refreshment) and "so ends the account of our Journey."   A reference to Mrs Austen’s belief she is fragile (maybe she was not in great health); to Jane’s eyes she bore the trip "without any fatigue". Since it was long and arduous we see that Jane does not think her mother at all really ill.

(Remember her sitting on 3 chairs when she in her decline and in pain and leaving the sofa to Mrs Austen. Maybe by that time Jane had given up, learnt it was better to pretend to believe and acquiesce in whatever her mother wanted — to have a quiet life.

The dash has the effect of time passing.  My sense is Austen does not go to sleep at this point and then upon getting up write "How do you do today?"  It could be that. But it seems more likely from the next sentence it’s rather that she rose very early that first day in Bath. Under considerable strain and over-excited: "I have been awake ever since 5."

She couldn’t sleep is the idea for in the next sentence she hopes "you improve in sleeping." The utterance comes out of Jane not improving in sleeping at all. Indeed she’s dog tired – the trip and the struggling to get into the Paragon. She hopes that Cassandra "must" be a good sleeper "because I fall off."  I in italics. Cassandra must sleep for them both. As she writes, Austen feels herself nodding off.

Then a couple of lines which suggest that again 1995 and 2008 S&S films do not exaggerate so much when they show the Dashwood girls cold in bed and trying to cope.

Here Emma Thompson as Elinor gets out some socks for her feet before retiring with Marianne for warmth (1995 S&S)

It seems that Austen went to bed with "too much cloathes on my stomach".  She thought she had too much is the meaning of the next line, but she had not the courage to take the stuff off. She thought she’d need it in the night. So she sweated? anyway she was uncomfortable and maybe that got her up. The sentence next testifies to Bath being warmer than Steventon — than Hampshire where they lived, or at least this area of the paragon. "I am warmer here without any fire than I have been lately with an excellent one."

Then a mysterious line.  LeFaye guesses a legal fight for Martha which she won. "Good news is confirmed & Martha triumphs."  I incline to think it’s something to do with money at any rate.

Now the line how the uncle and aunt appeared quite surprised Cassandra and Mr Austen have further delayed coming. Mrs Austen and Jane gave them a soap and a basket, and "each have been kindly received."

Subsidence people.  I can imagine they’d have a yard sale and not miss selling a towel.

I do not exaggerate for the next line Austen records as a serious think ("I beg pardon" is not ironic) that Cassandra’s "drawing ruler" "was broke in two."  It’s spoken of as of moment, a loss, "just at the Top where the crosspeice is fastened on."

I’d like to believe this is an incidence of over-concern for small items one ought to be able to cope and values (something to sew with) with when one is upset about the larger ones that one can’t do much about. I do this, get all excited or upset about some smaller item because I’m really upset by something larger I can’t do  anything about. But I fear it more coming from their really limited funds.

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The upper Assembly Room today: it’s a costume museum

And since now she turns from the trip and their installing themselves however temporarily to Bath news, what’s to come, Bath people, Bath weather, and again where to live in Bath.

 I agree with Diane that this is a letter which feels cheerful or at least equable. Austen is lending herself to life in Bath, getting into it. She has no power to stop this and now she’s there she’s making the best of it. If she has no power to decide which building or where they’ll live, perhaps that on this first week or so she finds she has been given her own room, quiet, apart, she takes as a sign that her comfort and needs will be addressed too — if if she’s the youngest sister — so the lowest on the totem pole, girls’ needs coming after boy, and the eldest coming first.

When Nokes argued that perhaps Jane was delighted to go to Bath, he used parts of this letter.

The Chamberlaynes. Although the biographers don’t say much about this family and Lefaye very very little, I’ve noticed Jane Austen has brought them up twice since the Bath move was contemplated (as offering their experiences in an effort to reassure was one) and remember late in the letters Austen walked a marathon walk with Mrs C. I get the feeling they were friends, Jane and Mrs C.  Goucestershire was where Thomas Leigh lived in Adlestrop and Jane and Cassandra seem to have visited in 1794 (LeFaye FR, 81), Mrs C was a neighbor then.

Adlestrop Park where Thomas Leigh lived before he tried to take over Stoneleigh Abbey

So if Austen is being catty about Mrs C’s "long chin" and doesn’t like to be reminded of having been "very charming young Women,’ they were perhaps congenial. Austen writes: "I begin to think better of. …" Her dislike of the phrase "very charming young women" may also again be her disliking cant hypocrisies.  We see this in Emma where such language grates on Emma and the narrator.

I too took the line about Bath seen through the rain as aesthetic and lightly ironic: "The first view of Bath in fine weather does not answer my expectations; I think I see more distinctly through rain. The sun was got behind everything, and the appearance of the place from the top of Kingsdown was all vapour, shadow, smoke, and confusion"– Compare it to Anne Elliot’s tone upon coming into or remembering Bath and in the character you see writhing dislike and depression. Not here in this letter.  So Anne’s tone comes from later experience and memories (recorded in the missing 5 years of letters).

Where are they to live? Seymour? King? You can look up these places in various older guidebooks.None is as nice as Sydney which they eventually took nor as bad as Trim where (after Mr Austen’s death) they eventally were reduced to. Jane doesn’t want a King — she is relieved they take the same view as her.

Still it’s a measure of her powerlessness that an aunt and uncle who are not going to live there can choose what house or their opinions count, when Austen who is, is not going to be listened to.

I didn’t feel that Austen was reacting to the Uncle’s eagerness for news about the brothers with a sense of showing no interest in her and do agree that there is an implication he wants to know something about money.  The uncle questions to know "their views and intentions."  This language is that of a parent asking a young man what he intends to do for a daughter. I suggest the uncle is asking what Frank and Charles intend to do for Mrs and Mrs Austen and their sisters. Do they have any "intentions" to help them, do they have any views on what they or others should do. In this remark Austen should have heard a warning bell that the uncle had no intention himself of leaving his fortune to these relatives – he left it all to his wife  and it was bitterly disappointing the Austens at the time. They should not have been surprised.

Mrs Lloyd was much liked by Cassandra and Jane and I take the next paragraph to be jokes about food, also registering intense awareness of their price (as fringe people) at the same time teasing that they can get Mrs Lloyd to come if they hide the prices.  Cassandra must have said how she wishes they could have this congenial soul with them (instead say of Mrs Perrot).  The Duchess of York was part of the "ton" and such people drove prices up:

Meat is only 8d per pound, butter 2d & cheese 9 1/2.”  But Cassandra must “carefully conceal” from Mrs Lloyd “the exhorbitant price of Fish; – a salmon has just been sold at 2s 9d pr pound the whole fish” lest it scare Mrs Lloyd away from Bath

As Austen put down her pen here until Tuesday night.

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

From 2007 Northanger Abbey: they filmed someone getting himself a glass of water at the Pump Room
Tuesday: when Uncle Perrot took his ‘second glass of water" — this refers to the pump room. People walked over and drank glasses of this stuff. (Personal note: I did it the week i was in Bath and thought the stuff dreadful. I didn’t finish my glass. I was told it would — excuse the expression — my bowels."  Then they walked down from the pump room (under the arcade that would be) to green Park buildings.  She is pleased; it is low — down further than the parades, and near the river. That’s probably why it’s damp – the offices would be a basement or first floor.

two houses in Green Park Buildings, one of which pleased me very well. –. We walked all over it except into the Garrets; — the dining-room is of a comfortable size, just as large as you like to fancy it; the 2nd room about 14 ft. square; — The apartment over the Drawing-room pleased me particularly, because it is divided into two, the smaller one a very nice-sized Dressing-room, which upon occasion might admit a bed. The aspect is south-east. The only doubt is about the Dampness of the Offices, of which there were symptoms …

If she thought of having the room above the drawing-room for her bedroom with Cassandra, the second room could provide a space where one could read or write while the other slept. The extra bed would admit a friend visiting (say Martha Lloyd).

Wednesday: a new gown. They do dress up for Bath — as they did on their previous visit. Mrs Mussell is a milliner and dressmaker. I’ve just been watching the 2007 Northanger Abbey and a number of Felicity Jones as Catherie Morland’s outfits correspond to this: the jacket efect is found in the 2007 Persuasion on Sally Hawkins as Anne Elliot.  The 1996 Amanda Root had such an outfit only in Bath, towards the end of the movie. When you took the jacket piece off, it would be low in the back, with a belt. Apparently Martha favored this fashion — it’s sort of mannish and goes along with the empire line dresses whch are not filled with furbelows but plainer and simpler (Revolutionary tastes from Paris in middle 1790s).

It’s obvious that flounces, furbelows have been dropped and Catherine through lies and pressure is constrained to go riding with the Thorpes and her obtuse brother, James. I am calling attention to the two girls’ outfits.

              "Mrs. Mussell has got my gown, and I will endeavour to explain what her intentions are. It is to be a round gown, with a jacket and a frock front, like Cath. Bigg’s, to open at the side. The jacket is all in one with the body, and comes as far as the pocket-holes — about half a quarter of a yard deep, I suppose, all the way round, cut off straight at the corners with a broad hem. No fulness appears either in the body or the flap; the back is quite plain in this form [hourglass shape], and the sides equally so. The front is sloped round to the bosom and drawn in, and there is to be a frill of the same to put on occasionally when all one’s handkerchiefs are dirty — which frill must fall back. She is to put two breadths and a-half in the tail, and no gores — gores not being so much worn as they were. There is nothing new in the sleeves: they are to be plain, with a fulness of the same falling down and gathered up underneath, just like some of Martha’s, or perhaps a little longer. Low in the back behind, and a belt of the same. I can think of nothing more, though I am afraid of not being particular enough."

(The punctuation is Brabournes and also the normalization of the sentences.  Some thing is lost; the original argument of Sutherland”s book was that Chapman over did this sort of thing.  She was I think wrong; he was very careful, but the idea you should leave Austen’s punctuation the way she did it (the semi-colon and dash where we put a period, the Caps) is right.

New bonnets for Jane and Mrs Austen.

Kate Winslett in a straw version of the chip bonnet (1995 S&S)

A chip bonnet used willow and again we see them (Catherine wears one at Northanger while walkig with Eleanor; Kate Winslet has one late in the 1995 S&S (when she sits out in the garden and Alan Rickman as Brandon reads to her. There are reproductions of images on line in google reprints of Godey’s fashion book but I’ve not got the patience to try to catch the image. When I put all this on my blog I’ll illustrate some of it through the costumes from the film adaptations.

They’ll buy white ribbon too, but note that Austen is not extravagant. She says that Bath is getting so empty it won’t matter. "I am not afraid of doing too little" to hold up her head (pun intended) with self-respect. Her old straw one will pass muster and chip bonnets do look like straw ones only they’re tighter.  (I presume Ly Bridges is someone in the fashion world.)  It’s May and prices go up and many of the renters go to the shore and sublet their flats.

Black gauze cloaks are seen in 18th century film adaptation costumes. They are economic and light.

Then below a PS: Chamberlaynes again to visit them and a Mrs Lillingstone. What is odd is not said. But if it’s that they are not conventional or conformist in dress that might be a detail that added to Austen’s attachment. She and Cassandra early on started to dress older and didn’t care. Freed from the need  A Mrs Sarah Busby will be their visitor to tea and cribbage,Friday the Chamberlaynes (despite their "odd" looks).

The canal as seen in Sydney Gardens, modern illustration re-imagining the experience

That night a walk by the canal. Who with she doesn’t say.  Maggie Lane has a description of this — long and intended to be utilitarian (for pragmatic economic reasons) it was also pretty, a nice long walk.

See 1&2, 3&4, 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9 , 10, 11,  12, 13, 14 , 15, 16 & 17 , 18, 19 , 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 , 26 , 27, 28,  29, 30,  31, 32,  33 and 34.

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Mary Hays (1760-1843)

Dear friends and readers,

Another in my ongoing series of foremother poet blogs here and at Ellen and Jim have a blog, two: my choice for tonight is a woman poet whose voice in prose I am strongly drawn to. Mary Hays, appealing 18th century journalist, novelist, biographer, poet. I retell her life and summarize and comment on her writing. Her eloquent voice on behalf of social justice, her exposure of the culture of rape, her life-writing all very moving and relevant today.

I like her.  Her poetry may feel outdated because she uses poetic diction of her day, however, by calling attention to two of her poems which appeal strongly to me (for tone and attitude) and quoting from a third, I make an occasion to retell her life and summarize and comments on her  journalism, philosophy, strong feminist treatises, novels and life writing. Hays’s importance lies in her prose.

No likeness of her has survived.

Her poetry is written in the vein of sensibility.

  Invocation to the Nightingale

Wand’ring o’er the dewy meadow,
Oft at ev’ning hour I go;
Fondly courting Philomela’s
Sympathetick plaints of woe.

Sometimes, hush’d in still attention,
Leaning pensive o’er a stile,
Fancy bids her sound delusive
Lull the yielding sense awhile.

Soft the visionary musick,
Rising floats upon the gale:   
Now it sinks in strains more languid,
Dying o’er the distant vale.

Starting from the dream of fancy,
Nought my list’ning ear invades,
Save the hum of falling waters,
Save the rustling aspin-shade.

"Little songstress, soothe my sorrows,
‘Wrap my soul in softest airs;
"Such as erst, in Lydian measures,
"Charm’d the Grecian hero’s cares.   

"But, if forg’d by cruel rusticks
To lament thy ruin’d care;
"Breathe thy saddest strains of anguish,
"Strains that melodize despair.

"Deeply vers’d in Sorrow’s lessons,
"Best my heart thy griefs can know;
"Pity dwells within the bosom
"Soften’d by an equal woe.

"While thy melancholy plainings
"All my hapless fate renew,
"Heart-felt sighs shall load the zephyrs,
"Tears increase the falling dew.

"Cease to shun me, lovely mourner;
"Sweetly breathe the melting strain:
"Oft thou deign’st to charm the rustick,
"Roving thoughtless o’er the plain.

‘Yet, to him, thy softest trillings
"Can no sympathy impart;
”Wouldst thou seek for kindred feelings,
"See them trembling in my heart!"

Vain, alas! my Invocation,
Vain the pleadings of the muse!
Wrapp’d in silent shades, the charmer
Doth her tuneful lay refuse.

Homeward as I hopeless wander,
Faintly sighs the evening breeze;
Shadowy beams the pale moon’s lustre,
Glittering through the waving trees.

            (1781)

(There is an alternative much less plangent ending:
"Clouds obscure deform the aether,
Rising damps involve the plain;
Pensively I hasten homeward,
To avoid the coming rain.")
   
    Ode to Her Bullfinch

Little wanton flutt’rer, say
Whither wou’dst thou wing thy way?
Why those airy circles make,
All untry’d the thorny brake?
Various dangers lurking lie
In the guise of liberty;
See the wily fowler laid
Close beneath the hawthorn shade;
Mark his tyrannous intent,
Full on schemes of murder bent;   
For within that rugged breast
Meek-ey’d Pity ne’er wou’d rest,
Nor the softer powers of Love
E’er that stoick heart could move,
Little trembler, hither fly,
In my bosom safely lie;
Sympathy and tenderness
Doth that bosom still possess;
There thy glossy plumes unfold
Plumes of azure and of gold;   
While secure from every harm,
Pining want and rude alarm,
A willing captive still remain,
Nor with thy liberty to gain.

Whisp’ring Nature prompts to fly,
Seeking sweet society;
Or the gentler voice of Love
Bids thee range the mazy grove;
Ah! thy fond intent forbear,
Transient joys which end in care;   
All a parent’s anxious woe
Soon thy downy breast would know,
Lest the school-boy’s truant eye
Shou’d thy tender young descry;
Lest the ruder vernal storm
Shou’d thy little nest deform,
Hither then, thou wanton, fly,
Bless thy soft captivity;
And lull with notes of soothing sound
The pangs which do my bosom wound.

John Constable (1776-1837), Hampstead Heath looking towards Harrow at Sunset (1823)

                (1785)

From "The Consolation:"

Oh let me then with trembling footsteps haste
To where Fair Science gilds the dreary waste.
And seek from philosophic lore to find
A lenient balm to heal my wounded mind …

Survey the boundless prospect of mankind,
And mark the lot by heaven to each assigned,
Fleeting their joys, but real in their pain;
The various ills — a complicated train,
Disease, Intemperance, Want, and fell Despair,
The thrill of anguish and corroding care …

The"Invocation to the Nightingale" is in Ann Radcliffe and Helen Maria Williams’s vein:  about loss and disappointment and losing yourself in an illusion  The "Ode to her Bullfinch" is in the vein of Robert Burns to a mouse; Anna Barbauld, the mouse’s petition; Helen Maria Williams to  a lovely flying bird.  These are familiar from early fables; the poems are most often by women and in them small animals are caged, tortured, killed and or just fail to survive in a harsh natural world.  The harder version is the supposed laughing neo-classic type about preying cats drowning in their efforts to murder a yet smaller animal.  I’m thinking of Thomas Gray’s rather cruel Ode to his cat trying to kill a fish.  The excerpt from The Consolation, a long poem,, shows Hays’s strong affinities with  Samuel Johnson — with the important difference that she shows is aware of the generality of people and connects their destinies to how they were treated by others ("society").

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Mary Hays’s signficance lies in her journalism, lives of other contemporary women, a treatise that matches Wollstonecraft’s, An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women, a book of letters she left (between herself and a lover who died), and a short epistolary novel, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney.  In all these she powerfully presents the inner life of a intensely passionate and radical spirit, a woman, caught up in the real circumstances and injustices of the era.  Her writing like Helen Maria Williams is often ignored because some of her best pieces are not in fiction but in the jouralism of the day (like Johnson), the forms it took, the specifics of issues.  The fate of Hays’s reputation makes me think of Molly Ivan’s reputation eventually , journalism is not really paid enough respect as a whole and journalists often have to go to other forms, and yet what they write in journalism is probably much more important and as influential as anyone ever is.

Hays lived well into the Victorian age (1785-1843).  She was the child of middle class radical dissenters; early in her life she fell in love with a neighbor, John Eccles, whose parents had even less money than hers, and they were pressured to give one another up, held out, but after overcoming (ignoring) continued objections, they got engaged.  Alas, he became very ill, and died.  To assuage her grief, she turned to books, poetry, reading, philosophy and through this plus her knowledge of how dissenters were treated in England, became a strong Jacobin (as the English radicals were called).

In Paula Feldman’s retelling of Hays’s life (from her British Women Poets of the Romantic Era) I took the first two poems), Hays was often isolated after the death of Eccles; she was slowly brought into a circle of non-conformist and radical friends by a rational dissenter (an early religious radical much attacked by Burke), Robert Robinson. She met and much admired Mary Wollstonecraft, and they became fast friends; so she entered the circles of Wollstonecraft’s associates William Godwin, Blake, Paine, Holcroft, Helen Maria Williams.  She wrote her Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women in 1792.

Encouraged by Wollstonecraft, she finally left her mother and went to live alone independently at 30 Kirby Street, Hatton Garden.  This freed her to write herself publicly and she began with the Critical Review, studied mathematics, penned sermons, fell in love again, with William Frend who did not return the feeling.

An important aspect of her life was that she was perceived as ugly.  She later wrote a powerful novel inditing the way women were treated sexually, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney.  The basis of this are the  letters she and Frend wrote. The novel makes painful and yet exhilarating reading.  It’s not often mentoined that it also includes a story of adultery and a woman accused of murdering her newborn infant (she didn’t) so the issues swirling around this not-common happening and accusation are equally part of the novel.  It was at first praised and then ferociously attacked and explicitly for its political stances and description of women’s lives.  Really women’s memoirs of the period were often much franker, told much more. There’s a masterly one at the Folger, An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy, an important actress of the period who ended indigent and ill and had the guts to tell about it (not an uncommon ending), but since often (as Bellamy still is) such women were dissed as not respectable and their books described as "scandalous" and treated scabrously, stigmatized; some are until today, e.g., Frances Vane’s Memoirs of a Lady of Quality.

Godwin became Hays’s mentor by the mid-1790s and he encouraged her to write novels. It was his encouragement which led to Emma Courtney where she placed much autobiographical material.  People will remember his candid biography of Mary Wollstonecraft (written just after she died in great grief). When Wollstonecraft returned from the continent, and the terror was on, she and Hays found themselves increasingly isolated and attacked.

Hays in particular was mocked and ridiculed for her open vulnerabiilty, her refusal to play parts, to be guarded, to hang out performative signs (to use Janet Todd’s metaphor).  Elizabeth Hamilton was one of those who couldn’t leave her alone, but also Coleridge was really crude and in the Anti-Jacobin others.  Wollstonecraft had married Godwin and died in childbirth.  Hays was with her in these last days and announced Wollstonecraft’s death in letters and wrote a short biography of her which went into her Female Biography, which begins with Anne Askew and has the merit of being among the first to drop all goddesses and mythic figures, and include many women who the world would call failures, many persecuted women.  These are exemplary portraits in a new style.

By 1799 Hays’s feminist stance had become intensely unpopular in the media.  Her Victim of Prejudice written "to delineate the mischiefs that have ensued from the too great a stress placed on the reputation for chastity in woman" was castigated and ridiculed mercilessly.  it is a daring bold tale of aggravated rape (the only one beyond Richardson’s Clarissa from the 18th century): of Mary Raymond in Mary Hays’s startling The Victim of Prejudice: “Deaf to my remonstrances, my supplications [to] his callous heart, his furious and uncontrollable vehemence [was unstoppable] I suffered a brutal violation” (117).  She defies the virginity taboo (as it’s called), and Hays argues that given what society is, the demand that a woman maintain a reputation for absolute chastity as a condition of respectability to find employment robs them of any opportunity for independence and/or a moral life.

Southey comes out well here.  He did remain friends with Hays and she was invited to live with  his family in Keswick in1814. Her friendship with Godwin cooled, probably because of the dense conservative woman he had married.  Charles Lloyd then published a rumor she had offered herself to him. Hays had not at all (nonsense), but Lloyd could get attention and make a little money that way, and she became the subject of ridicule again. What was supposedly ugly about her I don’t know. So since Emma Courtney where she gave away her vulnerability, the place to hit her was obvious.  Elizabeth Hamiton kept up riculing her biographies of women whom (according to Hamilton) no one admired.

So Hays retreated from public life in 1814 and went to live in Hotwells Clifton, Bristol.  She was writing evangelical tracts for the poor at the end of her life and 83 at death. Feldman’s life of her is shorter and tells what counts in an intelligent (humane) and candid way.  I also recommend Gina Luria Walker’s The Idea of Being Free:  A Mary Hays Reader, a Broadview Press book where Luria reprints Hays’s journalism, letters, and a mass of writing by others which makes it into a sort of autobiography intermingled with contemporary voices by others on Hays and her writing and with writing by a very few critics and scholars today on Hays.

There is an excellent Mary Hays site by Eleanor Ty one chapter of whose book, Unsex’d Revolutionaries is devoted to Hays. See Walker’s biography.  Ty includes a superb bibliography

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Further commentary:

Two essays by Mary Hays:  reprinted in The First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799 are 1) an essay for the Monthly Magazine where she argues women are as intellectually capable and emotionally competent as men, but miseducated and given no opportunity to develop their talents or strength of character.  Indeed discouraged strongly from this. In the literature of the 17th and 18th century and especially in the 17th century one can see how women were really treated in effect as secondary animals (for breeding, for family aggrandizement).  The second 2) is an essay in the Monthly Magazine where she daringly argued that the system of demanding a reputation for absolute chastity for women is pernicious in the extreme:  unreal, unfair (she shows that when they fail this test they are outcast and turned into a hollow destructive world), blinding. 

I was interested to find in the essay she says this sexual faultline and injustice supports the "system of property" and goes on to expose that.  Like Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and numbers of other radicals, men and women both, she did not give up on the principles or ideals of the revolution even if the results became themselves horrific, retrograde, or useless in many areas. Not all, for the documents signed and the new codes put in place in some realms remained.

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Dual edition with Amelia Opie: see my foremother poet blog.

The Memoirs of Emma Courtney: In these letters Emma is neither a Marianne or Jane Eyre, but a woman  who doesn’t fit in: ostracized on grounds of poverty, lack of status, not being married (and she’s what’s called ugly apparently), and yet so gifted, capable of such intense enjoyment of experience were she only to meet a cordial mind.  This portrait is a mirror of Hays herself.

I can see that these may have been originally letters she wrote to Frend who intellectually was so much her confidant, but who was not attracted to her sexually. She can’t understand why he can’t love her for herself, her mind, and through that grow to love her character and thus want to spend his life by her side, as she’d love to spend her life by his.

It’ s a novel where the heroine bares her souls to men, pursue them, and in the face of rejection, humiliates herself,  by pleading and reasoning with the man about all she has to offer.  Three like this in real life memoirs, both books of letters, and Mary Hays’s own letters to William Frend:

1) Julie de Lespinasse’s Letters to M.Gilbert (available in an older English translation), she is abject, passionate, and ceaseless in her attempts to appeal to him.  The first time I read the book in English I was overpowered with the intelligence of the woman and couldn’t quite understand why he couldn’t like her the way she liked him.  Now it seems to me he was afraid of this intensity and didn’t want such a relationship with anyone. 

2) Madame du Deffand’s letters to Horace Walpole:  she is humble, pathetic, eager and anxious to show how much she loves him, all the while knowing he finds her attitude painfully embarrassing. She was much older than he and blind.  Her letters are to many other people, including a small volume to Voltaire (as witty and clever as he, which he knows), but those to Walpole are the ones most famous in English. 

3) In The Idea of Being Free:  A Mary Hays Reader edited by Gina Luria  The opening section is made up of her letters to Eccles; her love is reciprocated but the same passionate woman speaks out.  The problem is they are being forbidden to marry, and it seems that her mother is one of the big obstacles, all the more so because her mother will not acknowledge her true opposition and maneuvrings to stop the marriage from going forward. . This is a Broadview Press book where Luria reprints Hays’s journalism, letters, and a mass of writing by others which makes it into a sort of autobiography intermingled with contemporary voices on and to Hays and with writing by a very few critics and scholars today on Hays.

for a modern version:  Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment.

Back to Emma Courtney:   I found particularly striking the content of the arguments Emma produced.  Emma says that Augustus admits fully she is his intellectual and emotional companion; she and Augustus are deeply congenial; what’s more the woman Augustus prefers to her is superficial, petty, and not someone he would want to talk to at all. Nonetheless, it seems he would prefer to spend his life with this woman. What she is making visible is the animal basis for marriage for this man (and perhaps all men).  Does not he wants an equal to talk to?  What is it he wants out of marriage to a woman? 

What we see here is what some say is a perhaps continuing difference between men and women or so some say. The woman looks for companionate love and support above all; this man for sexual gratification and someone to be his housekeeper, bear children.   He looks for friendship among men or elsewhere. I don’t say this is a general truth at all, but I’ve heard it asserted to explain why men frequent prostitutes and women don’t:  men are more aggressively sexual.

At any rate, this presentation of herself continually as his soul-mate which he nonetheless reject is terribly painful especially when you know that in real life Mary Hays was ridiculed as ugly.  Rather like George Eliot (and Lewes too) come to that.  We might ask how our reading of this novel knowing it’s based on real letters should proceed. Is not this one at least deepened by regarding it as a partially real document, one rooted in realities not mentioned but assumed on the part of Mary Hays and her contemporary readership.  I find Elizabeth Hamilton’s ridiculing of Mary Hays particularly ugly because she does refer to Hays’s appearance. Again, In the middle 1790s when it was known that Frend had rejected Hays and that she had written these abject letters to him, an unscrupulous journalist Charles Lloyd then published a rumor she had offered herself to him (she didn’t but he could get attention and make a little money that way), and she became the subject of ridicule again. What was supposedly ugly about her I don’t know.

I can see that these may have been originally letters she wrote to  Frend who intellectually was so much her confidant, but who was not attracted to her sexually. She can’t understand why he can’t love her for herself, her mind, and through that grow to love her character and thus want to spend his life by her side, as she’d love to spend her life by his

Part of novel usually not discussed:  What happens is Emma is fallen in love with by a Mr Montague and although she doesn’t love him, she decides to marry him.  It’s the wisest and most prudent thing to do:  it will help her get over Harley and provide for her.  It seems Montague is this gentleman who does appreciate her mind and soul.  What happens is Montague becomes intensely jealous when Augustus returns sick and dying, and Emma nurses him and takes over Augustus’s child.  He also begins to commit adultery with a maid, Miss Morton.  It is when Emma catches them nearly in the act, that Hays’s famous peroration against the double standard, her argument that women are driven to allow men sexual freedom because they are desperate for a partner, a support, a protector, and then are despised for what they are driven to obtain occurs.  This peroration appears on blurbs about the book. 

To make a long story, short, at first Emma fires Rachel or Miss Morton, but then she relents when she discovers Miss Morton has given birth to a baby and Montague has killed it.  Miss Morton is in danger of being blamed.  So we have in the last part of the novel  a woman accused of murdering her newborn infant (she didn’t) so the issues swirling around this not-common happening and accusation are equally part of the novel and made visible.  Then Montague shoots himself through the head. 16,000 men each year in the US shoot themselves through the head. 

The point of this is I think not to present Emma as ever so alluring and the creme de la creme all men want (as I’m afraid Burney could be accused) but again to make visible what drives people to deep depression, counterproductive anger, suicide, murder, rage.  It’s not a story of jealousy in the way of Othello (and Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigne and Brooke’s Julia Mandeville rehearse the archetypal jealousy plot Shakespeare used) but to show values people pretend to have, illegitimate and oppressive norms, what really motivates them.  To bring all this out in the light of day.

Not argued. But felt.  The last letter is deeply pessimistic, dark, despairing; Emma can look forward only to death for a release.  I found the last chapter and closing passages very moving,

    The dawn of my life glowed with the promise of a fair and bright day, before its noon, thick clouds gathered; its midday was gloomy and tempestuous. — It remains with thee, my friend, to gild with a mild radicance the closing evening; before the scene shuts,and veils the prospect in impenetrable darkness."

She is compensating, trying to justify her existence just now by writing her life to Augustus who she adopted and brought up as her own.  Her own daughter Emma by Montague is not Augustus’s sister so perhaps they can marry. But her concerns in this last letter is to tell him the study of many of the lucrative profession is a study of chicanery, lying, cheating (that’s law), violence (that’s the the navy). The church is a school of hypocrisy.  Augustus has shown interest in an art, architecture and she hopes that he will be able to make an honest living giving people decent good places to live in.

She also reiterates a single value in italics:  the child Augustus will have (by Emma) should be taught "the true dignity and virtue consist in being free." Much of Emma Courtney can be seen as variants on others manipulating and using one another for their possessive ownership ends. The source:  fear, anxiety, and behind that lies resentment (and hatred too) of those better off in whatever way.  This may cause revolution but not lead to progress at all.  So this would be Hays’s take on what happened to the French revolution. 

This theme as I’ve just described it is endemic in much of the work reprinted by Gina Luria in her Broadview edition which I cannot recommend too highly.  In this Broadview press edition, you find Hays’s her journalism, some of female biographies, excepts from her Appeal to men on Behalf of Women, and much contextualizing material from other writers at the time, including the important Robert Robinson, the single most important influence on Hays’s thought:  he was a dissenter with radical Enlightenment philosophy and psychology (Burke chose him as a special bete noir in his Reflections on the French revolution). Anna Barbauld is typical of the kind of woman who accepted Hays. excepts from those who castigated and ridiculed her. 

As you read along you really get to picture of this woman which is (I think) deeply sympathetic.  Since she was like Johnson, Helen Maria Williams and others — not living in an era where the novel was all important because it could make such money, you really can’t rely on reading her novels to begin to get a sense of how she functioned in her era and could be read today for most profit.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88), The Revenue Cutter (1779)

Ellen

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Jane Austen’s Letters, Letter 34: Wed, 11 Feb 1801, from Manydown to London

Dear friends and readers,

This is a calmer letter. Jane is out of Steventon. She writes from Manydown where she is staying with the Bigg sisters and their brother to Cassandra, now residing with Henry and Eliza in Berkeley Street. The chord has been cut but more importantly she no longer has the irritant of Mary Austen’s triumph and James’s acquiescence — or collusion — in front of her.

Steventon from Barley Lane, by Julia Lefroy

It is as realistic as those which have come before (see, e.g., Letter 33) about the people she has to be dependent on (Henry, James), the politics surrounding her sailor brothers’ lives and continually aware of her lack of money and independent power.  its focus is first on simply retelling a letter sent by Charles; then we get a visit Austen intends to Miss Lyford (not exactly a favorite as we’ve seen), but also to where the Bigg sisters are (so friends Austen likes, if not as much as Martha Lloyd). Then these worried frettings about traveling, this time it’s Cassandra who must be ferried here and there in a state of upper-middle-classdom prestige and safety (how much did these people dread the "lower orders" — or did they dread being identified as one of them).  I am interested to find that again Austen thinks it fine for Cassandra to go with a servant..

I suggest from this juncture of her experience emerged The Watsons. People have often observed the milieu is that closest to Austen’s own and that of her father’s generation.  He is the person she has most identified with in this crisis, and for whom she has hidden why he was led to move his family from where they were secure and comfortable.

Page from manuscript of The Watsons: not titled that by Jane Austen. The Younger Sister gives away the strong autobiographical perspective. The bad Tuesday in this case was Oct 13th, 1801: see my calendar drawn from the novel.

Jane is not spending three days in Lisbon, she is not in London — she’s the younger sister, thought to have been the original title of The Watsons, perhaps the novel whose milieu for the central family comes closest to Austen’s own.  She dines at the same hour as Emma and Elizabeth do, one their visitors do everything they can to shame them with. I argued from the extant calendar in The Watsons that the novel was begun in 1801 (its opening date is Tuesday, Oct 13th and by my calculations that probably means 1801. So The Watsons is the novel written in the wake of the full brunt of the Austen family dismissal. Its mood is an expression of what she felt at this time. In rereading The Watsons I see the older brother and his nasty wife have inserted in them characteristics very like (but much stronger) we find in John and Fanny Dashwood, so all are reflections of Austen’s reaction to her eldest brother and sister-in-law as well as Edward Austen (though it was Henry Austen who made the remark about just think how cheap they will live …)

A must read & reread

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Manydown

We might mention that at Manydown Austen lives with the Bigg-Wither family. She would be with her wealthy friends (the family went back 4 centuries in records), Elizabeth, Catherine and Aletha. Harris was the brother, born in 1781, so 6 years younger than Austen. The proposal in December 1802 would not have come in a vacuum but after a considerable acquaintance. So perhaps during this and other visits there is building up a relationship between Harris and Jane that Jane’s extant letters do not mention. She might have talked of him, described him in some of her letters either unfavorably or mockingly (derisively) or else been frank in some other way (shown him to be stupid, or herself to be half-interested) and Cassandra destroyed it. I speculate that Jane did so write at times and this is part of what was destroyed.

I take Austen’s opening line to be a teasing about Mr Smithson, Henry’s friend. Cassandra has perhaps written about Mr Smithson so eagerly, that Austen teases her that she likes him.

Again Austen is self-consciously aware she will be seen as writing too much and excuses herself on the grounds of a letter from Charles which she now proceeds to paraphrase. This takes up about 1/2 of Austen’s letter..

There is a description of Henry and Eliza’s home in Upper Berkeley Street in Nokes, pp 231-234 — of the French cook, of the lifestyle of Eliza and Henry’s doings as a banker.

New Bond Street — shopping in fashionable London, 1801.

Jane acknowledged Cassandra’s letter on her mother’s behalf and then proceeds to paraphrase a letter that she has had from Charles Austen.

Charles’s letter contained information about Frank as well as himself. The Start is a headland on the Devon coast, a landmark for ships coming up the Channel from the Atlantic. The letter was written there and carried to Popham Lane by Captain Boyle (on his way to Midgham (Boyle family house, north of Reading and Newbury so he passes Winchester, Popham Lane, Basingstoke).Charles had traveled from Lisbon on the Endymion. Charles had met Captain Inglis (a commander) going to take command of Petterel. The Petterel was Frank’s ship. Boyle was a big man on the naval board and Austen’s allusion to a "conjuror" probably refers to how much the man can help Charles in his career (and Boyle’s own). The Endymion has not been plagued with any more prizes is one of her satiric jokes — this is very much in the vein of her mockery of the way Francis’s successes were over-played (letter 32).

Charles spent three pleasant days in Lisbon; they had the Duke of Sussex, 6th son of George III and his morganatic wife, Lady Augusta Murray (daughter of an Earl, Dunmore) aboard.  We see from Austen’s letter that the Duke did not hide that he had married Lady Augusta (even if by law not recognized) and was (like a number of these sons of George) "fat"; he also seemed to Charles "jolly and affable." Charles hopes to be in Portsmouth by Tuesday and is eager to see Henry (a banker)

Then we get how Charles was "of course" much "surprised" at his parents’ plans, "but quite reconciled" (right — she’s simply paraphrasing his pretense) but still wants to go to Steventon before it’s taken over by James and Mary.

I mentioned I’ve been reading Maggie Lane on Jane Austen and food; ever so discreetly, she registers surprise at Mr and Mrs Austen’s move from Steventon (though of course immediately turning to qualify and adhere to the myth they were seeking a version of "golden years"). Charles’s letter apparently — again ever so discreetly paraphrased by Austen with no open admission of subtext — showed much surprise  "he "was much surprised of course."  But of course too "is quite reconciled," though not enough not to want to get to Steventon before James and Mary move in: He "means to come to Steventon once more while Steventon is still ours." Not only did James and Mary make it clear they would be regarded as distant guests, Charles is aware there is nothing to be gained (indeed much lost) by this decamping. Note that Austen is ever controlling her every move by money: she will stay with Miss Lyford only 4 days because then she can return at no expense by filching a ride with Catherine Bigg.

The mention of Abercombie can introduce Sir Home Riggs Popham. Popham accarried dispatches for Abercombie (who died in March 1801 from wounds).  He would be another man around Austen’s sailor brothers.  Southam offers a portrait of Popham, pp 135-57 because Jane Austen wrote a political epigram (yes, Austen) defending this man as a victim of envy (he was court-martialed). Basically (according to Southam) Austen was right: Popham might have been as amoral as the rest of these naval people when it came to a career, and he was capable of wild adventurous risks, he was also efficient, knowledgable, effective, and ambitious — and his quick rose earned the jealousy of other naval people who cared more about their careers and status than anything else.. As Southam says, there is something of his personality type in Austen’s Henry Crawford (p. 166).

Austen then concludes her report on Charles with an allusion to the doings of Cassandra, Henry and Eliza in London:

"Such I believe are all the particulars of his Letter, that are worthy of traveling into the Regions of wit, Elegance, fashion, Elephants and Kangaroons (kangaroos)." LeFaye says Cassandra had gone to the zoo at Exeter Exchange — as I believe John and Fanny Dashwood do with their little darling son.

W see the sign for the menagerie (Zoo) at the top floor of the Exeter Exchange.

For Letter 32 instead of patiently parsing out the lines the way I just did this one I quoted a long paragraph by Southam retelling the details of what Austen was half-mocking.  Austen’s epigram  shows her genuine casual knowledge of the intimacies the Royal Bourbons seemed to share with everyone.

Miss Lyford was the young woman Austen suggested was either mutually in love with or chasing down the Digweed involved in the bickering and jockeying for most position and least expense at Cheesedown Farm. Mary Susan (born 1772) did marry James Digweed in 1803. There is no portrait of this apparent friend of Jane’s (or why visit her), only paraphrasing of Austen’s cattiness (Nokes 226).  Tomalin does not mention her either, only John Lyford, the man who later was Austen’s doctor when Austen was dying. I for one wish we knew more about the characters of these women. Austen makes no portraits of them in her letters; they are too scatty. By contrast, you do have portraits of people in Burney’s letters and that of many other women of this era.

Austen, for example, will only stay with Mary Susan for four days in order not to have to pay to travel back and still travel in upper class exclusionary style by going with Catherine Bigg. It seems that Catherine (not Mary Susan –it’s hard to tell from the vague pronoun reference) wished to see Cassandra again before she left permanently (as they saw it), if their schedules allow this. Austen says she supposed that Cassandra would not stay with ehr brother (Berkeley Street) more han 3 weeks.

It’s apparent here that Catherine will miss Cassandra and Austen assumes that Cassandra might like to see Catherine Bigg once more when she is still a owner-occupier as daughter of Steventon. The sentences do not quite make sense (as last week’s on the snow didn’t). for now Austen turns round and says she hopes this news of Catherine will not retard her coming back.

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shelf in Austen home, from Miss Austen Regrets (they’d like to have more customs.

Teasing out this detail we see another source of Jane’s unhappiness at leaving Steventon. She leaves women friends. Psychological studies have shown repeatedly how much women friends mean to other women, and at least in Jane’s case that seems to be so. Perhaps Cassandra too — if so, then staying at Kent was something of a sacrifice, though the reverse sentence suggests it was not. I get the feeling Cassandra is a self-contained controlled woman; the insistence on preparing and thinking and feeling pious fits in with that.

The more of this fretting detail about travel. In the mid1790s letters we had Austen going over vexing different plans for her to be able to travel and her frustration at having to wait for a brother to take her, and here is a repeat. Henry might send a carriage; Cassandra could avail herself of John their servant who could sit outside on the bar or take some cheaper way near her? (How they regard servants as fixtures here for their convenience.)

I note her sarcasm over James her brother. She says that James offered to meet Cassandra anywhere — but Austen says he would not want to inconvenience himself, and has no intention of going to London on his own account.  Cassandra had better go with John, the servant.

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The landscape in many of the film adaptations: this one sets quiet mood.

The last part of her letter from Manydown quickly sketches a visit to a country village town, Baugherst.  I add to Diane’s remarks about the wit here (see comments):  this small last section has the usual barbed remarks . A sentence testifies to Austen’s love of landscape and countryside (think Cowper). She had hoped to be in a pretty place, but it is winter. Family life of a house is described ironically: "all the comforts of little Children, dirt & litter."  Not much fun with endless noise, messes. Mr Dyson was his usual desperate self ("wild" = desperation) and she once again (as with Anna "poor animal") pregnant. Yes fat here means pregnant:  the 7th of 13 pregnancies. Once again the results of the cruel shallow selfish stance of those who repressed the knowledge and dissemination of contraceptive devices is before us: the ironies here include the reality it was done partly to keep men in charge (and women submissive); a man with little income and so many around him is not exactly in control of his life or space.

The only place left for Austen to express herself directly is the close we are told they pass the time quietly, and then we begin to get the usual barbed remarks  "Mr Dyson as usual looked wild & Mrs Dyson as usual looked big." This "poor animal" (to use Austen’s phrase for Anna during yet another pregnancy) was on her 7th of 13 pregnancies

A Mr Bramston called in Manydowne the day before: if John Byng (LeFaye’s note) is to be believed he was a "blockhead;" and while (years later) his mother or mother-in-law enjoyed Mansfield Park ,her daughter-in-law declared P&P, S&S and MP "boring and nonsensical." It should be remembered that from around 1820 when larger groups of people began to read Austen for the first time and until 1870 Austen was regarded as an elite taste. Nowadays many who might dislike Austen or be bored will not say so readily; there was nothing preventing conventional dullards then. Boring Austen might be to many who want adventure stories, but the "nonsensical" shows the cant mind.

Jane has sent a colored Muslin gown instead of a white one. So Cassandra was in need of a gown.

And "Everybody sends their love" (of course they do) and we get a fuller salutation than those in the last two letters which have survived from this moment: "I am sincerely Yours …"

We then have a silence of three months. Some of this would be letters between Cassandra and Jane before Jane got to Bath; others include her letters to Frank and other friends.  Perhaps she began The Watsons then.

Unabridged texts read aloud.

See 1&2, 3&4, 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9 , 10, 11,  12, 13, 14 , 15, 16 & 17 , 18, 19 , 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 , 26 , 27, 28,  29, 30,  31, 32 and 33.

Ellen

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