ASECS, Cleveland: actresses & plays, women French moralists on marriage; 18thc opera on today’s stages; poetry reading

Hubert Robert (1733-1808), The Louvre

Dear friends and readers,

A final blog on this year’s ASECS meeting in Cleveland. Two plenary lectures, one by Felicity Nussbaum defending 18th century tragedy by way of the salacious mocking epilogues associated with key actresses of the age; the other by Julie Hayes on French women moralists and marriage. Then a miscellany: a session on later 18th to early 19th century drama & novels, one on women’s attitudes towards Rousseau. Sessions on music: I went to one on 18th century opera as performed, now, in the 21st century. Tourism and art. Finally, most delightful, a session where people read aloud their favorite poems and for once revealed why they enjoyed them so much.

Elizabeth Pope Young (1735-9 – 1797), Countess Hortensia in Jephson’s Countess of Narbonne

Saturday, 11:30 to noon, In “Unaccountable Pleasures: the Subject of Tragedy,” Felicity Nussbaum began with the admission many of the plays of the era were poor; if tragedy is central to an era, how explain the aesthetic failure of tragedies when they were so popular. Radical shifts in ways of performing and the new central roles for women make for a different kind of drama: actresses made visible a new kind of bonding whose goal was to flatter and to enable their audiences to escape. She went over the careers of actresses, gave readings of several centrally popular 18th century tragic plays (not all today considered great masterpieces like Arthur Murphy’s The Grecian Daughter), read aloud numerous of the epilogues & and then explicated them and discussed how they were enacted to suggest they were meaningful as performed for their audiences.

One of the sessions, on Thursday, 9:45 am (18, “The 18th century repertoire) can be aligned with Nussbaum’s speech. All three papers were about the radical content of the plays of the 1790s; what unites them with the previous topic is on the face of it these have been seen as poor plays, rewrites of earlier plays or apparently naive recountings of earlier political events. Daniel Gustafson spoke of the rewriting of specific Restoration libertine plays (a revival where they were rewritten and famous Restoration historical figures brought before the public again, i.e, Rochester, Charles II); these manifest a preference for acting out contemporary (early 19th century) politicized ideals. Later plays have characters of lower rank; the earlier time of history is itself de-politicized. Daniell O’Quinn (quoting John Barrell) showed how plays got through the harsh repression and how performances through visuals, noise and a libretto yield comments on what is tyranny. Better plays — as Otway’s whose complexity was little appreciated — can tragically fail. Multiple complex intentions are mostly lost.

From a 2013 production of Sheridan’s Rivals (Emily Bergl and Matt Letscher) at the Vivian Beaumont in NYC

Roz Ballaster explicated the text of Sheridan’s Rivals as a prologue to looking at the interactions (so to speak) of the novel and drama. She went over plays which reworked other plays (Inchbald’s Married Man reworked Destouche’s autobiographical play of the same name); George Colman writes a play that is like an obsessed novel where no conflicts are resolved. We must not read the plays too much as imitations either. She pointed to texts which were read and not staged. The novel heroine is generally more active, more aggressive, more complex, but we get novelistic treatments of heroine in the theater (Southerne’s Isabella).

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Madame du Chatelet at her work table by an unknown French artist

Julie Chandler Hayes first looked at the work of many 17th, 18th and 19th century women moralistsm then singled out 4 individual women and their works to treat in detail and then moved back to generalization. A mordant tradition of moralizing which differ from that of males which has little to say about childbirth or marriage, which women moralists discuss, often as a kind of slavery; they were given no or little choice. Women whose works she covered include: Gabrielle Suchon (1631-1703), Madame de Lafayette (1634-93); Anne-Therese de Marguenat de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert (1647-1733); Madeleine de Puisieux (1720-98); Madame de Verzure (?1766); Marie-Jeanne de Châtillon Bontems (1718-1768) who translated Thomson’s Seasons; Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte d’Arlus (or Darlus), married to Louis-Lazare Thiroux d’Arconville (1720-1805), and wrote scientific works, translated, whose works have been attributed to Diderot; Emilie du Chatelet (1706-49).

While Prof Hayes discussed some themes as they appear in a few individual works or are of interest for one person, I’ve given just her heads of topic and what she discussed both separately and for the women as a group. SO: they discuss celibacy, companionate marriage, adultery (this was expected, people presented as taking a lover out of boredom, but then finding themselves in a morass of jealousy and resentment). The issue of parenthood is treated abstractly: before Rousseau motherhood is not a topic. More abstractly: unequal power relationships, egalitarian feminism; the necessity of submission, a pessimistic view of humanity, marriage as a perverted institution, hardly calculated to add to happiness of either person. Loss of liberty is central to the truth of marriage, especially for women.

Girls are victims raised with care in order that they submit to this life; boys are put into armies. The moralists say there are husbands who love their wives and wives who love their husbands, but it’s the husband who knows independence; for a wife to know liberty she must be a widow first. People shipwreck themselves for desire and ambition. Bleak depictions of social customs; she must obey him and his self-interest; he can make her unhappy with impunity. We see the interior of households, happiness not common among the lower class people either. Marriage not a natural state, an ideal of an unattached life. Some deeply poignant life stories hinted at: one woman lost her child at an early age and does not get over it. Some see a double movement between ambition (so you follow convenances) and personal identity.

There is little or no emotional refuge to be found in French women’s moralist writings. Novel took on further cultural analyses with its quest to understand human motivations and interactions. these are discourses of self-regulation. They have a profound sense the world they are allowed is not enough.

Portrait of Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), Georg Oswald May (1738-1816)

Again I attended a session that may be aligned with this general lecture: Rousseau’s Emile (Friday, 11:30 am, No. 113). There were four papers. There were no surprises: Mary Trouille showed Rousseau advised educating women to serve men’s needs absolutely; his novel, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise shows the tragic results; Kristin Jennings went over how 18th century German women responded to Rousseau as seen in their writing, her specific example the work of Sophie Von La Roche whose famous novel she compared to that of another German woman writer; Karen Pagani explicated an unfinished text by Rousseau, Les Solitaires which seems to be about whether a man should forgive a woman who has transgressed. The question (to me) seemed inadequate as the women in question was probably raped. Questions include whether the person should react with personal feelings (which seemed to lead to forgiveness) or do his or her civic duty and set an example. A fourth paper came from another panel: Avi Lifschitz had to leave early so he gave his paper on Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages in this session. I thought most interesting was Rousseau’s idea that words have a natural link with reality through their signing function; that the visual holds us, that language has lost its ability to persuade as it becomes more abstract, that it’s most effective when people say less. Rousseau was frank enough to show his imagined teacher and pupil acting out some of his theories and failing.

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2013: Metropolitan Opera: Handel’s Giulio Cesare

A session I and Jim enjoyed but I probably won’t be able to convey much about was “Eighteenth Century Opera in Production” (Saturday, 9:45 am, No 169). All four presentations used power-point, computers, screens, music, DVDs. Majel A. Connery discussed a recent production of Mozart at Salzburg which appears to have been 3 plays, all intended to reflect his life, his imagination trajectory, his work: she called it “meta-theater Mozart.” The plays were controversial among other things for the way they characterized Mozart’s inner life: wild, nightmarish, when reflective sad. Money (the lack of it) tears the hero apart. Everyone in simple symbolic costumes; the stage a huge box. Annelies Andries discussed what happened when the traditional aria of an opera is replaced by anther aria part of the opera but often left out. This happened in a production of the Marriage of Figaro with Cecilia Bartoli; the audience was apparently disappointed instead of reinvigorated with the apparently new perspective.

Danielle de Niese as Ariel (Enchanted Island)

Laurel E. Zeis’s's “‘Persistent 18th century in two recent Metropolitan productions” was about elements of staging, kinds of voices, costumes, motifs, attitudes, practices, brought into the 21st century from the 18th century stage. I have a picture of some on this blog: the imitation of an 18th century stage in the recent Giulio Cesare. I wrote a blog about The Enchanted Island which was her central focus — and the use of boats on artificial water in the background appeared again in Giulio Cesare. Supernatural elements and computerized projection are found everywhere — though not Dryden and Davenant substituted for Shakespeare. Her suggestion that the “machine” for the Ring cycle was “very 18th century” because it changed the scenery in front of the audience, caused the players to come up front stage, & even dress in front of us was not all that persuasive, but her clips were fun. She talked of operas I’d not heard of (a Little Women), and pointed to unexpected 18th century elements in recently written operas like Nixon in China (a da capo aria).

Giovanni Piranesi (1720-88), Carceri V

Similarly, the strong tourism element of the four papers given in “Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the 18th century” (Thursday, 4:15 pm, No 71) were dependent on slides, and clips and photos, and I took few notes, just looked at lot. Suffice to say I especially enjoyed T. Barton Thurber’s talk on lasting impressions of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and British artists in Italy” and the pictures of Roman Antiquities discussed by Carole Paul. I was not able to stay for Jamie Smith’s Lady Mary Montagu and the Masks of Venice,” and unfortunately David Kennerley did not make it with his “Italian Prima Donnas and British Female Singers, 1770-1840″.

A little more on a poetry reading session and I’ve done.

Ellen

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Diasporic Indian Austen: films about displacement, exile, seeking a home

Hasidia (Sarita Khajuria and Oliver (Mo Sesay) seen from the bus (Bhaji on the Beach, 1993): modern reality transforms the romantic image

Wm Darcy (Martin Henderson) and Lalita (Aiswarya Rai) walking on LA beach (Bride and Prejudice 2005): romance scene left fantasy but with addition of cultural disparities

Dear friends and readers,

For the last couple of weeks now I’ve been watching the 6 Sense and Sensibility films still available, and a group of Indian films, mostly Tamil, powerfully great ones, Roja, Bombay, Guru by Mani Ratnam; plus the two other recent Indian adaptations of Austen, Bride and Prejudice and Aisha. I’ve watched two transnationals: Bhaji on the Beach and Mississippi Masala. And I’ve read in whole and parts several superb books on Indian cinema and essays on individual films.

I had watched them before (see earlier blog on Lagaan, Guru, Bombay, Charuntula, Mississippi Masala) but this time it was with a view to understanding and then writing a paper on Rajiv Menon’s I Have Found It, the 2000 Tamil analogous or free adaptation of S&S.

I’ve come to a few general conclusions. Jane Austen’s novels — or novels of the 18th & 19th century — seem peculiarly suitable for contemporary Indian films, from the typology: chaste heroine, intelligent assertive yet tactful and acquiescent in her subordinate position to men; she also regards having and bringing up children one of her main functions in life. Austen and the English traditions of middle class novels also contain social criticism from the angle of the vulnerable or underdog combined with women’s romance. Finally, they have ethical heroes who are ambitious and want to marry and are respectful of women, the traditional family group, and the arranged marriage for money (for themselves as well).

Further, if we look at the four faithful movies, we find her material has forced upon the film-makers images of displacement, journeys, exile from home:

Striking & memorable image of Marianne pacing un-home-y space (not usually discussed, in “faithful” 1995 S&S)

Turning to both free adaptations, I Have Found It is filled with sudden journeys, by train, by bus, by truck; the characters stand outside buildings they are excluded from; the Elinor character Sowmya has a hard time getting a job and the family is harassed for rent and lacks food for a time; they live in a rented apartment, in danger of eviction. They had lived in a palace type house in their village before the grandfather died and cut his daughter, the equivalent of Mrs Austen, off without any money.

The family’s train journey away from village (I Have Found It)

Sowmya-Elinor can find no place, outsider in Chennai

From Prada to Nada makes the trip from West to East LA profoundly transformative of everything the sisters have known:

Crossing from west (white, rich) to east (Spanish, poor) LA (From Prada to Nada, 2010)

Since I’m interested in Indian films here I turn also to Aisha too. Despite the static quality of Emma’s life in the novel becomes a film of journeys. Aisha is conceived of as a romance about an upper class girl with plenty of leisure time to spend her life socializing in her milieu, but what does she do but tak journeys between four places cities, a town not far from Delhi; Delhi; a resort area; Bombay:

Mumbai seen from the angle of Aisha’s car

Aisha’s coming-of-age story and confused inner life is mirrored in these concrete displacements:

Aisha has many car scenes; here the characters (Shefali and Gambhir) have been tricked by Aisha & are w/o their car and are in a dangerous unknown area, must find & walk home (Aisha)

When I compared Gurinda Chadha’s transnational Bhaji on the Beach together with Bride and Prejudice & distinguished the features of Austen’s 1813 Pride and Prejudice from all that accrues in one’s mind: I saw that Chadha took on board, added, as part of what estranges our lovers in B&P a displaced young man (Wm Darcy) and a journeying set of sisters at risk. Bride and Prejudice is filled with images of journeying, of people displaced, suddenly turning up; planes, bridges, odd angled cities juxtaposed are noticed by many. But the images of moving, of loss, of zoom shots are continual and many unnoticed. The many cars laden with family belongings:

When Jaya-Jane and Balraj-Bingley are separated a visual image of a train on a desolate landscape appears:

This is part of what makes the imitation of Austen’s P&P plot-outline touching beyond the beauty and energy of the dances & songs. Austen’s P&P had nothing to do with cultural liminality and yet the novel lends itself to this sort of deepening treatment.

Since it’s not well enough known by Janeites or Austen scholars, and at the present time the only way to get it is to pay to have a DVD manufactured on demand, I’ll describe Bhaji on the Beach.

One of the many scenes of the women in the van (this one at evening, coming home)

From “Representing the Spaces of Diaspora in Contemporary British Films by Women Directors,” by Anne Ciecko, Cinema Journal, 383 (Spring, 1999), pp. 67-90:

Bhaji on the Beach takes place in the course of a single day. The film begins with a journey down a street in Birmingham, offering glimpses of England’s second-largest city as a marketplace of diversity … Birmingham is [the] place of departure, and the ultimate destination is Blackpool for a summer holiday. In a series of short, parallel-edited vignettes, the viewer is introduced to the dramatis personae, a wide range of pilgrims of different ages (mostly middle class)-women of South Asian ethnic backgrounds- all headed on a day trip to Blackpool sponsored by the Saheli Women’s Center. Through the character of the group leader, Simi, Chadha and her screenwriter, Meera Syal, foreground the site of the Asian women’s refuge and resource center, which provides facilities, advice, services, and information to the community, concentrating on women’s issues with a strong focus on the family.

We have three separate stories threading their way through the trip and day long outing. The first is Asha (Lalita Ahmed), a middle aged Indian women terrorized by her nightmare Gods, who appeases them by saying she will know her place; she slowly emerges from her nightmare and finds herself stumbling among huge grocery store goods, which come down to normal size and she is in a grocery and her family just behind waiting for her to make them lunch. Over the course of her day at Blackpool, she will meet, walk, and talk with a lonely gallant ex-actor British (white) man.

We switch to Ginder (Kim Vithana), a Southasian young woman in her mid-20s reading a letter on a stairway; these turn out to be divorce papers; she goes into the room where her son is and he asks when they will see Daddy in this new place they are moving to. She says she can’t answer that but today they are going to seashore, and she feigns or feels some relief to get out of their tight quarters. We switch to an empty cot for child, near by Ranjit (Jimmi Harkishin) angry Southasian young man on another bed with similar letter; and his young brother, Manjit (Akbar Kurtha) comes in and he cries with real rage, “Will no one ever leave him alone in this family.” Manjit wants to be reasonable (and prevents his brother from kidnapping his son later in the movie) and with a bully tyrannical older brother, Ranjit chases Ginder down to Blackpool, to try to persuade her to return to him and his family on his terms. We learn from seeing her body he has beaten her, and he tries to again as a way of subduing her. He is unable to change his destructive life patterns.

Ginger makes one last appeal to Ranjit

This opening with an insistence he listen to her and make a separate home for them results in his hitting and throwing her on the ground

The third couple is comprised of a 21 year old Southasian girl, Hasidia, daughter of aspiring parents; she has made medical school and they want her to be a physician. She finds she is pregnant by Oliver, her black English boyfriend (Afro-Carribean?) whose existence the parents do not know about — only partly because he’s black. Over the course of the day she argues with him, phones him, he tries to find her; she finds out about abortions and they meet again at the beach where he too followed her. The most directly hopeful moment of the film occurs when they agree they must do the abortion, they are not in a position to marry or bring up a child, but they will see it through together, and they are last seen in the shot I put at the head of this blog, on his bike.

On the bus are relatives of both young women, a grandmother, an aunt, Pushka (Zohra Sehga), Rekhan (Souad Faress) a Indian woman who lives in Bengal. There are two younger women who are “taken out” (or harassed, depending on your point of view) by some British young men (louts is the feel). They wear combinations of traditional and modern British dress.

The film also makes humorous references to the artificial conventions of popular Indian movies, as in the stylized fantasy sequence in which Asha dances in the rain until she is jolted out of her reverie when the man who courts her is revealed to be [her eldely English escort] Ambrose (his brown makeup washes off) … The whole place has a liberal and liberating atmosphere about it; at the same time, it is stiflingly cluttered and consumerist. The Blackpool “illuminations,” the late-summer lighting up of the tacky town with Christmas lights, is ostensibly the reason the women’s group has chosen this place for the summer getaway. … The women from Birmingham are allowed to enjoy the spectacle at the end of the film, when the darkening streets are lit up and the place takes on a unique beauty. Despite the heavy situations encountered along the way, the film has a comforting tone. They also bring with them the enormous symbolic baggage of tradition. Befitting the carnivalesque environment of Blackpool, many are in costume or change their clothing along the way, as if taking on the guise or garb of the “other.”

I felt as with Mira Nair’s Namesake (see Natalie Friedman’s “From Hybrids to Tourists: Children of Immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 50:1 (2008): 111-27)and Mississippi Marsala which combines an ethnically diverse Southern American town culture with India culture (from Uganda), in Bhaji on the Beach, I could discern the archetypes of Indian filmic culture in this hybrid form.

Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala like her adaptations in general are in mood quite different from Chadha’s — far more grave, melancholic, with more emotional depths. Chadha uses stereotypes far more: of course the husband is wretched and violent; of course the wife longs to return but “I can’t.” Individuals are far more various than this; some hybrid people are happy, not punished, have parents who sympathize. As B&P is shallow easy romance, so Bhaji on the Beach is a situation comedy in type. Nair gets beneath the stereotypes to suggest another self which does not have any public space to be. Nair’s Mississippi Massala uses strong melodramatic patterning (the opening flashback of Indian films, the wedding, the dance) while Bhaji on the Beach is more Western in tropes and does have the inconsequentality of life in feel because of many events not part of the plot-design. Yet in both the same imagery and concern with homelessness, exile, displacement prevails (so too Nair’s Namesake).

Jay (Sethman Roth), the exiled Asian Uganda eagerly returning (from Mississippi) by plane, car to discover he has been dreaming of ghosts, of what is not (Mississippi Masala)

This blog is meant to be suggestive only. I’m working out some thoughts. So I turn to Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar’s “The Cinema of Displacement: Towards a Politically Motivated Poetics,” Film Criticism, where they write:

Home is largely construed in terms of the land to which one belongs: land is a cultural repository of memories and symbolic of a way of life … The spaces that the protagonists occupy become a central feature in their acts of self- representation. In films representing displacement, the protagonists seem to locate themselves in a curious double space. The space in tiie mise-en-scene – a room, a train station, a porch – always evokes an “other” space.

I add the dominant principle in the relationship between the double spaces is intrusion. There is a constant traversing of space.

All six S&S films show the above emotional characteristics & imagery: psycho-social distress becomes literal displacement and liminality. I move from first seeing the Dashwood women lamenting on the stairwell in the 71 S&S:

We see the 3 Dashwood women pressed together on the stairwell surrounded by new furniture crowding them out (1971 S&S);

to the many grim journeys of the 81 S&S; to the dwelling on melancholy stark and fearful landscape in the 95 S&S (even gardens are nightmarish and a piano has to be hauled up a hill); to continual displacements of I Have Found It (2000), and the continual movement of Davies’s 2009 S&S

The classic coach journey (2008 S&S)

culminating most recently (2011) in the use of zoning and moving trucks in From Prada to Nada, where Edward and Nora-Elinor’s love scenes are conducted next to a moving van.

Virginia Woolf pointed out in 3 Guineas how most women have no state for real — if they want any liberation; Carole Pateman that they are attached to the society they live in through men or families who however can eject them at will. These insights are pictured in these films out of Austen.

Ellen

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Gardening & women in the arts; reading & writing spinsters

Dear readers and friends,

This blog has two subjects: lesbian arts and spinsters. About a year ago I was so enthused by a review of Lisa Moore’s Sister Arts, and now I’ve been sent it to review and have skimmed the book as a preliminary move. First it’s a beautiful book, an art book, about 18th century landscape and gardening and the popular images conferred and imposed.

If one wanted seriously and earnestly to persuade readers that Jane Austen had some lesbian tendencies (as when she and Martha spent the night on the floor together one fall evening at Steventon), to substantiate Emma Donoghue’s thesis about a type of individual recognizable in the 18th century (thought not openly admitted), the lesbian spinster, one could not do better than advise the person to read this book and Moore’s previous, Dangerous Liaisons, together of course with reading selections of letters and diaries from literary women of the later 18th and early 19th century. Dangerous Liaisons close reads the overt lesbian patterns in Edgeworth’s Belinda, Austen’s Emma and takes us from a group of 18th century artists (including Mary Delany and Anna Seward) to 20th century lesbian poetry and art through nineteenth century poets (Emily Dickinson one) and into contemporary aligned art, Mickalene Thomas.

A precious – mouldering pleasure – ’tis -
To meet an Antique Book-
In just the Dress his Century wore-
A privilege – I think -

His venerable Hand to take-
And warming in our own -
A passage back – or two- to make -
To Times when he – was young -

His quaint opinions – to inspect -
His thought to ascertain
On Themes concern our mutual mind -
The Literature of Man-

What interested Scholars – mos t-
What Competitions ran -
When Plato-was a Certainty -
And Sophocles – a Man -

When Sappho – was a living Girl -
And Beatrice wore
The Gown that Dante – deified -
Facts Centuries before

He traverses – familiar-
As One should come to Town -
And tell you all your Dreams – were true -
He lived – where Dreams were born -

His presence is Enchantmen t-
You beg him not to go -
Old Volumes shake their Vellum Heads
And tantalize – just so –

371 — Emily Dickinson

Serena Reading (Honora Sneyd), George Romney (178)

Moore opens by going through lesbian genres, lesbian type arts hitherto not recognized nor I see the woman who were one another’s partners (as in Jane Austen and Martha Lloyd). Sister Arts is filled with color plates and drawings — all by women, often flowers and still lifes. Moore wants to show us a kind of taste or aesthetic crossing across countries and time too, and claims should be part of the lesbian matter we will attached to Virginia Woolf. I’m not sure Moore is not simply identifying l’ecriture-femme (the best book is still Beatrice Didier’s):

Letitia Bushe, Mary Delany’s first Irish love, a drawing (1731) in the et Arcadia Ego situation: I too (Death) am here in this idyllic place.

It may be because the general culture at large either ignores women-centered writing and its characteristics or downright despises it that it begins to seem lesbian. But I’ll withhold judgement until after I’ve read the book and more about Moore’s thesis.

I was asked to and am also reviewing, this one for a Burney journal Volume 5 of Burney’s Early Journals and Letters and there I’ve come across long pieces on Mary Delany and have been reading about her. She’s a woman who may be said to have begun life all over again several times, from devastating falls/disappointments (except maybe the second husband). As a biography about her says (Mary Peacock’s The Paper Garden), Delany’s best time began at 72! Another book which focuses from a different perspective on some of these women is Betty Rizzo’s Companions without Vows.

As background one has to read books like Ann B. Shteir’s Flora’s Daughters: Cultivating Women, cultivating science. I cannot say this is an entertaining read; Shteir’s style is dull, but she does convey important information about women in science in the earliest days they entered consciously. She tells of how plants were organized by different taxonomies and the superiority of Linnaeus’s precisely because he used sexuality as a marker; the arguments to keep even this knowledge from women as too sexualized. How that was successfully fought off. Latin could be used to exclude women, but Lineaus’s terms had just two words. Then a chapter on the popularizers, who women read and where they got these texts. I’ve been aware of how much information women in the 17th through later 18th century had of what was useful in medical science as well as plants and vegetables. They were responsible for putting food on the table. (Shteir does not make that kind of point).

The chapter seemed to me to present essential foundational knowledge of books read and information understood for women in science and the art of botany.

I also found it telling that one source of botanical knowledge was a book by Rousseau: Lettres elementaires sur la botanique (1771-73). Here’s something Mary Trouille in her Women Read Rousseau overlooked in trying to figure out why Rousseau had such a positive reputation among women. The readers and comments in letters on botanical knowledge include the French Swiss (the Constants) and English so-called bluestockings whose lifestyle again exemplifies Emma Donoghue’s findings.

Lichfield Cathedral: Honora Sneyd lived here for a time with Anna Seward

Reading about learned ladies, bluestockings (how resented, despised) and the one area women made their first forays into as scientists; botany (which did move into archeaology), I came across this poem by Charlotte Smith:

To the Goddess of Botany

Of Folly weary, shrinking from the view
    of Violence and Fraud, allow’d to take
    All peace from humble life; I would forsake
Their haunts forever, and, sweet Nymph! with you
Find shelter; where my tired, and tear-swoln eyes
    Among your silent shades of soothing hue,
Your “bells and florets of unnumber’d dyes”
Might rest — And learn the bright varieties
That from your lovely hands are fed with dew;
And every veined leaf, that trembling sighs
In mead or woodland; or in wilds remote,
    &;Or lurk with mosses in the humid caves,
Mantle the cliffs, on dimpling rivers float,
    Or stream from coral rocks beneath the Ocean’s
waves.

Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, 1797

Her Rural Walks were not meant just for children, but contained available sound scientific women’s delights As her sonnet tells you she was also escaping a hard life and resulting depression (she had a violent abusive husband, many children to bring up and place and was cheated out of a legacy for them).

Mickalene Thomas also turned a life of hardship and abuse into beautiful art:

Mickalene Thomas

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Now three days ago I queried Austen-l thus:

IN the Latino (would it be called? or hispanic?) film adaptation of S&S, From Prada to Nada, Mary-Marianne arrives home the morning after the central party of the film (the second during which Mary/Marianne (Alexa Vega) is snubbed comes much later and is denouement). Mary has gone to bed with Roderigo-Willoughby. Nora-Elinor (Camille Belle) marches her away from their boarding house and Mary explains she wants to marry Roderigo for his money, class, all he can give her of freedom from having to work for a living, that being very unpleasant. Nora says “that makes you a whore.” To which Mary replies, “that’s better than being a spinster.”

Hot quarrelling

Now I know the word “whore” is nowadays a slang word for slut, promiscuous. It’s not used in its more accurate sense of prostitute receiving money for sex. But I find the use of “spinster” odd there. Does anyone else? I never hear that word used by anyone. I’ve heard “old maid” not all that long ago, but not “spinster.” It would have been used of Austen in the 18th century.

Does it jar others? It could be that young women today do use the word “spinster” for an unmarried woman whose style of life they dread, but not among the people I know.

Is there a Spanish equivalent of spinster this use of the word reflects?

After 3 days & nights one person had responded by referring to an essay on spinsters as represented in films and dictionary definitions of the term: the term is not just to refer to a woman who “spins” – it was until the turn of the century [1900] a legal term meaning an unmarried or single woman – it is used in legal proceedings as a title, or addition to the surname; as it was / is? in the Book of Common Prayer.

To which I replied: Thank you. I think the answer to my question is this: people think with the word spinster but rarely use it. It’s such a dreadful state (irony). I asked her since she still had not replied directly: let me put my question up front to you: “Do you use the word spinster?” If it’s embarrassing to be asked this question, it’s okay to answer off list.

I have not called someone a spinster aloud that I can think of ever; I have also not used the term seriously for anyone today. I mean that. I have used the word “spinsters’ when talking of characters in historical fiction or in history, as say “Jane Austen would have been called a spinster.” “Verity Poldark was on her way to be a spinster.” When I was young I did want to grow up, get married, have children; around age 9 I dreamt of a wedding, and husband (never very distinct image) and 3 children. But the state to be dreaded as “old maid,” the word in use was “old maid.” I used the term “old maid.”

So, in the movie, From Prada to Nada, had Mary-Marianne retorted to Elinor-Nora, “It’s better than being an old maid” it would not have jarred on my ears so much as spinster.”

Despite that useful article on film — thank you I’ll save it — I do not believe that the public attitude towards unmarried women with no children has improved. I used to screen a powerfully great movie, Wit, about a woman who is a professor in her later 40s diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. It was a shock to me the first time the students wrote about it, how many of them held against her that she had never been married. I cannot remember if they used the word spinster but a whole host of negative terms for her as cold, dried up, isolated (that’s a negative one) were trotted forth.

From the article and remembering these students, I conclude it seems that people think with the word “spinster,” but they might not voice it aloud — it being such a horrifyingly unacceptable state for a woman. I use heavy irony here. So when Elinor-Nora defies a taboo in effect and calls Mary-Marianne a “whore” for spending the night with Roderigo-Willoughby and planning to marry him based on his wealth (as well as good looks and romance charm), Mary-Marianne is licensed to break a taboo and trot out the “other label” for “unacceptable women;” spinster.

I suggest all the words in the second part of your posting from dictionaries are euphemisms.

The thing protested is a virgin. What’s scorned is a woman who has not let a man fuck her.

Deeper: How dare she? Who does she think she is? Does she not realize the ends of her being is having children for men, by men, with men. The single mother with no husband defies this norm. She is having a child for herself.

The resentment of bluestockings is precisely they don’t want men; they want books first and to study, read, make art, sit in groups and talk. (“How useless to the ends of their being?”)

We might take a step back as Austen-lovers and admit the the ambivalent attitude towards Austen emerges in many ways. One we’ve seen here is the refusal among other things to see that she’s basically asocial outside her family — much of the false way of presenting her comes from hiding from, compensating for this fact.

Cassandra (Gretta Scacchi) discouraging Jane (Olivia Williams) from going through with her promise to marry Bigg-Wither (MAR)

In both Becoming Jane and Miss Austen Regrets Jane Austen is presented as really depressed for much of her life because 1) she never married, and/or 2) everyone is nagging her to marry. Miss Austen Regrets has her trying to tell people she didn’t want to marry but they refuse to believe her, and in the final scene implicitly suggested she and Cassandra had an inactive lesbian relationship. That Cassandra convinced her not to marry Bigg-Wither in the opening scene and now in the closing one is herself drenched in remorse and asks for forgiveness for this.

The African Queen with Katherine Hepburn is a movie that tries to defy the stereotype but does not succeed.

Women alone in modern movies are often semi-promiscuous, are these aggressive detective types. When Helen Mirren is Jane Tennison, her state of mind remains opaque. Such programs are said to be transgressive, but I feel they usually have too much else to do beyond delineating the state of mind of women detectives. A few hours did do much to convey what’s it’s like to live as a single woman having a career, and much of the time we were to see that Helen was not personally happy though she was professionally fulfilled. She loved to be genuinely useful to other women and the vulnerable and powerless.

Season 3, Part 4, morning: Edith (Laura Carmichael) getting up early for breakfast (nothing to keep her in bed) now wants a profession

To invoke Downton Abbey the coarse (insensitive, unsubtle, prejudiced) way of understanding the humiliation of Edith for trying to marry Sir Anthony Strallon was she was so despicable as to marry him rather than be a spinster. I believe one of the characters uses the word of her at the close of that hour. She’ll be a spinster … And those who can’t feel the cruelty of the dowager for her egregious part in it are glad to see Edith exposed because Edith was so “not getting it” that she was open about her intense desire to marry. I can see Fellowes meant it somewhat differently from that and is now going to make Edith the journalist of the family, but we are to understand she became this because she couldn’t marry not because she wanted to be a writer first and foremost.

On commercial popular TV, the program “Girls” does not to me make much progress. (See Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker article, Barbaric Hannah.) Why? well for a start all these girls are into sex, and supposedly realistic sex at that. Like many a women’s film the sex in Girls is not idealized. I did watch 3 episodes of the first season myself and went from feeling liberated by what I was seeing to feeling it was a one joke or one paradigm scenario. Girl rises above humiliation, puts her clothes on, and walks away, only to return the next day.

Does this show really put an end to the demand that women marry, have sex with men and babies? No. it does show an alternative lifestyle going on for a small group of upper class white women living in Manhattan for the time of their later 20s. These are precisely the terms of Sex and the City. And fashion, however differently presented, is central to both, the women costuming themselves.

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The two topics come together in the strong prejudice against, refusal to recognize lesbians and continued hostility to unmarried women and women who haven’t had any children. The sources of the stigmatizing, ostracizing are the same. Women’s central function is to provide sex and children for men.

Lena Dunham and her “girls:” Illustration by Michael Carson.

Do not they look like they are waiting to be taken?

Ellen

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Austen’s Letters 85 & 86: Mon, 24 May ’13, Sloane St, to Cassandra, Chawton, Sat-Tues, 3-5 July ’13, Chawton, to Frank, HMS Elephant, Baltic

If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it, with Henry, Mon, 24 May ’13

There is another female sufferer on the occasion to be pitied … I hope you continue beautiful & brush your hair, but not all off, to Frank, Tues 6 July ’13

Huet-Villiers portrait of Mrs Quentin (as later engraved by Wm Blake, the original that Austen saw is lost)

Samantha Harker as Jane Bennet (1995 BBC P&P): probably closest in physical type of Janes thus far, in typical overt expression — and green ribbon

Dear friends and readers,

Two weeks have passed since I last wrote about Austen’s letters (see letters 81-84). Jane is still in London with Henry, both looking forward to going back to Chawton; once at Chawton, she writes at length to Frank in the Baltic, a rare letter to him to have survived.

The first, to Cassandra and mostly about Jane’s continuing distraction of and her relationship with Henry in London as he prepares to move and adjusts himself to Eliza’s death and his widower’s life, has been quoted repeated and made the centerpiece of interpretations of Austen or her characters because of two visits to two exhibitions, where Austen looks for and says she finds one image of one of her heroines from P&P; Austen’s reluctance to go to a party and socialize with people aware she has written S&S and P&P; and Austen’s self-conscious “parading about London in [Henry's, more probably Eliza's] Barouche.”

The second, to Frank, our first to him to have survived for a while (all we have left thus far are her two to him upon their father’s death, and her two poems celebrating a new marriage and new home. He is captaining a ship in the Baltic sea and she writes as companionable, reassuring, and locally descriptive letter as she can. Here attention has been paid to Jane Austen’s gathering precisely the right information for her MP, a paragraph asserting Henry seems no longer grieving at all, and a PS paragraph of her avidly keeping track of what money she has made thus far.

Taken together, the two have much to show about three of Jane Austen’s brothers: Henry, Edward (who figures in letter 86), and Frank. Austen’s life at Chawton is emerging. Yet again she identifies with a marginalized nearly homeless woman, Elizabeth Leigh-Thomas.

Ciaran Hinds as Captain Wentworth: he has a beautiful amount of hair (1995 BBC Persuasion)

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No 85, to Cassandra, Mon 24 May ’13, From Sloane Street to Chawton.

J. J. Feilds as Henry Tilney (2007 BBC Northanger Abbey)

Four days ago Jane had taken her several trips with Henry around the near-by countryside. Jane continues this mostly cheerful upbeat manner, all activity she (“I then walked into No 10 [Henrietta St], which is all dirt and confusions”) She has Cassandra in mind and her content says she is “very much obliged” to Cassandra for wrting to her because Cassandra must have “hated” this sitting down and writing. She had had a worrying morning. What this is we are never told but it’s in Jane’s mind:

I am very much obliged to you for writing to me. You must have hated it after a worrying morning.-Your Letter came just in time to save my going to Remnants, & fit me for Christian’s, where I bought Fanny’s dimity. I went the day before (Friday) to Laytons’ as I proposed, & got my Mother’s gown, 7 at 6/6. I then walked into No. 10,’ which is all dirt & confusion, but in a very promising way, & after being present at the opening of a new account to my great amusement

Cassandra’s letter did spare her some shopping. She is glad to have shopped less, not more. Now she didn’t have to go to Remnants. The day before Cassandra’s letter arrived she had gone already, to Layton’s as she had proposed. As in the last letter it is a question of buying mourning, this time for the mother.

I take her amusement at the opening paragraph to be her sense that this is absurd because she has herself so little money, has spent a life of tight budgets (for her to be opening a new account!). This connect forward to the close of the letter where in a much quoted phrase she feel a curious triumph (somehow inculcated by the very physical experience of high up in an open carriage (Fanny Dashwood and Mrs Elton understandable in their exultations)– only Jane is actually saying that this is not her, this temporary elevation is not something she “has a right” to. A curious phrase. Most people in rich cars go about in them because they have money, money they often did not make. The idea here is her lack of self-importance and this does connect back to her unwilling to be made a possible show of.

I had great amusement among the Pictures; & the Driving about, the Carriage been open, [sic] was very pleasant. — I liked my solitary elegance very much, & was ready to laugh all the time, at my being where I was. — I could not but feel that I had naturally small right to be parading about London in a Barouche. –

Then the famous passage: Jane picked Henry up from his office, and they went to an Exhibition of apparently 3rd rate pictures. The weather was bad. The collection not thought by others to be good and Austen says simply it was poor. For most people today Huet-Villier’s portrait is not exactly attractive (it was first identified by Martha Rainbolt, English Language Notes, Dec 1988, 35-42). A complacent heavy face, surprisingly not blonde, but big. Big women, large, fecund, obviously eating were admired; it was a class inflection but the type is still seen and admired (Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, Patricia Dodge, Samantha Harker)

Henry & I went to the Exhibition in Spring Gardens. It is not thought a good collection, but I was very well pleased-particularly (pray tell Fanny) with a small portrait of M” Bingley;” excessively like her. I went in hopes of seeing one of her Sister, but there was no M” Darcy; — perhaps however, I may find her in the Great Exhibition’ which we shall go to, if we have time; — I have no chance of her in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Paintings which is now shewing in Pall Mall, & which we are also to visit. — Mrs Bingley’s is exactly herself, size, shaped face, features & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her. I dare say M” D. will be in Yellow. — Friday was our worst day as to weather, we were out in a very long & very heavy storm of hail, & there had been others before, but I heard no Thunder.

Sabrina Franklyn, the sweetest of the Janes (1979 P&P)

Rosamund Pike as Jane Bennet (Wright’s 2005 P&P), the sexiest and most knowing

I do not know why there the “no chance” of seeing Mrs Bingley in Joshua Reynolds studio: he painted many an upper class flattered icon of luxury and wealth and fecund femininity Looking at Jane’s words they are very general, no specific trait, only that the painting shows a woman in white (upper class women liked to wear white it showed their wealth and servants — Mrs Norris is resents that Fanny is in white) with green ornaments. Green a pastoral color? spring like. Perhaps that prompts yellow? I don’t know. Were brunettes through to look good in yellow — Elizabeth is said to be much smaller and traditionally taken to be darker (not dark, just darker more brown in her hair).

Note that the tone of the section make the next day just as important as well as a locket where four important words are Snipped away!

Saturday was a good deal better, dry & cold. — I gave 2/6 for the Dimity; I do not boast of any Bargains, but think both the Sarsenet & Dimity good of their sort. — I have bought your Locket, but was obliged to give 18 for it — which must be rather more than you intended; it is neat & plain, set in gold. [Four or five words cut outJ; -- We were to have gone to the Somerset house Exhibition on Saturday, but when I reached Henrietta Street Mr Hampson was wanted there, & Mrs Tilson & I were obliged to drive about Town after him, & by the time we had done, it was too late for anything but Home. -- We never found him after all.

Hampson is this tiresome Walker connection. Eliza may appreciate her Walker connections but in Jane's previous letter, no sense of this. Only that Hampson is wanted for some business reasons - a relative, and in this period bankers went where they could. She drove about with Mr Tilson seeking this guy for business reasons.

And they never found him after all.

Note Henry didn't go. He's being spared. He's enough to do, moving.

And now Jane is interrupted because Mrs Tilson comes over all excited about this party she and Mr Tilson have got up. Jane Auasten is ironic here: Jane is laughing at the Mrs Tilson's disappointment and shows us just what she thinks of this kind of ambtious social life. Just think of it, Jane's cousin Carole is now Mrs Tilson's sole dependence to go to Lady Drummonds. How low can Mrs Tilson go? So everyone should read the whole thing:

-- I have been interrupted by Mrs Tilson. -- Poor Woman! She is in danger of not being able to attend Lady Drummond Smith's Party tonight. Miss Burdett was to have taken her, & now Miss Burdett has a cough & will not go. -- My cousin Caroline is her sole dependance. -- The events of Yesterday were, our going to Belgrave Chapel in the morns, our being prevented by me rain from going to evens Service at S' James, Mr Hampson's calling, Mr Barlow & Phillips dining here; & Mt & Mrs Tilson's coming in the evenimg a l'ordinaire. -- She drank tea with us both Thursday & Saturday, he dined out each day, & on friday we were with them; & they wishus to go to them tomorrow evens to meet Miss Burdett; but I do not mow how it will end. Henry talks of a drive to Hampstead," which may :aterfere with it.-I should like to see Miss Burdett very well, but that I am rather frightened by hearing that she wishes to be introduced to me. -- I am a wild Beast/ I cannot help it. It is not my own fault. -- There is ao change in our plan of leaving London, but we shall not be with you before Tuesday. Henry thinks Monday would appear too early a day. There is no danger of our being induced to stay longer.

The big event is in a list of diary like (minutiae) events. What did they do on Sunday? well they went to Belgave Chapel, but it rains so no evens service. Finally Henry and Mr Tilson got to see Mr Hampson Whew. Now Mrs T came to tea on Thurs & Sat while Mr T dined out each day and then on Friday Jane and Henry were with them both.

They are enacting duties, business duties and it's wearing. It's expected they go with the Tilsons and she does not know how the latest suggestion will end. I note the meeting which is usually presented as set up by Henry is not set up by the Tilsons and he is clearly as reluctant to go as his sister. In the previous letter of their trip Henry says only that he "found it too warm and talked of its' being clsoe sometimes," it is Jane who enjoyed herself very much. It was his plan to go to the Exhibition the next day; he is setting up activities. Also leaving the home he and Eliza had set up as soon as possible. Without Eliza he sees no need to keep up a social residence on its own so will live above the quarters of his store (so to speak). Or maybe he wants to get away.

This social event was not set up by Henry but the Tilsons: "they wish us to go tomorrow evening to meet Miss Burdett. " Tilson was a business partner of Henry; perhaps he's networking; the Tilsons are also said to have been evangelical (but that has no play here). The person that the Tilsons suggest that one person longs to meet Jane: Miss Burdett. Not a literary lady. LeFaye tells us the woman was a member of a rich and radical family and later did not like MP as much as P&P. Does anyone at all know why Jane should find her formidable? In the letter she is characterized as someone who was to have taken Mrs Tilson to Lady Drummonds but now she is coughing and will not go. Alas, Mrs Tilson will now not be able to go. Oh dear oh dear. It's clearly insinuated that Miss Burdett she knows that Austen is an author, the novelist, and is intensely curious about this "lion" (from P&P) of the season? There is nothing in the letter to say that Henry told. Further henry's plan to drive to Hampstead would interfere with this social setting. He'd prefer Hampstead and perhaps Eliza's grave or simply another pretty trip together -- if it doesn't rain so hard and is not so warm.

Henry's next sentiment is that he feels "Monday would appear too early a day" for them to leave London. Not that he thinks it is. Says Jane of this: "there is no danger of our being induced to stay longer."

Why does Austen liken herself to a wild beast and say she can't help being one. All sorts of suggestions to have been made. Diana: "she feels she is being exhibited like an animal in a menagerie, and "it is not my own fault" means that Henry has spread the secret so that she is becoming a celebrity rather against her will."

Only there is nothing here about Henry doing this. It's the Tilsons. For my part I also feel she felt she didn't have the performance manners; she wouldn't have hacked the kinds of behaviors demanded in such a show-offy "ton-ish" setting. She is not of the ton. Fanny Burney didn't like the "ton" either. She's not polished is Jane's meaning and she's glad she's not polished. What Jane does not want is a loss of face in the immediate sense. She does not want to go down in prestige by having been treated without the usual respect accorded a gentlewoman. Someone ogling her would take away what is a class respect. It's a loss of deference to her she is intent on preventing.

Then how Henry would like to go back on Monday but it would appear to early so they must wait for the next day, but not to worry Cassandra: "there is no danger of our being induced to stay longer." Henry wants to return to Hampshire with Jane as soon as possible.

Austen turns to their travel arrangements, and Henry's moving. It's just a thicket of social nuances which are being assumed and she's trying to manipulate to her and Cassandra's credit. This intense consideration for each move in life is something I am glad I do not live by. These nuances are interspersed with again this attention to saving the smallest expense. This is what I take the references to Mrs Hill (a tradeswoman?), and the Hoblyns to party be about. Money and games of social prestige. (I'm glad I don't live this way, to avoid it you must avoid social life).

-- I have taken your gentle hint & written to Mrs Hill.- The Hoblyns want us to dine with them, but we have refused. When Henry returns he will be dining out a great deal I dare say; as he will then be alone, it will be more desirable; -- he will be more welcome at every Table, & every Invitation more welcome to him. He will not want either of us again till he is settled in Henrietta St. This is my present persuasion. -- And he will not be settled there, really settled, till late in the Autumn-"he will not be come to bide", till after September. -- There is a Gentleman in treaty for this house. Gentleman himself is in the Country, but Gentleman's friend came to see it the other day & seemed pleased on the whole. -- Gentleman would rather prefer an increased rent to parting with five hundred G at once; & if that is the only difficulty, it will not be minded: Henry is indifferent as to the which.

Perhaps Henry would prefer not to have his sisters there (as a drag? these two old maids dressed much older than they are? and his sisters): he will be more welcome without them and he will welcome the invitations more. He will not want them any more until he's settled in Henrietta Street. In part she's being realistic. My sense of the passage is that Jane also assumes that once she is gone Henry will dine out and then it's time enough for him to accept an invitation from the Hoblyns. Right now he does want to dine in and with Jane. So it's quite not that self-mortifying or saying she's nothing.

The use of Frank's phrase as a child is telling. Jane extends its original meaning now to mean the person is comfortable. This shows how she can read a subtext from a child - and Frank's again, in a loving poem to and about him. Actually the words as given us are hers, not his. The implication in the poem might be something she attributes to the child Frank. I suspect that's so. Henry will not be comfortable until autumn. Only then will he want his sisters back. He wants Jane there now as a distraction and company.

So he is in an emotional state, one which reaches down to his depths. And yet the one thing averred of him by Jane in this section is "he's indifferent"which money arrangement the new tenant goes for. It's a matter for the tenant of paying the money all at once upfront or bit by bit as increased rent. Either way says Henry. It seems to me he just wants to get out -- away from memories. But that's not what Jane says. I feel she is deliberately turning away from the man and not entering into his case -- instinctively, intuitively at a distance from what is happening in front of her.

Why should Henry move to Henrietta Street? because he too wants to save every expense and after all he is not into making a show that much. I do take it he and Eliza lived the way they did -- in upscale apartments -- because it was necessary to her self-image and to the kind of entertaining she wanted to do. She had the money from Hastings, her father now. We do see all the Austen children do not care that much about show when it comes down to it, which is at odds with this intense consideration for jockeying for position in social life.

-- Get us the best weather you can for Wednesday, Thursday & Friday We are to go to Windsor in our way to Henley, which will be a great delight. We shall be leaving Sloane St about 12 --, two or three hours after Charles's party have begun their Journey. -- You will miss them, but the comfort of getting back into your own room will be great!-& then, the Tea & Sugar!-

She begins with a yet renewed-again longing for great weather to enjoy another journey. Austen loves to wander about in landscape -- it's something you find marginalized women who are given no direct daily responsibility can feel. It's natural. She satisfies a certain safe lust for seeing new things and people and in the passage her love for landscapes. She gets what she can out of life.

Mismarried to Mr Collins in the 2009 Lost In Austen, Morven Christie as Jane Bennet tells Mrs Bingley: "we must not reproach ourselves for unlived lives."

It seems that Charles is with Cassandra. Note Jane's attention to time: she and Henry will leave 2 or 3 hours after Charles and his family leaves, Cassandra will miss them but she's given up her own room for them and now she will have privacy. There's a suggestion here too that while Charles and his family were there Cassandra controlled the amount of tea and sugar meted out. This is another instance where Charles and his family hover just out of sight but Jane does not pay much attention to them in the letters we have. (My gut feeling is she was not keen on her sisters-in-law except for Eliza and now she's replaced her -- I'm being a bit brutal here but then so is Jane Austen.)

Back to Godmersham and Chawton:

I fear Miss Clewes is not better, or you vt1 have mentioned it. -- I shall not write again unless I have any unexpected communication or opportunity to tempt me. -- I enclose Mr Heringtons Bill & receipt.

Miss Clewes is another of these unfortunate governesses: "I fear Miss Clewes is not better, or you would have mentioned it." Notice how Austen repeatedly enters into the cases of other single women, especially marginalized ones and especially more governesses at Godmersham. What a misery life must have been for a such a woman there is what comes out to me. Low in status, so many children, expected to keep them in order and yet not given real authority, they disliking her for it instead of the parent who decrees it. As Jane says in The Watsons better anything than this except marrying without love -- which is the other alternative.

The second paragraph is again intensity over bits of money. Mr Herington was the man she talked to about the currants in their garden. She does like to write but will not have another opportunity

I am very much obliged to Fanny for her Letter; -- it made me laugh heartily; but I cannot pretend to answer it. Even had I more time, I should not feel at all sure" of the sort of Letter that Miss D. would write.

The letter to her from Fanny which is destroyed. We cannot know what was in it -- it may have been an awful wooden thing. Austen herself does not write letters for her characters in the present texts most of the time except to comically expose them. It shows when Austen has not personated a character that way she is not brought them alive as yet in the way of others. That's interesting because the story told of Georgiana is the lurid elopement plot. People filming the book have trouble with the character of Georgiana and make her over-sweet because she is not fully realized in the book. Austen knows this. She's not bothered. She has these caricatures and less than 3 dimensional presences. Writers of novels often do.

Miss Benn -- I had almost said Miss Bates -- not forgotten:

I hope Miss Benn is got quite well again & will have a comfortable Dinner with you today --

And finally back to these London pleasures which Austen does triumph in, carriage, pictures. His sending 3 dozen of claret and wanting Edward to know is showing off to the rich adopted brother. Austen though undermines that. It's cheap stuff. Maybe he's showing off that he does not care as much as Edward too.

We pay attention to the wisps on Elizabeth and Darcy but notice now that there is a word omitted. Some word that Cassandra felt she just has to censor. Was it a reference to sexuality? Austen seems to be complicit with male possessiveness and jealousy here and even exult in it for her heroine. I'm interested though in Austen saying apart from that she enjoyed looking at the pictures. In the previous passage she recognized the poorness of what she was seeing; here she recognizes there is really something worth seeing. Her jokes about her heroines being there or not are jokes. She intersperses herself into these prestigious shows this way but does not forget reality. I like that she has a taste that's alive to silly drek (upper class overweight women flattered by these portraits) and to something better.

We have been both to the Exhibition & Sir J. Reynolds, -- and I am disappointed, for there was nothing like Mrs D. at either. -- I can only imagine that Mr D. prizes any Picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. -- I can imagine he have that sort [of omitted] feeling — that mixture of Love, Pride & Delicacy — Setting aside this disappointment I had great amusement among the Pictures; & the Driving about: the Carriage been open, [sic] was very pleasant. — I liked my solitary elegance very much, & was ready to laugh all the time, at my bewhere I was. — I could not but feel that I had naturally small right to be parading about London in a Barouche. — Henry desires Edward may know that he has just bought 3 dozen of Claret for him (Cheap) ordered it to be sent down to Chawton. — I should not wonder if we got no farther than Reading on Thursday even — & so, reach Steventon only to a reasonable Dinner hour the next day;-but whatever I may write or you may imagine, we [continued below address panel] know it will be something different. — I shall be quiet tomorrow morns; all my business is done, & I shall only call again upon Mrs Hoblyn &c.-Love to your much [redu]ced] Party.-Yrs affectinately,

Joe Wright’s 2005 Miramax P&P creates a Keira Knightley as an Elizabeth is who glad to make herself all Mr. Darcy’s (Matthew MacFayden)

Then her half-uncomfortable triumph in a carriage which she feels she has no right to. Reading was a central stop (a good book on The road to Reading by Diane Philips — quick recommendation here).

Finally the last line or so. I like the tone her. I don’t often really like the tone of these letters – the tone of mind is shaped by Cassandra’s presence. But here we have: ‘”I shall be quiet tomorrow morning; all my business done, & I shall only call again upon Mrs Hoblyns &c

That last phrase does detract. After all not such a quiet morning. She has to do this socializing, but she will have a little time to herself. She wrote her novels in the long mornings when she had them.

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No. 86, to Frank, Sat-Tues 3-6 July 1813, Chawton to HMS Elephant, Baltic

A map of Rugen

What a change from the letters to Cassandra — anyway for the most part. The basso continuo of this letter is an open and (as Diana Birchall says whose words are in quotation marks) “most heartfelt way that displays strong feeling” throughout. It’s been 4 months now since Eliza’s death, a full summer, and the immediate sense of continuing vital loss of the first weeks has diminished considerably.

It is indeed “a handsome letter” and shows that Austen did indeed follow politics, could effortlessly recite off names and events. Were we to have the 3 packets, it might well be that the letters to Cassandra would seem the strained, strange ones. Jane talks of what’s happening in the world today, shows real knowledge of it. Why should she not? The way she brings together three different people and then moves on to Elizabeth shows her to have been read in history and travel books. She never speaks of this to Cassandra for it’s of no interest to her and Cassandra early on let Jane know Jane should write to Cassandra what Cassandra wanted to hear — and didn’t mind making these ultra feminine letters of shopping, catty gossip, but also these indirect vibes, guarded barbed statements, and sudden (frank enough — something she does not write to Frank) of her shared outlook with Cassandra on endlessly pregnant women.

Indeed there is no need for close reading in this letter — at least most of it — except in the sense of information so that we may understand it. You need to know all the details of the Austen-Leigh inheritance and know the reality of what Aunt Jane Leigh-Perrot was like to realize “vile compromise” is our Jane mimicking, repeating the typical words of her aunt, resentful that she didn’t get that property but had to be content with a mere 24,000£ and annuity of 2000£ She wanted that property too.

You have to know from elsewhere (letters are life-writing not self-contained novels) about this time Edward took his family to from Godmersham and lived near the Austen sisters for 5-6 months. This you get if you read Margaret Wilson’s book on Fanny Austen for there are annotations in Fanny’s diary of this time living near her Aunt Jane.

It’s a loving letter, and yet she is slightly afraid to offend him. Frank was literal — as we have seen not one for landscape, at the same time sensitive, and while she used his ships allusively (Wm is partly Frank, Edmund Bertam partly Frank, but also James Austen) is willing to erase immediately upon being told it displeases him. It’s hard to say I admit if she is not this way with other relatives, as a rare early draft of Persuasion tells us how upset she was when her mother disapproved of the ending of Persuasion as somehow reflecting adversely on older women, mothers — it might be an earlier version did not have Anne so strongly justifying Lady Russell.

There is no exertion here as it’s all so direct. It makes me remember how she has her Emma (at the close of the book where she most identifies with her heroine) say how she loves openness. Even the rhythm is different, no all thing jumbled together as swift as she can do, but sitting there taking her time, luxuriating as one does when one writes a letter to a friend and pretends one has him or her right there. Bachelard talks of this in his book on reveries (the section on epistolary writing). The parallel is Austen’s Fanny Price sitting down to write to William.

Behold me going to write you as handsome a Letter as I can. Wish me good luck. — We have had the pleasure of hearing of you lately through Mary; who sent us some of the particulars of Yours of June 18th (I think) written off Rugen, & we enter into the delight of your having so good a Pilot. –

I often find the Hubbacks’ JA’s Sailor Brothers more useful for situating Frank vis-a-vis Jane than Brian Southam’s JA and the Navy because Southam organizes by theme while the Hubbacks’ do by year and by the end resort to using and then printing Jane’s letters as the core of what they seek to elucidate. So in the Hubbacks’ book (pp 229-31) we learn the details of Rugen while in Southam’s (p 116) we are taught about Sweden’s importance: Copenhagen was a place people sailed in and made money (whence Mary Wollstonecraft went to Sweden to do some business for Gilbert Imlay). I won’t copy out Frank’s entries here, as the Hubbacks do in their book and I leave it to those interested to read just a piece from them just below. The Hubbacks say Jane’s letter was spot on refreshing for Frank both because of its appropriate details of history and turn to the English countryside.

For the rest of the letter, see comments.

Ellen

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