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.

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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

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

A new Poldark adaptation

Goldolphin House, Cornwall — the first Trenwith

A new Demelza or Verity: Anna Maxwell Martin

Dear friends and readers,

The 18th century cannot be too much on film — nor Winston Graham’s Poldark novels. It’s going on for 40 years since the last 2 popular mini-series were filmed (Poldark, 1975-76, 1977-78), and 16 since the attempt at the 8th novel as a single film (The Stranger from the Sea, 1996). The Guardian has reported a 6 part series is genuinely planned or under way — it’s at least budgeted for at any rate): from the company which recently filmed Parade’s End, scripted by Tom Stoppard and featuring (among others) Bernard Cumberbatch, Rupert Everett, Anne-Marie Duff. Deb Horsfield is to script, a BAFTA winner (she worked for the Royal Shakespeare company. Looks good.

So I reopened the new Yahoo listserv I had started: perhaps a new audience will form, a new configuration and the books be newly seen.

A new Ross Poldark or George Warleggan: Richard Armitage — in one of his kinder moments as Mr Thornton

Here he encompasses the unabiding renegade and seething sexual presence (could rape someone)

One cannot resist candidates, though I expect I’ll be all wrong. what’s telling here is when you think about specific actors and their psychological baggage you see how interchangeable the types are.

I wish for Richard Armitage (who played John Thornton in North and South), for Ross Poldark or George Warleggan, perhaps Anna Maxwell Martin (Esther Summerson in Bleak House) for Demelza or Verity and Morven Christie (Jane Bennett in Lost in Austen) for Elizabeth or Morwenna.

A new Morwenna: Morven Christie as Jane Bennett whose line “We must not reproach ourselves for unlived lives … ” stays with me

And for Drake or Dwight Ennys: Martin Freeman — here Dr Watson

I admit it’s worrying only 6 one hour episodes. But we may hope they mean just to film the first 4 books, and if it goes over well, go on for another season. In the manner of Downton Abbey …

Ellen
Poldark website
Poldark Archives

Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (1737-1801), American poet & writer

Benjamin West (American 18th century painter): his family (there is a drawing of Elizabeth by West in the Historical Society of Pennysylvania)

Dear friends and readers,

On April 12th of this spring at a monthly meeting of the Washington Area Print Group I heard Rodney Mader tell the story of the life and writing of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, a learned woman from an upper class family in Pennsylvania. He gave a paper on her long melancholy autobiographical poem, The Deserted Wife, which prompted a lively 45 minute discussion afterward. This matter makes a fitting coda for the predominant themes of my blogs on the ASECS meeting at Cleveland this year: women’s life-writing, unconventional choices, and poetry.

Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson by Anne Ousterhout

Fergusson’s life course is intriguingly puzzling. She begins as a socialite, admired and well-read writer thoroughly ensconced in the local high cultural milieu. When young, she was engaged to Benjamin Franklin’s son; she wrote & circulated a Trip to Great Britain, an outgoing sophisticated travel book. She then marries Henry Hughes Fergusson, who became a loyalist during the American revolution. When Henry is thought to have impregnated a servant girl, Jenny, in her friend’s house, Elizabeth estranges herself from him. Although she refuses to listen to his pleas from England (where he eventually went) that he was guiltless of impregnating the girl and for her to return and live with him in the UK, she writes a poignant poem showing how intensely she feels the degradation of her position and loss of her husband. She remains angry with him for undermining the servant of her friend. Her grating and obsessive behavior eventually alienates all her friends (she is regarded as a pest) so she ends up a reclusive woman writing an unpublishable poem and late in life a translation of Fenelon’s Telemaque (a 17th century sequel to The Odyssey, all about Odysseus son’s education).

How did she change from publicly engaged woman to someone whose books were her friends. Prof Mader tended to account for Fergusson’s decision through her husband’s Scots loyalism. She was forced (unwillingly) to separate herself from this. The colony wanted to confiscate her property as that of the wife of a treacherous man. She was devoted to the place and it had been central to her identity. Nontheless, she fled her home at Graeme Park and lived with a friend, Betsy Stedman for the last 30 years of her life. But she did not find solace in this arrangement. Her poem tells her tale as an aching story of sexual betrayal and unhinging sorrow. Fergusson imitates Pope’s Eloisa and is like Richardson’s Clarissa; she alludes to Pope, Mary Wortley Montagu, Edward Young, James Thomson, Henry Mackenzie, Lord Chesterfield. Prof Mader suggested the poem represents a moving gesture of containment and self-control.

Keith House, Graeme Park today

In the discussion afterward one scholar brought up the large Quaker community nearby. Was it a Quaker influence which led Fergusson to insist for real that sexual infidelity is not to be tolerated. Most women at the time would say they would not accept sexual infidelity but quietly tolerated it. Men were allowed to have mistresses. Quaker women’s culture provided for an empowerment of women: they would not tolerate the husband’s infidelities. Prof Mader said he believed that Jenny’s child was her husband’s; she had been a servant in the house of Charles Stedman, her friend Betsy’s uncle. Her Quaker friends would be against loyalism to the UK. Against that she seems trapped by social structures — did not want the kind of conformity whether unconventional or not Quakers demanded of their members. She wrote she did not like the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps (I suggested) she simply preferred not to marry, to live with and among women. People agreed that made sense. But there was her continual fight to re-gain her property which she spent so much on she ended up a bankrupt.

In talking about the poem, Prof Mader said Fergusson ventriloquizes (uses) other poets’ voices. The poem is very melancholy, a Penseroso. That it was not common for women to write private poetry. A couple of us disputed that. I pointed outAnne Finch who wrote of her private autobiographical experience through the masks of translation, fables, and public genres, to Charlotte Smith who simply openly wrote autobiographically (for which she was castigated by Anna Seward and often criticized by others). Another woman scholar talked of life-writing in later 17th century poetry of other women.

It’s a book history group and people also talked of the history of the manuscript, how people in the era kept commonplace books. The US had an oral culture. The interested reader can read the poem (published for the first time), together with Prof Mader’s introduction’ in “Rodney Mader, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s ‘The Deserted Wife’,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 135:2 (April 2011):151-90.

Engraved print of later 19th century impressionist painting by a woman, Tina Blau (1845 – 1916), Spring at the Prater

Ellen

Austen’s letter 102, Thurs 23 June 1814, Chawton, to Cassandra, Henrietta St

Henry Robert Morland, late 18th century, a laundress

Dear friends and readers,

Again Diana Birchall and I in tandem. This time the best way to convey the outline and pith of this letter is to provide the text, Diana’s walk though the content more or less step-by-step and then my contextualized approach of its themes seen in terms of its individuals who matter to Austen.

The letter is cheerful. This is what Cassandra has demanded all along and Jane has acceded to since she was able to, which is around the time they arrive at Southampton — and especially since she begins to write for publication. She has MP out in print and is working on Emma.

What strikes me are the paradigms — or repeating patterns — we’ve seen from just before Austen was ejected from Steventon and forced to go to Bath (as we saw something she intensely did not want); a desire to develop a woman’s community, a time together with beloved women friends is thwarted. Martha and Anne can’t make it; they lack free time altogether. Her recognition of marginalized women and their problems. In this letter there are so many mentions of servants, and predominantly women servants, including the girl who will go do very hard work for Frank and Mary.

Although Austen doesn’t seem to recognize its importance, she does record how two women whom she is pushed into visiting are identifying with another woman, the fictional heroine, Fanny Price. I say she doesn’t recognize its importance, since this is not included in the folder of comments on her novels that she gathered. It’s not conventional: not overt I like this or disdain that in the way the other exclamations or occasionally more thoughtful general judgements she copied out are.

That much more than what is usually paid attention to (“oh what a Henry!”) out of context or with no context. One good reason for him to be there as we’ve seen him emerge, especially since Eliza’s death when he begins to turn up regularly in Austen’s letters (as she is one of those who come to visit and to help) is to network for business. His business was dependent on the rich and well-heeled investing in his firm as well as borrowing from it. And so goes even if (as we’ve seen) he himself when asked about these parties says he would prefer not to; we may assume he liked the theater but can’t say for sure. It seems to be Edward who has gone this trip; the women need a male with them as escort and the younger girls get a great kick out of the popular trash of the theaters of the day.

This letter also makes it clear beyond the complicated family trees, we want specific information about individuals; it’s hard but not impossible. I note each of the Burney Journals and Letters do just this: entries are about individuals. LeFaye also provides no meaningful information on the ball at White’s — that it was, for exampple, more than a bit premature, because (as we all instantly recall) Napoleon escaped from Elba, came back and there was another long bout of war as the Allied powers regrouped determined to stamp him out and put a Bourbon back on the throne. We need to know something about the UK economy at this point too. Henry’s there to help his banking business.

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Burlington House, today the home of the Royal Academy

Diana’s paraphrase:

A week later, another letter to Cassandra, who is still at Henrietta Street.

Jane calls Cassandra’s a “pretty letter,” brought by Mr. Louch, one of Henry’s banking partners. She has heard also from Frank, whose visit is delayed by a Naval Review, and Portsmouth being in a bustle. This must have to do with the visit of the Emperor, whom she hopes Fanny has seen, “& then I may fairly wish them all away.” She goes tomorrow (where?) “& hope for some
delays & adventures.” A mention of her mother’s wood, and “Bavins,” which I’ve never heard of, but the dictionary calls it “a fagot of brushwood or other light combustible matter, for kindling fires,” though apparently you bought it.

Then a famous line: “Henry at White’s! – Oh! what a Henry.” This of course refers to Henry’s excursion into high social public life, being at the fabulous ball sponsored by White’s Club at Burlington House, lent by the Duke of Devonshire, to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon. Beau Brummell was one of the organizers, and there were 4,000 attendees, including the Tsar of Russia, King of Prussia, Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb, and all the ton, at a cost of £10,000. Whatever you may think of Henry, it would be impossible to think of any other of Jane Austen’s brothers at White’s – or at least, he was the most likely!

I don’t know what to make of the “Miss B” reference – Deirdre thinks it was Miss Burdett. A possible match for Henry? Mention of Sackree and the children, and a gift of a ham and “4 Leeches” from Godmersham. Leeches seem an odd gift, did you keep them in water or something until somebody needed to be bled? [see just below]

Now here comes mention of how they have “called upon Miss Dusautoy & Miss Papillon & been very pretty.” Deirdre has long footnotes on the Dusautoy, Papillion, and Hinton families, who seem complicatedly interrelated. I suppose we ought to research it, and there’s an article on the Dusautoys in the Collected Reports, but as usual she sites the volume not the year of the journal. What’s amusing is that she says, “Miss D. has a great idea of being Fanny Price, she & her youngest sister together, who is named Fanny.” You can read the touch of subacid mixed amusement and horror. Little did she know that it was only the beginning of thousands of people thinking they “are” one or another of her characters – another was Princess Charlotte, who thought herself like Marianne.

A bit about Miss Benn and her infected finger – a much more serious matter then, before antibiotics. Oh! (slaps forehead) Arnie will say I am having a Breakthrough Moment. Perhaps this is what the Leeches are for! Or not.

“The Clements are gone to Petersfield, to look.” An innocuous statement enough. Notes tell us that the Henry Clement was Henry Austen’s banking partner in Petersfield, and a member of this Alton family, who were connected to the Prowtings, whom Miss Benn has just visited. One of the major obstacles to understanding these letters is the heavy interconnectedness of these families, all of the permutations of which would have been known to Jane Austen, but which are murky to us.

“Only think of the Marquis of Granby being dead,” she comments. “I hope, if it please Heaven there should be another Son, they will have better Sponsors, & less Parade.” The sponsors of the Duke of Rutland’s child were the Prince Regent and the Duke of York. Jane Austen often mentions matters concerning noble personages, almost as if she knew them; she certainly took an interest in them, but I suppose these things were made much of in the newspapers, so she’s commenting on what she reads.

Trip planning – she hopes Henry doesn’t want her in town again; she’s planning to go to Bookham, and wants to go straight home afterward. Then something about the movements of Martha, and the Deans Dundases, who have taken a house at Clifton. More interesting is that she has received a letter from Miss Sharpe, who has been suffering (we don’t know with what), but is now
more comfortable. She is at the house of Sir William Pilkington, in Yorkshire. Austen writes, “She writes highly of Sir Wm – I do so want him to marry her! – There is a Dow: Lady P. presiding there, to make it all right.” Sir William, born 1775, didn’t marry until 1825. Mysteriously, she writes, “The Man is the same; but she does not mention what he is by Profession or Trade. – She does not think Lady P. was privy to his Scheme on her; but on being in his power, yielded.” Yielded to what? What scheme on her? Has Miss Sharp been telling Austen hopefully about advances from her employer? Not very decorous, but Austen writes in a sort of odd glee, “Oh! Sir Wm – Sir Wm – how I will love you, if you will love Miss Sharp!”

We commonly write about the situation of spinsters forced into governess work, as serious and pitiable (as it is treated in the novels), but here it seems to be a matter for pleasantry. Yet Miss Sharp was her good friend, and she certainly sympathized with her. Perhaps this girlish sort of levity was how they joked together.

Some domestic material about Mrs. Driver (housekeeper at Godmersham) being off by Collier (coachman), and not having time to leave the keys. “The Coach was stopt at the Blacksmith’s, & they came running down, with Triggs, & Browning, & Trunks & Bird cages. Quite amusing!” A farcical scene, one presumes.

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Walter Richard Sicket (1860-1942): A Marengo, an imitation conversation piece

My exegeses from the point of view of the individuals on Austen’s mind. The paragraphs arise associatively as themes runs through Austen’s mind.

So, to Frank (first Frank):

She has had a letter from Frank; apparently he hoped to come to Chawton to see Jane and mother but has been delayed:

– I heard yesterday from Frank; when he began his Letter he hoped to be here on Monday, but before it was ended he had been told that the Naval Review will not take place till Friday, which will probably occasion him some delay, as he cannot get some necessary business of his own attended to, while Portsmouth is in such a bustle

At the close in a postscript: Frank and his wife Mary have hired Mary Goodchild to be an undermaid. She’s just delighted …

Then Henry:

The famous way over-quoted exclamation about Henry. Diana provides some context by seeing the juxtaposition might have meaning. I agree. It sounds like the two sisters have been wishing for a possible new sister-in-law. Certainly he wants women around. About the individual LeFaye says nothing, but the family was politically radical and rich. That’s interesting that he was drawn to a rich and radical woman — he wants interesting people I see. He likes to travel into the country, of course was married to Eliza:

Henry at Whites! — Oh! what a Henry.-I do not know what to wish as to Miss B, so I will hold my tongue & my wishes …

But there is more on Henry. Jane is reluctant to come back: Henry wants her in town perhaps when Cassandra leaves, but this is not what Jane wants; however, she feels she can’t say no since it was “kindly intended:” he takes her places and also helps her with her publishing. MP has just come out and Emma is going strong. Still she doesn’t want it. I think that’s significant.

I certainly do not wish that Henry should think again of getting me to Town. I would rather return straight from Bookham; but if he really does propose it, I cannot say No, to what will be so kindly intended. It could be but for a few days however, as my Mother would be quite disappointed by my exceeding the fortnight which I now talk of as the outside;-at least we could not both remain longer away comfortably. –

Now for Martha Lloyd:

This is as and more significant than the passages about her brothers or Anne Sharpe (to follow). There are as many lines about Martha as Frank, more than about Henry, and as many as about Anne Sharp. Jane does not want to return to Henry because Martha is coming. This was to be Martha’s time and it appears that Cassandra wants to be there too. The friendship has stayed strong — more than friendship it was at one time.

The details (not looked into by LeFaye at all) are about Martha’s constraints and lack of money. Martha is a paid companion (toady was the ugly sneering term): Mrs Craven we are told by Caroline was a harridan of a woman (that’s backed up by others). And notice she’s not been paid. The tiny sum not given her. Would she quit? not likely. We are not reminded in modern serials that often it was hard to get the money owed, as servants were used by fringe people. Martha needs this money to to come: “I fear her going at all, depends on that.” She also worked for the Dundases – remember that old lady’s death. Well this group is going to Clifton instead of Bath; Martha would not prefer this (she prefers seeing Jane and Cassandra) but it would make a change (away from the lady she works for and Mrs Craven). It’s very hot at that time of year (to the English at any rate): I find poignant: “as far as she has any time …”

— The middle of July is Martha’s time, as far as she has any time. She has left it to M” Craven to fix the day.-I wish she could get her Money paid, for I fear her going at ail, depends upon that. — Instead of Bath, the Deans Dundases have taken a House at Clifton, — Richmond Terrace — & she is as glad of the change as even You & I should be-or almost. — She will now be able to go on from Berks & visit them, without any fears from Heat. –

By association and because the plan (thwarted again) was for the four friends Austen turns to write of Ann Sharpe. People quote the joke about Mr Pilkington marrying Ann as evidence of how Austen is partly desperately mercenary and because the line is half-jokey. But coming up after Martha’s problems it’s not all that funny nor is it quite intended to be. First she has been suffering but we don’t know why; anyhow now she’s better comparatively. Perhaps just being a governess to this man and some children? but it does read like a physical ailment. Worse yet: another planned happy time for the women crushed here too. “There is no appearance of her quitting them.” A real pleasure lost. What kind of man was Pilkington? LeFaye tells us what sister married who. Useless. So it could be that Austen is half-mocking that Anne writes so highly of the very man whose family keeps her from coming. He is her boss, one of her bosses. Perhaps she was excusing him for not giving her this time. “The man is the same” suggests they have met him and he’s the same sort of man still, not changed. There have been love passages is hinted too: Lady P privy and the need of another woman, the dowager.

– This Post has brought me a Letter from Miss Sharpe. Poor thing! she has been suffering indeed! but is now in a comparative state of comfort. She is at Sir WP’s, in Yorkshire, with the Children, & there is no appearance of her quitting them. — Of course, we lose the pleasure of seeing her here. She writes highly of Sir Wm — I do so want him to marry her! –There is a Dowager Lady P presiding there, to make it all right.- The Man is the same; but she does not mention what he is by Profession or Trade. — She does not think Lady P was privy to his Scheme on her; but on being in his power, yielded. — Oh! Sir Wm — Sir Wm — how I will love you, if you will love Miss Sharp!

Miss Benn:

Might as well bring in Miss Benn (reflected in Miss Bates) here and while not too many words, she has been in these letters for years now and occurs in two separates places. Her finger not yet good, but she is in good spirits – as Miss Bates often was and she too was glad to “accept any invitation:”

– Miss Benn has drunk tea with the Prowtings, & I beleive comes to us this evens, She has still a swelling about the fore-finger, & a little discharge, & does not seem to be on the point of a perfect cure; but her Spirits are good-& she will be most happy I beleive to accept any Invitation. –

I will agree that the leeches are perhaps for Miss Benn. Indeed I think it’s probable from what I’ve read about leeches, and actually I’ve read some genuinely medically informed papers on this. They used leeches for digits (fingers, extremities). It’s good to see that the Austens are taking care for Miss Benn to help her, and they are enlisting the woman servant, Sackree to help too. That’s picture of decent caring for someone who is a nobody.

Mansfield Park as subject, aka Fanny Price:

Fewer lines. These have escaped critics as remarks on MP Austen gathered, probably because she didn’t single them out in the folder she kept. She did not see this identification as important as it is for readers reading her (and other books like hers:

– We have called upon Miss Dusautoy & Miss Papillon & been very pretty.-Miss D. has a great idea of being Fanny Price, she & her youngest sister together, who is named Fanny. –

This could mean they want to be Fanny, they see she’s the heroine, or Miss Dusautoy fears that Austen herself has her in mind or if not her, someone like her. That would imply trepidation when the lines suggest they are delighted to be Fanny together. They recognize traits and are not at all put off. Miss Papillon is part of a family Austen saw often and makes fun of so it’s not improbable the people in the neighborhood did fear they’d find themselves in these books (another reason for anonymity in the era).

A dead baby joke. We haven’t had one of these in a while. The irritant here is her revulsion against the phoniness of the people’s professions (the sponsors) and the overt displays:

Only think of the Marquis of Granby being dead. I hope, if it please Heaven there should be another Son, they will have better Sponsors & less Parade.

For the rest we have household news. Of this we can say Austen is paying attention Sackree, a woman servant and conveys her anxieties the work she did will get there:

Sackree & the Children set off yesterday & have not been returned back upon us. They were all very well the Evening before. — We had handsome presents from the Gt House yesterday, a Ham & the 4 Leeches. — Sackree has left some shirts of her Master’s at the School, which finished or unfinished she begs to have sent by Henry & Wm. — Mr Hinton is expected home soon, which is a good thing for the Shirts

After all Sackree’s efforts Jane would not want them to get lost. Jane is described in another letter as making shirts for men. An arduous task, time-consuming, difficult. Remember how she said she wished she could buy dresses ready-made at one point. That awareness plus the servant wanting her work to acknowledged (and thus herself feel more secure).

Mrs Austen’s doings

It may be hot, but it’s going to be cold and Mrs Austen thinking ahead (a long life of required thrift here) is getting her wood in, and a wood that provides heat quickly and light (you save on candles)

– -I go tomorrow, & hope for some delays & adventures.-My Mother’s Wood is brought in — but by some mistake, no Bavins.’ She must therefore buy some. –

At the very close, her mother wants a letter from Cassandra.

And just before the very end: Triggs, the gamekeeper: a comical scene of the gamekeeper trying to cope with the birds that have been brought from elsewhere, making sure they don’t get loose, Triggs who supplied a chair to get to Bookham — did he not? Austen knows him too:

The Coach was stopt at the Blacksmith’s, & they came running down, with Triggs, & Browning, & Trunks & Bird cages. Quite amusing!

Ellen

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

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