ASECS, Cleveland: Susannah Centlivre’s plays, Charlotte Smith’s poetry & romantic women’s gothics

Modern photo of Beachy Head, England

Dear friends and readers,

A fifth blog report on this year’s ASECS meeting in Cleveland. Centlivre. Three panels, two very early morning; one very late afternoon. Susannah Centlivre’s plays on gambling, addiction and marital and civil liberty speaks to us today so too the sources and power of Smith’s melancholy vast poetry. The gothic strange work of several later 18th century women writers is explained & defended.

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Folger production of The Basset Table: Valeria (Emily Trask) and Ensign Lovely (Robbie Gay) bond at Valeria’s lab table, where they share a discovery about worms.

An early morning session on Susannah Centlivre on Friday, 8:00 am (87, “A Woman’s Case”) surprised me by how good it was. Only recently have I had the opportunity to see one of Centlivre’s plays staged; it was so much better than than it had read, I realized I had not been giving them an adequate reading at all; these papers found Centlivre adumbrated humane understandings of addiction in the areas of gambling and alcoholism for men, and explored in a modern way the problem of personal or civil liberty.

Emma Ingrisani’s “‘If He Has Lost his Money, this News will break his Heart:’ Sentiment and Vice in Centlivre’s The Gamester claimed this play showed real sympathy for gamblers. Centlivre shows Valere’s gambling to be compulsive, but the qualities that led him to be addicted to gambling make him appealing. In gambling Valere experiences sublimity, he’s attached to gambling and feels himself magnificent; & the point is made that the man of feeling is not moral so much as someone who enjoys his emotions and is attuned to the emotions of others. The culture of sensibility alters the play’s criticism of gambling. The play is suggestive of an inner world in the characters, and seeks to explain supposedly abnormal impulses. The play’s conservative sexual politics parallels a sophisticated economic and social world. Angelia knows his faults, wants to marry Valere anyway as his dangerous masculine sexuality appeals.

In Aparna Gollapudi’s “The ‘Itch to Play:’ Gambling as Addiction in Centlivre’s The Gamester and The Basset Table are companion pieces. The male in The Gamester is an early prototype of an addict; the fame in The Basset Table cannot be an addict as such because as a woman she is unfree, bound to the will of others and thus does not have autonomy in the first place. Ms Gollapudi suggested the Enlightenment adumbrates the idea of an addict out of its concept of an ideal man of reason. Gambling is still considered a vice or sin, where we look at it psychologically (or chemically): the individual has lost control. In most plays we see gamblers play because they want to, not because they feel compelled to. The full idea of addiction (self-enslavement) comes in the later 19th century when people observed opium addiction. Ms Gollapudi cited much earlier treatises where drinking is shown to have an element of inner compulsion; Trotter: the drunkard is driven by cravings despite his intentions, irrationality, not for profit, unthinking pleasure, fueled by a failure of the will. Benjamin Rush gambling a disease or palsy of the will. Cotton’s Compleat Gamester is someone obsessed, with a deep-seated need, uncontrollable. Valere is exhausted in the morning; he earnestly vows to stop gambling, but he is at the table again soon after. Lady Sago is wasting her husband’s money, wilful and she and others are shocked into reform by showing them parallels with sexual complaisance. In the tradition of such plays, the male threatens financial harm to his family (e.g., Holcroft’s play); Lady Towneley chooses an irrational ideal of pleasure (Vanbrugh). Centlivre’s plays present a modern individual self in her depiction of gambling.

Lady Lucy (Katie deBuys), Sir James (Michael Milligan), Mrs. Sago (Tonya Beckman Ross), and Ensign Lovely (Robbie Gay)

Jennifer Airey’s “‘I must vary shapes as often as a player: Centlivre and liberty on the English stage” took up Centlivre’s defense of the stage against Collier’s criticism it’s immoral. In A Bold Stroke for a Wife, Colonel Feignwell frees Anne Lovely through his masquerading; the females help one another by using disguises too. Feignwell also defends his militarism as supporting the Hanoverian world which provides liberty for the subject; Anne Lovely shows us the right of women to resist male domestic tyrants who claim a power over individuals they do not deserve. Anne Lovely says her right to chose her dress (not to wear quaker clothes) is an aspect of her liberty, freedom of movement. She is justified, and enters a new contract with a better master; but her freedom goes only so far. The play’s parallel argument is that children are obliged to obey only when parents use authority reasonably. The older guardians are utterly destructive, selfish, obsessive. Underlying the action of masquerade is the idea that through acting one can save oneself. Ms Airey felt the play’s presentation of good sense and romantic fidelity in the central characters disconnects actors from the charge of prostitution (selling themselves).

Misty Anderson was the respondent and said that in Centlive liberty is a core value. She summed up Ms Ingrisani’s paper thus: emotional susceptibility is not entirely negative (gambling is an emotionally drenching experience). The depiction of the gambler is part of the history of the depiction of the reformed rake: excess is turned on itself but it “re-inscribes” [makes visible?] uncontrollable passions. Ms Gollapudi’s paper: more psychological terrain, makes a powerful case for considering the history of the invention of addiction (we move from Hogarth’s disease of the will to Methodist’s brain-searing). Gender gets in the way as Lady Reveller cannot be a slave as she is not free & in the end is indistinguishable from social norms; Valeria is obsessed with science; her character is just not convincing. Ms Airey’s paper: acting itself part of the agenda for liberty; a provisional self challenges patriarchal power and belongs to Butler’s discourse of the self as performer, re-assembling the self for social life.

2005 Bold Stroke for a Wife: Illinois Wesleyan University

Ms Anderson seemed though to object to the empathy and idea that rebellion gives liberty and pleasure: what do we do with actors around us who act with less liberal tendencies? Ms Ingisani defended the breaking out; but, asked Ms Anderson, is not this a risk, a danger making someone susceptible to a conservative person’s resentment? Valere is a psychological portrait but we see he’s a victim to an economic system. To Ms Gollapudi’s paper, MS Anderson said the will is not something individual, women can realize themselves through social manipulation; we don’t believe men have self-mastery (or autonomy) either. Ms Airey wants to show Centlivre defends the theater as a place of moral reformation.

Ms Anderson then asked what is the difference between Behn’s and Centlivre’s characters. Centlivre claims liberty through enacting performance; Behn’s characters perform hedonism plainly, not an act. Centlivre’s characters exist in a deeply unjust situation where you choose one trap over another; we can see some freedom if we see that signing a contract does not enslave us ontologically.

It was a brilliant response, show-offy too. My demur (which I voiced in the discussion afterward) is that if you obey the social conventions these will prevent you from enacting radical freedoms which may over-ride and erase contracts if the whole society agrees eventually to change. To worry about the risk of vengeful conservative people about you, made me think of Marianne Dashwood’s reply to Elinor who claimed freedom of understanding even if her behavior was under subjection that this ends up in subservience. And in another dialogue that “we are all offending every moment of our lives” no matter what we do (S&S I:13 & 17). The compromise Ms Anderson suggested ends up in supporting the establishment, not changing it and keeps everyone unfree.

Would it were that every session I ever went to at a conference came near the interest of this one.

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Again at 8:00 am, now Saturday morning, a really worthwhile seesion on Charlotte Smith’s poetry (which I love (155, “Unromantic Charlotte Smith”).

Charlotte Smith by George Dance

Regulas Allen (“‘Rightly to spell of every herb hat sips the dew: Chaos and classification in the poetry of Charlotte Smith”) found the pervasive theme in Smith’s poetry is displacement, exile, a failure of boundaries, mourning over disorder, nothing can be securely in a place. She approaches plants in a scientific spirit, telling the species of plant, categorizing them using Linnaeus to try to impose an order on chaos which the notes to the poems continually undermine. In her life she knew continual disasters from the time of her marriage; abject terrorizing powerless misery as a women with a violent ruthless failure of a husband. She remembered her childhood as a time of wealth, innocence, contentment; her refusal to relinquish her class pretensions meant she had to make large enough sums of money to support gentility and a good future for 9 children too so she had to write for publication continually. She produced 10 novels and many editions of poetry. Her apparently learned study of Linneaus, geology (Erasmus Darwin), botany, her notes at the bottom of her texts, were not done to show off but as a way of finding order in nature. She’s not plagiarizing but situating her work in time and against the savagery of society (as in footnotes telling of pirates brutality).

Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening

Huge vapors brood above the difted shore,
Night on the ocean settles, dark and mute,
Save where is heard the repercussive roar
Of drowsy billows, on the rugged foot
Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone
Of seamen in the anchored bark that tell
The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone
Singing the hour, and bidding “Strike the bell.”
All is black shadow, but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Mislead the pilgrim-such the dubious ray
That wavering reason lends, in life’s long darkling way.

Her poetry has a continuity. In the sonnets and Beachy Head we find traumatic displacement, or geographical violent shifts, corpses adrift in tides, emblematic landscapes of despair. She finds deep-time geology registered in a Middleton churchyard; couples cruelly parted; if she presents a shepherd she looks at the ground he walks on, many presences sleep unremembered there. In her Emigrants we find a French lady and her children, a female exiled from her husband, born to affluence; the channel waters, England and France dissolve into one; in Beachy Head the cliffs register the sudden violence of time, shells high up show continental shifts; it ends on a hermit in a sea cave who tries to make his place but cannot. Late in life the botany and zoology of her Rural Walks show her turning to order, contrasting what has been learned in the new science to peasant cultures she has known. It’s an escapist pursuit, a resource for someone sick at heart, provides calm to a wounded mind. She does not just think of herself and hers: her poetry is about the instability and harshnesses of experience for others too.

Greta River Bridge by John Sell Cotman (1782-1842)

Ruth Knezevich talked of “Charlotte Smith’s “Antiquarian Pursuits in Beachy Head.” Ms Knezevich wants to understand the history and philosophy we find in this poem. The narrator’s literary voice presents the past tangibly by narrating a history (including going back to a castle of Stephen of Blois) that reflects the invasions and evolutions across the island (with relics) and the globe. People are in a local place but that’s the micro-level. She records names, places, events that make a wider perspective. We are invited actively to participate in the geological landscape and history. Her use of annotations is innovative; she distinguishes botany from Shakespearean perspective. She uses them to authorize her text and embed it in the writing of her era. The poem ends in brief rhapsody. She can be distinguished from romanticism by her concrete particularism and brings out the duality (intertwining?) of history with a literary voice. She wants her text to be respected, with her roots in 18th century traditions which go back (as in Warton’s history of poetry) back to the middle ages.

Lisa Ottum also discussed “Unromantic History in Beachy Head.” In her own era she was attacked for imitation; in our time Beachy Head is seen as central and romantic. Ms Ottum saw the poem as part of a debate about history’s effects, moving from past the cliffs to Asia, from the countryside to pre-historic time, from geology to cosmopolitanism. Smith has read Fergusson and Kames, Hume and Gibbon, and followed the changes in historical writing. She looked to the past to understand the present, to private life too, seen in larger social movements. Historians wanted to learn about manners and customs of people as well as statecraft. In Beachy Head she could find a proximate perspective to bring the moral imagination to bear. The poem is preoccupied with departed happiness which is fleeting, unsustainable. She uses temporal shifts in perspective, with a surplus of emotion. All things will collapse away into nothingness; after contemplation of large disasters, she has smaller pictures of cottages. The mind then rests on local peaceful moments. The poem draws on Cowper’s Task, anticipates Mont Blanc, where mediating power of the poet copes with vast powerful teaming worlds.

A cover illustration for Radcliffe’s Udolpho: in prose she too register the cataclysms of time and history

We had a fine discussion afterward. It ranged from asking what were Smith’s sources to when the people first encountered Smith and what editions they first saw her work in. I asked if she was influenced by Scott’s Antiquary and we talked of his Old Mortality and Scott’s use of history, chronicles and antiquarianism. What geology did Smith read? I thought of the poets and text of Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. We discussed when Smith was first identified as a romantic (by Wordsworth, and again in the 1970s), the long period where most of her works fell out of print and no one discussed her. What a change since the mid-1980s and the feminist movement which was essentially responsible for bringing her back.

For “Women and the late 18th century gothic, see continuation in comments.

The novel has a famous scene of a wild hurricane flood over a vast cliff (mocked by Austen in her letters — but recalled)

Ellen

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Anne Finch and the Poetry of Retirement

Dear friends and readers,

Let’s begin with a beautiful reading aloud of a poem once one of my favorites (I’d read it again and again): Anne Finch’s The Tree:

The Tree:

The picture is by Joseph Farrington (1747-1821), The Oak Tree, the musical group, Epping Forest, and here’s the text for you to read along as you listen:

Fair tree! for thy delightful shade
‘Tis just that some return be made;
Sure some return is due from me
To thy cool shadows, and to thee.
When thou to birds dost shelter give,
Thou music dost from them receive;
If travellers beneath thee stay
Till storms have worn themselves away,
That time in praising thee they spend
And thy protecting pow’r commend.
The shepherd here, from scorching freed,
Tunes to thy dancing leaves his reed;
Whilst his lov’d nymph, in thanks, bestows
Her flow’ry chaplets on thy boughs.
Shall I then only silent be,
And no return be made by me?
No; let this wish upon thee wait,
And still to flourish be thy fate.
To future ages may’st thou stand
Untouch’d by the rash workman’s hand,
Till that large stock of sap is spent,
Which gives thy summer’s ornament;
Till the fierce winds, that vainly strive
To shock thy greatness whilst alive,
Shall on thy lifeless hour attend,
Prevent the axe, and grace thy end;
Their scatter’d strength together call
And to the clouds proclaim thy fall;
Who then their ev’ning dews may spare
When thou no longer art their care,
But shalt, like ancient heroes, burn,
And some bright hearth be made thy urn.

Good news. My proposal for a panel for the next fall conference (November 2013) in Philadelphia has been accepted. It’s one I enjoyed doing which will take me back to the poetry I used to read a great deal, still love, the poetry of retirement, especially those written in the meditative style. I spent hours yesterday rereading poetry by Anne Finch and a paper I wrote about her and Mary Wortley Montagu as sister poets.

Here’s the description of the conference’s theme: “Retirement, Reappraisal, and Renewal in the Eighteenth Century”, from which I cull:

Retirement … had then and continues now to have resonances in [disparate] fields [and] almost invariably leads to many open-ended questions. Retirement from what or to what, or more simply, what next? Is retirement even possible? Is retirement an end in itself, a momentary pause, a strategic withdrawal, an evasion, or a new beginning? Is retirement a necessary fiction, and if so, necessary for whom? Is retirement enough to hope for, or is there something more to be wished?

Here’s what I came up with:

CFP: The Retirement Poem

It’s telling that one of the most frequently-written kinds of poems in the century and one half where the social role of the poet was seen as central to the writer’s ethical function is the retirement poem. Its aesthetic conventions vary as it mixes with Horatian imitations, Georgics, and pastoral, and friendship and nature poetry, or the act of retirement (or contemplating it) turns into groundwork for political statements (from exile), and court satire. It may arise from life experiences like depression, the death of someone, or destruction of a way of life that meant a lot to the poet and now seems irretrievable, or reactive defiance when ambition, a path to advancement has been thwarted, blocked. Paula Backscheider finds the poet’s gender leads to characteristic fault-lines in retirement poetry. The male poem explores a political terrain; they may be country house estate poems which while ostensibly exemplifying a useful virtuous life carve out space which projects power, what one should do with wealth. Female poems show the poet re-creating herself in a counter-universe, where the poet has time and follows “reason” (individual judgment), learning, memory; these poems are often visionary. There are many other fault-lines, genre is one, purpose another: the poet seeks to renounce or denounce social authorities, is reappraising a life, seeking renewal, or health. To try to promote a coherent discussion I call for papers which seek fault-lines in retirement poetry, shaping elements either in the poem, its context or era (including who is the poet), genre, themes, imagery, which seem to lead the poet into taking his or her text(s) in a specific direction.

An Image:

Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743): Afternoon: Backgammon

The organizers liked it very much.

What I’d like to do is also write an deliver a poetry on Anne Finch, return to her poetry and write about how she used the poetry of retirement to work out a modus vivendi for herself that she could live with: she had to give up ambition when she saw its price and milieu to find peace. Often people speak of her poetry as coming in two types: the satirical, fables, pindarics, which analyze her depressions and argue for the perspective she took on life as ethical; then there is the romantic and visionary, the half-mad and allegorical-poetic in retreat. I will show these are really one body of poetry, just different genres, which forms are made too much of, some of which (Wordsworth was right) got in her way, prevented her from expressing herself from a deep level which finds its own form. And will go against the fashion for preferring her more analytical and feminist complaints, and return to an earlier view, suggesting her finest poetry remains the romantic lyrics, the landscapes (inward and outer), picturesque and wild. The Tree is a good example of what I mean. Many of her poems are not well-known, not in the one supposed standard edition of her poetry, which leaves out a lot of them. So here’s another, dwelling on Eastwell Park, as her Arcadia, the abode of poetry. Invocation to the Southern Winds.

And I’ll be biographical, which I think one central way to read literature. It gets us to the core. As when I finally wrote frankly about rape in Clarissa, why the book was and is so important (to me too), so writing about this center of Anne Finch (much of which I do have scattered on the Net) will be deeply satisfying. Pure happenstance the society’s topic of retirement coincides with the year I’ve retired from teaching for money (though not reading, writing, studying, going to conferences or anything else).

Ellen

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East Central ASECS in the Baltimore Hyatt: women’s books & lives, infamous, respectable

Frontispiece for Phillis Wheatley’s poems

Dear friends and readers,

In this second of a two-part report on the EC/ASECS conference I attended a couple of weeks ago now, the themes of the papers and talks seem as much about what gains respect as what incurs infamy.

Papers and talks were on ways writers were pressured into presenting themselves in order to be heard at all, surprising underlying punitive and/or emotional patterns which are still with us; the difficulty (impossibility it seems) of breaking out of stereotypical expectations, frustrating publishers. Since two of the panels I went to were chaired by Eleanor Shevlin and were about book history, I also summarized a paper she read aloud to the Washington Area Print group last week on the publisher William Harrison.

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From a 2007 film adaptation of Justine

The session I chaired on Saturday (9:00-10:15 am) was originally intended (by me) to be about actresses, but as my call for papers turned up but one possible paper and I found I was not able to write a paper myself after all, I contented myself with the publication of my review of Felicity Nussbaum’s Rival Queens, and widened the scope of “R-e-s-p-e-c-t (yes I had Aretha Franklin’s famous song in mind) to include women in all working occupations and all ranks: “For actresses, women playwrights, working women, fictional heroines, and even aristocrats respect and favorable reputation matter.”
I’m delighted to say truthfully all three papers were excellent (I took more notes than usual) and the talk afterwards stimulating.

Kate Novotny spoke on “The Ethical Quicksand of Sade’s Justine: or, How to Win Readers and Offend People.” Mr Novotny went over the text, conventions and rhetoric of Sade’s Justine to show how Sade mediated his book’s shocking content in order to persuade his reader to listen to his philosophical point of view which (among other things) justified violence. His rhetoric relies on the similarity of his story to Richardson’s Pamela and other tales of virtuous lowly girl makes good. Justine is a satire on Richardon’s piety. Kate went over the text of Justine slowly, showing its use of familiar motifs. Lulled as it were, once we are reach the orgy, the fundamental nature of the text is an egoistic misogynist ethos. The strongest person is the best person and can or will not be controlled; one implication is that it’s a mistake to give women a voice at all.

In contrast, Sarah Hastings’s paper, “Vows, Whores, & Signs: Women and Words in Behn’s The Feigned Courtesans and The Rover shows Behn’s comedies hinge on a critique of mores that prevent women from exercising their power. Behn intermingles women who enact normative roles of virtue and who are prostitutes, gypsies are aligned and actresses identified with prostitutes. Failed servants survive through prostitution — indeed only through sexual flexibility can women survive at all, marriage being an exploitative commercial contract whose crux is a sexual-familial bargain. We see the mask of the courtesan allows her to enact agency and be pro-active on her own behalf; she is better off than the relatively helpless women who obeys norms of virtue. Women want to flee the world of men, be free from male control. Her stories foreground anxieties about marriage. Behn’s women want marriage to be partly based on compatibility (love). Tellingly Angelica Bianca is the only real courtesan in The Feigned Courtesans and wants to de-commodify herself; Helena wants a constant husband (while Willoughby wants an open marriage for himself). Behn’s plays reflect the world outside them too. Ms Hastings gave a brief history of the laws concerning prostitutes (made illegal under Henry VIII) and suggested an infinite series of steps exist between respectability and being called a whore; the class the woman belongs to affects how she is seen too. Women were treated as interchangeable objects. Market savvy women exploit these gradations and contradictions. During the civil war too there seemed to be a surfeit of women in civilian society, yet changes in customs which favored women.

From a 1986 production of Behn’s The Rover

Katherine Kittredge’s paper, “No Shame in Patchwork: Didactive Depictions of Laboring Class Girls” came out of her work on child poets and children’s literature in the long 18th century. Mr Kittredge asked how are laboring girls depicted in the 18th century? The improbability of Pamela not only gave rise to parody, it was felt not to be the strongly corrective narrative needed to train working class girls to accept their place and condition. The most famous of the didactic stories for girls was Goody Two-Shoes, the story of an itinerant orphan teacher who becomes respected and later marries up. Much harsher is the History of Susan Grey where an orphan becomes a washerwoman; when a captain goes after her, she is unjustly fired, flees, and dies a horrible death. We see the vulnerability of such a girl; ambition is dangerous; education and gentle behavior cannot change your status. In another story, the mother so busy with so many children that she can teach them only the catechism and her older daughter cannot be spared to attend school. Interestingly, in such stories we do not find upper class women teaching; the roles modeled insist on plain clothing, mending one’s clothes, and if the girl has fewer that suggests she will be safer: one good calico say and two other outfits. (She is not trying to get above herself.) Sewing or making clothes becomes a skill that creates community among women. These are proto-adult narratives that teach the girl that a laboring girl will never pass, they have an underlying paranoia that everyone is watching and punishments meted out. Later on in the century other standards than home-made few clothes replace these; now the girl has to be careful lest she make herself ridiculous because she has access to consumer culture.

Samantha Morton as Jane Eyre (1997 film)

The discussion afterwards was very interesting. One French scholar debated whether Sade had a discernible or consistent philosophy in Justine. Late on I thought of the Comus-like debate in Sade’s Marquis de Ganges but do not know if there are such passages in Justine. After all the papers all stayed within the 20 minute limit. I remembered Germaine Greer’s two part chapter in her Slipshod Muses where she argued that we have very few documents on Behn and suggested that much that has been said about her in biographies has no foundation. Greer thinks what evidence we have suggests Behn lived partly as a kept mistress and her playwriting was a way to help her make ends meet, not something she could really survive on. Thus her plays mirror her life’s experience. Ms Kittredge’s children’s stories anticipate Bronte’s Jane Eyre who has (we recall) only 3 dresses, two grey plain ones and one grey silk; she resists Rochester’s attempt to make her play a role above her status; she becomes a teacher, and she is rewarded for her selflessness. Even 20th century novels for women reflect these didactic “good girl” patterns: in Winifred Holtby’s socialistic radical South Riding, one of the heroines is very intelligent and her parents cannot afford to send her to school because her mother having too many children needs her at home. She is rewarded for her self-sacrifice when someone comes across with a scholarship for her; her great wish is to become a teacher like the primary heroine of the book.

Sarah Burton (Anna Maxwell Martin), the working class girl as teacher with her pupils behind her (2011 South Riding, an Andrew Davies’ product)

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Edward Young (1681-1765)

Eleanor Shevlin chaired two book history sessions. The mid-morning (10:30-11:45) had three papers whose particular topics — a woman poet, a bluestocking and saloniere who wrote letters and Richardson — were areas I’d worked on.

Jim May spoke first about the frustrations he’d experienced working on a half-volume for the Cambridge edition of Richardson’s complete correspondence. Prof May has been working for many years on Edward Young and his part was to edit the 28 Young-Richardson letters (6 from Richardson). He gave a brief history of the publication of this correspondence. Richard Phillips had bought Richardson’s letter ms’s, and commissioned Anna Barbauld to edit the papers inside 3 months (!) Peter Sabor has counted around 600 letters from Richardson and Barbauld included about 1/4 of these; she conflated, abridged, eliminated substantives. The texts are hard to read. Foundational work was done in the 20th century by Henry Petit and Harry Forester; it would be very hard to improve upon them. PRof May handed out a xerox of letter by Mary Hallow, Young’s housekeeper who had a close relationship with Young. The problem is Cambridge’s policies which do not include information on punctuation, variants and have other restrictions so hat Prof May will intends to publish an essay which includes the notes not permitted in order to get the material he has added.

Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800)

Eliza Child’s paper on Elizabeth Montagu’s “Letters from the North: Marriage, Power and Coal” was fascinating to me. I had known Montagu was involved in her husband’s mines (a central source of their great wealth), but not how active, how interested in industry, genuinely knowledgeable and (for her time) benevolent or at least just to the workers. It was another outlet for her imagination, altruism, sensibility. She chaffed at the limitations her husband imposed on her. Ms Child told us about Montagu’s entrepreneurial activity at Denton, a mining community; she had the confidence to persuade her husband to risk capital expenditure. Sections from Montagu’s candid letters were read aloud (she does not want to “lose” money “merely to avoid a little trouble”); her husband was more cautious (we heard her urging him “to act”, that he got “angry” but when “money came into his pocket” is gratified). She had hoped to be seen with Voltaire and Johnson in her “Essay on Shakespeare”; here she could be socially useful. She enacted fair hiring practices (contracts were short-term), opposed fixing prices (cabals), broke ranks with their peers over these issues. Her sister, Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison, is a model of benevolent capitalism. She also had effective charities: set up schools, gave material assistance to children to learn to read, for girls to knit and spin. These letters can provide a conterpoint to how women are often depicted in the 18th century novel where we often find them victimized by wealth.

Felicia Hemans, recent edition of her poems and letters

Alex Grammatikos spoke on “The Nothingness of Fame, At least to Women: Felicia Hemans and the Price of Celebrity.” Mr Grammatikos’s paper showed how Hemans was gradually pressured into presenting herself in the most conventional poetess sort of ways because she saw that not to do so left her vulnerable to criticism for her private life: she separated from her husband after having 5 children by him in 5 years; she turned to her mother who took care of the children while she spent her days writing and reading. She was also ignored or seen as inferior to the male poets. When she presented her work as that of a women of sensibility (and wrote poems to suit) she was successful. In her letters we see her say that she has no friends to help her promote her work as an author. She tells one correspondent how her previous poems were not successful because their subject was “not to be seen from a female pen.” She read reviews which focused on her femaleness and she redirected her career. There was a considerable gap before she could get a book of poems published again and when she did, she writes in the sentimental vein (“Records of Women”) for which she became famous. Mr Grammatikos felt Hemans resented this identification and Byron’s mockery of her as a “he-mans” was grating. But there was no breaking out of these stereotypes. So the phrase “nothingness of fame” was hers and refers to her sense of her true selfhood as lonely and suppressed.

Once again the talk afterwards was very interesting. I regret I was not able to get most of it down because so much was give-and-take. I can remember best what I contributed which was that I reviewed a Cambridge edition of Austen’s later manuscripts (which is supposed to be published this spring) and found the edition to be a missed opportunity; the choice of documents showed the series had not been thought through (so one had “everything else” including early manuscripts and not all the late ones); it was said to be for students and yet the price was outrageous and notes veered between minute erudition and high school-type explanations; it was basically a reprint of Chapman without Chapman’s apparatus.

There were two more lively talks (Phillis Wheatley, Kathy Temple on William Blackstone’s Commentaries); another session from which I briefly summarize 2 papers, and on November 9th (a few days later) Eleanor Shevlin’s paper on “The Making of the English Novel,” the role of periodical subscription magazines and newspapers; for summaries of all this see the comments.

Ellen

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Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline and The Young Philosopher, her 1st & last novels

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), Le Reveur, or the Ruines of the Oybin Monastery (1835-40), this image appears with Emmeline in an essay on the novel

Dear friends and readers,

Over the past couple of months I’ve read the first and last of Charlotte Smith’s novels, Emmeline, or the Orphan of the Castle (1788) and The Young Philosopher (1798). Inside those 10 years she wrote 8 more, one, the 2nd, Ethelinde; or the Recluse of the Lake (1789) I’m hoping to make an edition of. I wrote about it here, as well as her translation from Prevost, Manon Lescaut, or the Fatal Attachment (1786), her abridgement, translation, adaptation of Pitaval’s Causes Celebres, as The Romance of Real Life (1787), and her later gothic, Montalbert (1795), as part of other projects, papers, or simply I wanted to read them because I like her writing.

Emmeline is remarkable for its powerful whirling around a group of characters who directly represent herself from different angles, and her frightening violent, irresponsible, utterly egoist, half-wild inconsistent husband, both when they first wed, and as she had come to know him by 1787 when she finally left him, taking her still living 9 children with her (she had had 12), and writing to her publisher that “his temper been so capricious and often so cruel” that her “life was not safe” (Smith to Joseph Cooper Walker, 9 October 1793). At first (age 16), she had spent extravagantly with him, but quickly came to see what a meaningless drone he was; she seems not to have been able to fend off his sexual demands and had 12 children by him; he used up his inheritance, embezzled moneys, ended up in a debtor’s prison, to which she accompanied him; later she obeyed him and went to live at a remote chateau (like a gothic heroine) in France where she nearly died of another childbirth. He had mistresses in front of her and finally she left him for good.

Some might say a novel which is so filled with such autobiographical painful issues cannot be good; I disagree. The greatest art comes out of an artist returning repeatedly to their life’s core issues to address these in large meaningful ways.

Her life of hardship, penury, continual tragic deaths and disappointment is also treated on the Net. Omitted is an incident (told by Antje Blank in the Literary Encyclopedia) that when Smith had already had a number of children by Benjamin Smith, she did meet a man whom she loved and could possibly have lived a fulfilled life with but she parted from him because she thought living with him would do her children harm.

In The Young Philosopher she presents the autobiographical material more indirectly, provides a wild, whirling, indeed exhilarating series of agonized adventures for a pair of outcast heroines and strong good thoughtful men as heroes (one an original thinker, the other determined to live his life according to his own evolved ethical standards) in order (it seemed to me) try out how far the philosophical ideas of various Enlightenment figures provides guides for understanding or life.

Since Emmeline was her first novel, and for its time so original and sold widely and ever since has been one of those by Smith readers read (and thus it came back into print in the 1970s in an Oxford edition by Anne Ehrenpreis), Emmeline has a full wikipedia article with a complete summary of the story, characters, and themes.

The Young Philosopher is only treated briefly as “a final piece of ‘outspoken radical fiction’. Smith’s protagonist leaves Britain for America, as there is no hope for a reform in Britain.” The novel is not often left out of treatments because it came last. There is, however, an excellent chapter on The Young Philosopher in Eleanor Ty’s Unsex’d Revolutionaries. The core story (presented as substory at first) is about Laura Glenmorris whose mother disliked her and who eloped to marry an unacceptable highlander; when Laura is deprived of his presence & protection, she is hounded by his relatives who destroy her newborn son (his heir); her daughter by him, Medora, is already grown and she has a series of parallel despotic, exploitative, and violent experiences, both in the Highlands and in London from which she seems to emerge the stronger. The framing story is of George Delmont, a younger son (though not young), the philosopher of the book whose brother takes advantage of him; Delmont’s experiences occur mostly in provincial society and London; he is the sober thoughtful caring man who occurs repeatedly in all Smith’s books, a dream figure for her of the good man she was not permitted to have a worthwhile life with.

Most salient: Emmeline makes clear why it was so necessary if you had an illegitimate child to hide the fact. The inheritance laws and desperate for any property was what made this imperative. If it should get out that Adelina now coercively married to Trelawny had had a child by someone else (Fitzgerald), immediately Trelawny’s family would be on top of her to discover if it was someone else’s and then spread nasty rumors, go to court if they had to, to secure the property away. Her brother can claim the child as his because he is a second son. No one cares. The Young Philospher makes clear how the legal system and customs render the strongest woman helpless when someone wants to take her property, abuse her body or her mind (a family or husband can put a woman away and this is one of the threats the heroines in The Young Philosopher endure).

I try to suggest the journey that occurred between them, keep to autobiographical and literary contexts. They have flaws But the first keeps a heroine who has a baby out of wedlock central; the second occurs in Scotland, is exhilarating, looks back to Lee’s Recess, and forward to Austen & Scott.

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Carleton Watkins, The Three Brothers (1865-66), the photo is on the cover of the Broadview Press edition of the novel by Lorrance Fletcher, which I recommend

The two most interesting characters in the Emmeline are Adelina (see below) and Delamere who falls in love with Emmeline at first sight, immediately thinks he has a right to woo her, and because he is heir to a wealthy fortune and she a poor (probably illegitimate he thinks) cousin of his must accept him. He spends the whole of the novel either pursuing her demandingly, or, when he thinks she has been unchaste, castigating her harshly. As a character he is often mentioned in other novels of the era, but not always negatively, often as in a handsome suitor perhaps misbehaving in some way, handsome, rich, debonair, (like Darcy an eligible candidate). This is utterly to misunderstand the book, to ignore Smith’s whole perspective.

Among Austen’s marginalia to her History of England is a comment that suggests Austen may have understood Smith:

Though of a different profession, and shining in a different Sphere of Life, yet equally conspicuous in the Character of an Earl, as Drake was in that of a Sailor, was Robert Devereux Lord Essex. This unfortunate young Man was not unlike in Character to that equally unfortunate one Frederic Delamere. The simile may be carried still farther, & Elizabeth the torment of Essex may be compared to the Emmeline of Delamere.

In Sophia Lee’s Recess, Essex is a tyrant, irrational, a bully and he destroys the sanity of Elinor (Matilda’s sister, Mary Queen of Scots’ twin daughters; in the fiction, they lived to adulthood). Now since the young Austen seriously presents herself as idolastrously pro-Mary, it may be she has fallen for the romance of Essex, but by the time of the Juvenilia she is strongly disillusioned about people’s behavior.

Delamere very much reminds me of Leonce in de Stael’s Delphine: one of these aristocratic older males who has been taught he is just a God on earth, needs answer to no control. can do whatever he wants, and if he’s thwarted goes enraged. Such a type and presentation is found in Montbrillant by Louise de D’Epinay. Staeland Epinay almost or just about say the only way you can stop such people’s behavior is to guillotine them. They will not accept the revolution, not accept their diminished status or a give away of any of their wealth or uncontrolled power but right to the death to keep it, do anything necessary.

This was a type encouraged in the era by the primogeniture system in the ancien regime. One of Hubert Robert’s patrons (Comte d’Artois) grew up at first to be sensitive, a reading boy and was deliberately corrupted and changed into this type as a necessary linchpin of the system. In our time many boys are taught to be competitive, encouraged to develop aggression, even bullying propensities rather than risk they’ll be “effeminate” (read homosexual). Those who won’t or can’t behave this way suffer inwardly a lot.

One real flaw of this book — which reminds me again of Austen’s S&S (like Austen’s S&S, Smith’s Emmeline begins quietly, drily) is the chief male is not given enough inner life. We never see into Delamere’s mind so it’s hard to grasp what is probably meant as a partially sympathetic portrayal. Delamere is the badly educated heir, not controlled enough, given too much leeway to his passions. I’m beginning to think Delamere is a portrait of Mr Smith when young. Some phrases referring to someone who has no control over himself and inflicts himself on others, spending spending spending are surely memories of her husband as she first saw and still experiences him.

There seems an unsureness which harks back to Smith’s Manon. It really is not clear if Smith is on the side of the young couple as lovers — so the Emmeline does yearn to marry this eligible heir — or we are to think of Emmeline as sheerly harassed, enter into the case of Delamere’s father who wants to prevent the marriage sheerly on the basis of Emmeline’s poverty and lack of rank. The sequence which imitates Clarissa where Emmeline goes down to the garden and is abducted by Delamere is written with an unsure focus.

I couldn’t disagree more with Mary Wollstonecraft who decries the presentation of Adelina: Adelina is daughter of Lord Westhaven, an ideal male type in the novel (non-violent, chivalrous, Enlightened) who marries Augusta Delamere. Wollstonecraft inveighs against developing empathy for once Adeline is discovered to be pregnant with Delamere’s friend, Fitzgerald’s child. She fled her abusive husband, they fell in love and did the natural thing. The story of Adelina – “infamous” with the word having its central connotation of sexually transgressive — is one of the best things in the book. Instead of hoisting her off the stage, for having gotten pregnant by a man other than her horror of a coerced husband, Trelawny (who gambles as impulsively as Smith’s father and husband) Smith has the nerve to make Adelina a secondary heroine.

The story of the circumstances which led to Adelina’s marriage like that of Mrs Stafford is a mirror image of Smith’s. So Adelina is a Mrs Smith who got another chance. Fitz-Gerald was not the good man he should have been but he is decent enough and offers some affection and stability, both needed desperately by Adelina.
The book is filled with mirror images of Benjamin and Charlotte Smith’s very first years (when she did not see clearly how amoral he was as yet, how she would pay for his reckless utterly selfish behavior, his bad business deals, his gambling) and Smith’s father’s marriage with his shunting a 15 year old Charlotte Turner off to Benjamin Smith when his second wife did not like the girl.

Mrs Stafford is the most obvious: she tells the story of her life which parallels the Smith’s precisely, including the trip to France (omitting his violence and adultery); juxtaposed to this we watch the utterly spoiled Delamere. She’s retelling this obsessively in her first novel, for Emmeline and Adelina walking along the shores are both Mrs Smith.

Friedrich, called A Monk by the Sea: its sublimity and picturequeness visually captures the feel of Smith’s Emmeline at moments

During these walks (indulged by Godolphin too), Smith’s characters utter great poery (Broadview Press edition, p 408). This poem is attributed to Adelina as she wanders along the shore. I suggest in it Smith expressed the anguish of her memories of sex.

Sonnet XL

FAR on the sands, the low retiring tide,
In distant murmurs hardly seems to flow,
And o’er the world of waters, blue and wide,
The sighing summer wind, forgets to blow.
As sinks the day-star in the rosy West,
The silent wave, with rich reflection glows:
Alas! can tranquil nature give me rest,
Or scenes of beauty, soothe me to repose?
Can the soft lustre of the sleeping main,
Yon radiant heaven, or all creation’s charms,
“Erase the written troubles of the brain,”
Which Memory tortures, and which guilt alarms?
Or bid a bosom transient quiet prove,
That bleeds with vain remorse, and unextinguish’d love!

The novel has these picturesque sequences by the end of volume 3 and into 4. She attributes poetry to the good melancholy hero in Montalbert. What these novels testify to is not a real lover (which she deprived herself of), but Smith’s desire for one. How she felt cut off forever from any personal happiness. How in dreams she gave herself ideals and then put them into her novel.

Adelina’s story is partly undermined by all the hysteria by others over her, how she is ostracized and how ashamed and self-berating she is. This is true to the way people really behaved: they made do; the unwed mother remarried if she could (based on her looks and original status). This stigmatizing makes the portrait less worth while (to put it minimally).

Readers have expressed surprise that Emmeline does not marry Delamere — again that’s to misunderstand the book. Emmeline’s turn to Goldolphin is slow and justified and developed slowly. Emmeline dreads marrying Delamere by the time she meets Godolphin (Lord Westhaven’s brother). So Emmeline anticipates or is parallel with S&S as Willoughby was a bad choice for Marianne (though she didn’t see it) and she is paired off with the genuine man of sensibility and intelligence, Brandon; so Delemare is a very bad choice for any woman, and Godolphin is the parallel with Brandon.

In the character of Godolphin, with whom Emmeline finally ends up (married), Smith achieves the type of man that the film adaptations of S&S and recent readings of S&S want Austen’s Brandon to be. Smith really meant us to see a highly ethical, deeply emotional man of sensibility and high intelligence, moral, in love with the heroine out of deep seated urges but Smith sure did (see in Oxford edition, pp 272-84). Alan Rickman is indeed perfect for the role.

Alan Rickman as Brandon first coming upon Marianne

Tellingly, David Morrisey is not: for example, in Emmeline Godolphin does want to challenge Fitzgerald, duel with him and it’s made plain in order literally to kill him, but is persuaded out of it. We are told in 1995 that Rickman fought Willoughby but we never see it; the passionate brutality of the 2008 duelling scene is felt and then abjured in Emmeline and (in truth) kept out of Austen altogether (not a topic). The books — Emmeline and S&S when compared illuminate one another.

Scott’s comments against the prudence of the love affair between Emmeline and Godolphin suggest that he cannot have read this novel carefully. Again the film adaptations of S&S are more like this than S&S. Godolphin loves her and she is falling in love with him. There is nothing particularly prudent or mercenary about their love affair. As for Delamare, he is presented as the worst person possibly any woman could marry. On the supposition – a rumor suggested by the Crofts after Delamere’s fortune through his sister — that Emmeline has been unfaithful, he leaps to believe this and becomes fanatically jealousy and abusive. How could Scott suppose this is a love story? only by not having read the book perhaps — or not carefully.

In the later parts of the novel, the story of Mrs Smith begging money, negotiating is powerful. It’s not quite believable that Montreville, Delamare’s father could himself want to help and be so easily turned off. Such a man would not be, but Smith wants to white wash Delamere’s father to make Delamere and his mother worse. Montreville also has traits and parallels with Smith’s father and this shows she wanted to have a positive view of her father. So they go to rural France where Smith produces her sea- and landscape pieces and continues the parallel of Mrs Smith following Mr and finding him anything but repentant or grateful.

I am ever puzzling how Mrs Smith (as Stafford) just let her husband continually impregnate her. If he was such a physical brute, that’d be another reason to keep away in whatever way she could. Had she no one to turn to for a bed? Perhaps not. Restif de Bretonne’s daughter fled her husband beaten in the middle of the night to sit half naked on a stair and some neighbor actually came out and demanded she return to the monster because she was his wife. (See Ingenue Saxoncour)

At the close of the book, we learn all about Emmeline’s mother at last — like many a gothic. Emmeline’s mother was married to her father and she is an heiress! Here Emmeline and her mother’s exemplary behavior, this incessant use of secresy to keep the plot turning and turning without resolution becomes very tiresome. And all these men wanting Emmeline. Campion disliked James’s Portrait of a Lady rightly: who wants all this harassment. The extreme emotionalisms of the text are absurd. She had this in Ethelinde too. It’s absurd and she knows it.

All that saves it is the sense I have that it is a form of harassment. At moments too Smith throws out this or that new little life, another woman, another form of abuse suddenly told, e.g., the woman Godolphin picks up on his boat trip (who arouses Emmeline’s jealousy.

At the close of this book: she does mete out poetic justice to everyone. I can see that the way to get rid of the “problem” of Delemare will be solved by himself: he will die after he challenges one of the other males who crosses his obsinate ideas about what he is deserving (every single appetite) and respect he demands (ludicrous). Delamere is not only a version of Smith’s own husband but stands for what this society makes of its most privileged men: unreasoning tyrants who ruin the lives of all they inflict themselves them whether explicitly or implicitly. Everyone cares so much about this guy too. Is Smith sufficiently aware of this? I don’t know. In Caleb Williams Godwin was. Doubtless Mrs Smith wishes Mr Smith could be got rid of this way. It was her only hope.

Still from the way Smith presented a very chaste sexuality for her women and seems to uphold the establishment herself when her interest is involved, it seems to me her radicalism came from her experience in marriage. Her feminism is limited.

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J.M.W. Turner (1776-1851), Dumblain Abbey, Scotland

The Young Philosopher starts strong with a quotation from Sarah Fielding’s Art of Tormenting (a book published by Broadview nowadays and actually by Jane Collier) and we get a powerful series of scenes: Dr Winslow is trying to get his wife to leave one place to get to another where they have been invited. We experience her procrastinations in favor of feeding her vanity with nasty gossip from friends. The family with their ward and servant get caught in a storm on a wasteland part of the landscape and land in the house of a younger son of a younger son inside a wealthy family clan, George Delmont. (It does in outline curiously remind me of Sanditon with its overturned carriage and slow movement into the families we are to be interested in.)

Then there is something of a muddle in the way the family line is presented: my feeling is this is due to Smith not being able to be forthright about the autobiographical material here: the oldest male has managed to disinherit his brother (father to George) by unexpectedly marrying his wife’s sister; that is, George’s aunt. Charlotte Smith was excluded from her father’s care when he and her aunt colluded in her marriage to Benjamin Smith; later her aunt married Smith’s father.

We then get a portrait of George who is emerging as the usual good man in Smith. We see the perverse nature of schools and how the values instilled just about everywhere are actually awful, with an opposition of the mean cold calculating older brother, Adolphus. George’s ward Miss Goldthorpe, plays a role in a coming romance; we have an older harridan woman figure, Mrs Crewkhern — a type found in women’s fiction of this era (Austen’s version is say her Lady Catherine or Mrs Norris). Mrs Crewkhern is the type of the woman who inflicted false values on the Miss Goldthorpe. Letter follow where George explains his views to Miss Goldthorpe (why he is teaching her independence) against those of Mrs Crewkhern.

George’s reading and his values are the focus on this early part of the novel — we are to ask, how will he do in life after having imbibed these.

For more on The Young Philospher, see comments.

Ellen

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Foremother poet: Annette Von Droste-Hulshoff (1797-1848): The Jew’s Beech

Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840), Sylphide

Dear friends and readers,

About a week ago we finished a lightning-quick absorbed (for those who participated) reading and discussion of Annette von Droste-Hulshoff’s one work still in print: The Jew’s Beech (first published in 1842), during which we also albeit briefly discussed her life and poetry. She was an important (rare) early 19th century German lyric poet (so foremother poet), and in the way of advertising familiarizations one reads her work and life represent a kind of intersection between the passion and content of Emily Bronte, with her retired life resembling that of Emily Dickinson.

I’ll do one better and suggest her autobiographical novel, Ledwina (which I was able to read a portion of, Englished by Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop in Bitter Healing: German Women Writers, 1700-1830) depicted her restricted choices and liberty and all-encompassing apparently kind but repressive family makes me think of Austen:

she so loathed this sad and anxious sheltering, this pitiful cautious life where the body governs the spirit until it, too, becomes as infirm and impoverished as the body itself, loathed it so much that she would gladly have let all her life’s energy, which was glimmering out a spark at a time, flare up and expire in a single blaze

We see her daily life, and as in Austen’s letters, her close relationships with servants. There are strikingly modern passages: for example the heroine grows irritated with herself when she falls asleep (partly tiredness, partly boredom) during the day because as it is she can

scarcely sleep at night; then I get up from time to time and walk about my room; it’s not good for me, but what is one to do with the long night.

What indeed?

Her continual rewriting and perfectionist stance towards each detail of her text recalls Austen too.

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To begin with her life:

Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, 1838 portrait by J. Sprick

Annette von Drost-Hulshoff may be said to be a rare women represented in the German romantic canon, but like so many women before the 19th century, it’s hard to get at the truth of her life. What I have read amounts to two different lives.

Take your choice:

Her birthplace, Burg Hülshoff in Havixbeck, Germany

at wikipedia and from the articles cited you will learn of a woman who was ambitious, wanted a career (planned her publications to make an image) and was thwarted by her family, the prescriptive life laid down for an upper class Catholic German unmarried woman, and bad luck. Her father was learned and gave his daughter an excellent high culture education (tutors in ancient languages, French, natural history, mathematics and music (she inherited considerable musical talent from her father).

We are told she was a member of her brother’s intellectual circles, knew Grimm, Goethe, Schiller and many other illustrious German names. She almost married a Protestant, but was cruelly tricked out of it when family members persuaded a Catholic lawyer to pay court to her. The end result was her reputation was hurt, she presumably shocked by this treachery.

Her father’s death, religious doubts, and her family’s wealth enabled her to live a life of quiet retreat with her mother and family and study and write poetry in the countryside. She wrote long-narrative poems but her work was not marketed skilfully (a backwater publishers) and the commercial failure humiliated her.

But again she tries for a social life, this time a salon in Munster where she meets Levin Schücking, a young poet, whose friendship, sympathy, congeniality inspire her to write again: poetry, The Jew’s Beech. Schucking has to take a position as a tutor in an aristocratic family. New contacts led to a literary success, an invitation by Clara Schuman to write a libretto, but she was betrayed by Schucking who, now married, writes two novels, one exposing the flaws of the aristocracy she belonged to, the other with a portrait of herself that distressed (she is said to have treated the poet like a son), so again she retires, this time to small house by herself and dies of TB. Nonetheless, Schucking was himself responsible for publicizing her work.

Or the life as told by Blackwell and Zantopp (Bitter Healing) and suported by Ledwina (written 1819-26):

The Säntis, a mountain in the Alps near Schloss Eppishausen, which inspired Droste’s poem “Der Säntis”

Blackwell and Zantop present Drost-Hulfshoff or Annette as not wanting to have her works published, as reclusive, quiet, and the story of the thwarted love affair becomes not so much a manipulation of her as her being over-sensitive and alienated or different from most of those she met, unconventional in her perceptions, and drawn inwardly by her religious feelings and love for travel and long sojourns in a wild romantic Westphalia landscape. Her relationships were all with family members or close friends; important to her were a Professor Anton Matthias Sprickman of Munster, a woman writer of popular tales, Katharina Brusch, and Adele Schopenhauer (the famous Schopenhauer’s mother who wrote her of travel in the UK). When young, Annette chose to turn away from her brother’s friends (now they are boorish students); she rejected one man who denounced her as arrogant and manipulative. They describe her poetry effectively (inward, intense, her marshes and moors inhabited by demonic nature spirits), some prose works (Pictures from Westphalia, 1842), two unfinished novels (one Englished as Our Country Place, begun 1841).

Both accounts depict her as an isolated and independent woman in character who was often ill: her heroine Ledwina suffers from severe chest pains; she has a widowed mother who has to give up her estate to an unworthy son, sisters desperate to marry but wanting to remain close to one another, a woman who goes mad with shame when she is left a bankrupt widow, another who renounces speech for 14 years to be able to live with her husband. It is an account of un-freedom, a lack of social worth accorded women. The Jew’s Beech presents women in the same light.

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Friedrich, Abbey in the Oakwood

The Jew’s Beech, another Scheherazade tale:

I can find no plot-summary, but there is an account of the story’s sources in Drost-Hulshoff’s relatives’ experience of peasant culture and court cases recorded by them (see August von Haxthausen) The prosaic feel of everyday life, the anger and greed and competitiveness within families, occasional violence, the pragmaticism which nonetheless accepts superstitions reminded me much of the world of Martin Guerre as described by Charlotte Smith and Natalie Zemon Davis.

Basically it tells us of the lives of a few people who live amid and participate in a fierce smuggling and destruction of timber going on in the local rich woods and lands owned by the wealthy by bands of men desperate to make a living. We are told of foresters who are hired as murderous police on behalf of the state and grandees (who want to protect the game and “their” woods). In effect an unackknowledged all-out war between the haves and have-nots goes on ceaselessly in the background and every once in a while individual people erupt to murder and avenge themselves for humilation or because someone owes them money (or something else) and didn’t pay up.

The translation by Lionel and Doris Thomas (reprinted in an Oxford paperback classic) held me because it was rendered in modern lucid idiomatic fluid English. It reads as a startlingly modern fable (rather like a unusually plain Isak Dinesen story) so I expect the translator is part of the new school of translators (pressured to do this by publishers) which modernizes older texts by getting rid of certain kinds of idiosyncracies of the original author or the period. The packaging reminded me of Wolf’s historical fiction set in the same era about the poets Kleist and Gunderrode, Englished as No Place on Earth: the prose style here is the same. It may be that one or both of these texts is distorted.

So, we have a fearful world of peasants seen by a narrator kept at a distance. Violence is the way they control one another and the novel suggests things like drunken beatings, the intense concern with money and surviving as the main motive for people’s actions without admitting it. Margret the mother, loves her son, Frederich, but unhesitatingly lets the uncle take him away to work for him though it seems to me that the uncle is as fierce as Peter Grimes and I would not trust my son with him.

Oddly (again referring to Wolf’s historical fiction) I felt it was sort of an 18th century tale told much later – the way women are said to write in a belated way. It opens in 1738 with the birth of the young hero, Frederick,moves backward to the mother and her bad decision to marry a violent man (but then she was single and it’s said ugly) and then forward to Frederick as a young man — who can be dandy like, sensitive dreamy but also a determined bourgeois. It jumps forward once to July 1756, again four years and ends 28 years later (1788).

Charlotte Smith’s Romance of Real Life shows us how the legal and economic arrangements of the ancien regime create hatred and resentment and can lead to murder. What’s on Drost-Hulshoff’s mind is precisely this. The first three pages gives us the framework:

As a result of primitive and often inadequate lesiglature, the ideas of the inhabitants as to right and wrong had become somewhat confused, or rather beside the official legal system there had grown up a second law based on public opinion, usage and superannuaion arising from neglect … legal form mattered less the spirit was adhered to more strictly, infringements occurred ore often … nothing destroys the soul more surely than an appeal to external legal forms in contradiction to one’s inner sense of justice.

Drost-Hulshoff differs from Smith in emphasizing custom and also the vulnerability of women who do suffer terribly in this tale. As a kind of throw-away detail we are told of how at a wedding where everyone is celebrating, a young woman is being married to a very old man who sneers at her and seems to look forward to domineering and being cruel to her. The first time we meet Friedrich’s mother she has decided to marry a man (Friedrich’s father) who we have seen be somehow hideously cruel to his first wife so that she flees from him in the night all bloody and thereafter lives with her parents and not soon after that dies. Friedrich’s mother receives the same treatment from this man who we are told makes an exception for his son, which makes his son tender to the father.

It ends enigmatically. There are two murders and after the first murder was committed I was convinced that Friedrich had not done it. He was an accomplice with the lumber thieves, but not the prime actor. After the second the murder of the lender Jew Aaron (who is presented anti-semitically), as he had humiliated Friedrich, I thought he had done at least that one (though it’s never stated), and then when his corpse is found by the Jew’s beech tree, although it was implied that after years of exile and flight, he had returned and killed himself near where the Jew he killed died, I was not sure.

I am particularly struck by her originality and unconventionality. How different this is from the sentimental pirate and other tales of the French at the time. I thought of Marmontel’s Shepherdess of the Alps, but also the tales of sensibility of Germane de Stael. It is wholly alien in the way of Emily Bronte’s stances.

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Johan Christian Claussen Dah (1788-1856), Dresden by Moonlight (1850)

We had some very good talk and I’d like to include some of the postings of two friends on WWTTA. Fran, a reader of German, very knowledgeable in its literature, wrote as quietly brilliantly as she usually does:

Glad you’re enjoying this hauntingly puzzling tale, Ellen. I’ve already re-read the German text and the notes in my new edition, so I’ll try and make time to see how the English translation compares with the original as well. I’ll probably be using the older online translation, though.

You’ll probably have seen from other sources that Droste-Hülshoff based her story on true events, ones that her ancestors had been involved in. The historical murder took place on 10.2.1783 when Soestmann-Behrens, a so-called ‘Schutzjude’(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzjude), was killed by Hermann Georg Winkelhagen, a farm worker from Bellersen (the B. in the text) after an argument about an unpaid bill.Though Droste-Hülshoff purposedly clouds the issue of who actually murdered the Jewish merchant in her text, there seems to have been no such doubt as to Winkelhagen’s own guilt.

At the time, D-H’s maternal grandfather (some sources say great-grandfather) Caspar Moritz von Haxthausen zu Abbenburg, an aristocratic landowner, was also serving as judge at the patrimonial court in charge of the case, so the details were passed down in family lore.

Like the assumed murderer in D-H’s story, Winkelhagen fled capture, but in the course of his adventures was picked up by pirates and sold into Algerian slavery. This lasted until 1805, when he and 231 fellow prisoners were freed by Jérôme, Napoleon’s brother. Winkelhagen then made his way back to Bellersen, arriving in April 1806, only to hang himself later in the woods on 18.9.1806.

From these dates, you can see that D-H did choose to set her own story further back in time as you thought.

It’s interesting that you should mention the sentimental pirate tales popular at the time since D-H.’s uncle August had already published a version of Winkelhagen’s story under the title of ‘The Story of an Algerian Slave’ in 1818, which played up the pirate and slavery scenario much more.

I’ve read that version, too, as it was in the notes. It’s a much more
straightforward, unambiguous account, though the Algerian side of the events as described there are actually held to be almost entirely fictitious, written perhaps to cash in on the wave of interest you indicate, whilst the details of the murder itself seem to have been more solidly based on the surviving details of the original case.

Since the subject of anti-semitism has already come up, it was interesting to read there that Winkelhagen had first been taken to court by Soestmann-Behrens for defaulting on payment of some cloth and that W. had expected to be let off since his accuser was ‘just’ a Jew. He wasn’t: the court found in favour of his accuser and W. retaliated by violence. When he returned from slavery, the matter of whether to prosecute the murder came up again, but it was deemed that his 24 years of exile, imprisonment and forced labour had already been punishment enough.

Interestingly enough, Droste-Hülshoff didn’t read her uncle’s version until after she had written all or most of her own story and, whilst she notes wanting to introduce some of the details he mentioned that she had initially forgotten, she also mentions not wanting to re-write the whole thing, underlining in particular how very different her fictional portrayal of the supposed murderer was from her uncle’s portrayal of the historical W.

She actually did revise this short tale again again over a long period of time, perhaps because it was one of her first adventures into prose. There seem to be eight, extant, much revised drafts or manuscript versions, which makes establishing an accurate text history pretty difficult.

This process of constant revision might also be the reason why this is her only completed prose text, whilst the rest remain as mere fragments.

Continued in the comments where I end with two lyrics and a bibliography.

Ellen

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South Central ASECS: The nightmare of history in Ann Radcliffe’s landscapes

Claude Gellée, dit le Lorrain (1600-82), Landscape with Psyche, better known as The Enchanted Castle (1664) — it’s not really enchanted but forbidding

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been back from the South Central ASECS at Asheville, North Carolina for two weeks now and not yet begun posting on the good time I had there. It was a holiday. The South Central 18th century people run their conference as partly a mild kind of party. One night there was a wonderful lecture on Irish music across the 18th century; another a celtic band and drinking and dancing to it; a banquet on yet a third; a fourth we watched an opera on DVD (a Rameau from the Paris opera-house). During the day one afternoon we went to the Biltmore Mansion built by the super-rich Vanderbilts, a US equivalent of Downton Abbey and the popularity of this enormous mansion with its rooms for display, servants quarters in the attics and servants’ workrooms and gyms for the rich in the basement told us it mirrored the values of US society today as much as it did then. I have much to report about the papers too.

But this evening as a preliminary I thought I’d put my paper online to make it available generally with its scholarly notes. As presently written it’s too sketchy for publication in an academic journal but I hope to work further on this topic where my ultimte aim is to change the views people have of Ann Radcliffe. Yes I see her as a Girondist, and think we should see the 1794 A Journey Made in the Summer and Mysteries of Udolpho as part of the English Jacobin movement. These ought to be read alongside other 1794 books: Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art, Wm Godwin’s Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, not to omit the 1792 Thomas Holcroft’s Anne St Ives, Charlotte Smith’s Desmond. I could keep citing books but this will do.

The topic of the conference was “Panoramas and Vistas” in the 18th century and here is my contribution:

The Nightmare of History in Ann Radcliffe’s Landscapes.

John Crome (1768-1821), Yarmouth Harbour, Evening (circa 1817)

For the two blogs about the papers I heard at the conference and more details about Asheville, North Carolina and some of the really pleasurable events and socializing we did:

South Central ASECS Asheville: Panoramas (gothic, animals in, the Biltmore), Scottish fiddling, Rameau and Jane

South Central ASECS Asheville: Women writers, actresses, and landscapes.

See also Ann Radcliffe’s Landscapes: Christa Wolf (No Place on Earth) and the Seige of Mainz

Ellen

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the usual acknowledgement of Cassandra’s letter:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A painting of him:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harville, wife and child from 1995 BBC Persuasion

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

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

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

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Chawton Cottage unergoing some process of renovation

Wednesday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Turning outward:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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JA Among Frenchwomen

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

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

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

Ellen

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Star-gazing, sublimity and retreat in Austen’s MP & the 1983, 2007 MP movies & 2009 Lost in Austen

Dear friends and readers,

I was reminded of the central perspective I take on Austen’s books for my study of the Austen films by a recent thread on the Austen lists and a query a friend sent me about a paper she’s writing on Mansfield Park. I found myself skim-rereading Avrom Fleishman’s brilliant innovative Reading Mansfield Park, skim-rereading Isobel Armstrong’s little intertextual and close reading of Mansfield Park (done from the same by then consensus point of view), and two excellent  close-reading articles specifically on the star-gazing scene between Edmund and Fanny at Mansfield: Maggie Lane’s "Star-Gazing with Fanny Price," Persuasions, 28 (2006):150-165 and. Kathryn Libin "Harmony, Nature, and the Unmusical Fanny," Persuasions 28 (2006):150-65

The scenes are done so movingly in the 1983 BBC  and 2007 Mansfield Parks (screenplays Ken Taylor and Maggie Wadey respectively):

The lines come from the book almost verbatim in the 1983 MP — the use of the window adds a strong contemporary element:  looking out a window to see a dream image is a common motif of the era (Sylestre Le Tousel as Fanny, Nicholas Farrell as Edmund)

But nearby there is the allurement of the glamorous Mary Crawford, and the vanity  and sexual competition of the Bertram girls over Henry Crawford

It’s a passage that fits into the childhood education, memory/imagination themes of the novel, order, peace: the 1983 movie has Edmund recite these lines from Cowper — Scenes must be beautiful which daily views please daily/Whose novelty survives long knowledge and the scrutiny of years.  It’s a passage that fits into the childhood education, memory parts of the novel.  Fanny and Edmund both are not keen on the social world. They are happiest loving to study and read together; Mary’s music and her harp are part of the artificial world, the social one.  Fanny certainly is losing out against Mary for Edmund at this point, true, but in the end she will win Edmund — as nature, order, peace, memory rooted in the past.

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Again the pair star-gaze but this time the language is derived from their shared desire to escape the parties and vanities outside, an explicit rejection of experience of social life (Billie Pipe as Fanny, Blake Ritson as Edmund)

Something is lost by putting them under columns, and yet this motif found in Hubert Robert paintings where the feel is similarly retreat into picturesque feels right

Austen’s lines are dropped as I say and escape through dreams and reverie is the idea here. But they do escape, as they cannot in Lost in Austen (2009). . In the sadness of star-gazing of Jane and Mr Bennet, the social world seeps in and impinges everywhere even in Austen land.

09 Lost in Austen (Hugh Bonneville as Mr Bennet, and Morven Christie as Jane)

POV, Amanda also standing by helplessly; here the social world impinges on the private one (Jemima Rooper as Amanda)

Here Mr Bennet has been escaping by studying the new astronomy; he can do nothing he feels to save Jane from marrying Mr Collins. The gazing is very sad.  The POV on the second far shot is Amanda’s: again we have columns, only this time accompanied by modern touches of a chair on wheels. Perhaps the darkness of candlelight is overdone:

There’s a Chekhovian feel to the novel and yearning that is found in the 83 and 07 movies; the 09 has lost its connection with the earlier idealized city (Moscow) and seeks to retreat in Austen land itself.

Maggie Lane’s essay  is centrist, nothing we didn’t expect, but well done. Lane says the passage is about artistry and MP is reflexively about what is beautiful art. Kathryn Libin "Lifting the Heart to Rapture" on sublimity and music is also nothing revolutionary but is good: it’s about sublimity, what is the true sublime. The landscapes of the skies matches the landscapes of Cowper and Mansfield Park. Sublimity links Burke and Radcliffe to MP. There is something very Shelley like in Fanny — and makes me think of what Elinor wryly calls Marianne’s passion for dead leaves & anticipates Shelley’s ode to the west wind.

For my part I think the 1983 and 2007 MP reflect accurately some of the most profound themes of the novel (if truncated in 2007 MP).  The novel’s Christianity is implicit not explicit but this is part of God’s heavens. In Elective Affinities (Goethe) the stars also play a role as there is a serious theme about astronomy and mathematics as reflecting the world’s order and this comes into Lost in Austen intuitively.

As for Avrom Fleishman’s book on political novels, his witty ironic essay on Emma exposing the heroine as possibly neurotic, and certainly an obtuse hypocrite when it comes to her behavior, especially about sex. Basically he accepts Lukacs and has no women historical novelists except as tokens; he also sees the limitations of Wayne Booth’s naive love for Emma as an cynosure of all the ideals of womanhood that inhabit his middle to upper class mind.

So it’s no surprise that there are some limitations in his basically fine and insightful book on MP.  He’s a normalizer.  Written in 1967 it shows that "way back" then people did read Austen aright and they saw the significance of the slavery part of the novel. Fleishman demonstrates that MP is a serious critique of the society of which MP is the pinnacle. It’s not a defense of the society, but it is not a "plea for connection" or connectedness. Only one of its subjects is the misery that isolation can bring; the novel does stand up for retreat  For seeking refuge where you can if you are lucky enough to land in it. Austen does not hate her characters (Crawfords) for their refusal for "full self-realization" because they are subtle versions of Fielding’s Biflil.  They don’t recognize as "self-realization" what Austen does, she presumes her reader might; they don’t know why they are half-miserable. They just are.

I did think the Fleishman pulls a kind of fast one when he tries to push away the problem that Austen is not conscious of the depths of what she is seeing by the argument and demonstration that "the psychology of Jane Austen’s novels is clarified by modern discoveries, but is not dependent on them." In other words he says that she sees what he is seeing though she does not have the language to say it in reasoned words. I’m not sure of that. No where in her letters or as her narrator do we see any full sign she does understand the kind of morality based on the amorality of all around us, what I’d call the bleakness she sees.  We do not know that she is upheld by some faith in some other order "beyond" in the way of Fielding either for he says he is explicitly, puts a providential design in his books so they end full circle on a benign order. Austen’s books do not end this way.  They end in petered out ironies with a few characters forming a new circle in which to "struggle and endure" with one another.

His error over where the dialogue on the stars occurs (he thinks it’s at Sotherton) occurs is unimportant.  It’s not at all true that people didn’t vet articles in the 1960s. If anything they proof read more carefully.  The Net is a red herring in this argument.  What happens on it is irrelevant; it has just added to an explosion of scholarship and information added both in public and through places like JStor.

I was cheered to see in his bibliography many others taking off from Trilling at the time. For his essay builds on Trilling.  Trilling is the more accurate than he. Trilling faces up to the novel. So (I recall) does Tanner.  Isobel Armstrong is what I’ll read next — she takes a feminist turn on Fleishman and Trilling — probably through Tanner and  intertextualities. She read MP in terms of other books in the era the way she does S&S.

Ellen

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Caroline Moorehead: lives of Lucie de la Tour du Pin and Iris d’Origo

Dear friends,

I’ve wanted to write about Caroline Moorehead’s useful and moving biography of the life of Iris d’Origo, Marchesa of Val D’Orcia, for too long to try to remember. And now about two weeks ago I finished another marvellous biography by her: Dancing to the Precipice, the life of Lucie [Dillon] de la Tour du Pin, eyewitness to an era. Both bring to life the inner world of two profound women writers of memoirs.

Origo herself was a great biographer. Among Origo’s memoirs is an acknowledged (by discerning critics and those who know Italian history and literature) masterpiece showing the extraordinary courage and strength of character she displayed on behalf of a large group of peasants, servants, friends, a memoir of her time as the lead woman running a mid-northern Italian estate during the worst years of WW2: An Italian War Diary, 1943-44. I’ve a hunch that Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is heavily indebted to this book for its depiction of war-ridden northern Italy (from the perspective of a person concerned with keeping a community going and held together might experience it). Origo wrote a great literary biography of Leopardi, A Study in Solitude, and a perception dual biography of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, The Last Attachment, which despite the perspective of the title (Byron’s) is more about Teresa (who left a long memoir of her time with Byron which is very good).

Lucie Dillon, an eighteenth-century woman did not live in a milieu or time which would give her the opportunity to write great books of scholarship and she was apparently not prompted to write novels; instead in the last thirty years of her life she wrote a long memoir of her experience of life from her childhood to1814, which since she and her husband became attached first to the Bourbon, then the Napoleon, and then the Bourbon courts and governments includes a depiction of the French revolution, as well as the northern US (where she and her husband fled) and other European countries they wandered in as from time to time they were ejected or got appointments, were imprisoned, and finally retired. It was published posthumously and has been a major source for historians ever since. She also left reams of apparently superb letters, most of which have never been published.

For this blog I’ll confine myself to Moorehead’s books: a full account of her life of Lucie Dillon, and briefly about Dillon’s memoirs and letters; a much briefer account of Moorehead’s life of Iris Origo, prefaced by an account of one of Origo’s books of life-writing, Images and Shadows. Origo is a well-known woman writer, but her Images and Shadows is not as valued as it should be.

These are comfort books for me: sustaining, thoughtful, sensitive

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I’ll begin with Lucie as she comes first in time (1770-1848).

Lucie Dillon in black: she and Lewes had ignored conventions and lived together as man and wife.; gym machines and swimming (hjave to ask Izzy if she wants to go). The movie who I read aloud this paper for. It is a revealing portrait, with a real face (instead of the doll’s faces so common in the era). To me she looks intelligent and kindly. I will learn about the son I expect; I know all but one child predeceased her. Very hard.

The reviewers complained that the opening section had too much background. I disagree: the back Moorehead brings in is necessary to make us understand the world as Lucie Dillon saw it and the worlds beyond that she sensed but was kept from. That she sensed them is important for it gave her grandmother the upper hand to bully and mortify and make her life miserable through a vicious tongue. Lucie knew if cast out, she was lost. I’ve carried on reading this book and must say it’s excellent. The flaws (to me) are her obviously (if quietly) siding against the revolution’s principles or not be willing to be for them, so we are told of people liking Thomas Paine’s ideas about the "rights of men." I would not make this distance of Paine’s ideas about and I wouldn’t put scare quotes around the rights of mena and women. Thus one must read what she says alert to her bias, but the bias does not prevent her from telling much that is important and insightful and is not often told about the French revolution in a larger history. Because she is dealing with a particular individual in each case when she gives a larger context I learn something.

The daughter of a weak mother dominated by a selfish harridan cruel grandmother whom Lucie had the courage to delineate honestly (no cant here), and of a man who travelled away from this "nest" and re-married, she was under the thumb of this grandmother who herself was the unacknowledged mistress of a bishop. A woman creates self-vision. The bishop was actually used to control Lucie; they thought they were doing her a good term. Lucie’s mother’s biological father and Lucie’s grandfather. The grandmother had this positive side: she was determined the girl should be well educated and luckily to her mind this included book learning. She also, Lucie concedes, saw, as did the grandfather-Bishop, the girl’s genius.

The early chapters are taken up with probable reading, the houses and places Lucie lived in, where and how she travelled (by coach) and the suitors that were brought to the house. Her father brought the man she eventually married and gave her the happy private life she managed; against him, the grandmother was determined, but Lucie won out, probably because she was not herself so very marketable. And she did not want to be a lady at court (insightful of and more power to her).

Frederic Serraphim de Gouvernet (eventually du Pin de la Tour) was an interesting man, well-travelled, given decent appointments (had been in America by this time. He too has a scandalous demi-monde background if we look at his parentage and less than kind relatives. But some of the better ones (more intelligent and decent and interesting) began to form a circle around Lucie once she married in. The title comes frmo Lucie’s memoirs; she saw herself and all her privileged milieu as dancing near this precipice; ironically it was all brought back in the later 1790s. Her marriage enabled her to escape living with her grandmother. Moorehead (following her) goes on about her presentation at court as the Comtesse du Gouvernet by her new relative, the Princesse de Henin, but from this time there is this interesting drawing of her, suggesting she did like to write as well as read even when younger.

We get thumbnail portraits which leave the reader with a sense of this society: her nameless mother-in-law. The woman is not named by her first name in the text; you must look it up in the index and then a complicated family tree. We are told that sometime after her marriage her mother "shut her up on a convent" because she got into scandals. We are not told what these were, the implication is something sexual because we are told her husband was a narrow rigid soldier type (hugely rich from an ancient noble family). She is let out one day to go to her son’s wedding.

From my reading of other books, and what I remember of women "shut up in convents" I get the feeling she couldn’t cope with abrasive aggressive people, broke down rather like Sarah Lennox, and in France there were the cruel lettres de cachet.

Her sister, the Princesse de Henin was married off very young to an old man who had mistresses and hardly paid any attention to her. She got herself a lover type and spent her time networking in salons and going to court — ordeals that took huge amounts of time and were about pecking order. We are to (I gather) admire this woman as she’s so witty and competent in this corrupt heartless world.

Lucie’s marriage to Frederic was against her grandmother’s will as I suggested, and as I said the grandmother has perpetually "painful, hurtful tongue:" someone overfilled with spite. Lucie had not seen him before they bethrothed and stubbornly woudl not give him up to escape the grandmotehr and also to displease her. She was able to carry it off because Marie Antoinette approved. When she met Antoinette she didn’t like her and we get a rare prosaic account which is neither laudatory nor supercondemning. The queen alternated between a kind of sentimental hypocrisy and unconscious arrogance.

And younger nieces and other girls of Frederic’s families regularly "shut up in convents" is the phrase in their mid-teens and then hurried into marriages; the convent probably curbed their spirits and made them accept the marriage as a release.

Amid all this a couple of scenes between Lucie and Frederic when they first meet: already bethrothed. They sit down and have serious talk about books and social life; politics would come later. The value Lucie feels for him reminds me of Elizabeth Bennet for Darcy: intelligent, well read, amiable, and decently kind, she really does esteem him and feel gratitude. She is soon pregnant too

Lucie Dillon’s husband was a military man and he was one of those sent to the provinces to put mutinies down. Moorehead explains that once the National Assembly was formed this encouraged all sorts of people suffering (for centuries really) from blatant ruthless injustices of all sorts simply to act against them directly: in the military where punishment was savage, promotion utterly corrupt (favoritism, cronyism, coteries dependent on family connections), the ordinary soldiers began to demand change and when they didn’t get it, mutinied. The state government sent out ruthless officers and other men to put these men down. The fights were ferocious on both sides, but as today the government often had much better weapons and money: they acted the way governments do today when faced with hostage takers: refuse to negotiate and when they win (with time on their side and levers of all sorts) institute horrific punishments (executions, transportations). Moorehead tells the demands, the punishments and then that afterwards quietly these kinds of changes were instituted — and in different areas.

Lucie herself does not register any wider guilt or understanding than her own interests, but Moorehead is continually providing such wider perspectives which explain much. I am learning about various counterrevolutions. "La nuit de Varennes" is retold accurately and with perception and insight.

The lack of salaries and rents for the first time to all these hanger-on courtiers is amusing to watch: to see them flee, have to deal with ordinary people and make money and also how theydo manage and keep their egoes and world views in tact is fascinating — they were aided by the rich and powerful in the countries they fled to. But they would have to kowtow to local customs: like in Switzerland people travelling as sexual couples often ended up marrying one another as they would not have bothered to do in France.

Lucie and her close female relatives have now fled to Holland — soon after "the great fear" (people realized all hell was going to break loose) — where her husband got a job as an administrator. Connections and education are still keeping them going as aristocrats. As I’ve said, Moorehead gives us frank candid portraits in a perceptive context of the individuals in Lucie’s life; these she mostly owes to Lucie’s diaries — but her own able research too.

Lucie Dillon was quite a woman. Arguably it was she who saved her husband’s life, who had the social skills, original kind of thought (which allowed her to break social manner taboos), active nature and energy, to pull them both out the vortex into prison and death and across an ocean to the US. The story is complicated and it’s obvious that she could not have done this without much aid along the way: some of it came from her husband’s rank (in and of itself still enormously respected by those with it, all the more tenaciously as it was so violently and aggressively under attack), connections, money, property, and revealingly, his job and effectiveness as a military man. He was valuable to the revolutionaries too and played a game where he worked for them on the surface.

They had a long period of hiding out and she made a number of friends among people of lower rank who ran inns and had small houses: she lived in a cottage on the far edge of a village in Northern France (not that far from Paris I gather) and sent her husband to live far away from her so they would not be spotted as who they were. To this she remained consistently loyal and one accompanied her to and from America.

Again Moorehead to me takes sides (the wrong one) and I am invited to lament this or that aristocrat or wealthy person’s bad diet. She will say so-and-so- was guitless meaning of the specific crime charged. Sometimes. Crimes are hard to prove of the underhanded type — it’s not in your interest to write anything down. But Lucie Dillon’s husband was someone who had ordered the murder of the justifically mutining men I described earlier, and he was doing what he could to bring the king and his people back into power. As Carlo said, this plotting never stopped — not even when the king was dead, though that demoralized the counterrevolutionaries. To them of course they were what they were, and her father and father-in-law were among those guillotined. Many many died (and this is a terrorizing way fo killing people) and many who lived lost friends and beloved people.

I am led to like Lucie for her personal character and behavior. She could herself throw off ancien regime ways — which had made her miserable growing up. In the US she had managed to take many crates and a piano (!) across a hard trip and they still had assets and were accepted and socialized with the upper classes in the US with connections to France. So she managed to learn and buy a farm and with her husband farmed it. Unlike her husband and most of the emigres, she was reluctant to return — most did upon understanding they were safe and had hopes or retrieving some of their property. She is doing much that she does while pregnant and giving birth again and again and some of her babies dying.

Lucie Dillon in America, buying slaves, French rococ style painting

liked her treatment of black people. She did buy four slaves — reluctantly Moorehead claims, but two of them were the relatives of two (she bought one woman’s husband and another man’s father). She treated them well as things went: they had their own cabin and quarters. More important: when she left, she freed them. It’s revealing to know that this was much disapproved of but she went ahead with it.

Of course there is Talleyrand’s visit to her, and Moorehead takes out time to tell a little of his life in the US — as she does other colorful or famous people. He was a survivor all right. He brought Lucie the right presents when she needed them, said comforting things; she characterizes him shrewdly and also (unexpectedly to me) labels him "worthless" by which she means amoral, not to be trusted. Amusingly to me, he managed to live a way of life closer to his own than others: he tooks a mistress, a mulatto and was irritated by censure. Moorehead doesn’t say if she was a slave or not, doesn’t tell her name and doesn’t tell what became of her. Probably not easily found out, but if Moorehead does know this I would have loved to know too — and what happened to her afterwards. Did it help her having been Talleyrand’s mistress, or was it a wash?

Lucie Dillon surprised the French by sleeping with her husband — they did love one another; she took to dressing American style while in the US and had little trouble coping as "Mrs Latour."

Of course I know this portrait is the product of Moorehead’s reading of Lucie Dillon’s diary and the times, but it rings true enough and tells a lot of what Moorehead admires. Iris Origo was similarly a powerful chatelaine at heart who during WW2 ran a stout-hearted community in Italy, keeping children, other women and men and people who came and went safe enough and going. She was also a fine writer in ways Lucie was not, but Lucie is of another time. Lucie’s little boy does mean a lot to her and now that I know (from Catherine) he died young in a duel, I can understand what tragedy this was for her as well as her son.

I’m just loving this book. Is value for me comes from Moorehead’s quotations from Lucie Dillon’s memoir. When I read these, my spirit finds itself in deeply congenial veins of thought and I’m comforted or amused or made to feel something I’ve thought is right is indeed right. Moorehead did manage to quote Dillon referring to Madame du Deffand and in these passage she rises to the level of Madame du Deffand’s insights on human nature, social life, how to survive. I find I do read women’s memoirs precisely for this kind of thing. I don’t care so much what they do in life (though I don’t like treachery and ugliness) or even want any kind of model (in any case I often disagree with what’s admired — as I do here with Moorehead now and again); it’s rather in these meditative passages I find what’s alive and counts.

She had one good friend who she wrote to frequently; they fought and broke up and then came back together again: Claire de Duras. It is to her some of these passages were written; others to Stael (who she became friendly with after the Napoleonic era was over). And of course the memoirs themselves. We see a softer more reflective woman.

Moorehead has a larger view and fill outs much that Lucie Dillon could not see about herself and contextualizes the journals effectively. I praised the angle the perspective comes out of as joining the intimate point of view of the Dillon and La Tour families at the same time as channelling other individuals they knew and the larger picture. Moorehead has done a lot of research and reading and brings different worlds alive – including the places the emigres fled to and what it was like there.

What I do qualify is Moorehead’s political stance. This is not to say that she is narrowly biased; again I said she does justice to the misery and realities of the vast mass of people beneath the grossly rich in the ancien regime, but she is also biased on behalf of the aristocrats or the establishment at the time – and probably now. I daresay many reading her would not see her as biased for her politics are centrist for our time. Were I write a review for a periodical I would be careful to phrase my critique because of this. But this is a listserv and we are talking among friends and so I was not careful and spoke out of my own deep sympathies for the revolutionary point of view and the excluded. She doesn’t make Dillon’s prejudices her own; rather her own outlook, centrist coheres or is partly coterminus with Dillon’s. Mine is much less so.

She adds a lot and I recommend her; as Hayden White would say, all history is retelling from structures we inherit from previous histories and our own time and that’s what’s here. Probably anyone reading my reviews would find I
have a definite point of view too and might not like it.

Voltaire is quoted now and again about this or that and so too Diderot and Rousseau; very effectively too. Indeed after the stupid (there’s really no other word for it) death of her son Humbert in a duel in 1816, just after her Memoirs end, she wore black for the rest of her life. I assume most or those reading my blog know of the ironies of this era: how the wealth\y and powerful who survived the guillotine were precisely those put back in power by Napoleon, and the re-jockeying that went on during the restoration. We talked of "progress" on my Trollope and 19th century list (whether there is any and how can we find any): as I contemplate this scene it’s hard to see much — the worst of the abuses of the ancien regime were swept away (but not slavery and not women’s position), many areas of life were made more orderly in public. At any rate I can’t summarize as there is too much. Dillon’s life is also complicated and the poor women lost most of her children — in young adulthood too, a time hard to bear. Her son sounds either semi-suicidal or stupid; he was given bad advice by the father — who I can see is nowhere as smart as Lucie. She saves him and herself repeatedly.

I will just content myself with sharing one remarkable passage by Lucie Dillon written to her friend, Claire:

"to look inside your heart, see what needs destroying and then not have the strength to do it: that is more dangerous than useful; one grows accustomed to one’s enemy, and by making a familiar one loses the desire to get rid of it . . . I want to persuade you that there are a number of things in life that one must pass by without looking at" (p. 323)

I find that strengthening. When I reached the end of the book i found myself moved by contemplating the life and character of Lucie Dillon. The book is good but not good enough: Moorehead’s book on Iris Origo is better. I’ve outlined some problems: another is she begins to lose her grip on Lucie as the center of her book towards the last quarter: like others, Lucie in the last 30 (!) years of her life did nothing remarkable and went about with no Big people; on the other hand, what she did while living in a relatively meagre (very near real genteel poverty, no servants at times) was write these memoirs. So we do have a record of the last 30 years — if not explicitly.

More to the point of Moorehead’s problem, Lucie did stop her own memoir at 1814. However, there are many many letters between her and her niece, Felicie (well from her to her niece — more on that in a bit), to her beloved friend, Claire de Duras (a difficult relationship but very important to Lucie as site for her to express her deeper thoughts); diplomatic letters of her husband and her last son (the only child who outlived her) left a memoir; plus letters to Germaine de Stael. Most of this is not published and lies in a Chateau de Veves, in the hands of relatives and those who inherited the house and papers. My complaint is that the last third of the book could have been more moving and private had Moorehead chosen really to give us the substance of these letters.

Contemporary picturesque illustration of chateau where Lucie’s papers now reside

Instead she concentrates on the outer life, the politics, and colorful figures and happening. It sells a book but is not a life of Lucie in a true real way. I have published a book and know how publishers push you not to write close readings, at length about writing of any kind and about social events, but Moorehead could have done differently. My feeling is she didn’t have it within her: Iris Origo’s own memoir is vastly superior to Moorehead’s book about her for this reason.

Among moving realities: all her children but one predeceased her. She threw herself into their lives and loved them; I’ve read how it shows Jane Austen’s mother was a good woman because all her children survived; no such thing; she was lucky. Lucie Dillon has similar access to what doctornig and medicine there was and did as much. Her husband was finally (in my judgement) not that bright and he was rigidly monarchical and they kept going down and down; not fun; towards the end she spent time with him in a prison. It was not a bad prison — like Sade’, they were living in decent if humble rooms, but it was certainly humiliating hardship. Due to the husband in part the son who duelled did duel and get himself killed; the last son was so loyal to her but he also was involved in useless attempts to put the old Bourbon regime back and ended in Italy because had he gone back to France he would have been executed.

She turned to women friends for companionship and was disappointed. Claire just wasn’t up to her friends ethical, senstive, passionate brilliant nature (she was a novelist and write rin her own right and I’ve read one of them). Endlessly is Lucie disappointed and hurt. Worse: the niece she finally came to depend on really apparently didn’t care for her. It’s the story fo Madame de Sevigne and her daughter: the older woman writes and longs for companionship and reciprocation and doesn’t get it. A granddaughter, Cecile, meant a great deal but Lucie gave her up: she let her be taken back to Brussells by a cold grandfather who could find a world for Cecile to belong to and marry in. Lucie writes desperately how she has no contacts, connections, nothing to offer but herself; the girl apparently at first said she didn’t want to marry and remained with her grandmother but the old man was adament and in the end she was much better off, happier with a life of her own. Moorehead only treats the relationship with Claire adequately; she doesn’t the other. I wondered if she was afraid of offending someone. More likely here she herself had priorities and values which blind her to what makes for real contentment in a life and the tragedy of Lucie’s was she was deprived of much of this.

Politics, money, class, rank, a lack of decent scientific medicine all threw heavy blows at Lucie. She stood up because she was strong and able to remain calm and kept up this stance of low expectations for herself. Any other way led to madness. I noticed how she had a decent library in Pisa (where she ended up) and that helped.

My criticism is that Moorehead has not quite conveyed the depth of emotion and variety of Dillon’s inner life; she has stayed on the surface and given us social life when she ought to have gone in Dillon’s letters and provided more of the partly hidden private consciousness; but she is judicious, full, and she gives the discerning reader enough to extrapolate from and she tells of the memoir, the letters, calls attention to Lucie Dillon (Mrs Delatour as she was called in the US) once again, and perhaps such a book may lead to a better edited version of the memoir and publication of a selection of Lucie’s letters.

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As with Lucie Dillon, Moorehead’s Iris Origo, Marchesa d"Orcia is based on the eloquent and perceptive life-writing of its subject, especially the war memoir, War in Val d’Orcia, An Italian War Diary, 1943-44 and Origo’s last autobiography, Images and Shadows.

I’ll begin with the autobiographies this time: Images and Shadows and a little of War in Val D’Orcia, An Italian War Diary, 1943-44. Iris Origo is an intensely intelligent and stylish writer who really gets to the pith of things. It’s her autobiography upon which Caroline Moorehead relies for the biography. Origo’s is the deeper satisfying book: she goes into how memory works in the imagination of the older person returning to the past (so there’s a Proust feel here). The images are the houses she recalls and all they evokes; the shadows are the lost people.

It’s deeply felt and deep-musing; Origo says for this book she takes off a mask. What I’d like to say that is relevant to both Trollope-l and WW is that Origo depicts the familiar Trollopian world of the later 19th century, the top 10,000. Some of the behaviors that seem strange (girls who are forbidden to see a manfor years and hold out and how the young couple slowly gets to marry), values (the high aristocratic urbanity), the uses of ceremony, the big houses and toleration for real difference in individuals within families (not brought out in the novels) are found here.

I recommend this one strongly as a remarkable depiction of a world which has been erased, probably to some extent for the good (as it was dependent on much misery for vast amounts of people), but one which in imagination we seek when we read 19th century novels and watch film adaptations and costume dramas based on these.

Iris as a child in Italy

Images and Shadows begins to fall off as Origo hit adolescence and especially young womanhood. Nothing about sex are
we told. She marries inside three paragraphs, hardly anything about her new husband: he’s explained as a philosophical choice . So perhaps one reason autobiographies often do fall off after childhood is people are unwilling to tell of their
hard growing up and painful experiences for which they may not find the sympathy or understanding they’d like to create; and then they’d have to expose other people (or their friends) who might get back or complain bitterly in print. But then the book picks up on La Foce and the war years in Italy and she’s back in stride again. She can tell of these experiences.

The children Iris started and maintained a school for at La Foce

One part of the book more relevant to Last Attachment occurs in the section called "Writing." Origo tells how she came to be a writer: she had always written, but when her son died, she had to throw herself into something. Leopardi came out of the heart: she had translated his poetry and loved his spirit as what she felt was congenial to hers (this does not quite come out in the book where she is stern against his solitary life); but the book on Byron and Datini (really about the 14th century world through documents) were a result of serendipity: she came across through friends a cache of documents no one had seen, much less published. The story of her meeting with Teresa’s great-great nephew, his sudden decision to trust her, and then putting all the papers and things and relics he had in a big room in her car without wanting to know any more is comic and touching. He trusted her because she was not famous at the time; because she seemed to have a spirit that was genuine and he could recognize as able to be true to the people whose lives he was (in effect) in paper entrusting her with. So Byron was not a big interest of hers, and we can see this from the book. Before writing.

She had wanted to write a book called Poets Children and it was to be about the children who were born, tagged along, sometimes died, and sometimes managed to flourish in Italy or England later on. She wanted to tell of the Hunt children, of Mary Shelley’s son, of EBB and Browning’s son; in the event, she wrote a book on Allegra which Diana has told us of. Again this is connected to the vulnerability and death of her son.

I was much surprised by the ending, though I should not have been. The ending tells of how she would like to believe in an afterlife and some sort of supernatural presence, and she tells us the reason directly: the death of her son, Gianni, at age 7, is one she has never gotten over. This reminded me of Rosamond Lehmann’s late life adherence to spiritualism as a result of the death of her daughter (here is another woman whose novels I meant to write about under the sign of Austen). Origo also tells of an older woman friend of hers, Elsa, who meant very much to her, and died years before (though old by that time), a kind of mother figure, intellectual but not ambitious, who Origo buried in La Foce’s graveyard. Origo presents a kind of sequence of deaths from her father to her son to this friend. So here we see the shadows. Throughout she has not been as open or intimate about herself as she may seem — particularly over her husband.

Now for Moorehead’s biography: it’s splendid. Moorehead adds much essential information and perception not included in Images and Shadows. It’s like a continuation by a far less poetic spirit. I’ve learned a huge book of letters between Origo and one of her lovers, Colin Mackenzie; of Origo’s deep relationship with her young son, who died at age 7 of meningitis (still a dangerous disease). The depiction of Italy in the later 1920s through early 40s (what I’ve read through) is insightful: I realized how 20 minutes fro a sophisticated city like Florence you could find worlds where people’s outlook and illiteracy matches that portrayed of Europeans in the middle ages. It seems she was so lucky to be in contact with the best minds in art and literature in the Anglo-Florentine community and some of the cultured circles of England, but she talks of her experiences as fraught with spite and disappointment; she ever wanted to return to Val d’Orca.

They were reviews praising of Caroline Moorehead’s biography of Origo highly. Here is one which sums it up very well: Benita Eisler, "Tea with Mussolini," Los Angeles Times Book Review (11 August 2002):

Caroline Moorehead’s Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia (David R. Godine, 374 p., $35). It’s a biography of a biographer (words I expect to become very quick at typing during the fall’s group read). She was born Iris Cutting in London, 1902, heiress to her American father’s railroad fortune. When he died, her English mother Sybil moved with her only child to Florence, "to escape both families," says the review. She lived in Italy the rest of her life, wrote biographies (though her husband "loathed ‘literary’ women") of a fascinating variety of subjects (Giacomo Leopardi, Byron’s daughter Allegra, San Bernardino, Teresa Guiccioli), knew Mussolini well socially but hid and fed Allied troops on her Tuscan estate, married an "arch-conservative, monarchist and anti-Semite" philanderer, mourned the death of her only son from meningitis, organized a primary school in a nearby village, arranged housing and medical care for working families, etc.

The last line of the review rivets me: about dissatisfaction, despair, retreat: "If there is an absence at the heart of Moorehead’s book, it is there within Origo–hers a restless and incomplete life, fleetingly consoled by art." This is at the heart of women’s memoirs at their greatest, including those written from the perspective of war (I’d link the two 17th century autobiographers who lived through sieges and wars to Origo: Brilliana Harley’s letters and Lucy Hutchinson’s life of her husband).

Predictably, the marriage was unhappy from the start. The pair had nothing in common, and although [Caroline Moorehead] describes Origo as a "sportsman," his athletics were confined to the usual pastime of men of his class: philandering. Iris, too, soon found consolation elsewhere. What kept them together more than nominally was their purchase of an unpromising parcel of arid land in Val d’Orcia, a remote corner of Tuscany. "La Foce" was a miserable collection of hardscrabble farms where the peasantry eked out a subsistence living from the thin-soiled steep cliffs–"like a lunar landscape" the new owners said happily–virtual slaves to the ancient system of tenancy called patronage.

Cover for her Italian diary, idealizing one, for the diary is about the time of war

Settling in La Foce, the Origos reinvented themselves as model landowners and agrarian reformers. With the wedding present of a pipeline from a [Bayard Cutting] aunt, water from the valley turned the chalky terraces into flourishing farms. (What God could do if He had money!) Iris’ investment in reclaiming Val d’Orcia provided an incompatible couple with complementary roles. Antonio presided over the agricultural innovations: new tractors, irrigation, livestock; Iris applied her intelligence and energy to organizing a primary school, decent housing and medical care for the workers and their families. Then, in June 1924, as if to bless their collaboration, the Origos’ first child, a son, Giovanni "Gianni" Clemente, was born.

Moorehead’s treatment of the political dimensions of Origo’s life, evenhanded and honest, is only one of the virtues of her exemplary authorized biography. She captures the giddiness of pre- war Florentine society, its musical beds and warring salonistas, along with the deep sadness of Origo’s last years, which neither two daughters, her own last attachment of friendship with a great and noble woman, reconciliation with Antonio nor conversion to Catholicism could assuage. If there is an absence at the heart of Moorehead’s book, it is there within Origo–hers a restless and incomplete life, fleetingly consoled by art.>

Elsa Dallolio, a close, Iris’s best friend from her later years, a reading and writing woman who never published, lived on a tiny income and remains unknown but for the records of her in Iris’s life

I really do feel reading this masterpiece of a memoir-biography — it’s not really a full biography but rather a memoir, a book about a person from a specific portraiture angle about one portion of his life — this masterpiece, and remembering the Leopardi, I’ve met yet another new woman author I want to read more and learn more about. You can see why Origo would do so well in describing the inner life of the household of Byron and Teresa as well as the strangulation of Leopardi in his family — why like Emily Dickinson he had to live apart.. Simply put, Origo is remarkably insightful about daily life in a large household — since she came from one and that Moorehead captures that here.

And for future, a related memoir: I mean to write about Vittoria Colonna’s great-great-great aunt, of the same name, the Duchess of Sermoneta who wrote a decent (not great) memoir of her life as an Anglo-Italian the first half of the 20th century

Ellen

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John Sutherland’s Life of Walter Scott: the ruthless obsessive man under the masquerade

Dear Friends,

What could be more appropriate for reverie under the sign of Austen than a realistic, sceptical biography of her rival (as she saw him, even in 1817), Walter Scott? 

Over the past month and a half for an autumn retrospective on Walter Scott on Trollope19thCStudies at Yahoo, I’ve been reading John Sutherland’s new ground-breaking biography, The Life of Walter Scott.  While it’s not based on any primary material not known, and makes heavy use of secondary (other critical and biographical studies), it has the great merit of telling the truth accurately with no obfuscation in clear lively English, something apparently not done frequently in Scott studies until very recently.  It resembles his sceptical and disillusioned literary biography of Mary (or Mrs Humphry Ward), is similarly psychologically perceptive and written in a lively wry style. 

When you finish this biography, Scott’s use of anonymity (the pseudonymous "author of Waverley) is not a mystery or anomalous; it’s essentially characteristic of the man who kept much of his activities a secret; his carapace and self-guard was a continual masquerade.

Walter Scott (1824) by Edwin Landseer

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The boy and young man

To begin with, in Chapter 1,  Sutherland situates Scott in a dream of primal freedoms in Scottish history. As a boy and man these allured him, as did mythic genealogies for his family.  Sutherland then goes over the real genealogy back to Scott’s great grandfather (which is about as far as one can go for real in the sense of influence), and then moves onto Scott’s early years.

This early time is very important and shows up characteristics of Scott that never left him and he had formative experiences. He had a very good memory and was a deep feeling little boy.  His mother was loving and tender but endlessly pregnant and didn’t have much time or space for her crippled third son.  Probably Scott had infantile paralysis and he limped afterwards all his life. This crippling was central to the way he was treated. He was frail, probably sensitive and was sent to live in the country with grandparents and loving kind aunt, Jenny (father’s sister).  This Aunt Jenny functioned as mother.  The boy was precocious and very much encouraged by his grandparents, made a pet of.

He did find himself having to return to the crowded household in Edinburgh and it was miserable for him there. His eldest brother was a bully and the next not much better. His father was a grasping hard man and gave the boy a minimal public education, with as soon a possible putting him in university briefly and then making a Writer of the Signet out of him.  Sutherland points out how many fathers there are in Scott’s fiction and how most of them are pretty bad.  Redgauntlet’s father is the exception (a later book)

A significant early visit was to Bath to help his health.  He picked up an English accent there. There are the usual horror stories of boys’ schools at the time. Efforts were made to keep Scott away from the cruellest schoolmasters (who would beat boys).  His nuclear family came up in the world and moved to the new town, but Scott’s roots were also in the old and worlds of servants.

Much of the chapter is on what we can glean of the boy’s inner life, what he read, how much he remembered.  I found myself very moved here and (oddly I suppose) identified or found myself remembering my own childhood where when I was 18 months old I was sent to live with my father’s youngest sister (a kind sensitive woman, but poor, with 3 children of her own, 2 stepchildren, and she was alcoholic, and I loved her), then at 3 to Jewish grandparents (where I met my very kind grandmother and remember experiences of very like Scott is said to, like how she would play cards with me and how aware I was of how kind this was of her, and her troubles too, she was a woman who had been matched with a man she was not congenial with, and how I moved about only not in a wild country but in a slum, southeastern Bronx). The moving around, the going with relatives (even a kind aunt), the good memory from a very good age which Sutherland attributes to Scott (on good evidence if numbers of his stories are fantasies) reminded me of myself. I feel that a child’s memory is made more vivid and the child remembers more if there is disruption of routine and sudden changes, and that’s what happened to me.  Each new event is startling (or unnerving or scary) and I at least reacted to them strongly and remember more from my early childhood than a lot of people seem to be able to.  I do admit my feelings about it to myself and hope I don’t fantasize too much   I’ve compared "notes" with relatives (all of them but one now dead) on what I remember and know these early memories have been to some extent shaped by what I’ve been told since, but I try not to keep what I’ve been told separate from what I remember. Hard to do.

So Sutherland shows the earliest origin of Scott’s peculiar sycophancies and how he identified with the law so that in a book like Heart of Midlothian what saves Effie  is justice and rich unelected potentates not her heroic sister.  But as Sutherland says actually Effie would have died.  Scott early on was led to identify with the professions of his father and male relatives and cling to this for security and respect. On the other hand, Scott was not heir, the third son and he could have rebelled but he didn’t.  We also can see that Scott’s later ruthlessness and determination to be as rich as possible, control much that was around him, probably came as a survival reaction and attempt to gain later in life what he had been deprived of when young.  Later on Sutherland shows the great coldness of Scott to towards those dismissed and hurt by the system. A woman will complain about something and be punished for it, and Scottscarcely regards her. This reminds me of the high Tory, ruthless of the journals who excludes people without remorse from jobs or places and works hard to keep up conservative propaganda.

In this part of his biography Sutherland suggesst that Scott’s son-in-law’s early biography of is more sceptical and disillusioned than you think. Scott told a lot of fibs (or lies) about his great precocities and feats which are unlikely. He has himself in school as central to other boys and them following him about. Most improbable. Fantasies he wove later on which he would not let go of.  But then that probably shored up his identifications with the powerful.  Not much about women when he was young,except the kind aunt and put-upon mother with no time for him.

In Chapters 2-3, Student and Apprentice, Getting Forward, Sutherland shows us Scott’s father rushed him through school to give him the forms of a gentleman’s education, too accelerated for the boy to pick up much, especially given his frequent absences for sickness. So Scott educated himself, and remarkably well, but as any self-educated person he went for his own interests. 

He was as a personality remarkably "pliable to authorityy," "no poet in his youth was "less non servam").  A vein of subservice runs through his work reflecting the way he followed for his own advantage Henry Dundas (a principle Tory satrap giving out plums,  and therefore a social dictator, "Henry IX of Scotland); the worst of this is the way for his life he bowed down before Robert Macqueen, Robert Braxfield, a real brute in a wig, who engineered horrific punishments for anyone who could be caught or seen to be working against the establishment (transportation, hanging). Scots law, Sutherland reminds us, was rooted in Roman law.   Law to Scott was an instrument of control (not justice, certainly nothning to do with achieving equalities or rights).

At the same time Scott was reading romance, touring with one friend particularly, John Irving.  Absurdly improbable descriptions of Scott’s prowess as a walker and great jollity. Sutherland shows Scott to have been singularly immune in real life to the charm of peasants (this reminds me of Trollope). Scott and Lockhart continually present Scott as rock-climbing, schoolyard brawling, but the list of serious ailments to say nothing of his lame leg makes all this impossible. In fact Scott was nervous, often preferred to stay in and read. He was a tall talker.

His life was suddenly changed at the death of his older brothers.  Robert had been a bully and heavy drinker and helped on by one Captain Robert Scott; he died of malaria at 41. At the death of Robert, this Scott took on Walter; Robert Scott was an antiquarian, bookish too (or could be) and they visited castles together, shot and became close. This Scott influenced some of Scott’s portraits of older men.

He did begin to go against his father’s desires for him by declining to be his father’s partner and keeping up more college for a while.  Sutherland here shows us Scott’s noctural activities in clubs and making friends (and later useful contacts).

Getting forward is about expeditions, career building and "finding a wife."  Expeditions is in making friends, going with some of them to collect antiquities and anecdotes (hoarding ms’s, coins, relics, non philosophical history which Sutherland defends vigorously).

The truth about Scott’s early career as an advocate is he didn’t get on. He didn’t make a lot of money and didn’t get many clients: "For someone with Scott’s contacts, the lack of fees was ominous."  So the way Scott got on was securing sinecures; therefore if he has any Whiggish or other propensities he would have had to hide them. Here’s where we see him backing the cruel Braxfield to the hilt. A man named Muir who was an effective leaders of a Friends of the People society was destryoed for "sedition" (he had peacefully advocated universal suffrage and annual parliaments); he was transported. Witchhunts of the 1790s in which Scott participated as an underling and supporter are described.

Three women. It’s here Edgar Johnson comes out a fatuous fool. 

A digression that’s not a digression:  I’ve read a number of Scot’s novels because I took a course as a graduate student with none other than Edgar Johnson. He actually had the nerve to simply sit there and read his book aloud and not one student protested (not me either). By the end of the term, there were 3 students left attending. I don’t remember his outlook anymore, but he was certainly a Victorian celebratory type. I have his book on Dickens which I did read (I never read Johnson’s book on Scott — after all it was being read aloud to us) and it is the same sort of thing: nothing of a modern psychoanalytic kind of understanding. Unlike Ackroyd, Johnson (as I recall, I may be misremembering) thought Dickens had sex with Ellen Ternan, but he never brought any insights or thought about this relationship to bear on the fiction. It’s this old-fashioned kind of thematic criticism which to me is finally unsatisfying: it doesn’t explain what’s there enough at all, nor why it continues to have power.

I don’t have space to go through how Sutherland shows all the insinuations of Edgar Johnson about Scott’s early romantic love life are naive dreams which don’t fit the facts (chronology as we know it).  There were three. The one who counted most was Jessie: she was a shopkeeper’s daughter, and they had a physical affair on and off for a couple fo years. There seems to have been a bastard child who was got rid of somehow (sent out for adoption, given to an obscure family member — it’s still common in some institutions run by religious groups in the US to today to try to force a girl to have her child and then force her to give it up for adoption to a "worthy" [read religious] couple who haven’t got children).  Finally she married elsewhere when a deaf aunt died, and left her a bit of property and a medical student married her. She nurses a lifelong resentment for Scott every after.

The second is the nonsense about "the green mantle." This refers to Wilhelmina Belsches who it seems Scott never had a chance of marrying and was attracted to and Lockhart told stories about that don’t make sense when you compare it to her engagement and marriage dates to another; her higher rank than he, much more money.  Sutherland finds the pictures conjured up by Johnson charming. I don’t.  What’s told is not the sort of thing that’s real or rooted in any personal experience; it’s all blather this stuff about "pure love" from afar. Sutherland suggests it’s a kind of unexamined front for what Scott was really getting up to. I’d liken it to the stories of his great prowess and jollity when he was really nervous and at home reading or quietly with a this or that friend gathering materials he later used in his novels and writing. 

Apparently Scott did see Wilhemina in a green cloak.  Throughout this loving from afar and attraction on Scott’s part (there is no evidence of what Wilhelmina felt one way or another). Scott continued his affair with Jessie. It was Jessie’s necklace he wore and Jessie who kept him from prostitutes in Edinburgh.  Rather quickly a rival supplanted Scott’s desires, a man with a title and ties to financial institutions William Forbes.  Women were married off to further the ambitions of the men in their family. Sutherland discerns Scott’s father in some of this refusing to pay or offer to pay the huge dowry and settlement the match would have cost him.

How heart-broken Scott was we cannot tell says Sutherland but it was only a few months later he married Charlotte Carpenter who was an equal match for rank and property and prospects.

I did find myself remembering Scott’s very quiet or sober and moving objection to Austen’s morality in Emma. He says surely we don’t need anyone to encourage prudence and worldliness in novels, as that is done quite enough in life, and a couple of other such sentences (on the side of romance). It’s at such moments I think we might say we see the older Scott’s memories for real of what he lost or could have had if he did have any personal liking for Wilhelmina.  It’s at such moments (and they are not I repeat not infrequent in his fiction and even more his criticism) I like Scott.

From his journal by the way he seemed to get along with his wife, but there is no sense of intimate companionship or support; rather it’s a partnership both understand. I can’t remember much about the children any more but if Scott did take advantage of one daughter, leant on her, he also was tied emotionally and this was what was done to girls as a matter of course. Sutherland shows Scott’s father had done the same to a sister of Scott’s.  Girls could be used this way: they had no recourse to school, were not trained for profession and the gentry ones could only marry where they met, and their movements were strictly conttroled; so partents could refuse them marriage and then use them as upper servants in effect (no matter ow this would have been covered up and rationalized and we see these girls miserable, with nervous breakdowns and so on; maybe beging a governess for some was escape as in Claire Claremont). That’s what Wordsworth did to his one daughter until late in life when she finally escaped him and her mother. It’s no real excuse of course since it’s not that hard to find others at the same time acting decently (e.g., Southey who as a person except for his obdurate cruelty to women writers rather decent).

What bothers me about Scott’s lies, Lockhart’s refabrications and the fatuous romancing of Edgar Johnson is they reinforce cruel and pernicious stereotypes of masculinity and women’s lives.  If they made his life easier and kept his reputation up, they distort what is valuable in the books, which is all we have left that’s worth anything.

Cover illustration of recent edition of Heart of Mid-Lothian (Porteous Mob by Victorian painter, Drummond), a novel actually about a young woman seduced, impregnated and then accused of infanticide when her baby is born dead

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Young adulthood, poetry, early scholarly and biographical work

In Chapters 3-5, settling down, and building an endurable life, the book continues debunking hypocrisies and fatuities step-by-step and giving a real picture of Scott’s life and work. 

Getting forward ends on Scott’s marriage to Charlotte Carpentier. Both were eager to find partners and that helped too: for both it was time.  Charlotte was apparently the daughter of the Marquis of Downshire, and the portrait of Fairford (very appealing) in Regauntlet is a portrait of Scott’s de facto father-in-law. Charlotte was educated in a convent and her brother helped by the count’s interest to a lucrative post in the East India company. Another man replaced Fairford:  Wyrriot Owen who left Madame Carpentier money to live.  Fairford married and gave Mme Charpentier an allowance and she lived in France.  When Charlotte was dying, she did call for or mention this real father of hers.

She helped Scott live a far more social life than he had known, having a kind of salon in Edinburgh, but there was intense dislike between Scott’s parents and his new wife, and life was pretty awful between them all at home.  Apparently Scott’s father again did all he could to ruin this marriage (disliking the Frenchness, Catholicism of the woman) but didn’t succeed in time (he died).  The marriage became slowly a prudent mutually affectionate partnership. Four children were born and in the early years Charlotte was in good health; later not, and we don’t know why.

Scott turned to literary work now that his marital social life and working life too was partly settled.  He had gotten a sinecure through making the right impression on Dundas: every after he was Sheriff of Selkirkshire.  He got an underling to do much of the work and kept the money. He doesn’t come out too badly here; he was to decide the big cases (most were these venomous kind of petty money and property squabbles Leonard Woolf describes in his dark novel about village life in Sri Lanka, the sort of thing people murder one another over with subtexts about sex and pride.)  Scott mostly was very humane, didn’t hang people and writes that for the most part most of these cases should not be in any court in the first place. Sutherland doesn’t say this but I should think Scott learned more about human nature here and its relationship to authority and law.

The early ballads about horseness Sutherland puts down to Scott’s compensation for his lameness. One place he could keep up was on horse and he liked to ride and wrote about riding as high romance. He had gone to London with his translations of Goethe and met the right people and also Monk Lewis to help him. But such a project could go nowehere; anyway as St Clair would say the texts were sold far too expensively. They were also strange to English peopel and erudite.

So he came back to his friends in Scotland, one Heber sound like a nice type. Scott gets involved repeatedly with people who are reclusive, men who are probably homosexual and sensitive literary men. It’s through these acquaintances and his abiilty to also connect to people like Percy and Ritson (both who themselves hated one another) that really led to his career. Bourdeius would call this social capital and Scott’s abilty to make and keep friends — he was socially able.

The long chapter on the Ministrelsey of the Scottish borders is fascinating. I don’t want to summarize the details as it would take too long and people can read it themselves who are interested — by which I mean much of this doesn’t shed that much light on Scott’s novels and poetry and criticism. What does I’ll now recount beyond that Johnson and Lockhard wrongly made fun of and misrepresented John Leyden (one of these central friends and associates) as a uncouth half-mad genius who became this learned person all by himself and they didn’t give him the central credit for what was produced which he should have gotten. It was due to Leyden it became a 3 volume big work. Leyden himself is a credit to the Scottish educational system at the time, showing what can happen when education is given out to people based on principles of democratic universality.  He was seen to be very bright and got to university for 7 years.  Scott did give him a lucrative position in India to pay him off and that’s what he wanted, but he is not properly credited in the book.

Much of the footwork of gathering the ballads was done by these other people who themselves often had not much to do (or much money).  Scott was a married man and he had his job in Edinburgh for 3 sessions a year.

Scott never it seems says anything that can be construed as for progressive thought — at least not in his public and daylight self or life.  The theory behind Minstrelsy is also all wrong and pro-aristocratic.  He stayed with idea that the ballads are the product of a few aristocratic types, and are Scottish. In fact at the time there was enough knowledge to know some of the most famous poems are redos of earlier French pieces and they do rise from communities, perhaps from individuals originally but are much changed in transmission and women could have therefore had a hand in them too.

This Minstrelsey set Scott’s career off.  The Ministresley volumes would only reach a limited set of people, but they were the right people and Scott began to write in a vein that was fruitful for his fantasy life. He began to write originally these ballads which whipped up his id and appetites and dreams. They are very gory and violent but also insipid and probably mroe than a little repetitive and dull. I’ve seen this kind of thing in early English anonymous verse from the middle ages.

Meanwhile Scott’s uncle died and left him a lot money.  He and Charlotte have a townhouse in Edinburgh which they kept for 25 years. He also settled through connections in a lovely country house which cost him only 30 pounds a year; it was amply big for the four children, it was in Lasswade. He need never have been broke. (p. 73). Some of his income also came from his being in effect a top police man.   It never mattered to him how broke the people around him were, how miserabl these wars were for them.  His downfall was vanity, pride, and it reminds me of my neighbors (really) who buy houses which are just fine and then go into big loans to make them huge and fancy and impressive. (The depression here in the US only hits some classes; the Bushite types are many of them still just fine; Obama has done nothing to cut into their incomes at all; his tax changes just bring us back to Reagon years.)

In chapter 5 we see Scott take up with some society ladies and write a poem which pleased one: Cadyow Castle — vivid trailer for violent movie really. This was still ballad stull  He gets involved with the Ballantyne brothers, one of whom Sutherland says was a crook and the other deluded. And he takes up a working writing life like Trollope"s: he gets up early in the morning and for the first three hours writes away.  

We are told repeatedly Scott’s one sin was his love of Abbotsford and he went into bad debt because of that and then the Ballantyne brothers failed. It makes him sound relatively innocent — after all it’s not such a bad failing to want to make a beautiful estate that is today still treasured by the many who visit it.

Abbotsford, dreamt about over photos by those who can’t afford to

But according to Sutherland thus far, in fact Ballantyne brothers were from the get-go financed by Scott. Through his connections Scott borrowed money to get them started and keep them going. He brought other authors to them, and he began to make needed money by his editions and criticisms of Swift and Dryden.

Is this so bad?  Well, partly relying on Quayle, Sutherland characterized Scott as more than worried about provision for his family, but as someone avid for money, property, higher rank, prestige, and willing to do anything to anyone to get this. One story here:  Scott ruined his younger brother, Daniel. Daniel made two mistakes: when sent to the Carribean he did not savagely put down a slave revolt and was not kept on in his job.  Scott castigated him for lack of courage.  Even worse: Daniel fell in love with the housekeeper to the Marquis of Abercorn. Scott was mortified and deeply angry. Now how could Scott visit the Abercorns with his brother involved with their housekeeper.  Scott was at the time flattering and cajoling this pair of people, especially the woman.

A digression: I’m also reading at this time Arlette Farge’s Fragile Lives and she talks of the intense anger, real wrath and revenge taken by families on anyone who persisted in marrying beneath them or someone who would not aggrandize the family. In France there were lettres de cachet, but for the most part she can’t give particulars as the police records don’t have them. Lettres de cachet were used because you just went to the king, he could sign, no habeas corpus law was in place.  Farge is astonished at the rage: I’m not. The family members are like Mrs Norris: they hate the person who shows us their viciousness.

Back to Daniel: Daniel got Miss Currie Laugh pregnant and marriage was not an option. He had in fact been sent away to prevent this and the baby was born out of wedlock. Then (as in Farge) he had the temerity (and disgusting lowness) to return to her and live with her again. It seems he may even have married her on the sly. How low can you get? Daniel like Scott’s older brother drank himself to death. He collapsed. Scott would not attend his funeral. Lockhardt covers this all up, and then tells us how Scott felt all this remorse and gave us a picture of Daniel as a hero in Fair Maid of Perth. Apparently Edgar Johnson goes on about this.

How good of him.  But it appears Scott did not (as Lockhardt claimed) provide for Daniel’s son by Miss Laugh. He did give the boy 100 pounds to be apprenticed to a clothier in Edinburgh, but when Scott went bankrupt, he informed the boy that he could not continue payments.  The young man was cast adrift with 10 pounds; his mother could or would not help him and he vanishes from "good society."  The mother did marry again, this time to Mitchell of Selkirk, a gentlemen of a small standing in his town. She had been an educated women (a housekeeper is not nothing). 

Sutherland says of Quayle’s book, The Ruin of Walter Scott, that Quayle treats Scott as an enemy and villain and he does not.  It’s true that Sutherland makes Scott’s motives understandable and shows him to be deluded over the youngest brother (endlessly supporting him even after he was discovered to be an embezzler).  One might say what worse could one say than Sutherland here? Apparently Quayle shows an intense "innate greed" and other behaviors in the Ballantyne business that are even more ruthless and inexcusable.  For Scott was behaving the way people of his type behaved at this time, particularly with his values, outlook and as a person wanting to climb up no matter what.  He would have been supported as pious by many had this story got out; and it was probably known. 

Another non-digression:  The Ruin of Sir Walter Scott by Quayle, is a very old-fashioned hard back copy (dead cheap). I can see Quayle is an expert on the Ballantyne family; I don’t know how much I can get into this one which is so detailed but I can pick up Quayle’s attitude towards Scott in the opening epigraph:  "O what a tangled web we weave/when first we practice to deceive" (that’s from Marmion) and also the picture of Scott which is an unusual one showing Scott not looking like some eternal monument but with his eyes bloodshot and also looking shifty or bleak and angry, askance, and his face tired and grim. I like it better than any other I’ve seen; he’s more human. Looking a little closer at the picture of Scott in Quayle’s book, I find it’s by Andrew Geddes and I’d describe it a little more fully as  his eyes bloodshot and also looking shifty or bleak and angry, askance, and his face tired and grim. His lips are set tight and yet he looks like he is about to laugh (or grimace).  His hair is slightly awry too. I do not wonder why this one is not better known — like Cassandra’s portrait of Jane Austen, this reality is not wanted.  I remember how Virginia Woolf said how that much that we read is so dull and bland and a wasteland and it need not be that way at all.

The man described in Sutherland’s biography is the man I met in Scott’s journals. I was startled by three elements in the journals:  one, the genius.  Nothing in Scott’s fictions come near his character sketches.  His character sketches in his fiction are for the most part bland in comparison and stereotypes with nothing political for real brought out.  He really captures real people in their actual setting. It gives you insight into how he could manipulate others.

Which gets me to two: I did dislike the man as I read on.  How ruthless and cold he could be.  I found him actually actively working to prevent liberal and other progressive types from being taken on anywhere. It was no skin off his nose in a couple of instances.

Three: melancholy. The man was partly a depressive. He was very sensitive and did love beauty and appreciated how hard and dark the world is. This comes out towards the end of his journals.

I’d like to stress I didn’t read them through. Too long. I dipped and read and dipped.  But I certainly got enough to agree with Carlyle that Scott could have written so much better.  He wrote down and (like Trollope) censored himself to fit a political agenda. If he goes well beyond this, which he does at times, it’s his unconscious and better self coming out.

What really gets me is how Edgar Johnson, a man of our time, covered all this sort of thing up too.  I was too young ever to ask Coleman Parsons any serious questions about Scott. I wonder what he would have said. He told me he was at Columbia at a time when salaries were low and if it hadn’t been for his family, could not have persevered in his career.  So who knows?  Nothing he ever said or wrote came near what you can find in Sutherland.

Well, Scott maintained an extraordinary pace and did so many things all at once and then drove himself to write book after book once he and Ballantyne went bankrupt.  In fact he didn’t save Abbotsford for himself — I haven’t gotten there, but know that it went into a kind of receivership for a while.  In the journal I read the last three years he did little at long last and just travelled a little out of Scotland (to Italy) at long last.

He did write for money and his books show this. I came across a wry comment by Anna Barbauld where reading his poetry she quipped something about how it was the product of a need to sell and quickly. Now this is before the novels had begun . 

Briefly, Scott himself funded the Ballantyne brothers and did all he could to undermine Constable and others. Very close and unscrupulous dealings by the way with people like Malone whose scholarship Scott relied upon but didn’t pay for or acknowledge. Meanwhile he was churning out these appalling poems — The lay of the Last Minstrel was however popular. It has a lot of alluring picturesque descriptions (set in the verse) which appeals and was published with suitable illustrations.  When Ballantyne went under, it was Scott who was going under. Basically he lived well beyond his means and kept making books he couldn’t get the money for (well beyond his own); the cost of running the business (which included him using someone else as a front for a Tory quarterly) was just about even and then he went and gave up his Ashetiel property where he was a tenant (he couldn’t bear to be a tenant) and moved into the extravaganza of Abbottsford.

On Abbotsford Sutherland is very good: he pictures it for us and says  how it was built and who did it.  He demonstrates it’s been very influential, far more than super-respected architects because it answers to a dream of the past which is popular. I have just gotten to Waverley.  And Sutherland is exposing the myths here too: about finding the opening six chapters six years later and ho hum going to it. At the same time Sutherland shows what a genius Scott could be. His Dryden is the first sociological and close reading literary biography in English. He felt for Dryden: Scott seems to admire all the some people today find what is worst about him: how he changed sides when he needed to, his party man, his extreme conservatism towards the end.  If he ruthlessly used the work of others, he used it to make the first modern studies of a period in the way we understand it, sort of anthropological, an outlook which informs the novels.

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The novelist

Arthur’s Seat, Craig’s Tower by Wm Turner

What a sort of relief when one gets to Waverley.  While Sutherland does justice to Scott as an original critic, his activities to enrich himself enormously, put up his status, and grasp the hands of a press which he could control (I think this is like Dickens, Bob, who I regard as a canny businessman when it comes to getting his own press and his hard-dealing with publishers), and his behavior to various people and ruthless politics just are so offputting.  The fun of this part is partly seeing Sutherland expose the fatuity and (shall I call it) Victorianism (in the worst sense) of EJ (Edgar Johnson).

But when he gets to the novels although he’s hasn’t the space to get at the inner life of the novels at their finest, he is very good. I’ve gotten up to 1820 so I’ve now read past Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, and the English phase.  Sutherland divides the books into Scottish phase, English phase, and then (dropping these categories), a kind of breakthrough in Bride of Lammermoor.

He spends 12 close packed pages on Heart of Midlothian as one of Scott’s "very imperfect masterpieces" and I’ve not got the time nor would it be really helpful to summarize as the argument and analysis is so complicated. For this kind of section alone though I’d say this biography is worth it. (Garside’s critique is the result of academic politics and his career bias.) I think I’ll just emphasize that Sutherland presents Heart of MidLothian as "the first nonpornographic novel in the English language to deal with "the tricky matter of contraception, infanticide, abortion, and the embarrassing propensities of the working classes to breed." Alas, as I feared, Scott is actually on the side of the law which would hang Effie Deans ("pour encourager les autres" to quote Voltaire’s succinct quip on this mindset) really for succumbing to seduction and then desperate and understandably not behaving according to codes which would at least have not murdere dher when she gave birth to a stillborn child.  Why do I want to read a heartless book?  A good question. I should say according to Sutherland The Heart of Midlothian sold manically: huge numbers of books.

Sutherland devotes far fewer pages to both of The Abbot and Monastery than, and sees The Abbot as a sequel (a first sequel in the English marketplace, Sutherland thinks) intended to make up for inadequacies in the rushed Monastery. (We shoudl not forget this writing is for money, big money and Scott wanted this bad and drove himsel.) In the event, The Abbot and Ivanhoe were seen in context by sophisticated readers as about very hot issues. In the case of The Abbot Queen Caroline who was treated very badly by the king and then died. Scott’s novels were topical and present adulterous women as a vexing issue but he does glamorize Mary to an extent it took a very long time for her to be de-glamorized and become unsympathetic (only in recent movies where Elizabeth is now replacing her — as in Cate Blanchard’s and Helen Mirren’s embodiments). Again he’s on the wrong side and doesn’t see how this is compensatory victimhood thrown out to women to wallow in.

Sutherland proposes an interesting topical slant on Ivanhoe. I could summarize the concise explanations for Old Mortality too. The Antiquarian is more like Heart of Midlothian: long, densely packed and too rich a book and analysis.

However, what Sutherland is talking about is the conscious Scott, the conscious message we might say that can be read in these books. I would argue that it’s the unconscious mythic level of another level of Scot’ts writing self that we can find depths and interests in both in the picturesque passages, the characters and actions and also the narrator’s ruminatons.  And I think it’s this level of Heart of MidLothian I’d like to acquaint myself with again — if I can read it at night.  Sutherland is enormously readable (like Trollope); Scott as a novelist is not.

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The Tory Grandee and influential man behind the acrimonious hack-attack journals of the time

Sutherland’s tale of the real Scott in the journalistic world of his times and his son-in-law Lockhart is important.  The opening of Chapter 12 tells all sorts of things I didn’t know about Lockhart but am not surprized at.  First once Scott is the author of these famous stupendous best-selling novels and has gotten his hand into and controlling a press (Ballantynes which he funded and exploited for his career) and a couple of notably Tory quarterlies, to say nothing of his positions in the Scottish establishement, plum houses, and connections, he wields patronage Big.  He got John Wilson (the great attacker of Barbauld by the way), the chair of Blackwood’s instead of the qualified Sir William Hamilton:  Sutherland calls this a Caligula like appointment, and say it was justified to Soctt on groups of the man’s Tory politics and (to Scott) amusing wit.

Then we get the story of Lockhart:  his nickhame was the Scorpion, and Sutherland says he most of the time was "saturnine," misanthropic, and often venomous outside his knack of a very few chosen friendships. I knew that Scott made his career from the journal but not what shits the pair were together.  Lockhart came to Abbotsford and fell in love with the place; he would not be the first or uncommon for marrying to get a certain father-in-law. I knew this as also his descriptions of Scott go beyond sycophancy into idolatry. I didn’t know how often they veer so far from the truth (until I read this book and Quayle).

Scott did warn Lockhart against the kind of brutal satire the journals of the time did promulgate (maybe Keats was really done in by one of these; they didn’t help a TB victim I’m sure).  First John Scott, editor of Baldwin’s openly accused Lockhart of being the secret editor of Blackwood’s and attacking the "Cockney school of poetry" on political grounds, and he had the courage to call Scott a man with a "penchant for hoaxing and masquerade;" in brief, John Scott ended up dead; Lockhart challenged him and then after publicly branding John Scott a liar and coward (not so at all), retreated to leave his second, Jonathan Christie to murder John Scott in a duel.

Scott then urged Lockhart to mend his ways and Lockhart wrote an "excruciatingly dull classical romance Valerius; only Walter Scott ever found merit in it. Walter also showed little sympathy for John Scott on his deathbed.  Scott then did all he could to insinuate his son-in-law into the higher echelons of tory power and get him a career as a London editor. Lockhart rose only to be "the eventually embittered editor of a decayed Quarterly Review."  It was often venomous.  His one book that has lasted is his life of Scott

In character I have to say (from my reading of the journals)

John Ballantyne died, and Scott wrote for him a set of introductions to the novelists’s library; it was a gift as he didn’t charge. The man has TB and Scott then insisted he work hard to publish the novelists’ library against Constable.  John did die; Scott was kind ot his family: John left Scott a non-existence 2000 pounds, earning Lockhart’s scoffing at him.  Quayle, who is the biographer of the Ballantynes outlines this phase:  when John died, Scott lured James back into the business on advantageous terms to get someone in place.

Scott then started a magazine called the Beacon; it was intended to be ruthlessly Tory in every way.  It slandered a whig, James Wilson and one James Stuart who thrashed an editor in the street.  According to Sutherland, those in the know who knew the realities of the literary commercial marketplace world, especially magazines had begun to see that Scott was "a provocateur of unprincipled literary ruffianism". Gibson threatened Scott with a challenge (once you were challenged in this atavastic male atmosphere that reigned then you had to fight somehow or other or would be bullied and ridiculed out of all social places by thug-types). James Stuart was not satisfied with not knowing and when the attacks on him were resumed, he managed to find out the writer was Alexander Boswell (I wonder if and how related to James); a duel ensued, and Stuart murdered Boswell, and was acquitted (defended by distinguished Whig lawyers, Francis Jeffreys and Henry Cockburn).

Lockhart wrote that Scott had nothing to do with the Beacon; it is not at all persuasive; Scott founded, designed, launched the thing. He knew what was written in it (from his journal). Boswell had dined with Scott a couple of days before the murder, a dinner Scott recorded he much enjoyed. Sutherland writes: "although he could contemplate the death of John Scott as the disposal of so much dung, the shooting of his nobleman friend affected Scott deeply. Lockhart said as how a duel in St Ronan’s Well memorializes Boswell.

It was a scummy world that of early 19th century journalism, but Scott did nothing to restrain Lockhart and for real encouraged him. Sutherland ends: "he was an accomplice before and after the fact and bestowed favours on those who did his party’s dirtiest work."

No wonder so much in his novels are aksi dull; he (as Carlyle says) hiding fundamental aspects of his personality all the time.  The difficult years of Scott’s youth (crippled, sensitive and so accused of not being manly, no secure mother nor supportive father or loving person to be absolutley depended upon, only the contingent kind aunt, the third brother) — led to an adult so determined not to go under he overcompensated into ruthlessness, innate greed (he never had enough to satisfy him) and clawing his way to the top of the hierarchies of his era.  Indeed we also see a kind of deep anger coming out, and lack of compassion for most others vulnerable.

The thing is such a childhood could produce an opposite effect: someone who identifies with the vulnerable and hurt and wants to bring them along with him or her.  So yes there’s no reason to like him especially. Sutherland’s book has great explanatory power and gives context for Carlyle’s famous assessment. But he does forget the writing self and he continually leaves out or minimizes how there is an artist’s self which comes out differently and he is not inward when he gets into the books either. He has little patience for the melancholy sensitive Scott we do find in the books. Now that self was in his public consciousness too and helps explain how good he was at making friends.

Chapter 12 ends on succinct analyses of Kenilworth, The Pirate, and The Fortunes of Nigel.  Kenilworth was influential if only because if inaugurated the three volumer for the century to come.  He suggests the complete disregard of historical realities shows a kind of contempt for Scott’s readership.  Carlyle thought this too.

Kenilworth‘s mixing of history and events is so complicated, I leave it to others to read good introductions or Sutherland: it is meant as a celebration of English nationhood as a pastiche Elizabethanism; many of its incidents are now enshrined as having happened (Raleigh putting his cloak on the mud before Elizabeth I; and it became a main source for illustrated Elizabethanism.  Sutherland suggests analysis of its inward text (which we did on ECW and I invite people who are interested to join, determinedly search the archives) is as worth doing as Goethe’s Elective Affinities. I agree for the portraits of women, men, and sexually.

The Pirate is one I’ve not read and is here presented as based on stories Scott was told by friends; Scott loved "the thresholds of history" he said, "the ancient rough and wild manners of a barbarous age … just becoming innovated upon and contrasted by the illumination of learning and instructions of renewed or reformed religion."  The descriptions of the Northern Isles is what it’s famous for. The Fortunes of Nigel (another one I’ve not read) is said to be really about the coronation of 1821, and come out of the concoctions of (false) nationalism, highlander traditions all cooked up by Scott. Scott in fact knew very little about militant women (who appear in these books) as he did the life of the NOrthern Isles at the time or on the oceans.

Scott’s price was beginning to go down at this point but he was still milking the Ballantyne firm ruthlesssly, taking its capital out to build Abbotsford. Ballantyne thought Abbotsford was part of his security; it wasn’t.

Yes novels were written in three volume form frequently before Scott’s time:  Austen makes fun of the 297 page "rule" (or maybe it’s 279) for each volume in one of her texts.  But it was in a sort of institution exploited for commercial gain.  Kenilworth was retailed not just as 3 volumes, but for a guinea and one half, and in a luxurious binding and octavo.  That’s the ticket until late in the century. Novels were marketed in instalments and then published in this way and only a couple of years later came the cheaper editions.  This way of marketing enabled people like Trollope and Dickens to grow rich by their ability to write to this formula and extract a high fee (Trollope) or develope their own publishing press (Dickens did this in his magazines). St Clair points to how convenient this was to the establishment too in controlling what books reached the public.

So Scott led the way for this Victorian tool of commerce.  

A curious quotation: Goethe’s response to Kenilworth was he would never read a Scott novel again. He had too little time to waste on what he could not "learn" anything from. Sutherland points out how Scott completely re-arranges history.  Goethe would not have been interested to read for how Scott regards sex and women and murder .  Sutherland (I think I said) says that you can gain as much from close reading of Kenilworth as Electrive Affinities:  that second book is well chosen as EA is a stunner when you are reading for attitudes towards love, marriage, sexuality, deeply iconoclastic, brilliant, disturbing and (I think) utterly accurate about human nature.  Goethe saw Kenilworth as a low in commercialism in Scott.  It did make pots of money, and (I agree — read it with Judy on ECW about 2 years ago) is a rapid fast read, just what people say is true of Ivanhoe is actually true of Kenilworth. Ivanhoe is slower going.

I should mention I am noticing that Sutherland often quotes Herbert Grierson’s 1938 Sir Walter Scott book when he is discussing the novels.  I am wondering if in fact that is a good book for analysis.

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Almost Done:  Crash and Carry on Regardless

There’s a memoir I love (by Nuala O’Faolain) called "Almost Done" — it takes her into middle age.  I’ve read several more chapters as can be seen from my header and can’t summarize all that I’ve read.  Rather I’ll give succint synopses; 

Chapter 13 tells of how Scott almost single-handedly (well, with a little help from all his well-placed and favored friends) engineered a royal visit which made it seem as if George IV was a spectacularly popular man, and where Scott invented a number of hitherto unknown traditions out of scattered habits, clothes, history which are now used in nationalistic celebrations of Scottishness; then Sutherland goes into Redgauntlet, another of Scott’s finer and genuinely interesting novels.  What’s remarkable is its subjectivity — it’s epistolary for about 1/3 through. It’s here we are told Scott’s journal began and became his "best writing" of his last years. That this one hero (as well I think as the antiquary) is Scott’s alter ego can be seen in one of Darsie’s (the hero’s name) letters journal entries in Redgauntlet:
 
     "Yet, in the meanwhile, the exercise of the pen seems to act as a sedative on my own agitated thoughts and tumultuous passions. I never lay it down but I rise stronger in resolution and ardent hope.  A thousand vague fears, wild expectations, and indigested schemes, hurry through one’s thoughts in seasons of doubt and of danger. But by arresting them as they flit across the mind, by throwing them on paper, and even by that mechanical act compelling ourselves to consider them with scrupulous and minute attention, we may become the dupes of our own excited imagination; just as a young horse is cured of the vice of starting, by being made to stand still and look for some time without interruption."

On line image of a page of 1814 manuscript of Waverley

I wonder if this isn’t a key to the impulse to write for many writers. It’s brilliant and important as a statement about the experience of writing. Trollope and James can give us analysis of how their imaginations work, but they do not tell us how the act of imagining and writing lifts them from their narrow selves and depression and circumstances.  When Sutherland quotes this kind of passage, I know he’s a great biographer as well as understands books.  I would say the above is the kind of passage I’ve been pointing to when I say what I read Scott for and there are more of these in his novels than is ever supposed when you read literary readings or interpretations or criticisms of his texts.

Chapters 14 and 15 are "The Crash" and "Working for Creditors."  I couldn’t myself give a real precis since I don’t understand the finer ins and outs of bill discounting (so I sometimes get lost in a Trollope book. Suffice to say Scott along with Constable and Ballantyne (all three knew what they were doing) borrowed hugely and weren’t making off their presses what they borrowed; on top of that Scott creamed off a lot of the money for building Abbotsford and whatever else he needed to make the right splashes, as for example, when he married his heir off to the "right woman" (who at least Scott liked but not the son very much and she never produced any child). It made Lady Scott just miserable (remember her, the socialite) and her very last years were awful — she had had this bad illness since the 4th pregnancy and child and she died fairly young — as did all Scott and her children.  Sutherland says Scott was not very sympathetic; I can see he (like many writers) spends huge amounts of time reading and writing and that’s the life he really lives (so to speak). EJ and Lockhardt (Scott’s cheerers-on) go on about how honorable Scott was when he could have declared bankruptcy, but had he done that he would have lost his house and status, and by letting him keep the house, and try to keep paying the creditors had a hope of getting something and he of not losing all he had worked to gain.  On the plus side, Scott had made the novels a respectable potent form (we talked of his when this weekend in response to Nick: historical, marxist, European, a vehicle for nationalisms, and certainly now men took over); Ballantyne had run a small town newspaper, now he was teh head of a printing factory with major UK-wide important publications for the world of culture in many areas; Constable went from a second-hand bookseller to a powerful publisher.  Constable lost most and so did his family (and Scott did behave badly): Scott "demonized Constable" (blamed him); for Ballantyne, Quayle is apparently an heir, but Daiches tells of Scott’s callousness as he continued to live comfortably when his two ex-colleagues and erstwhile friends went down the drain. 

Chapter 16 is Magnum Opus.  Remarkably Scott did carry on writing and wrote some remarkable books:  Fair Maid of Perth is one (the most bloody novel Scott ever wrote). He was aging and no longer well, but it does seem he could forget all consciously and throw himself into his books.  He had put into Constable’s head the idea of collecting and publishing all his fiction.  It’s a good marketing step and was later used by George Eliot and G.H. Lewes for her fiction, Henry James for his. It makes an automatic landmark and if it builds on previous popularity or at least some niche, it can "make" an author part of the canon.

I was pleased to find in Sutherland that he agrees with me that Scott’s journal late in life is a work of genius often and Scott was moving from the novels to autobiography at the time.  But this influenced no one as it was not published until much later and only recently whole and unabridged and uncensored.  I regret Sutherland does not go into Scott’s excellent biographical and critical essays of his contemporary novelists, perhaps because they are mostly of women? (eg. Austen, Smith, Radcliffe).  Nor Scott’s Tory series of novelists; by contrast Barbauld’s earlier one contains almost equal women novelists and writers from the later 18th century and various types of novels (Scott goes for his predecessors), and also heterodox ones.

Scott’s study

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Last years

It seems obvious to me that Sutherland does not like Scott the man, though he admires him for his tenacity and worldly successes.  That may be seen in the ending of the book. Most biographies end somewhat sadly, with a sense of tragedy — as the subject usually dies and death rarely comes without much grief. 

This is not true of this book.  It carries on rather in its tone of bring out the truth at last in the context of exposing the falsities of what has been written (mostly by Lockhart and Edgar Johnson).  We are told all of Scott’s failing intellects, the later unhappy years of his nuclear family, their relatively short lives, his persistence in writing, and Sutherland sees that his friends and business associates should have encouraged him to rest, and they did not.  Maybe he wouldn’t let them .  And he himself had not been kind to others; why should they be so to him?  He had not chosen friends for their decent natures.  Towards the end the one partner who kept him going was Cadell (not Constable or the Ballantynes who he had variously betrayed) and it was Cadell who helped him publish and sells widely his Magnum Opus (his works). 

He did write more original works: the book on witchcraft is a early version of serious anthropology (I’ve actually read about half of it), Anne of Geierstein (like Fanny Burney’s last book) is about aging people; there were more Tales of my Grandfather (which Scott kept the profits from somehow or other); Count Robert of Paris, marred as it is by Scott’s incoherence and his son-in-law’s censorship and whole-scale rewriting, shows the grotesquerie of humanity, its customs and societies powerfully.

He was also (as Sutherland says) "an odd kind of bankrupt."  He had 1600 pounds (in effect) unearned income each year, lived in one of the finest private houses in Scotland rent-free, and beyond that kept 1000 pounds a year from his pen (beyond the Grandfather Tales).

Ellen

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