Dressing Up: the motif in costume dramas

Ross back from trial, bitter at how he failed Jim, his servant: Demelza presents herself in beautiful dress

The full tide of erotic dream (Poldark, 1975-76)

Fashion is the daughter of time — and money

Dear friends and readers,

Over on Ellen and Jim have a Blog Two I’ve been discussing why and when someone might fall in love with the form or subgenre, the film adaptation, especially in the mini-series or soap opera structure, and then went on to discuss the carrying motif, a trope often seen as enforcing a certain kind of masculinity: loving, protective chivalrous. In truth, this subgenre is often watched and loved by women. One of its tropes seems to me peculiarly important to women, and women’s art; it links up with a love of fashion, clothes-making and domestic arts: dressing up.

A disturbing characteristic of this trope when we find it is it’s often punitive. The heroine may get to dress up, but she is often punished for it; she may get to enjoy herself for a time, but as often while she is dressed up, she regrets her masquerade, and is taught a socially conformist lesson that she must not try to leave her rank, or break out of sexually conventional behavior.

The locus classicus or most famous instance of this trope is probably in Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca. It contains the ambivalence of these sequences: most of the time the heroine-dreamer is punished for her temerity either immediately or in the long run; at the same time she gains her first triumph as a higher status woman, as beautiful, wanted, erotic, the observed of all observers. The second Mrs de Winter yearns to be the powerful poised and yes beautifully beloved wife she dreams Rebecca was; she sees on the stairs a portrait of an aristocratic 17th century lady whom she associates with Rebecca. The yearly masquerade at Manderley is coming up, and Mrs Danvers maliciously suggests that she imitate the picture. Mrs Danvers knows (as our heroine does not) that Rebecca herself dressed that way for a masquerade. Making a delicious secret of this, a surprise (Mr Knightley never approved of these as dangerous), she and her dress-maker and then her maid re-make the dress:

Emilia Fox as the second Mrs de Winter (1997 Rebecca, Charles Dance Max de Winter, scripted Arthur Hopcroft)

The 1940 movie visualizes the trope behind the power of this one: it reveals the whole urge to watch costume drama is to dream of the self as another alluring self:

Joan Fontaine as the dreaming Mrs de Winter, looking up at the picture before going down stairs (1940 Hitchcock film)

But as Max sees her from the bottom of the staircase, he becomes enraged thinking she has dressed like his wife deliberately and this torments him. She does not know that he loathed Rebecca and murdered her. He reviles our heroine in enigmatic terms: “‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ he said. His eyes blazed in anger. His face was still ashen white (Ch 16). She thinks he finds her absurd, embarrassing and assuming a place she does not deserve; humiliated, mortified, she rushes back to her room to come down again, very subdued in an ordinary blue dress kind friends say is much more suitable, more like the young Alice in Wonderland girl she is.

I’ve chosen a lesser known one pointed out to me by Judy Geater on my new Historical Fiction and Film adaptation (18th-21st, Poldark/Austen listserv. It’s the film version of the first night of love-making between Ross Poldark and his servant, Demelza Carne in Winston Graham’s Ross Poldark. He’s come home bitter from his attempt to excuse another servant, Jim, from the harsh punishment meted out to poachers. He’s made the mistake of appealing to their consciences in public and then scolding them when they show they have none. In the film she suddenly appears in a lovely dress he bought her some time ago for when guests come, taken by her sweetness, sympathy and sudden “prettyness” which they discuss, emotion, drink, disappointment, and need overcome him in a strongly erotic moment I’ve also chosen a still from. She is not punished because after she becomes pregnant, in a wonderfully chivalric protective moment, he chases her down in a meadow (on her way for an abortion) and says she will not be alone, he will give her and his baby his name, and carries her home (now) to Nampara.

The book version gets all the ambivalence of these motifs in. I had been looking at the lead-in to the love-making as one of those moments in the Poldark texts where the author buys into misogynism: he has Demelza dress in Ross’s mother’s beautiful dress she found in a trunk she was permitted to rummage through upstairs. Desperate to stay with him, and at Nampara, and not go home to a coarse cold father who wants her back because gossip has said she is Ross’s mistress, Demelza seeks to ensnare the morose Ross. Instead, much like Max de Winter, but after Ross is initially briefly drawn to Demelza, he is seemingly (to her) intensely put off by her temerity: how dare she dress up in his mother’s clothes. Wretched, drunk, but he does not want to abuse her this way. Her dog plays a role as the dog is there and they are playing and petting it. He does send her away, but then thinks what a fool he is to be so moral. Why not go to bed as everyone thinks he is. Later that night in bed, she comes to him, asking him to help her off with the frock.

By seeing this in terms of the dressing up motif, we can de-emphasize as the book does this entrapment, especially as in the novel, she does leave the room and goes back to her own, crying, and only after he goes to his own room, does he think to himself, he does want her, why should he pretend to be more moral or self-controlled than other men, and goes up to her bed, and they spend their first night in wild love-making.

She escapes punishment for her marries her within a month, partly make his rebellion against his world fully evident and confirmed. His wife an ex-maid servant.

I’ve long thought that Caroline Penvenen is a transfer of the gay witty lady of Restoration and 18th century comedy to Cornish historical romance fiction terms. Graham does “make” 18th century historical fiction by imitating 18th century forms and attitudes too. In herself she is so to speak in costume all the time — always dressed up, usually in magnificent hats:

As a Lady Bountiful trying to help an illiterate abused miner’s daughter: Caroline often is given a proto-feminist role; since she has rank, she is allowed to dress up

Judy remembered two more:

In David Garnett’s Aspects of Love, which was adapted for a musical, there is a similar scene where a woman dresses up in an old gown which turns out to have been worn by her new love’s first wife

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles (‘The Woman Pays’, chapters 35-36), where Tess dresses up in jewels bequeathed by Angel Clare’s godmother (heavy irony here) just before she tells him about her sexual past, and he gets her to tuck her dress in around her cleavage to make it look old-fashioned. Then, after he cruelly rejects her, he catches sight of a portrait of one of the d’Urberville ladies from the past and thinks she looked just like them in her low-cut dress and jewels.

Meg invited to visit grand people when Jo is not: family readying Meg’s clothes (1931 Little Women, with Katherine Hepburn, director George Cukor, scripted Deborah Y. Mason)

I can add Alcott’s Little Women where “Meg goes to Vanity Fair”: she has been invited to stay at the home of a schoolmater much richer than she. While there Meg is persuaded to dress up far more “sophisticatedly” and in contemporary fancy guise than her simpler, less fashionable clothes from home. She is chased after by young men in a very different (and to her uneasy and half-insulting way) and overhears an old man she liked saying “they have ruined” her (or some such words), has in short a very bad time as a result of her attempt to show off, assume a higher status than she really has, be what she’s not, be (innocently) erotic.

1994 Little Women, scripted Robin Swicord, directed Gillian Armstrong includes whole sequence, including uncomfortable moment before the (vanity) emblematic mirrors

Novels and films where the characters go to a masquerade ball or participate in amateur theatrical presentations could be included here, and those I can think of have the same ambivalence towards the danger of this dressing up as the more outright straight forward versions found in Ross Poldark Rebecca, Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Harriet Byron dressing up and then abducted in Sir Charles Grandison; Tom Jones seduced by Lady Bellaston in a public masquerade. Austen in her Mansfield Park shows herself hostile to masquerade (through Fanny Price), and she punishes her heroines (Emma is taught lessons) for hubristic dreams (as does Richardson).

I would be grateful to readers who would add to this list. My next blog will be on the common ambivalent presentation of the fashion parade in women’s films.

Ellen

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The good heroine & Smiley’s Duplicate Keys

Birgit Schossow, from a New Yorker cover: Big City Noir

Dear friends and readers,

Over on WomenWritersAcrosstheAges @Yahoo, quite a number of us have read (or tried to read) some of Jane Smiley’s novels, and two of us have just finished her mystery-crime novel, Duplicate Keys, with three now going on for 13 Ways for looking at the Novel. Having once tried 13 Ways where Smiley defends “the virtuous and good character” (though on what grounds I no longer remember) and remembering the ferocious quarrels that once flared on Austen-l over Fanny Price, I thought those of Smiley’s novels I’ve read thus far a good opportunity for discussing the good or exemplary heroine. All three novels I’ve read have at their center, Private Life, A Thousand Acres, and now Duplicate Keys, have such a presence as their point of view.

Duplicate Keys may be said to be centrally about whether such a heroine is really “good” or is she a fool (cannot see the world in front of her), a “free rider” (she — horrors! — lives off a man or someone else), “dependent” on others, unfairly entangling them with her devotion, idealization (so much emotional blackmail), in reality a “passive-aggressive” (what could be worse than the hypocritical bully in disguise?). It’s also a Radcliffian sort of gothic (heroine terrorized by locks and doors), a woman’s novel re-engineered to look like a crime/mystery book, similar to Hughes’s TV film, Five Full Days, and is reminiscent Jane Elizabeth Howard’s Falling & Winston Graham’s Walking Stick.

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First, about the book: the commentary on it online suffers because people stick to this anti-intellectual and silencing idea we are not supposed to tell the ending (or in some versions anything about the book the person doesn’t know) especially stubbornly when the book is a mystery. If you can’t tell anything or the ending, you can’t discuss its meaning. A book’s meaning includes the whole design. (See What do spoiler warnings spoil?).

Far from being like a Hitchcock story (though why this should be a term of praise is beyond me, Hitchcock being a mean film-maker who loves to do cruel things to women), it’s a woman’s novel re-engineered to be a mystery; or mystery-crime-detective re-engineered to be a woman’s novel. Rather like Gwyneth Hughes’s Five Full Days or Prime Suspect featuring Helen Mirren — with the detective, whose name is Detective Honey (perhaps a joke) marginalized. And I liked it for the reasons I liked her others: a deep-feeling study of a cultural milieu through the eyes of a heroine: the difference is this time we are in a big, no a world city, and the time is contemporary. I long for books to be getting on with, a kind of friend to be dialoguing with someone and I can go for quite a time without finding a new one, but admit I’m now sure Alice, her heroine, was quite someone I could identify with. Bond and care about her, but not love and be intensely anxious for. I had the same problems with her previous two heroines.

It has a story which swirls around the friendship of two women: Alice Ellis and Susan Minehart. Alice comes to Susan’s apartment one day to find murdered in two chairs next to one another Susan’s husband, Denny and his best friend, business partner in a firm making and marketing popular music, and hanger-on, Craig Shellady. Who did it? and why? we slowly hear about a tiny circle of friends, associates and meet Noah Mast and his wife, Rya, whom it seems he bullies, while she clings to him. I realize now that they are a weak parallel for Alice and her ex-husband, Jim Ellis, who left her for a younger woman, Miranda, because he couldn’t stand her idealization of him, her “goodness,” her dependency; at the same time we learn, through the phone calls he sets up, that he continues to encourage this dependence, is himself still sexually jealous of any other suitors. The back story as Alice remembers away in one chapter tells something rather different: Miranda was an idolizing beautiful and much younger student, and Jim preferred her as a rebel, as a romancer, and because Miranda never asserted herself in any way whatsoever, not even achieving the minimum of job and profession.

There is also the homosexual Ray, doing well in his music businessman, big spender in expensive restaurants for all, and a drug dealer, with a cool (nasty-minded) lover, Jeff. The cast of characters is small: the last is Henry Mullett, a man who lives in her apartment house, and whose window faces hers (he has been watching her for an undetermined time) and with whom she commences a sexual affair and friendship. Craig is a domineering abusive type and both Alice and Rya have become his mistress-punching bags for a time.

Did I say Alice is a librarian? but perhaps gentle reader you guessed that. It seems in the cliched universe of popular novels librarians are characters who embody “good girl messages” by their love of books, lack of ambition (librarians are assumed to be without ambition) and typical activities (shelving books, cataloguing, and worse yet, helping other people to find and read books). In a way she reminded me of the heroine of Graham’s The Walking Stick, also a mystery: Deborah Dainton is a kind of cataloguer and librarian for an expensive art-jewellry-antiques shop.

It seems there has been drug dealing and someone murdered Denny and Craig over money and/or drugs — Ray is a suspect; so too Noah who is at one point arrested. Susan has throughout a severe tongue, apparently hating Craig, whom she characterizes as a predator a neurotic abuser. Alice (as ever, traditional good heroine again) tries to understand which means excuse, even justify Craig. Alice also turned to Ray after Jim left her; as a gay man, she was a companionable friend and he a support. This feels sinister feel as Ray is one of those people who took keys from Susan and gave them out. While Susan spent for the funeral, she defied other taboos too: she will not leave the large comfortable apartment and after she and Alice do a ritual cleaning out and throwing out, begins to return to sleep there. Denny who seems to have loved Craig has a Catholic family who insist on an expensive burial and Susan feels she must make a Catholic funeral and has to go yet further into debt to pay for it, about which she is endlessly bitter. Never made explicit after a while the reader realizes Susan has turned to Alice for friendship because her husband, Denny, made Craig his alter ego.

The title refers to how Susan has been in the habit of making duplicate keys and giving them out to everyone who has a relationship with Denny and Craig as a matter of business policy, a way of networking. Those given duplicate keys can of course make more copies. So anyone could have gotten into the apartment and murdered Denny and Craig. Alice has followed suit (she often imitates Susan) and given keys for her apartment to others. The cover illustration to my book show two doors that seem to be at right angles, an old-fashioned glass-looking doorknob on one, the other in shadows, both having reflective light glancing over them.

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What there is of suspense is as Radcliffian as the business of doors that can be opened by others at will, doors Alice cannot lock: it’s the result of Alice hiding from Susan and everyone else her growing relationship with Henry.

18th century illustration for Radcliffe type novel

Duplicate Keys reminded me of The Walking Stick because of the way Henry Mullett quietly pursued Alice. We see he watches for her from the window; she half realizes this and does not (like Deborah trying to avoid Leigh Hartley) want the man’s company. She is though reading her ex-husband’s poems to his second wife as a substitute for phoning him, which she has not quite got out of the habit of doing still at the crises of her life. Henry insists she come downstairs as a much better way to pass the time. He cannot get her to go to a movie with him as she has to work tomorrow — to to her librarian job her basis for support.

Heny’s slow moving into Alice’s life is worrying — because of the way he is insistent, from the time he got her to pick him up (and we realize now that he was aware they lived near one another so he was watching her go in and out of the apartment house), and from her dropping the remark that she did not know why she had not told Susan about him.

This feels like a Hitchcock motif and to be sure he uses it, but I’d like to suggest it’s more endemic of women’s books. A very powerful one I read a couple of years ago, Falling by Elizabeth Jane Howard has another Henry insidiously take over a woman’s life to the point she is in mortal danger from him; it was made into a chilling film by Andrew Davies. The man can take advantage of this divorced woman now in the country, partly retired. At the core of Graham’s Walking Stick: the lame or crippled heroine discovers that she has been a target for the man whom she regarded as so beautiful and the rare friend; we don’t learn of this quiet stalking and plan all along to use her to steal jewels form the firm she works for until the very end.

Tricky this business of caring about, being anxious about characters. On Trollope19thCStudies we talked about how this is central to our love of particular books or authors …. Remember when we read A.S Byatt’s Imagining Characters where Byatt and Sodres talked about how filmed characters can get in the way of people’s memories or they can be very disappointed in the choice of an actor as he or she interferes with a previous conception. What happens to me sometimes is the actor almost replaces the preconception or character as I’ve felt it before I saw the movie.

Alice is carrying on a genuine affair with Henry (going to bed with him) and hiding this from her friends. This spells disaster: how will they know to help her or where to find her if he should spirit her away? Smiley accounts for her hiding where she’s been by her fear of a new failure or rejection. Alice fears Mullett will desert or hurt her as have all the others. The heroine of Falling is saved because her friends know of her Henry (hmmn the same name) and find out about him and are there to help her if she should phone.

This hiding reminds me of how Ginny in A Thousand Acres kept getting herself pregnant by not using contraceptives – and telling Tyler she was – and when she’d miscarry hiding this. Come to think of it this is a bit improbable. But Margaret also kept secrets in this way.

Remember the trio of lies, secrecy, silence as the way women get through life — and also the pathologies that result – this begins with Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, it’s central to Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and many a woman’s novel. In the 2002 film adaptation of Forsyte Saga we see that after sex with Soames, Irene goes to take a bath, and uses a syringe to push up into her vagina vinegar (and whatever else she can think of) to stop any conception.

She’s learn of more adulteries and betrayals among her group of friends. Rya was having an affair with Craig (he got around, so did Alice, so did Denny now dead and murdered too) and her deriding husband, Noah knew. And suddenly Ray shows up and asks to stay with her.

The novel held me mostly through the my fear for Alice over Henry … What I liked about the one Susan Hill mystery, The Various Haunts of Man (a Simon Serailler novel) I read – which made me very anxious — was there too a woman was threatened who was alone. I have liked mysteries when they are comedies of manners too (Sayers) and romances (Byatt); this is combining female gothic justifiable paranoia …

Ray and his slinky boyfriend Jeff now somehow force their way into Alice’s apartment and while she sleeps they take her key. I feel for her because I know that I could be pressures this way. The screws are turned as Henry Mullett is also pressing himself on her but then suddenly vanishes from the narrative and Alice wonders where he is.

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Semi-comic image of gothic library — libraries are replacing labyrithine castles (e.g., The Name of the Rose, Charnas’s Vampire Tapestry)

But our Alice takes satisfaction in her job as a librarian; what a release to escape to one’s job. (I knew the feeling even as an adjunct, when I would turn to what I was doing with books and writing and for my students). J. L. Carr has a wonderful line in Month in the Country about escaping into the mask of one’s job to meet others through. But as she works into the night she finds herself downstairs among the stacks. The light seems to go out after she has put it in and suddenly for a sequence we get this uncanny nervous fear that such books usually have on offer. From Radcliffe to Susan Hill this is part of what we are to feel; in Falling once the heroine lets Henry live with her in the house we have it continually.

But then Alice calms down. To me this calming down is a sign that Smiley’s real talent is not in the gothic area as she really is at play unseriously when she does it.

I should say it’s very easy reading and if you get lost on the subway (as I did yesterday on the DC metro) it is a good companion. There is Alice having her hard time and there are you lost. There is Alice unable to hold onto her keys. There are you unable to make the machine add $10 to your “smart” card (proving of course you are not worthy a smart card as you are not smart enough). Both incompetent before life’s demands. You feel not so alone …

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And then it happened, I was 23/s the way through and got to what Margaret Forster called in Smiley’s Blind Horses and A Thousand Acres “the sudden pull, the shocking jerk as the point of it all pushed home …” The brutal reality that was staring me in the face all along. Alice comes to the conclusion Susan did it. And we realize how Susan has been managing Alice’s life: Susan does all the cooking when she is there, takes over Alice easily.

At first when Alice come to the conclusion suddenly that Susan did the murders we are not sure. It might be all in her mind and Smiley wisely keeps up the uncanniness at the same time as we cannot be sure Alice is right. If Susan did it, that is the sudden pull though: so now we have a picture of private life in the city as lived by people making it through the arts (or not making it as the case is), and then we get the proof. It’s also about what constitutes success and what failure and how the lack of admired success can destroy people, and when it destroys an individual it can poison the circles he’s in.

It seems that what Susan loathed was Denny and Craig’s continual “whining” over their lack of success. They had one success with one hit and never made another, and they have spent the rest of their lives trying to make another hit, to become stars or businessmen like Ray. She has had to listen to them talk about this for years, plan this networking, that strategy, watched them fail, vow to do something else, but come back to the dream all over again. And take drugs in the meantime, sell them, deal, get into worse and worse debt.

A bit improbable: Alice twice sends away a locksmith, once after Detective Honey urges her to change her locks, and again after Ray and Jeff get in and leave without permission. After the first time she is left without a door. Could Susan have engineered a “difficult” locksmith? At any rate, after the second attempt she has no locked door again — we are in Radcliffe country now. Susan thinks she again hears that same sound she did before and escapes — out the window.

Great movie cliff-hanger as she literally hangs 4 floors up form a ledge; as she improbably rounds the bend, she sees Susan looking out the window gun in hand, looking for Alice.

Things fall into place: all the bitter conversations, Susan’s disgust (for that’s what it is) with Alice’s way of coping with life and men — Susan scorns the way Alice lived with Jim and blamed Alice for Jim having left her and we are asked to take this seriously.

Alice has so dithered and insulted Henry by this time — for example at one point letting him buy an expensive set of food from Zabar’s to bring back, and then when Susan shows up on the sidewalk hurrying off with her without telling Henry. He slams the door in her face the next time she comes to his apartment. We are to see she mishandled a relationship that would have been satisfying — though at the beginning we distrusted him too (Hitchcock-like looking at her from his window). The romance is weak because Henry disappears and at the close of the book is apparently suddenly happy to start up again — to furnish us with a supposed happy ending?

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A excellent thoughtful posting by Anna on our listserv awakened me to the function of this book as a woman’s novel. Anna said she was ambivalent about the book and heroine, and had a friend who disliked it — presumably because she disliked the heroine. I know I did dislike Ginny at times, not because she was good but because she was conventionally good, because she bought into the mores of her community, many of which were awful, and she hid the incest inflicted on her by her father and kept on justifying him to the end. The way for example, at the close of Persuasion Anne Elliot justifies Lady Russell.

Leonora Carrington, The House Opposite (a depiction of women’s worlds, women’s relationships)

Women’s friendship is central to this book, to me unexpectedly,
and also the good heroine. Alice is good and her goodness is
presented in this novel as under attack and somehow false — at least I suggest we are to believe Susan that Jim left Alice because Alice was”‘too dependent,” “loved him too much.” Susan shows a great deal of hostility towards Alice while dominating her, being the lead in the relationship. Susan resents this while taking advantage — as if somehow Alice were lacking and
irritating by not being aggressive and competitive. It’s false Susan thinks, a coverup for what? laziness? not seeing the truths of life. Alice is accused of not seeing the truths of life.

Ginny is similarly a good heroine and she gets some hard knocks because of it but her genuine helpfulness, cooperativeness, love and the rest are not turned into Freudian “passive-aggressive” nonsense (partly because her sister does not have the language for this kind of charge). This phrase is a badmouthing out of resentment and even jealousy. Many readers nowadays are perfectly comfortable with their more ugly and cruel impulses, told these are fine (such is the rhetoric of our time which supports unqualified competition, capitalism in the very corners of our souls). Ginny married Tyler out of her relationship with her father. He is NOT-her father, not a bully, not aggressive, not hurtful (and does get hurt for this is not a good reason to have married him just alone) Margaret is also good and has her life sluiced from her, but she is at the same time very strong and her husband lived off her.

Susan is also the bad heroine and fascinates Alice. Alice thrills to imagine Susan’s crime and for a while does not want to tell Honey what she saw. She admires Susan too. Only when she realizes that if she does not tell what she knows, Susan will kill her does she go to Honey.

The problem in Duplicate Keys for me is Smiley never defends Alice. We can see her goodness as real; how kind she is at the end to Noah, how she does the right thing to Rya. That she’s a good librarian Goodness ought to be defended more. I’ve had students write explicitly out of an assumption they’ve been taught: we are not to allow our human sympathies to decide our moral judgements. The best of judges know that this sympathy is what guides them in their determination. Yes there are pious books which teach women to hurt themselves centrally (good girl messages). And where I didn’t like Ginny was where she was this sort of good girl.

I believe the attack on the traditional heroine mostly comes out of resentment and jealousy when such a character is supported by loving people. Alice is acceptable to Susan because Jim left her. Susan then stepped in; she’d hate it if she saw Alice succeed by her goodness and it be accepted at face value — as well as having ambiguities.

People who want to be bullies and to win out at all cost want us to define the victims they make (as they often do make them) as “passive-aggressive,” and really wanting to do the same only too cowardly. Not so.

I liked Walking Stick so much better because Graham did not blame the victim. It’s true that Elizabeth Jane Howard is content to allow the villain to be simply pathological (Graham is not) while the portrait of Susan is sympathetic to her. Only it must be admitted Susan does not herself question success, she only wants Denny to get into another business, and drop Craig.

This is an important quarrel among women today. Many women just hate Austen’s Fanny Price (Mansfield Park) and call her every name they can think of including “creep mouse.” I suppose Ginny is a creep mouse, so too Alice – Esther Summerson has phases like that. This point of view hurts feminism, is anti-feminist, comes out of pride unwilling to admit women are victims, oppressed, and their goodness taken advantage of — if you want it to be socialistic, caring, supportive, a group effort for us all. I’m sure my readers have seen this “I hate the good heroine” syndrome; the good heroine is the traditional heroine from 18th century on to today. Nabokov openly despised this “type” and made her the mother of Lolita and had his Humbert Humbert kill her off.

A crime novel is a perfect place to bring out this debate as many womens’ enjoyment of these seems to be an enjoyment of femmes fatales, bad women, and the aggressive hard kind of heroine we see in Susan. There are (mistaken here) women justify violent revenge movies as feminist (these are serving the misogynist vicarious thrills of men viewers and movie-makers).

I’d like to read 13 Ways now to see if Smiley goes into this matter with insight and explicitly. I gather Smiley does what I call avoid the issues her own women’s novels sets up. She seems to treat “the novel” as if novels by men and women are seamlessly one. Myself I’ll guess it gives us more than insight into her books, but also insight into her Americanness and strong tendency as central heroines to justify (if in Private Life especially) undermine “good girl messages: Maybe though in the details she does not treat of novels and values as if they were universal and not continually gendered. Her own fiction is deeply gendered.

Ellen

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Ethel Reed: a hard life

Ethel Reed: an art photograph by her friend, another woman artist from the turn of the century Francis Benjamin Johnson

Ethel Reed: “In the studio” (girl child with cat)

Dear Friends and readers,

This past Thursday I managed to attend a meeting in the Library of Congress on Book History (thus Sharpe people) where Washington Area Print group people were in attendance too. We listened to Bill Peterson’s talk on Ethel Reed: he’s written a book in which he ends the mystery of what happened to Ethel Reed after she supposedly disappeared from the US in 1896 and is said to have “never been seen” or “heard of again:” The Beautiful Poster Lady: a life of Ethel Reed.

This new biographer has found out what happened to her after she supposedly disappeared. Although a witty stylist himself, I feel that he does not tell her life in an appropriate way.

Portraits in Miniature, Introd. Edward Penfield (New York: Russell & Son, 1896).

Typical for covers/posters by her: a glamorous sexy woman surrounded by flowers & musical instruments, dressed in ways which are a sexualized extension of her own (and sometimes a male) body

Peterson began by telling us of how it has been said how after achieving stunning artistic and commercial success as an artist and socialite in Boston, Ethel Reed “vanished in the fog” in the later 1890s, that she was famous as a “beauty” first through her glamorous photos. Her letters show she suffered from depression, had sleep problems all her life, and towards the end are suffused with a suicidal tone. They exist in groups in microfilm and in American Art Archives in DC. Mr Peterson said his aim was to show how how she played an active role in creating this story of herself, in other words his point was the fashionable one today of showing her life as a performance.

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Here is a sketch of her life as told by Peterson in his lecture:

Ethel Reed was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts. She grew up in “alarming poverty,” her father dying of TB in her adolescence. They lived in a boarding house near a cotton factory. While in school, her talent for drawing was noticed — and she was too – and Laura Hills, a Newbery artist became Ethel’s mentor and promoter. From early in her career a drawing by her of a pageant she participated in:

Ethel Reed as the the consort of King René of Anjou in an amateur theatrical pageant; King René was played by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (from Boston Daily Globe, 1 April 1893)

Earliest posters by her as a young adult appeared in the Boston Sunday Herald: one of herself reading a newspaper with poppies about her is well known. The Copeland & Day publishing house printed her images.

Another typical image by her in the 1890s

As she worked she began to do more interesting pictures: “strange, edgy images,” often including herself partly naked. A rising architect, Ralph Adams Cram wrote a poem to her, “Night Moth,” a passionate poem about a moth who makes nightly visits to poppies. It played on what had become thought about her in Boston: she was a woman who made herself “sexually available” is the way Mr Peterson put it.

Philip Hale, a young man from “a Brahmin rich family, became her lover and they were engaged.” The family broke it off. This was to become the pattern of her life. It was around this time (18986) that “she sailed for France with her mother and by the end of the year was living in London.”

In London she did a series of illustrations for a children’s book by Louisa Chandler Moulton who was so “horrified by [the illustrations] she never spoke to Reed again.”

They included pictures of children with “brutally chopped hair looking like The Scream by Munch,” pictures of thin young girls naked to the waist, but Reed was also influenced in this series by Aubrey Beardsley and his imitators in the Yellow Book.

Less well-known poster by her: Pierrot religieux

Through her Beardsley connections, she met Richard LeGallienne; she illustrated the cover for his Golden Girl

Mark Samuel Lasner collection

and they proceeded to have “a tempestuous relationship;” we have some oblique records of a love affair; LeGallienne though was married. Ethel’s first child born around that time seems to have been his too.

At some point LeGallienne had abandoned Ethel, and by 1897 she was living with her mother in county Cork (southwest Ireland), where LeGallienne may have visited her. When she is located with her mother as her companion in Ireland, she is taking opium as a sedative to sleep.

A third rich lover appears: Alexander Arnold Hannay, also wealthy, a gambling addict, English, friend of Whistler. Again she is “pregnant,” and again “abandoned. He returned to his wife.”

Then in 1903 she married Arthur Warrick (?): a document exists to show this. He too was wealthy and English; “the marriage broke up after the honeymoon.” By this time she had two children and he begins to pay her “a small stipend. She brought suit for a restoration of conjugal rights.”

In 1909 she is “living in a boarding house with her son and daughter and sustained by her landlady.” She was “alcoholic by this time, a drug addict and she died of an overdose.”

She did keep in touch with Francis Johnson and “it’s known that Johnson visited Reed in Ireland.”

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Mr Peterson told this story in a light slightly ironic tone. He has a blog where he reprints quite a number of Reed’s illustrations, many of which are coy, women presented as kittenish. The use of young girls suggests she was appealing to male prurient taste, pederasty perhaps. (Some of the above pictures come from there, others from what is readily available on the Net.)

For my part I found the way he told the story inappropriate; he simply repeated the kind of language used of her in the public media at the time so we cannot separate out her real motives in her various affairs; what was her position with these men; was she someone who yielded herself for lack of self-esteem, desperately. I would liked to know much more about her friendship with Francis Johnson, her children’s later lives.

A stance that emphasized the probable driven exploitation and tragedy of this life would been truer to her whole experience. He did say her early impoverished life was probably responsible for her secretiveness: she herself wanted to hide herself and her background. I’d say that like earlier actresses (see my reviews of Sandra Richards (Rise of English Actress); Kristin Pullen (Actresses and Whores); Felicity Nussbaum (Rival Queens), she was led in effect to sell herself sexually (like a prostitute); this, together with her early impoverished background, lack of connections made her unacceptable to the glamorous social world she needed to be part of to sustain her career. Faced with an obdurate closed world, she retreated to Ireland where she was less exposed, and costs were lower. Was this a performance?

I don’t say he needed to be overtly feminist but this way of telling, including the Butlerian idea of performance as central to all lives, erases all the ways of seeing women’s lives that feminists have given us to enable us to make clear the inadequacy of the glamorous girl who didn’t manage to “make” it approach. Basically the Butlerian point of view when just about performance (minus all she has to say about gender) supports the established quo.

I find this photograph interesting for the expression on her face:

A photo by Johnson of Ethel in a cape

Her lines for covers are intriguing; this is an 1897 Vision for the Yellow Book where all her ways of making drawings are brought together

She did know and worked for interesting artists: Lily Lewis Rood, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes: A Sketch (Boston: L. Prang & Co., 1895).

Ellen

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Historical Fiction & Film Adaptation, 18th to 21st century (Poldark, Austen &c)

Verity Poldark and Captain Blamey dancing together

Dear friends and readers,

I know it’s absurd of me to come back to this listserv community on historical fiction and its film adaptations I’ve been trying to title, set up as a group and attract people to, but I’ve not given up. After my initial enthusiasm for one series, I’ve renamed it yet a third time, this one I hope reflecting accurately what I’d love to find more people in love with sufficiently to want to read, watch movies and maybe discuss the pairings together. After all the Graham 18th century historical Cornish novels are but one example of the type; Austen films which I’ve studied so closely are another.

I’ve opened a listserv for anyone who is interested in this genre as such — historical fiction and film adaptations and invite anyone who loves them too to join:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HistoricalFictionFilm18thto21st_PoldarkAusten/

Thus far on this listserv we’ve discussed the Poldark series, Downton Abbey, Gosford Park, Upstairs Downstairs, A Tale of Two Cities, and now Fortunes of War, how central is our love for characters in which books we love, how this is what makes casting so important, different versions of the same book, how to reach the BBC through an American computer (the software is Expat Shield).

Barton cottage (2008 S&S by Davies)

Mrs Austen, Elinor and Marianne arrive

Another version of S&S.

So come one, come all, or none.

Ellen

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Jane Smiley: Only the Lonely

The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other — Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres

Truth is what Jane Smiley cares about most–truthful descriptions, truthful conclusions. If one of the purposes of fiction is to illuminate dark corners of life, then she fulfills it triumphantly — Margaret Forster

A Thousand Acres (1997 film, scripted Laura Jones): the central characters play monopoly (yes that’s Colin Firth as Jesse Clark)

Dear friends and readers,

Although I’ve yet to watch the film adaptation of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, I’ve chosen the above still as a nightly game of monopoly is played for many months among the novels’ five central characters, two sisters, Ginny Cook Smith and Rose Cook Lewis, their husbands, Ty smith and Pete Lewis (respectively), and an old friend turned lover of both, Jesse Clark. I’ve decided to make my way slowly through a few of Jane Smiley’s books, I admit partly because she emailed me to praise my book (!), and then sent me two: her latest, Private Life and her portrait life, Charles Dickens. I had read one of her books before, Ordinary Love and Good Will (two novellas published together), and begun two more, 10 Days In the Hills, and 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. I hope to go back to these and try her Dickens once again. For now I’ll discuss two I’ve just finished, A Thousand Acres and Private Life (an early & recent novel) as superb experiences of women’s art, with a little about 10 Days, MOO, Good Will, 13 Ways, a review by Smiley of a novel by Anita Brookner, and a review of Smiley’s novels by another favorite writer, Margaret Forster (I’ve yet to try a book by her I’ve not loved).

The three sisters: Ginny (Jessica Lange), Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer), Caroline (Jennifer Leigh)

As everyone knows, A Thousand Acres retells Shakespeare’s King Lear, the story of a King who gives away his property to three ungrateful daughters, two of whom take over everything and throw him out, while the third because she refused to trick him by flattery is banished, only to become the only loving daughter-queen of the foolish and (in the end) broken-hearted man. A second story has a Lord who stigmatizes his bastard son who is twisted by this derision, and becomes vengeful and deludes this fool father into banishing a son who loves him, this second father also only to discover the rejected is the good person who rescues him from the cruelty inflicted on him by his bastard son.

Like Charlotte Lennox (Shakespeare Illustrated), Smiley presents these stories from a woman’s point of view set in US mid-west at the middle of the 20th century. We slowly discover over the course of the book what seemed stereotypical “good families” covers over a central father Larry, who has been a remorseful bully, inflicting incest on his three daughters, after his complicit (like Charlotte Harlowe in Richardson’s Clarissa) wife dies, rigidly using every minute of their lives by (among other methods) isolating them. Similarly we discover the secondary father, Harold Clark, has broken his sons’ prospects by imposing central US values for men (competitiveness for wealth, macho male physicality “on behalf of country” called patriotism) on them though overt and hidden humiliation, punishment, ejection. What holds these people together is their need to cultivate their landscape to become working farms, sheer hard work, to maintain their dignity and self-respect and know a little fun within their strait-laced self-policed (in public) community.

I’d liken it to an anthropological exposure of American realities and lies. Its imagery is powerful, derived from the central US plains, its food, its animals, its farming practices, cars, furniture, things owned; the perverse destructive behavior comes from the social dysfunction of a culture of isolated (though acting together) individuals within kept-apart competitive family groups. Jesse is the important questioner: I felt exhilaration when to Ginny’s self-effacing endless justifications of the parents, and implicit demand, how dare you not come back to your mother’s funeral, how dare you not be there for her as she lies dying:

don’t you realize they’ve destroyed us at every turn? You bet she was sad, of course she was sad! But why didn’t she give me a fucking chance? He put his face in his hands ..

And then the truth of his mother’s betrayal comes out. I loved also the depiction of his girlfriend, Alison, whose story runs parallels: driven to kill herself because forsooth they don’t approve, she’s not religious.

Our heroine, Ginny, is now embarked on an affair with Jesse; she has sex with him the day after sexual intercourse with her husband in bed. It seems to me an interesting range in her character; she has had two more miscarriages than her husband knows and he does not like to have sex with her it seems because of these. it’s okay in her mind as long as she gives in in public.

Rose, who had breast cancer, given no other option, had a complete masectomy and is deeply ashamed of her lack of real breasts — this after enduring years of physical abuse from her husband. Now she gets back by liaisons and Pete, her husband’s having failed to become a singer (what he wanted), unable to become a successful businessman, drinks heavily, drives wildly. The two sisters go to a thrift shop and Rose tries on a dress alone but comes out with a kind of flat appalled look. She and Ginny talk:

    I’m not really to the point where I can take off my clothes in a dressing room yet.” She sighed. I pulled out of the parking lot.
    A few minutes later, she said, “What’s the hardest thing for you?”
    ”Well, I don’t know. Probably being comfortable with people
outside the family.”
    ”What do you mean?”
    ”Oh, you know. I either act too shy, or else I want the person to be my friend so much that I act like an idiot. I never believe that Marlene Stanley or anyone else actually likes me, even though I suppose I know they do.”
    ”God! This is just like how you used to talk in junior high.”
    I stiffened a little. “What practice have I had since then? Anyway, in junior high, you used to say, ‘Wouldn’t you like to be friends with so-and-so? Let’s bring some cookies and offer one to so-and- so, then maybe she’ll be our friend.’ “
    Rose laughed a full-throated, merry laugh. “Usually it worked too.
    We drove in silence for a few minutes.
    Finally, she said, “You know what? The hardest thing for me is not grabbing things. One of the main things I remember about being a kid is Mommy slapping my hands and telling me not to grab. What’s worse is I have this recurring nightmare about grabbing things that hurt me, like that straight razor Daddy used to have, or a jar of some poison that spills on my hands. I know I shouldn’t, and I watch myself, but I can’t resist.”
    ”I dream about standing in the lunch line naked. It’s always the lunch line in ninth grade.”
    ”Nakedness dreams are very common.”
    ”I suppose they are.” (p. 61-62)

Caroline was brought up by her and Rose differently than themselves, enabled to be more conventional, have pretty things, go with boys, go to college, and thus that’s how she got away to become a lawyer. She turns on her sisters, beats them out by replacing them as the obedient daughter. A glimpse from Ginny late in the book overhearing Caroline wheedling Larry, the father and he bullying her just the way Ginny used to. Giving her hours and life up to pleasing him. Suddenly we know the father inflicted incest on Ginny for sure (she had been in denial to Rose) and on Caroline too.

I mentioned interwoven into the story is an on-going evening game of monopoly. Most of the time when characters sit down and play cards I really have no idea what’s happening but here I do. What American has never played monopoly? Again Jesse has the acute observation. When Jesse’s father, Harold Clarke decides to renovate the Clark kitchen, the daughters’ father, Larry spends a thousand dollars on fancy things typical of renovatiosn (the sorts for which US people end of spending $40,000). Then he puts them out in the rain defying all efforts to bring them inside, infuriating Rose as wasteful.
Jesse has it: “it’s just a gesture that’s supposed to denigrate what Harold does” — and Rose who also renovated. Is Grandfather crazy asks Pammy, one of Rose’s daughters to her aunt, Ginny? No, intones Ginny, it’s all exaggeration. I would not say that. I’d say it: it’s spite, mean spite.

Ginny and Rose confronted by father (Jason Robarts)

Larry goes to court to wrest his property back, and loses his case; he signed a contract (as they say in the US) and Tyler, Rose and Ginny kept up the business very well (Pete has killed himself by this time); the suit is in fact vindictive and judge orders the father to pay fines. Nonetheless, the foursome were ostracized: no one approves of telling hard truths about family life or exposing its realities.

Yet telling one another the truth about their motives and what happened in secret tears the five apart, with winning the farm a final blow as to keep it going asks too much. Ginny flees to a meagre job in a nearby town as a waitress; Ty drifts off after making one last attempt to reach Ginny, and as before he cannot. “Don’t flirt with me” she says — reminding me suddenly of just that same comment from Cora, Lady Grantham (Downton Abbey) to Lord Grantham after their daughter Sybil’s death and he wants to make up. We are too feel they never see one another again. He is become a drifter unless he meets someone he can connect to. Rose and Jesse break up, and Rose’s cancer returns, so Ginny comes back (as if waiting in the wings) to become her sister’s daughters’ mother. She had enacted that by providing kindliness for much of their younger lives. Caroline remains estranged.

The last two chapters are fitting: an auction is going to be had, and I get the feeling if not an estate, some of it will be put out on the lawn just like these yard sales I see in the US. So Ginny and Caroline (Rose now dead from cancer) get to come for first dibs. The chapters are lists of things intensely familiar to me as common American objects, commercially made products. The debris and build-up of a lifetime. In effect I have that from 44 years of marriage (and from my parents before), only in my case I did not accumulate farm equipment, cooking stuff, cleaning stuff, I accumulated books mostly and some furniture and (less but something now — 2 closets full) clothes. I did notice Ginny’s father and mother are not listed as having much clothes. (My mother had just tons and tons of clothes and jewels, to put it in bags took a half a room.) In a way it’s a sum up of a lifetime — and then sold, disbursed which is what happens.

Looking at it from a sort of junk aspect, Ginny thinks to herself (uncritically the way she often still does) people will buy all these things. I can never really figure out why they – but then I got to library used book sales and buy myself.

The book’s great strengths are the implicit way it reveals what is as opposed to what seems, the controlled style, the use of irony (yes think of Austen if you must, she was one of the first to use this mode in English, in French it’s Madame de Lafayette) and the scenes where quietly things that should devastate are shown, with every once in a while a pointed naturalistic sum-up:

Ginny takes Rose’s daughters, Pammy and Linda, to the neighborhood pool where we see how Ginny colludes in her oppression: she gently but persistently urges both nieces to “make friends” with the others by asserting things about friendship that are not so: It sounded good, but the fat was that I really didn’t believe it myself” (p 86), and Pammy tries, equipped with polka dot sunglasses, but when they are leaving, Ginny knows they have not had that summer joy she dreamed of for them, “nowhere to be privately, contemplatively immersed. The energy we had brought, the expectation of fun, seeped away, and left us even more listlessly reluctant to go home …” (p 95) Yet at the pool a woman comes over to Ginny and tells her that when her and Rose’s mother died, the mother was so worried for both, that both would lead these frustrated lives, but especially Ginny. the friend was deterred by the murder of one son (what else is war?) in Vietnam and death of another in a car accident. The woman would have liked to have been the good friend. Nuggets defining people in this scene: “Rose always did things rights as an assertion of herself. Pammy did things right so that she wouldn’t get into trouble. Linda, a year younger, was more carefree.” Pammy another Ginny.

Sisters

There is at the end too much forgiveness for the Lear figure. Ginny has images in her mind of him prowling the house at night desperate. There is no excuse for maiming someone else bodily and emotionally in their inmost being. Glynis Carr has suggested Ginny is both a Demeter and Persephone (“Persephone’s Daughters: Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acre and Classical Myth.” Bucknell Review 44.1 (2000): 120-136

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Sven Bicketts has an insightful review of Private Life in the NYTimes which will spare me the trouble of summarizing the story.

What does he omit? the circular feel of the narrative — very like say Eva Figes’s Seven Ages of Women or so many women’s memoirs. The first section is labelled 1942; the second 1883, then each moves up slowly at significant moments in Margaret’s life, her marriage to Andrew, the birth of the one child, its death; the growing estrangement, and so on to 1957, and then back to 1942. 1942 was the time of internment of Japanese, where Margaret has made a few real friends.

It begins strongly: Margaret, an older woman (grey, in her sixties), is in bed, upstairs, somewhere in California, and hears someone coming in. She wonders if it’s her husband as she’s had no telegram, at first leery, discovers it’s a lover-friend. Pete. He drives her somewhere we discover gradually is an internment camp for Japanese people; they visit two friends, an older woman dying of pneumonia, not being treated as she needs to be even were she not deathly ill at all.

Book moves in next phase (blank page with 1883) to Margaret as a little girl remembering back to her grandparents and parents, and so swiftly confidently telling of two brothers’ deaths, the father’s suicide partly because of this, her mother moving in with her farmer father and the upbringing of her and three sisters.

So it’s a historical novel (in effect) too, set in the US.

Bickets also omits how funny is the satire on Andrew; how he become so self-involved; that he’s an outsider to all these establishment types so seen as a crank, and then partly because of this he does become a sort of crank as he finds himself rejected over and over; how he loses perspective. How Smiley bonds with him as much as she does with Margaret. A funny satire on the publishing business, on the nature of fame versus notoriety.

As the novel nears to an end the oddity is the laughter feels merry, and yet what one is laughing about is our heroine has spent her life with a delusional crank — who however is just like many people. She looks back on all she didn’t do — like get to Paris, London or Rome – and we empathize yet we know she could not have. I thought of a “saying” of the kind Trollope trots out towards the end of his The Way We Live Now(which I just finished, having really read parts of it with understanding that I never did before): He resolved ” “to take the world as he found it, and not to lose himself in regrets for a kind of happiness which he could never attain” — Trollope as Roger Carbury TWWLN When I do this I call this sort of this self-urging …

It ought to be devastating anguish at the close, but it’s not. We are dialoguing with the book instead.

How also Andrew bullies Margaret, isolates her from those few people she might find some fulfillment with, keeps her from traveling and experiencing the world.

Yes it’s a quintessentially women’s novel, no less in its ability to make wide-ranging statements about US paranoia and public life through this delving into one women’s subjective private experience as a housewife. Andrew is persuaded that Margaret is being used by a ring of fascist Nazi conspirators and himself tells on her. He is not believed (as this crank).

It ends on a quiet searingly bitter note which somehow includes acceptance and a glimpse at redemption. Our heroine has thrown away her life — lost it. Lost all the people who mattered in a world of inanity and cruelty too. But she has provided little spaces of sanity for the women circles she was part of.

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Hugh Grant: a marvelous mock-dance in Love Actually

To conclude: her imitation of Boccaccio, 10 Days in the Hills includes a wittily intelligent way of describing movies as they really operate today — she makes fun of voice-over and all the new enunciation techniques as well as what she calls the perpetual “manliness problem” which gets in the way of many males acting well. She says Hugh Grant is a rare actor who simply dismisses the problem. She plays with the reader too. She is partly writing a playful metafiction
which reminds me of Karen Joy Fowler’s Sister Noon.

I love the anti-war attack as part of its framing: her terms are those of Virginia Woolf. The people running the war is are simply horrifyingly openly indifferent to the deaths and destruction that don’t affect them. So too everyone else not in the arena of those who count.

I’m told repeatedly to read Smiley’s Moo, an academic satire, but honest, after reading Elaine Showalter’s explanation of the genre, Faculty Towers, I’d probably need a strong anti-depressant to get through. (I admit I’ve bought a copy though.)

Good Will an ironic title. Smiley’s male narrator created an enclosed world he expected his wife to live with him in, one which excluded outsiders. He was very cruel to the son, and I was relieved to find at its close that my feeling the stance was ironic was correct: we are not to see the narrator as he sees himself.

Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther Summerson grieving over her mother, Lady Dedlock (Gillian Anderson) (Bleak House 2009)

Jane Smiley as critic: I’ve begun her 13 Ways and knows she defends the traditional “good” heroine, i.e., Esther Summerson but read the whole book for its revelations of how a fine American author reads, what are her assumptions, her aesthetics. “Only the Lonely” is her title for a perceptive review of Anita Brookner’s A Closed Eye where she’s concerned to bring out the cultural difference between a British and American woman’s novel. Smiley says this about Brookner’s heroine:

Harriet seems more fatally restricted by her chilly social world than the Islamic women of Naguib Mahfouz’s works, who never leave their houses after marriage but at least spend joyful hours confiding in their children and servants … As subtly and lucidly as can be, Brookner makes the case that if women fail to claim their lives, their self-respect and their desires, the very pain they sought to avoid returns to them many-fold.

And Margaret Forster on Smiley’s early Blind Horses. (Smiley loves Trollope for his horse scenes too; she is herself a horsewoman as they say.)

It measures up, in spite of a wobbly first quarter. Here, just as in A Thousand Acres, is the same slow, unwinding of the narrative string and then the sudden pull, the shocking jerk as the point of it all is pushed home. Patience, such patience this writer has, content to proceed with measured steps, hesitant but carefully confident too … The tension here is real and almost unbearable, and it all stems from Kate’s sense of alienation. She loves her children only in relation to how well they connect with her horses. Any rebellion against riding is a sin. And her children seem at first extraordinary in that they do not rebel, do not protest. They resent and even hate her in varying degrees, but they conform. Each fantasises about escape, but only one manages it … Her husband–a background but important character–can hardly tolerate how his wife reacts to the tragedy which overtakes them. He always has pined for what he calls ‘just four normal American kids’ and he at last sees clearly why they never could be, and never will be, normal in the way he desires. There is a sickening feeling of absolute truth about his realisation

I have begun Smiley’s Duplicate Keys. Her foray into turning the formulaic or traditional mystery-detective-crime novel into another. There’s a certain kind of woman’s book I find that is the equivalent of an intimate supportive woman friend. They are not easy to spot since the advertising for books, and particularly women’s books, is often so misleading, indeed downright lies. Smiley belongs with these in the 20th, now 21st century: with Rosamund Lehman (one of her heroines reads P&P while having her abortion), Christina Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Emma Donoghue, Carol Shields. And there are women’s films which do the same: Sandy Welch, Gwyneth Hughes, Anne Pivcevic, June Wyndham-Davies as producers. All variously daughters of Jane Austen.

Ellen

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Austen’s letters 76, 103 & 104, to Anna Austen — brought back

Anna Austen Lefroy

Dear friends and readers,

Although I wrote about Austen’s 16 letters to Anna last year and individually, I thought I’d write again and provide an over-view since on Austen-l and Janeites we are now up to letters 103 (mid-July, 1814, Chawton to Steventon) and 104 (10-18 August 1814, Chawton to Steventon) in our journey through all Austen’s letters. These are the 2nd and 3rd of 16, the first is letter 76 (29-31, October 1812, a burlesque of novel; see also Isobel Grundy’s essay

Lady MacLairn, The Victim of Villany by Rachel Hunter

There are left to us 16 altogether and letters 103 and 104 show Jane Austen and her mother awaiting Anna’s coming wedding and Jane responding to an novel Anna was in the midst of writing, a novel which seems to be a close imitation of her aunt’s. The real poignancy of the set is they exist and we have them only because Anna herself gave them up to her brother when he was writing his biography. Anna was one of the three children of James who tried to transmit knowledge of the aunt. It is true that Austen’s remarks on her niece’s manuscript cannot be taken as general criticism since they are meant just for Anna’s eyes, but that Austen would necessarily be kind is not so; we’ve seen by this time Austen’s hostility to her niece (growing since Anna began to have courtships) to the point that Anna would not bring her fiance over to Chawton unless both her aunts were not there.

On the 8th of November Anna would marry Ben Lefroy

An image of their marriage license

In the 16 letters we will see much hypocrisy and lack of sympathy, including one where Jane pretends to sympathize with Anna’s purchase of a piano for herself and admire her furniture, after which Austen writes to Fanny saying she expects to find in the future Anna will regret this self-indulgence and mocks the furniture. And In the these remnants Anna has to have seen how her aunt really felt about her; one of them she herself tore up and left only a remnant and yet despite the pain she helped her brother. By contrast, Fanny had about 30 and only 5 have been retrieved — by her son, Brabourne.

**********************
Letter 103

18th century wash linen: this might be included in a trousseau

First a general account: Basically the first half of the remnant of 103 is by Mrs Austen, Jane’s mother, Anna’s grandmother. The grandmother’s letter functions as a sort of an excuse for not having made any or more wedding clothes or trousseau items (in her Notes and Queries it seems that LeFaye assumes when Anna stayed at the cottage in May the grandmother was making her trousseau, but that’s not the way the words read here and I don’t know what her evidence is), and Austen’s is a reiteration that it’s fine if Anna does not come over. I include in my first blog the full text of Caroline’s letter describing the bleak wedding ceremony, its lack of any celebration. It’s striking to see Anna’s continued dependence as she’s nonetheless sent her aunt and grandmother a manuscript piece of her novel.

This is a poignant as well as savagely cut letter (as is the fifth chosen by Todd and Bree, Letter 113). Pp. 1 and 2 are missing. In the text as we have it, Mrs Austen writes first. She asserts she is “well in health” just weak in her eyes. She says when she reads or writes it’s without glasses and since she needed glasses she had not read or written anything. Anna is about to get married and Mrs Austen is begging off making her any clothes. She did not have the spare time to do a full trousseau for the wedding. In the opening lines we see that Anna sends a MS rather than come over; the grandmother will sit and think of the niece because the niece is not coming over and she has not been there for 3 or 4 weeks. The grandmother is glad the niece has not come over sooner, for at this point she can no longer sew anything. I agree it’s not clear how much she has sewn, but there is a apology in the third line with the implication that the grandmother has indeed sewn all that is needed.

The family did not want this wedding. Anna herself was caught between a rock and a hard place. Live with the stepmother and she never gets to go anywhere; who wouldn’t escape to a man who presents himself as a figure of high integrity even it means he is unlikely to take sinecures (after all her father did not want to do it — harassed by his wife into it).

At the close of this fragment Mrs Austen suddenly assures Anna how much she, Mrs Austen, loves Anna; indeed she loves “very few bettter.” What can she talk about? fruit and flowers. Also that she has been thinking about Anna, and worried about the married life to come, Anna’s future, what her life will be like once she marries.

Ann Murray’s Mentoria (1801): google book cover; Jane Austen wrote a poem to Anna years before and placed it in this book as a gift

We then turn to Jane who provides a postscript. Jane says she is glad her niece has not come sooner — she is about to come over. So another part of the letter is about why Anna had not been coming over. Anna knew the relatives were not keen. Perhaps the front part of the letter had Jane’s doubts about the young man — or it could have been the stepmother or problems with James, the father — not a happy man as we’ve seen.

In the context of this Austen’s few remarks about Anna’s fiction are sent. Alas, the novel was destroyed by depressed Anna. Anna’s daughter, Fanny Caroline left a note to explain how her mother had destroyed the manuscript one night in a sudden fit of despair in the 1820s by throwing it in the fire.

What do we see in Austen’s comments shorn of the novel they are about: a fiction must have intense energy flowing through (“the spirit does not droop at all”); characters must be mixed not all good or all bad; verisimilitude again: a high status woman would not be introduced to a mere slip of a girl. The name Cecilia (from Burney and made popular) that Anna had made too good a heroine (too “aimable” is the tactful way of putting this), but Jane says she is still interesting. (Jane Austen had amiable heroines later on and before mid-1814.) She finds Lord Orville stiff and unnatural (unreal); her good hero, Mr Knightley (sans peur et sans reproche) is not even though very good he is natural in presentation, believable. Darcy is not so nice: and her other heroes are flawed.

In my blog I also include a brief life of Anna (her husband died young and left her with too many children and much of her later existence was spent in penury), then go on to describe and discuss Anna’s continuation of Sanditon because even if Anna destroyed this novel we do have this plus her one published romance, Mary Hamilton, a book like Persuasion in mood. Anna also much later on wrote some awful religious-didactic children’s stories.

See Diana Birchall’s paraphrase and reading. I agree the grandmother’s tone is cool and the aunt bland.

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Letter 104

One of Charles Brock’s illustrations to Jane Austen’s novels (for Pride and Prejudice, 1898, supposed Mr Collins and Charlotte, colorized for a calendar)

Like others I recognize the importance of this letter – there are a couple of others to Anna where we see Austen open up her way of thinking consciously about fiction as she wrote as well as read it; and there is one to JEAL, the nephew. Austen did recognize her older brother’s children had gifts. if she does not go in for “wild screams of praise,” that shows respect to Anna; overpraise is a sign of non-serious dismissal.

In the blog I began by reprinting the whole letter. I did that for each of the first three letters to Anna. I’ve taken to doing this for all Austen’s letters (only now I’ve begun to put the text in the “comments” part of the blog) but I wasn’t doing it at the time. Then I made real efforts by reading all the letters about this specific novel to work out something of the novel’s characters and story. Again I’m by no means the first person to try and I read some other critics’ efforts.

I agree with Diana Birchall on the general principles we can call them that the particular remarks exemplify: literal versimilitude very important in Austen’s mind, intense application of time and space to keep to a diurnal imitation of reality; psychological probability, no extravagances of phrase. Admittedly what Austen is instructing her niece on are surface elements; there are some underlying assumptions (about how necessary it is to get a reader to believe in, immerse him or herself in a fiction). Like Jane Austen herself, Anna’s characters wandered around the seacoast of southern England, the spas. Austen treats of these only as problems in verisimilitude. Anna’s female characters must not risk any untoward or too inviting behaviors. They should be above all discreet. Ireland won’t do but some of Anna’s Irish characters will.

I”ll add that it seems to me Austen also reads for suspense and thinks Anna should keep suspense up. She tells which characters she likes (whatever that means) and wants to see more of. She also likes sketches of life so to speak – the sketch of Clanmurray “and your picture of the two poor girls enjoyments is very good.” I surmize there was irony in Anna’s work here:she was exposing how little enjoyment the heroines had; Austen would enjoy wry exposures where much is left implicit.

Then Fanny Caroline, Anna’s daughter’s important note which I’ll simply reprint again:

The story to which most of these letters of Aunt Jane’s refer was never finished. It was laid aside for a season because my mother’s hands were so full she lacked the leisure to continue it. Her eldest child was born in October [1815], and her second in the Sept. following [1816] and in the longer interval that followed before the birth of the third [1818] her Aunt died and with her must have died all inclination to continue her writing. With no Aunt Jane to read, to criticise and to encourage it was no wonder the MS every word of which was so full of her, remained untouched. Her sympathy which had made the real charm of the occupation was gone and the sense of the loss made it painful to write. The story was laid by for years and then one day in a fit of despondency burnt. I remember sitting on the rug and watching its destruction amused with the flames and the sparks which kept breaking out in the blackened paper. In later years when I expressed my sorrow that she had destroyed it she said she could never have borne to finish it, but incomplete as it was Jane Austen’s criticisms would have made it valuable.’ Fanny-Caroline Lefroy, MS Family History (Hampshire Record Office, 23M93 / 85 / 2).

By these ‘later years’, however, Anna had evidently forgotten that she did make an attempt to continue with her story, for in a letter to JEAL, dated 26 October 1818, she says: ‘I am in the middle of a scene between Mrs Forrester & Mrs St. Julian — I hope I shall do it tolerably well, because it requires to be done so-I want to get a good parcel done to read to you at Christmas but you know how little time I have for any thing of that sort-’ HRO 23M93/86/3. Fanny Caroline Lefroy, MS Family HIstory (Hampshire Record Office)

I then went over Mary Hamilton the one extant romance type novel Anna did publish – beyond her continuation of Sanditon (which I reviewed with Letter 103 above). We see how intensely emotional – but not superficially so — was Anna’s romance writing, it’s very like Persuasion in feel. I summarize it.

Then I try to contextualize the letter differently: I bring in remarks about Anna (some unkind) and what is known about their relationship just then – that is clearly an influence here. How Austen seems to want a community of women and yet does not seek to make Anna part of it – the way she did Fanny, e.g., Austen does not care for Anna’s emotional character and genius and either ignores or wants to change it. Austen does worry about Anna’s future with some responsible caring words to her brother, Francis, but these are offset by words which blame Anna without taking into account why Anna makes the choices she does.

I’ll leave anyone who is interested to read the quotations. That Jane Austen was hard (I think unfairly sometimes) on her niece and her husband, Ben (when Ben did not want to do what might lead to a promotion and Anna supported him in this) is suggested by Fanny Caroline’s further note defending her mother against her great-aunt’s strictures:

My father although deeply attached to my mother was far too high-principled and conscientious to take Holy Orders for the sake of being immediately married. Possibly he had not yet quite decided on his profession, at all events he was not ordained until three years afterwards. As to my mother’s reluctance to go to Chawton, sent away as she was to mark my GodMother’s anger with him, it was not possible she should go with any other feelings.’ –Lefroy Notes.

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Another Brock illustration for Pride and Prejudice (Elizabeth teases Darcy, asking him if he admired her for her impertinence?)

After I posted the above on Austen-l and Janeites, Diana wrote:

Ellen, wonderful overview of the Anna letters. Jane Austen certainly had some mixed feelings about her. I’m now thinking that Letter 104 may be disingenuous … she doesn’t want to give Anna any real, deep, serious criticism or advice; just superfluities. And this may be because she doesn’t think that Anna has it to be a fine novelist, like herself. Yet she doesn’t want to discourage her or hurt her feelings, so she gives her some mild praise, “there, dear” pats on the head, and minor unhurtful critical comments just to make the thing smoother, close up some holes and inconsistencies. She’s not truly trying to affect, help, change, improve. Just to patch up the most egregious errors, so it can perhaps come out as a nice ladies’ novel … but she isn’t giving it the deep compliment and respect of treating it seriously, by the standards of her own.

To which I replied:

There’s a strong tendency to try to separate Jane Austen’s writing and fiction off from the writing of the rest of her family, and to insist Austen’s superiority was seen then as people see it today. The epitaph describes her gifts as strong intelligence, rather than having a strong imagination or gift for writing (not mentioning the novels as unmentionable). The family did encourage her to write during the 1790s but we do not know they did while she was in Bath. We do feel they must have known by the end, and there is Henry getting her work published (and spending his own money); there are her brother James’s and nephew’s poems to her about her work; Caroline’s awe in her life of her aunt, and all the effort both James-Edward Austen-Leigh and Anna took to memorialize her and put what had not gotten into print they had control over into print. Francis had kept all Jane’s letters and probably never would have wanted them to be destroyed. But none of this is cause enough to separate her work off. She did not, they did not, no one in her era did (even Scott does not see her as somehow different or much much better than his other women writers).

If it’s true that Austen’s letter shows condescension and dismissal, and I have half-agreed, and if we are seeming to to take a uncharitable view of Austen’s reaction, this uncharitable view is one we find Austen voicing again and again. Partly because she spent so many years unpublished, we have seen her throughout (but especially before published) trash and speak out harshly against most novels & authors she reads — the exceptions being the super-respected males (Johnson, Cowper). Understandably still (this being the one thing she has that gives her respect and yet among most people
she’s an old maid with no dowry, getting on), she will brook no sister near her throne. And it’s not that she’s not eager to recognize some quality near hers; she often genuinely reacts against qualities in novels she doesn’t like and burlesques. I suspect that Anna’s fiction is an imitation of her aunt’s but (from Mary Hamilton) much more romantic. This won’t do entirely since Jane Austen goes into oodles of praise for her nephew in a couple of years (as we’ll see, Letter 146, Mon-Tues, 16-17 December 1816), but then he is a man, and (as I suggested) watch out for people who over-praise. Trollope makes this explicit: cleverer than Southey we might say he advises a friend always overpraise a woman’s work, it’s not something you should take seriously.

So it may be her hostility is to Anna. Anna to me shows such pathos. She is trying to regain back her aunt’s respect and love. She must’ve seen how much Fanny was preferred, how better a time in life Fanny was having. No groups of suitors for Anna. Few visits to London. Good thing she got married
too: we see how her stepmother discouraged her father’s writing and sensibility proclivities (deep resentment there).

OTOH, we have no proof that Austen could write deeper criticism. The criticism we see here is just what we see her write for her own fiction. She is one of those authors unable to articulate consciously what is really valuable in what she writes. Her theory which enables her to delve reality is this literal verisimilitude, hold to it. So it could be this is her calm strong praise to talk about this novel the way she talks about her own.

We may hope it made Anna feel good. We can see that later on she may have seen the other disparaging remarks and certainly Fanny Caroline, the daughter, knew about this.

If anyone were to attempt a new edition (hard because now all sorts of copyrights have been claimed to stop you), there’s an argument for 1) printing the letters in groups, as Austen’s letters to Anna separately as a group, to Fanny, what there is to Frank, etc. 2) reprinting with them (as is done in the Burney correspondence) the Austen family letters that are
left, including (importantly) Eliza Hancock de Feuillide Austen’s and Philly’s letters to her. It would not produce huge amounts of text, but say a three volume set. With unbiased notes, set up alphabetically you might really have a usable scholarly resource.

Ellen

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Ethelinde & Anna Karenina: Undermining Stereotypic Masculinity

John Sell Cotman (1782-182), Carnarvon — one vision of her poetry, geologic cataclysmic time

To Hope

Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!
    How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!
For me wilt thou renew the withered rose,
    And clear my painful path of pointed thorn?
Ah come, sweet nymph! in smiles and softness drest,
    Like the young hours that lead the tender year
Enchantress come! and charm my cares to rest:
    Alas! the flatterer flies, and will not hear!
A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain,
    Must I a sad existence still deplore?
Lo! the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain,
    ‘For me the vernal garland blooms no more.’
Come then, ‘pale Misery’s love!’ be thou my cure,
And I will bless thee, who though slow art sure.

Dear friends and readers,

A milestone on my edition of Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake for Valancourt: I’ve typed two volumes and have begun the third. I’m slowly accumulating material for an introduction and notes. It ought to have been titled Newenden (the way d’Epinay titled hers Montbrillant).

I cannot say my reading of the novel has changed much. It’s more a matter of emphasis. I had not realized quite how central & dominant to the novel are the slow devolution into a bitter loneliness on the part of Sir Edward and adultery on the part of Lady Newenden. I find the depiction more true to life on the part of both people and their slow interaction with others than anything in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: Smith gives us the how and why, the real feel of such a drift. Ethelinde a study in adulterous longing from a genuinely woman’s point of view: sexual fulfillment and companionship ached for.

She is Sir Edward and in later novels he as a figure will be given her poems. Her rotten marriage transposed sexually. I’m puzzled why Sir Edward does not kill himself. Outflanked by the social hypocrisies of his wife’s parents, the vicious rumors of Lord Danesforte about him and Ethelinde; a clever man the wife’s apparent lover, his misery because she is such a bitch (Lady Newenden), his relationship with Ethy a ruin, Ethy’s father taking the money loaned him and gambling and giving it to Lady Newenden’s lover. In other novels Smith’s greatest poetry is often attributed to such a male figure.

There is ever a male who is obsessively after the heroine. Whether his general behavior otherwise be reprehensible (Delamare in Emmeline) or noble & self-sacrificing (Montgomery), it’s this obsessive pursuit of the heroine that makes for the discomfort and misery of the story. In Emmeline, the heroine is not openly willing to reject him but rather flees; in Ethelinde we get these emotionally twisted scenes of her not being able to say yes or no. Could this be a version of her relationship with her husband? of what he was? these have an individuality beyond the typical portrait of the upper class male educated to be a vicious bully and amoral and yet think very well of himself — as we see in Stael’s and Epinay’s fictions — how Smith read the French! In the light of French women’s more explicit fiction, when we place Ethelinde’s wastrel selfish gambling brother and the father’s original behavior, the novel becomes feminist in the 18th century way.

Cotman: Normandy fantasy

I would have much preferred for Sir Edward to end up with Ethelinde: I almost believe in their relationship as much as any marriage. Her Manon is deeply transgressive in its sympathy for the lovers and Manon herself, The Romance of Real Life reveals families as they are and this book fits right into this trajectory too.

The recluse would have been left out at the end, but she would then have been a more tragic figure had the son drowned as we thought — a sixth volume had been in the works. I hope she had not planned to kill off Sir Edward after marrying Ethy and Edward; then a Martin Guerre story in the offing.

I was blaming Smith for marginalizing transgressive heroines, female characters led to live with men outside wedlock, for making her heroine super-chaste, but after reading Wollstonecraft’s really stinging attack on Adeline in that novel, and realizing how much time and space and sympathy Smith gives such heroines across her oeuvre (here Caroline’s unnamed mother, Montgomery’s grandmother) and the thoughts she gives her — in this novel several female figures have lovers and children outside marriage — to have some joy, they take a risk and pay.

The novel has little specific politics of Desmond and the later books. The wide landscape there, but here acid satire on the hypocrisies and snobberies of social life is central to her purpose too. I just love it. It connects her to Thackeray. Long obsessive conversations between Ethelinde and Montgomery about how they cannot afford to marry, how this will “ruin” their chances in life (the word “ruin” recently in the newspapers and on line) go round and round. I can only think there is a personal element here, she must have been herself subjected to this morbid nagging. When she is pictured sitting on the stairs as her father and Montgomery talk, the scene feels like a memory — maybe when she was sold to Benjamin Smith. Austen’s Persuasion with its thrust to trust at the close, and several stories by Crabbe are aimed at just this kind of inhibition — which in Crabbe ruins lives all the more, as the people haven’t got a chance of growing rich anyway. Whatever happiness they can have is in personal fulfillment.

Still typing this, still studying this rich text. I probably enjoy the novel most when it approaches from a frank and caustic point of view the kind of satire we find in Austen towards say Lady Catherine de Bourgh or Mrs Norris. For example, the hypocrisy and insolence (Smith’s narrator calls it) when Mrs Ludford, Ethelinde’s rich aunt pretends to forget her siblings ages and says how good it was Ethy’s mother’s other children except for the one brother did die (p 186 in 1790 ed, p 40 in my edition),. Mrs Norris expresses the same idea only it’s presented more indirectly. (The line is later in MPl than I thought). These intersections they bring out Austen for me where I could be exhilarated in a twisted kind of way as we both dig the imaginary knife in and so doing expose the pettiness meanness of the world — there is more truth in Smith’s opener version: paradoxically it’s true that Colonel Chesterville has not put his son to the right path; maybe he would have been better off apprenticed (p 187) than brought up in idleness and self-indulgence. But this establishment view is presented against a backdrop that makes us see the ugly nature of Mrs Ludford’s motives for saying this (unlike Trollope say where such establishment comments are not undercut in this way).

There are long similar stretches in Celestina.

It’s remarkable how many scenes in Austen occur in variation in other novels by women of the era The difference between Austen and Smith includes Smith lets us feel the full bitterness of these. I’m struck by how the tone of the plangent section of Volume 2 when Montgomery comes to London, Edward is in love with Ethelinde and she more in love with Edward than she realizes, is close the mood and atmosphere of the 1983 S&S mini-series by Alexander Baron. The 1980s darker mini-series were more like these novels than any films before or since.

Irene Richards as Elinor Dashwood, Bosco Hogan as Edward — conversing over her drawings, the landscape, sitting together — perfect image for Smith’s Edward and Ethelinde (1981 BBC S&S by Alexander Baron)

What emerges in the latter part of Volume 2 is that Chesterville is a stand-in for Charlotte Smith’s own father who failed her so abysmally, who sold her, betrayed her. The acid in the soul of his novelist is Colonel Chesterville’s not caring for his daughter, and when Ethelinde’s aunt (it was an aunt who suggested to the father to marry Charlotte off and married Charlotte’s farther herself), Mrs Ludford, suggests Ethelinde needs another situation and her father would be glad to get rid of her (by implication) this touches upon how the orignal sin in her life was her father’s deserting her for a nasty woman and giving her up to an awful boy. If Charlotte was too young to know, Mr Turner was not (Elibon, Vol 2,, p 203, p 44 my typescript)

The novel’s scenery is all great prose poetry wants but it remains a framing.

Helen Allingham (1848-1926), Temple of Winds, Blackdown, Sussex — another, botanic, allusive, southern England

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The undermining of false stereotypes of masculinity.

Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton in 1935 A Tale of Two Cities — perfect for Sir Edward

Sir Edward refuses to duel. after reading your defense of Carton’s sexuality and courtship of Lucie Manette I began to see Sir Edward is in this new light.

Sir Edward’s wife, Maria, is a cold tempered socialite, presented as nasty-tongued, nervy, bored with anything but her vanity, loving gambling, despising anyone who likes to read or walk in the landscape and mocking the depression marriage with her is causing Sir Edward. He married her for her money but also to be her husband, and she wanted his title, but now she is clever enough to throw this up to him and when he forbids her to see or be with Lord Danesforte any more — on the score of gambling debts too – she turns on him and accuses him of adultery with her cousin, Ethelinde. There is no adultery (both too virtuous) but he loves Ethelinde intensely and now feels he must cut himself off from her and her improvident father (a gambler) and brother (yet worse)

A long meditation of Sir Edward as he contemplates Ethelinde’s future as the wife of a man without any adequate monetary support and connections — his desire to help alleviate any of her difficulties at any cost to himself reminds me of Sydney Carton. We might historicize Carton too: this is a time when there is no state or gov’t or any kind of safety net. Reading the brilliant analysis of Charlotte Smith’s depiction of Edward’s selfless yet deeply selfish (she is so deeply congenial a spirit, so good) and sexual (she is beautiful ohim) love for Ethelinde, and how persuasive their relationship, teaches me that the problem we have in reading Dickens’s Carton and many other heroes of “sensibility” and depression, is that the time is indeed more than 160 years ago when women also had no means of getting decent support on their own either. I find Volume 2, chapter 10, pp 239-44, the long inward delving into this man astonishing still.

Smith provides the psychological underpinning that Dickens & other male authnors omit to understand this kind of male temperament — they are too embarrassed. Who would admit desperation at their class background in this way (except for Godwin). To call them men of sensibility is to use a label to erase what the text does: undermine masculine stereotypes.

It’s ridiculous to get too worked up over a novel but as I’m typing it I do bond with it, and did find myself intensely hurt when at the ASECS someone ridiculed Sir Edward and read the book as if we were to empathize genuinely with Lady Newenden when she is the cruel pernicious presence of the piece from her outward conduct.

Smith gives Edward a good phrase for his attitude towards Ethelinde: she has a sanctity of character. So much better than purity which brings in this baggage of asexuality no no sexuality in this woman for real. She’s not corrupted or corruptible because of her background and asocial-ability. Sanctity of character is a phrase I’d use for Esther Summerson as well as Jarndyce as played by Denholm Elliot (the 1988 Bleak House like the 1989 ATOTC written by Arthur Hopcroft).

How Edward feels about Ethelinde:

that her whole life might be exposed to trials, he could not soften, to difficulties he could not alleviate; all his sense, his morality, his resolution, hardly supported him when he considered it; and he sometimes fancied he could rather bear to destroy her, and then himself, than endure the certainty of that, the very idea of which inflicted anguish so acute

When she writes so moving and ably and subtly we have to see that she did value her fiction and talked denigratingly of it because others didn’t value it or wouldn’t admit they saw it what is there (p 241-43 of Elibron, pp 52-53 of my new edition)

Again the lone figure against time and nature.

John Sell Cotman, from a Dulwich exhibit of his Normandy watercolors

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From her poetry: the autobiographical background: Her terrors for her children, several of whom predeceased her and did know hardship. I’ve no doubt she saw a version of this woman who lies at several removes behind this novel; Sir Edward’s terrors for Ethelinde’s future

The Female Exile.
WRITTEN AT BRIGHTHELMSTONE IN NOV. 1792. [from Elegiac sonnets (1797-1800)]

November’s chill blast on the rough beach is howling,
   The surge breaks afar, and then foams to the shore,
Dark clouds o’er the sea gather heavy and scowling,
   And the white cliffs re-echo the wild wintry roar.

Beneath that chalk rock, a fair stranger reclining
   Has found on damp sea-weed a cold lonely seat;
Her eyes fill’d with tears, and her heart with repining,
   She starts at the billows that burst at her feet.

There, day after day, with an anxious heart heaving,
   She watches the waves where they mingle with air;
For the sail which, alas! all her fond hopes deceiving,
   May bring only tidings to add to her care.

Loose stream to wild winds those fair flowing tresses,
   Once woven with garlands of gay Summer flowers;
Her dress unregarded, bespeaks her distresses,
   And beauty is blighted by grief’s heavy hours.

Her innocent children, unconscious of sorrow,
   To seek the gloss’d shell, or the crimson weed stray;
Amused with the present, they heed not to-morrow,
   Nor think of the storm that is gathering to day.

The gilt, fairy ship, with its ribbon-sail spreading,
   They launch on the salt pool the tide left behind;
Ah! victims—for whom their sad mother is dreading
   The multiplied miseries that wait on mankind!

To fair fortune born, she beholds them with anguish,
   Now wanderers with her on a once hostile soil,
Perhaps doom’d for life in chill penury to languish,
   Or abject dependance, or soul-crushing toil.

But the sea-boat, her hopes and her terrors renewing,
   O’er the dim grey horizon now faintly appears;
She flies to the quay, dreading tidings of ruin
   All breathless with haste, half expiring with fears.

Poor mourner!—I would that my fortune had left me
   The means to alleviate the woes I deplore;
But like thine my hard fate has of affluence bereft me,
   I can warm the cold heart of the wretched no more!

Ellen

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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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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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Austen’s letters 99 – 101, Wed 9 & Mon 21, March, from Henrietta St; Tues 14 June, from Chawton (1814)

A male peacock — alluding to Dorset’s Peacock[s] at Home

W. Turner (1816-18), Junction of Greta and Rokeby — a landscape envisaged as Austen might have (from exhibit at Bowes Museum. Barnard Castle, on the intersections of Scott and Turner)

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been 3 weeks since our last letter (98, 5-8 March, also from Henrietta St, Henry’s place of business and home), the second of two long journalizing epistles (97, 2-3 March, Henrietta St), both snowy. Edward and Fanny are with Jane for all three: two are from Henry’s place (99, 100), where theater-going, courtshipsfor Fanny (especially by Mr Plumptre), and Henry finishing Mansfield Park, just before publication (May 1814) are still central. The second is a remnant, fragment, we don’t know to whom, but I suggest probably not to Francis, but one of Jane’s women friends; the third is written from Chawton, to which Fanny and Edward have accompanied Jane while Cassandra has switched places and is now with Henry.

There is much theater-going, socializing. Jane is preparing the proofs for Mansfield Park which is published during this time. She is also writing Emma. We looked at the satire on social life implied by Jane’s allusion to Catherine-Ann Dorset’s comic Aesopic poem, The Peacock at Home, and discussed whether Jane and Cassandra were joking in their insistence that the child-niece, Cassy (Charles and Fanny Palmer’s daughter left behind with her aunts), had fleas, and the cool unkindness of this teasing.

As I’ve been doing, I reprint the text in the comments so that the reader can if he or she wants to, read them first or refer to them while going through the commentary.

Again, close reading or paraphrasing along with Diana Birchall.

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Imogen Poots as Fanny and Tom Hiddleston Mr Plumptre falling in love (Miss Austen Regrets, 2008)

99, Wed 9 March 1814, Henrietta St, to Cassandra at Chawton

First, Cassandra with the apparently flea-ridden niece, Cassy in tow were expected daily, almost momentarily, which would account for Austen not writing, but then how or why in June is Jane later at Chawton and Cassandra in Henrietta Street we do not know. The two exchange places by June 14th — my guess is they (the family) felt and Henry agreed, that he needed female companionship, company, someone beyond Madame Bigeon to care for his house and him.

On Tuesday again they went to the play; Mr Plumptre had come directly after breakfast, again having secured a box. A ceaseless day — out in the morning, then shopping, then Indian jugglers. So 4 in the afternoon she, Edward, Plumptre and Fanny are off to this entertainment while Henry was readying himself to go elsewhere. In the event Edward could only stand Farmer’s Wife once more and then insisted on going home. Austen now doesn’t seem at all keen on Catherine Stephen this time or her singing. Of course there were the stage comediens whom she names. Jane does now crave some quiet time: it’s Wednesday and Edward and Fanny gone off; next up she and Henry dine at the Tilsons and the next the Spencers.

Fanny and Edward “both liked their visit very much … I am sure Fanny did.” Henry sees the attachment of Plumptre and Fanny growing stronger and becoming real. Austen has a cold and can vie with her mother’s hypochondria. The cold brings on association of fashions and how she is making long sleeves (remember the fashion Mrs Bennet has heard of when Mrs Gardener comes in P&P). The ornate and somewhat sexy outfit she is making casts light ironic askance on by the poem, “The Peacocke at home.”

Diana concedes here that Jane not keen on the rituals of social life in the period:

A short letter, with no great gap; only five days after the previous one. She is still at Henrietta St., and she has rather a bad cold, bad enough to mention several times, yet it does not prevent her from the business of going about and gleaning what she can of the cultural and theatrical advantages of London. They went to the Play the night before, and this morning were shopping and seeing “the Indian Jugglers.” Everyone can imagine how tiring that is in any big city, and why she should say, “I am very glad to be quiet now till dressing time.” Though don’t you wish she’d given her opinion of the Indian Jugglers, as she touches on the exotic so little.

Just like Charles Musgrove in Persuasion, Mr. J. Plumptre “appeared to say that he had secured a Box,” about which he was perhaps more delighted than she was. Probably because of the cold, her reaction to the evening is a bit listless. “The Farmer’s Wife is a Musical thing in 3 acts,” is a lukewarm description, and Edward may have felt the same, as he was “steady” in not staying for anything more, so they were at home before 10. Fanny and Plumptre were delighted with the singing of Miss S, but not Jane: “that she gave me no pleasure is no reflection upon her, nor I hope upon myself, being what Nature made me on that article. All that I am sensible of in Miss S[tephens]. is, a pleasing person & no skill in acting.”

Also performing were three comedians, Mathews, Liston and Emery, and Jane concedes, “of course some amusement.” Fanny and Edward left early next morning, undoubtedly his reason for wanting an early night, and there’s a bit of gossip between Jane and Henry: “Henry sees decided attachment between her & his new acquaintance.” (We remember that Fanny nearly married Plumptre.)

More about her cold, and then some description of her tinkering with her finery, long sleeves being allowable, lowering the bosom. “Such will be my Costume of Vine leaves & paste,” she says rather mysteriously. What can she mean by this? Deirdre tells us that Dr. Vivian Jones identifies this as a slight misquotation from the comic poem, “The Peacock ‘At Home’” by Catherine-Anne Dorset, 1807. We are very fortunate in that this poem is available on Gutenberg

Wonderful notes by the author, too. It’s all about a sort of pre-Alice in Wonderland-esque birds’ ball. A Peacock decides to give a party:

The Peacock display’d his bright plumes to the Sun,
And, addressing his Mates, thus indignant begun:
“Shall we, like domestic, inelegant Fowls,
As unpolished as Geese, and as stupid as Owls,
Sit tamely at home, hum drum with our Spouses,
While Crickets and Butterflies open their houses?

Carrier-pigeons send out invitations, and the acceptances and refusals come in:

The nest-loving Turtle-dove sent an excuse;
Dame Partlet lay in, as did good Mrs. Goose.

That must have happened all the time in real life, as women were so often lying-in. Now, here is the bit referred to by Jane Austen:

The Partridge was ask’d; but a Neighbour hard by
Had engag’d a snug party to meet in a Pye;
And the Wheat-ear declin’d recollecting her Cousins,
Last year, to a feast were invited by dozens,
But, alas! they return’d not; and she had no taste
To appear in a costume of vine-leaves or paste.

Which explains the meaning of her joke! The “costume of vine-leaves and paste” is what you wear if you go to a party and end up being eaten! I have to admit to Ellen that this does not bespeak very much enthusiasm for social gayeties, but then again, perhaps it was the cold!

This delightfully mad next section I seem to remember reading before…I think Lord Peter Wimsey quotes it:

But the rest all accepted the kind invitation,
And much bustle it caused in the plumed creation:
Such ruffling of feathers, such pruning of coats;
Such chirping, such whistling, such clearing of throats;
Such polishing bills and such oiling of pinions
Had never been known in the biped dominions.

Then she looks forward to Cassandra coming. They are going to take her to the play to see Young in Richard. Covent Garden. Something Cassandra will enjoy.

Diana wrote:

Cassandra should expect to go to a Play when she arrives, on the first evening of her visit; likely to see Charles Mayne Young in Richard III. Young was the leading English tragedian following Kemble, before Kean and Macready were in full career. Interestingly, his first important part was as Young Norval in Home’s blank verse tragedy Douglas, which I presume is what Tom and Edmund Bertram recited as boys.

Not to worry about little Cassy, Jane has fixed things by swift going to Keppel Street. Does this have something to do with Charles or Fanny Palmer’s family I wonder? no use seeking this in LeFaye — there is no Keppel Street in her Family Record index. I looked at the indexes of four Companion/Handbooks. Since it’s a matter of the unfortunate child’s being swept off to Keppel Street immediately, I assume this is to de-flea her — some expert?

Fleas are found embedded in cat hair: did the Austens have a cat? was it a ship cat that gave Cassy her fleas?

Something of a digression: it was suggested by a couple of people that the whole idea of fleas, with Cassy getting Jane’s bed filled with fleas was an unreal joke.

Diane has found some evidence to suggest that fleas do not embed themselves in human being’s skin, but prefer much fur. Of course hair will do, but I’ll leave that.

If the child didn’t have some bug (like fleas), it’s not a funny joke. We were told when the proposal for her to stay at Chawton to regain her health that she was very scared of her Aunt Cassandra, and did not want to stay with her in a letter which indicates Cassandra had hit one of the peasant girls (perhaps working as a maid). (It was fine in this period to beat your servants. Let’s hope Cassandra was no Emily Bronte.) The child did not want to stay away from her parents, and we may guess nervous.

So Cassandra and Jane invent this little joke of theirs about her fear. Har har. They give her something to be afraid of, just think Aunt Cassandra getting rid of fleas. Ho ho ho. It’s not exactly kind.

When I was a girl growing up in the Bronx, a real fear among mothers and children was “nits.” If you got “nits” in your hair, you would be subjected to hard hurtful combing until you got rid of them and it was not easy. I know how it felt since at one point I had “nits.” I am wondering if “fleas” is an easy non-scientific way to refer to some bug that Cassy had naturally picked up aboard ship and Cassandra took it upon herself to get rid of it in the child.

Thinking a bit more and reading over the pieces, hair will do in place of fur. The child could easily have had some infestation from living aboard a ship with unwashed men in close proximity. If she didn’t quite, I can see how Cassandra might suspect she was — a class feeling.

Lord Brabourne removed all the references to fleas in his edition. How like Cassandra not to censor out that which makes Jane look bad — we saw this earlier in the laughing reference to the maid who was fired when the two nephews harassed her. At the same time we saw some indication of another letter where Jane did lambast the nephews; that was cut. Can’t have the nephews exposed, can we? Cassandra has no sense of what is humanely tactful or decent to people as people only what is conventionally allowed. JEAL did have a heart — very sensitive type — and Brabourne some literary tact and brains.

No one is selling Cassy into slavery, no one beating her; the aunt with her takes her to Canterbury (as I recall); I’m sure she’s fed and taken good physical care of. Treated overtly with affection too. But children feel things, they know. Charles and Fanny did not want to leave Cassy with the aunts, even though it was apparent to everyone the ship life was making her physically ill. And so that trumped, the fear the ship life would kill her.

But physical life is not all that matters to children. It’s just for a time and did her no harm, but I can understand why the child was so reluctant to stay with these aunts when I read Austen’s letters 91 & 92, Mon-Ties, 11-12, 14-15 Oct 1813

Here’s what she has to say specifically about Cassy:

I talk to Cassy about Chawton; she remembers much but does not volunteer on the subject. — Poor little Love — I wish she were not so very Palmery — but it seems stronger than ever. –I never knew a Wife’s family-features have such undue influence. –

A strong sense of distaste here. Like some kind of animal. Bad as colored skin? something racist here — though it’s origin is class. We know from various sources the family thought Charles married down — though Fanny was related to high officials, maybe they were not pseudo-gentry in the manner of the Austens. Had no aristocrats three times removed or whatever.

When Jane Austen looks at this child physically she feels distaste. It’s not just that she looks like Fanny but that Fanny is inferior and the child stigmatized by the outward clarity of the biology.

A little later:

Papa & Mama have not yet made up their mind as to parting with her or not-the cheif, indeed the only difficulty with Mama is a very reasonable one, the Child’s being very unwilling to leave them. When it was mentioned to her, she did not like the idea of it at all. —

Anyone who says this is just fine and she would feel the same would not be someone I would like to be my child’s teacher in school much less have the care of her 24/7.

And we are told Charles and Fanny hesitated and hesitated …

What cruel weather. We may assume it’s cold as well as snowy.

Then the sordid story of Lord Portsmouth, disabled as a child, mistreated probably he grew up reacting meanly to punitive or counterproductive treatment and became an object of unscrupulous fleecing and bullying by his lawyer and trustee who encouraged a daughter to continue this preying. Austen’s single exclamation conveys nothing of any adequate attitude. We can see in LeFaye’s words strong alienation from the disabled man, no empathy, no attempt to see him as human being, complete dismissal (see my blog on attitudes towards disabilities).

Diana quoting and takig her material from LeFaye:

Then she mentions the Lord Portsmouth scandal. “What cruel weather this is! And here is Lord Portsmouth married too to Miss Hanson!” We remember that Lord Portsmouth had been George Austen’s pupil in 1773, and was said to have stammered and been “backward.” He was born in 1767, but would have been gone from the Austen household before Jane could remember. As he could not lead a normal life, trustees and marriage to an older woman were arranged for him. When she died, however, Portsmouth’s trustee and lawyer John Hanson “cynically married off his daughter Mary-Anne to his ward, who by now was obviously a sadistic and necrophiliac lunatic,” in Deirdre’s words. Lord Byron, we remember, was persuaded, or bribed, to give away the bride. No wonder Jane Austen exclaimed at the event!

A close relationship between Henry (Adrian Edmondson) and Jane (Olivia Williams) suggested in Miss Austen Regrets (here they are discussing the price they should like for Emma)

Again Jane takes comfort and reassurance to see that Henry likes this later part of MP “extremely interesting.” (contentless word there.) Her mother had not given her enough money to pay small bills even.

Diana:

Then she reverts to her state and the weather: she has a bad cold, very heavy, she’d like to lie in bed longer. We can see here her avoiding some social commitment: Hertford Street. She’s not “well enough to go on any account.” And again she trots out the by now tired joke of Henry’s friend’s, Chowne’s likeness to Frederick in Inchbald’s play. This is the third time she’s milked that one.

Amid all this, she mentions that Henry has finished MP, and his approbation is not lessened; he found the last half of the last volume extremely interesting (underlined for emphasis). In the next sentence she writes of her mother not giving her money to pay a bill, and her funds will not supply enough – so perhaps she has in her mind that she may make some money from MP

Back to long sleeves by association. Chowne is friends with the Tilsons, Mrs Tilson is wearing long sleeves too and assures jane they are in. Dining her next Tuesday … (maybe an association with “bad” Tuesdays meant here.)

Photo of modern glass of homemade mead

Friday all this socializing will be over. How she dislikes this. Then they will be snug with only the man servant, Barlowe. She prefers quiet with the servant. Being alone brings on thoughts of the mead at Chawton. How glad she is it’s brewed. Even if she’s not there to drink it it.

Diana paraphrases:

They got home so early that she could finish her letter, and for perhaps the only time in her letters (for she was an early riser) she writes, “I rather think of lying in bed later than usual.” She wants to be well enough to go to Hertford Street, though who lives there and why her eagerness, I don’t know. They met only Gen. Chowne today – Tilson’s brother – and JA makes another reference to him playing Frederick: “I was ready to laugh at the remembrance of Frederick, & such a different Frederick as we chose to fancy him to the real Christopher!” (Chowne’s name was Christopher.) Then she hears from Mrs. Tilson about long sleeves, and is reassured to hear that “they are worn in the evening by many,” since she is going to wear some gauze ones.

On Friday they will be snug, with only the firm’s chief clerk there for an evening of business. She finishes with another disgusted reference to little Cassandra filling her bed with fleas, and then insouciantly, “I have written to Mrs. Hill & care for nobody.”

Jane got up early not only to play her pianoforte at Chawton, but to write. The long mornings were her writing time. Back to Cassy and her fleas. I assume it’s the older Cassandra who keeps harping on this and Jane is responding.

Mrs Hill is Jane’s good friend, Catherine, married off to that much older man and having children year after year who she visited back in November 1813.

See also Diana Reynold’s reading from Austen-l archives.

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Mansfield Park, 1st edition, title page

100, Mon 21, March, Henrietta Street, to ?

Here Diana and I had a direct disagreement. I don’t think the letter is to Frank. It’s a tiny dated scrap, March 9 and June 14, with no addressee. It’s LeFaye who says it’s to Francis, with Charles, the other brother, as an alternative. If it is that Jane had kept Francis apprised of the publication of MP because he was so sensitive as to the ship’s names, he would not need to know the novel is about to come out. It’s said she wrote him regularly. The warmth of “God bless you,” and sense of not only intimacy, but as sort of utter equality of status (“Keep the name to yourself”) between writer and correspondent, does not suggest Frank at all. As far as we can tell, Jane hardly wrote Charles.

I suggest this may be a scrap to one of Jane’s women friends: Martha Lloyd or even Anne Sharpe (there was a correspondence, all but one destroyed or lost) who she might not have told the novel was about to come out.

The paragraph suggests someone who has no idea Mansfield Park is about to be published, and from what we know of hearsay the family knew about this one stage by stage. Jane carried her writing desk about. So that rules out Martha who appears to be at Chawton with the mother. So by elimination perhaps it’s more likely Miss Sharpe who lived at a further distance — (or some other woman friend entirely — one of the Biggs, Constance Hill) who however is also close to Cassandra: Classandra’s best love is sent to her.

Diana, accepting LeFaye’s conjecture:

We may as well look at the next letter too, #100, Monday, 21 March 1814, as the letters are so close together and this is only a few lines. It’s thought to be to Francis. She revealingly notes, in a cut-off line, “…and only just time enough for what is to be done. And all this, with very few
acquaintance in Town & going to no Parties & living very quietly! – What do people do that…” which, though brief, sheds some light on her feelings about living in the city.

In a postscript she adds, “Perhaps before the end of April, Mansfield Park by the author of S&S – P&P may be in the World.” This bespeaks her sense of the momentousness of the occasion, though she asks her correspondent, “Keep the name to yourself. I shd not like to have it known beforehand. God bless you.”

As Diana says, we have a different tone towards social life. Gone the patient enjoyment or ironies (using Dorset’s poem is just the latest), flat out she has “only just time enough for what is to be done.” (Perhaps referring to getting her proofs finished and to the publisher or helping Henry out in some serious way). Then “And all this, with very few acquaintance in Town & going to no Parties & living very quietly!” — This is not that much at variance with what she’s been telling Cassandra. Rather it shows what was the preferred life Jane and Henry too returned to once Edward and his much-courted daughter, returned to Godmersham. They left on the 9th and maybe since then, even if with Cassandra there (no social butterfly herself — remember Jane’s do know somebody, how tiresome it is that you know no one) and poor niece, they have lived quietly. What Henry has is business acquaintance, and that only a few are consistently renamed.

Gretta Scacchi as Cassandra preferring country life alone (Miss Austen Regrets)

Again see Diane R.

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Olivia Williams as Jane Austen back in Chawton, writing again (Miss Austen Regrets)

101, Tues, 14 June, 1814, from Chawton, to Cassandra at Henrietta Street

Three months have passed since Jane wrote a letter to a friend (I suggest), and Cassandra has just arrived (by JA’s calculations) in London, so the correspondence between them resumes. We don’t know exactly when Jane returned home so can’t tell how many letters are missing.

We can say the announcement she may have made say to a friend of the publication of Mansfield Park is not here. (In the Fanny Burney D’Arblay Journals & Letters there would be a note to tell us of this publication, and probably some brief citation of a newspaper.) Fanny Austen Knight has accompanied Austen to Chawton; I assume Fanny and Edward are living in the big house and there is a lot of going back and forth.

Diana:

A short letter. Three months since the last, and March is now June. I’m reminded of this passage in Mansfield Park:

“It was sad to Fanny to lose all the pleasures of spring. She had not known before what pleasures she had to lose in passing March and April in a town. She had not known before how much the beginnings and progress of vegetation had delighted her. What animation, both of body and mind, she had derived from watching the advance of that season which cannot, in spite of its capriciousness, be unlovely, and seeing its increasing beauties from the earliest flowers in the warmest divisions of her aunt’s garden, to the opening of leaves of her uncle’s plantations, and the glory of his woods.”

Not that Jane Austen is in town any more, and in any case Henry’s digs at Henrietta Street couldn’t be compared with Fanny’s noisome abode in Portsmouth! Jane is at home, at Chawton, and has changed places with Cassandra, who is now in London. “This is a delightful day in the Country, & I hope not much too hot for Town,” she writes, which would seem to show that she participates at least to some extent in Fanny’s rhapsodies about spring in the country. Though there has been a little rain, and Edward has been not quite “brisk.” She went up to the Great House and “dawdled” away an hour. Not sure who “we all five” were who walked together into the Kitchen Garden
(Jane, Edward, Fanny, Marianne, the governess, perhaps?) or if someone lived along the Gosport Road about whom she said “& they drank tea with us.” Domestic matters about the cow man and the nursery man.

Miss Austen Regrets attempts a family scene at Chawton in the country: this includes Mrs Austen, Anna Austen, Edward Bridges (as played by the actors)

Still there is but one sentence on this, and the paragraph in which it appears gives a wider perspective of a picture of country life which includes servants and a long walk and evening tea. My predilection is to dwell on that walk even if it’s given a few less words.

Looking at the text as a whole it gives us a snap shot of country life from the point of view of a genteel subaltern woman inside a family; she gets to speak her voice a little by finding time to write this letter. We have to assume she’s also finding time for Emma but this kind of talk she will not allow herself or is not allowed. Hence my term “subaltern.”

To the letter: we are in present time: Fanny is taking Mrs Austen to Alton, giving Jane some free time. I am struck more by how meditative, yearning, deep feeling is the passage from MP and how matter-of-fact and brief in this letter: “This is a delightful day i the Country, & I hope not much too hot for the Town …” Then how the day Cassandra left which was rainy, how she went up to “the great house” between 3 and 4, dawdled an hour. Edward not well but better in the evening. Then one of these walks she loves to do — into “the kitchen Garden & along Gosport Road.” Then the two came back to the cottage and drank tea with Mrs Austen — we should imagine the soft wet evening in June.

Jane notices servants in these letters. It was something of a code, to erase servants in novels, not to mention them as unimportant. This does not control Jane Austen in her letters. ( Frances Burney D’Arblay rarely if at all mentions servants in the way Austen does, but then FBA has so many more people to discuss and describe.) We are not told why Cassandra will be glad that G Turner has a new situation — I hope it was not that they wanted to get rid of him: “something in the Cow Line near Rumsey” is an odd way to put cowherding, semi-comic is the intention. His wish to go immediately is said not to inconvenience anyone. This letter mentions a number of lower order people. I’ll bring together them all. There is a new Nursery man from Alton to value the crops in the garden.

Then a medium sized paragraph on the topic of the Cookes, which occasions a mention of MP. And still Austen hasn’t gone, she has literally been putting off going for months and months, and they are still (in effect) pressuring her to come. As of this letter (as she has before), she says she will, if a bit reluctantly: “after considering everything, I have resolved on going. My companions promote it.” Meaning Fanny and Edward — the way people do urge others to visit yet other people.
But she can’t just go.

Diana:

She has received a letter from Mrs. Cooke, which pleases her. This lady, born Cassandra Leigh, Mrs. Austen’s first cousin and contemporary, was now 70 years old; her husband Samuel was Jane’s godfather. They want her to visit, “and after considering everything, I have resolved on going,” she writes. Her companions promote it, but, she adds, “I will not go however till after Edward is gone, that he may feel he has a somebody to give Memorandums to.” Though joking, she does show what her position is with him – something on the level of a secretary or a governess. “I must give up all help from his Carriage of course,” she writes, the “of course” sounding a bit bitter. But she basically says, hang the expense. She’s going. She had thought of Trigg (the gamekeeper) and a Chair, “but I know it will end in Posting.” Will she post alone? We will see. The Cookes will meet her at Guildford, and what delights her so much is that “they admire Mansfield Park exceedingly. Mr. Cook says ‘it is the most sensible Novel he ever read’ – and
the manner in which I treat the Clergy delights them very much.” Therefore, “Altogether I must go”! She also puts it in Cassandra’s “capacious head” that she should join her.

Edward (Pip Torrens) pictured discussing papers with Jane (Miss Austen Regrets)

As Diana suggests, Jane seems to be functioning as a sort of amanuensis for Edward, following him about taking down “memorandums to the last.” (I am reminded of something 50 years ago when I was a stenographer in the gov’t I’d follow a Contracting Officer about taking down all that was said with sten, memoranda they were called too.) But forget the carriage. She must give that up. If she is to go to the Cookes, she’ll have to get there by borrowing a chair from Triggs (a gamekeeper)

She is willing to go suddenly and to this trouble because the Cookes like MP: “in addition to their standing” (half-relatives, long time friends) “they admire Mansfield Park exceedingly.” (The reviews of MP are non-existent, it just was not like the way the first two novels were at all and it shows in the silence.) They liked the way she “treats the clergy:” since they are clericals that means they see it as positive: it is a novel about taking religion and one’s appointment (Edmund’s) seriously. So altogether she must go. But she wants Cassandra to join her there when her visit to Henry is over. She’s not keen to be with these people in the first place and now, even with their liking for MP, without a buffer.

A joke: Cassandra must watch out lest she be trampled by the Emperor. The joke is about their insignificance — she is pretending as she has done before how much they count, and how their activities are central to the World. I imagine Austen would know about the naval review from either Frank or Charles or as a naval sister: so this line also tells us how she watches out for the navy and hints at ongoing other correspondences. The Important People were certainly passing by Alton on the main road or from Portsmouth. The reference to the “bow of the prince” mocks the importance given these people and their slightest activities — reported in the papers as if it mattered intensely.

Diana:

A reference to Tsar Alexander, who was traveling from London to Portsmouth for a review; she jokes that she hopes Cassandra will “not be trampled to death in running after the Emperor.” She longs to know “what this Bow of the Prince will produce” – but I don’t know what she means, historically.

Then some people whose lives are talked of with less irony — as are the servants in the earlier paragraph and throughout the letters. The Mrs Andrews and Mrs Browning mentioned in the letter’s close are farming people and “Elizabeth is Mrs Browning’s young daughter, aged 6. Austen says this mother “is very glad to send an Elizabeth:” a girl this age perhaps sent to London? to care for some other even younger child? or work in what’s called “service.” “Glad” is a kind of euphemism here: the reality is the woman would have to look upon this as an opportunity for money and to get the feeding of this child off her hands.

Miss (Tamsin Greig) and Mrs Bates’s (Valerie Lilley) hovel (2009 Sandy Welch’s Emma)

Perhaps by association the last paragraph moves on to Miss Benn (one source for Miss Bates) — in a new hovel undoubtedly, her “hand is going on as well as possible.” Again the wording puts a positive slant on something bad. The unfortunate woman has something bad wrong with her hand.

She has Fanny (again Imogen Poots) with her at Chawton

She closes with a word which suggests an awareness of Fanny’s presence: “Accept our best love.” Fanny back so time to end her private time with her pen and paper and sister …

Ellen

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