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

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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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ASECS, Cleveland: Frances Burney at Court, overturning how we see her life-writing

Windsor Castle, Henry VIII gateway (1775) by Paul Sandby (1731-1809)

Dear friends and readers,

A third blog on the ASECS at Cleveland, one which also continues a series I’ve been writing on Frances (Burney) D’Arblay’s life-writing. As with my previous, this is just on one session. The papers were so good I managed to take more detailed notes; the second half of this blog I dedicate to providing more context by summarizing a few recent papers which are overturning a perspective on Burney’s life-writing which prevented real analysis of what’s there from going forward: Burney (FBA) may be said to have written 4 novels, the 4 traditional ones (three very fat) and a 25 volume novelization of her life.

This is the conclusion I had come to after reading through the fifth volume of the Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (1782-83), as edited by Lars Troide and Stewart Cooke, which I’m now going through slowly. As I realized in front of me were writing from at least six different sets of years, all intertwined, some obviously rewritten, interpersed with letters by others (saved by Frances or provided by an editor or editors), and accompanied by notes from different editors, I began to wonder what it was I had in front of me and how many people at different times wrote it.

The “bouleversant” perspective as outlined below allows for a whole new way of approaching the life-writing. It becomes possible to apply to it techniques hitherto reserved for the fictions. Many of our close reading techniques (coming down ultimately from I.A. Richards) depend on the idea the text is imaginative, creative, and the sites or conventions of character, setting, theme (&c) seemed inappropriate for history based on some kind of factual truth. Now we can for example, look at how Frances D’Arblay used epistolarity in her final arrangement of her books. The real problem in treating his massive new “fiction” will be it’s so large. Critics and scholars will necessarily have to deal with a couple of volumes or one phase of her life at a time.

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Detail from Vermeer, A Lady Writing

The Burney Society session began at 9:45 and there were 3 papers. Lorna Clark’s “Burney’s Methods of Narrating the Court Experience”, a result of her long work on 2 volumes of the court journals, came first. A summary (as far as I could manage it):

Frances Burney (D’Arblay) is one of the UK’s great diarists; within a few years of her death, her life-writing began to be published, first by Charlotte Barnett, a sanitized censured abridged version of 6 volumes. Kate Chisholm expressed the traditional view that what they represent was the work of a reporter, a keen observer who witnessed so much.

A new preliminary view from Clark’s own work on 2 volumes is redefining the nature of the text, reshaping our view. Contrary to the view taken of her years at court, Ms Clark suggests that the most creative and crucial years of her writing years are those at court. Burney wrote more than at any other time. Dobson pointed out that the 5 years at court take up 2 1/2 of Barrett’s 6 volumes. If we look at our present 25 rescued ones, the court journals represent 25% (or 1/4). Though the court journals are presented as a chronological account written to the present moment (the phrase is first Richardson’s), that’s a fictional device. Burney wrote up her journals 12 to 15 months later; they are creative, diverge to make into wish fulfillment versions of what happened. She would hoard notes she made obsessively, compulsively. She was herself someone who loved spontaneity and found the obsessive control of the queen’s court killing. We can see how she built up her texts fro her reaction to a meeting with George Owen Cambridge (who she had fantasized about since 1782), which he instantly hastily retreated from. Burney evades this realty, streetches out the drama into several phases (referring later on to a heart-to-heart communication). She takes his avoidance as him conforming to customs, and hiding original serious intentions. It’s an artificially heightened, carefully crafted account. This process is repeated in her depiction of her encounters with rprosecutor, William Wyndham, at the trial of Hastings; she turns these into full-scale arguments about Hastings which she wins.

She has two people for her audience and critics of her court journals: her beloved sister, Susan Burney Phillips, and her close friend, Frederica Locke; these would arrive in instalments many months after the events had occurred. Susan would respond to the tale as if she didn’t know the present situation, but only in terms of what’s narrated, most of the time as if she didn’t know what was to come, as if it were a novel. Frances was actually producing a pathetic sorrowful text. She’d write of the early days of her relationshiop with Stephen Digby much later by which time Digby was already married. What we have is a memoir developed in tranquillity [using Wordsworth's not altogether appropriate term here]; not something written to the moment where she doesn’t know what the future will bring. Claire Harman uses the phrase “super-retrospective:” we have someone not letting go of the past.

We see her doing this in 1812 where she tries to catch up to what’s happening. Frances echoes Boswell: she felt she could enjoy nothing without relating it. Again there had been 10 years where she was removed from relations and friends, this time interned in France.

If you compare the actual manuscripts to Barrett’s edition, you disover she sanitized in favor of the bland. Barrett removed the intensely effusive, the trivial and petty, some purely family news; some harsh criticism from Hester Thrale Piozzi, from the woman who married Goldsworthy (another courtier); pruned tediousness, repetition; anything too obviously egoistic. Barrett marginalized the male attention FBA made central to her stories. The summer at Cheltenham where the relationship with Digby (as a kind of Orville) is so central is cut entirely, including sentimentalized discussions, his reading of love poetry to Burney, lyrical passages of serenity, tender scenes of parting. All expunged. What FBA likes most to write about is what is removed. What appears to be a journal of George III’s illness is a journal of Digby’s courtship of FBA, which is structured as a romantic comedy in the vein of Evelina and Cecilia.

What we have is multi-layered complex re-structured life-writing
adrift in time, someone writing intensely while in isolation. The 5 years at court improved her technique enormously; she worked out something of a system for writing. After she was released from court, she quickly recovered from her depression. The court years were crucial, and what has been suppressed was we have here one of the UK’s great fictional writers masquerading as a diarist.

Ball at St James, 1786, Queen’s birthday

Elaine Bander’s paper, “Fanny, or a not-so-young lady’s entrance into the world,” was an account of FBA’s time at court from a perspective very different from that of Hester Davenport.

FBA entered the court at age 34; she was separated from her family, with no hope of marriage, her father delighted; Mary Delaney wanted FBA near her. Frances expressed her intense anguish to Susan alone; it was an exile from the country retreats at Chessington with “Daddy Crisp” where she had been so happy (a home free of the stepmother); at Mickleham with Susan, at Norbury Park with the Lockes. The ritual and customs of the court meant she had to devise strategies to get alert time to herself. the 1st year: a primary scene of battle was Mrs Schwellenberg’s tea-table. Visitors preferred to talk to Burney; FBA much preferred to spend her time with Mary Delaneybut was not able to. The way Burney survived was to sit there silently, which shocked Mary Delaney when Delaney saw it. Frances told Susan she tried to free herself by remaining aloof.

The 2nd year Burney renewed her resolve to make the best of her life; Peggy Planta (another courtier) told her they all longed to be free of the tea-table, but Delaney warned Burney not to try to make changes without the queen’s permission. In her earlier life Burney liked social assemblies, was eager to make new acquaintances; this delight in the world continued until 1784-86 when she begins to express frustration with the duties of social life. Burney began to find uncongenial the preoccupation with what’s expensive, dress and surveillance. These years saw the conflict with Hester Thrale emerge; Burney would not visit her in Bath, could not acknowledge that Piozzi was acceptable. So Hester Thrale Piozzi dropped Frances. George Owen Cambridge seems to be a real suitor, but he never declared himself. They enjoyed one another’s company sometimes deliriously; as years went on the relationship mutated; he was invited to parties and then for months he’d be absent. Frances felt the bluestockings watching her became insupportable.

So Frances began a campaign to extricate herself from her father’s socializing; she would say how tired she was. One 1784 letter shows her longing for quiet, to be by herself in the quiet, Norbury seems a refuge from George Owen Cambridge too. This new replacemtn for Chessington was lost when the Queen’s offer came; it would be 5 long hard years before she regained it.

Sandy, Windsor Forest scene

Geoffrey Sills’s paper, “Journalizing as epistolary fiction” carried the story to 1789, the year of the Court journal he is editing.

Building on Lorna Clark’s paper in the Age of Johnson on “Epistolarity in Burney,” he showed her characteristic techniques and moods as an epistolary narrator. Her writing and sending journals to Susan was more than therapeutic; she “aimed to enlist her readers’ sympathy, to reshape reality, not reflect it.” The journal’s real emphasis is the romance; FB ignores US and French revolutions, and the madness of George III mostly.

Lorna Clark tells the story of Digby’s courtship of FB. Digby’s family was socially well above Burney’s, but he was the 5th child in the family so not about to inherit a lot of money. His wife died; as he appears in the journal, he is pessimistic and melancholy when it comes to thinking about achieving happiness in life. Life resembles the “grotto of grief” in a Spectator paper of 1712. Burney’s taste did not always turn to the gothic; when she heard Walpole’s Myserious Mother read aloud, she declared it “truly dreadful” from “the atrocious guilt:” the play’s themes include incest between a son and mother, and Fb showed an indignant aversion to this “wilful” story. Another courtier, M. Charles de Guiffardiere (the queen’s French reader called by her Mr Turbulent) troubled her too with his sense of the depravity of human nature; he once grabbed her wrists to see what she was writing so she erased what she had.

The summer at Cheltenham enabled her to escape Guiffardiere and construct Digby as an ideal hero. George III’s illness figures as part of her romance. Digby burnt whatever papers he wrote; Burney presents him as a potential serious lover who stays in her room to escape the socially stultifying world; she records her emotional conflicts at night. By 1789 she was looking to Digby to rescue her; the possibility was remote; she was told about Charlotte Gunning but refused to believe Digby would marry Gunning; she insisted to herself he would remain unmarried except if forced by his family or Miss Gunning. But in December 1789 a letter from the queen with a wedding present for Digby forced her to face reality.

The several phases of her presentation of Hastings’s trial: Hastings had come to stand for ruthless colonialism; it had been expected that Pitt would stop the impeachment, but he did not. The trial lasted from 1788 for 7 years; a third to 2/3s of the peopele had died and the tide turned against making Hastings a scapegoat. Claire Harman compares FB’s recording to a transcript that appeared in the news; instead of seeing that she is miraculously getting down word-for-word just as the reporter, it could be she took the report and rewrote what she had. This enabled her to pose as a chronicle of the time; yet we know that she sent off some version to her sister & Fredy Locke quickly after the trial scenes were done. At the same time Susan was sending very long very well-written journal letters to Frances.

The texts are prisms, many sided narratives where you are locked into the stories, but once you go outside and have someone else’s take or evidence, it contradicts FBA. Charles Burney loved the second wife whom Frances claimed he never liked.

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Sandby, Waterfall — a watershed

The discussion afterward was lively and provocative (I did think of Cecilia’s project in Book 5 of that novel to leave off wasting time with “undermining” people and read much more), but I thought instead of recounting what was said I’d cite a number of texts by the people giving papers and others which argue for the same or supporting points of view on FBA’s life writing.

Claire Harman’s literary biography on Frances Burney D’Arblay is the first book centrally to use the idea that the life-writing is brilliant imaginative rewriting and journalizing. This was very courageous of her because at the time Lars Troide was the controlling force of the editing staff and he insisted in his volumes and essays that the texts were all historical records, perhaps fixed a bit, but essentially history. He kept to the story of a miraculous memory and that line of argument dominated as did he for at least a decade. Harman’s is also a very enjoyable insightful book which unlike all but Hemlow does justice to Frances D’Ablay’s later years. Julia Epstein’s The Iron Pen had voiced the idea without elaborating.

Lorna Clark has three articles in this vein: “The Diarist as Novelist: Narrative Strategies in the Journals and Letters of Frances Burney,” English Studies in Canada, 27 (2001):283-302; “Epistolarity in Frances Burney,” Age of Johnson 20 (2010):193-222; “Dating the Undated: Layers of Narrative in Frances Burney’s Court Journals,” Life-Writing Annual 3 (2012):121-42. “Epistolary” goes over the use of epistolary techniques like those we find in Richardson, which partly accounts for the immediacy of the texts, as well as how the writing of the texts themselves becomes part of the story. “Dating the Undated” seems to me the most important because there Ms Clark from her long experience of editing shows how FBA wrote her narratives much later in time, sent them to Susan who responded as a good critic-novel reader; the two were collaborating in the re-writing of FBA’s life “in a way that answered her deepest needs.” A “turmoil” is continually going on beneath the surface of all her journals; in the court years she “remains deeply traumatized and fixated on the failure of her first love affair, and her rejection by George Cambridge. When she realized that Digby would not rescue her, she broke down altogether and began her campaign to escape through illness.

Earlier accounts include Ingrid Tieken Bouvan Ostade,”Stripping the Layers: Language and content of Fanny Burney’s Early Journals,” English Studies, 72:2 (1991):146-59. Remarkably because based just on a real reading of the first of Lars Troide’s Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Ostade comes to the same conclusions as Clark and all the others I’ve cited here. She carefully distinguishes the different layers which is helpful. Here I should not omit John Wiltshire’s “Journals and Letters” in the recent Cambridge Companion to FB, ed. Peter Sabor where based on 3 of Troide and Cooke’s EJL, Joyce Hemlow and her team’s 12 volumes and filling in with Ellis and Dobson’s editions from the papers and Barrett Wiltshire sees clearly that what we have is a many layered multi-voice fictionalized life-writing.

Paul Sandby, an untitled genre scene

I had high hopes for two further articles which disappointed me. One by Kathryn Kris, “A 70 Year Follow-up of a Childhood Learning Disability: the case of Fanny Burney,” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1983 (34):637-53, I thought might be of real help, from a psychoanalytical periodical, supposedly showing her compulsion to write the result of her 8 year dislexia and the humiliations it caused; it made a little stir in Burney studies, where people acknowledged she was “onto something,” but then anxiously hurried to deny FBA was disabled permanently or even at all. The essay itself was written in such a mild tactful it was almost useless. It didn’t convince because Kris was unwilling frankly to discuss FBA’s lifelong writing of her life as a fictionalized novel where much that we have is made up and starting with the court years written much later with the addition new habit of going back to earlier years and rewriting these to some extent too.

I also thought I’d like Linda Lang Peralta’s “Clandestine Delight: Frances Burney’s Life-Writing,” in Women’s Life-Writing: Finding Voice/Building Community (Bowling Green State University Press, 1997):23-43. Peralta’s idea — very reasonable — was that the persona or mood and attitude of FBA changed over time. I’d noticed this many times and know I prefer the later FBA, especially the woman who wrote the journal-letters of her time in Europe where she follows, stays near, and finally rescues her husband from Waterloo. Her later writing is more emotional, franker, more openly melancholy and yearning. But Peralta is taken by the work of Mary Field Belenky which purports to give a scientific documentary basis to Carol Gilligan’s book on a different psychology and development for women. The problem is it’s not scientific; Belenky claims too she did this working out with a team of women who wonderfully came to the same conclusions. It’s all Utopian (one can see that some of the women dominated over the others) and the schemes are too rigid and upbeat. The essay is good when it does into specifics, e.g., accounting for say Burney at the time she rejects Madame de Stael upon the advice of her father, but as a general account is not persuasive.

Among other things, what is happening is the Burney people are admitting that John Wilson Croker’s famous attack on Burney that it was impossible for her to have remembered so much, and the work was a fiction. Also the assertions of the few who had themselves witnessed the events told in the diaries or knew people who had and had told them something of them that FBA’s account was very far from an accurate record. We need to say that the value of the writing is in its imaginative realization.

Ellen

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ASECS, Cleveland: how to write a biography & women’s travel memoirs

Sir, the biographical part of writing is what I like best — Johnson as quoted by Boswell

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve written about the social life and place of this year’s ASECS meeting in Cleveland; now I’ll turn to some notes on the sessions and papers. I discover that I have rather more notes than usual on three related sessions: Biographies, travel-writing, and “Frances Burney at court” (this combines life-, travel and fiction writing). So I’ll begin by transcribing my notes from just two of these three panels and on another day go on to Frances D’Arblay (once again).

I’m with Johnson: there’s nothing I enjoy reading more than a superb literary biography or someone’s life-writing when well done; and I think the author or artist remains central to how we understand their art. All the forms of life-writing as an art first emerged in the long 18th century. . I bring together two really marvelous and informative sessions on writing biography and 18th century women travelers.

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Charles-Joseph Natoire (1700-77)

Eight in the morning on Thursday and after pouring myself a coffee in the central meeting area, I went off to a room on the side to listen to five people tell of their experience in writing a biography. Reed Benhamou was the chair and began: how does one write a biography? She wanted to learn things about the authors she was devoting her life to and for herself she felt she had to like her subject. So she chose Charles-Joseph Natoire, a French painter and director of the French academy in Rome. She wanted to re-insert him among his peers, and she examined known cases where he was accused of unfairness, bigotry, expelling a student unfairly.

Vin Carretta who wrote a life of Olauda Equiano (using the autobiography) and edited the poems of and wrote a biography of Phillis Wheatley. He soon found he needed a methodology: “trust but verify.” One of his subjects had written an autobiography and so he had to re-construct the puzzle where pieces are missing using this text. You have to cope with problematic and contradictory evidence. What do you do with critics today? Prof Carretta felt the best biographies move straightforwardly, and the problem is you can be tempted to fill your narrative too strongly with reception history or allow yourself to spend too much time answering literary critics. He mentioned that people had looked at Equiano as a precursor of Frederick Douglas; he wanted to show how Equiano had dealt with previous biography. As to Phillis Wheatley, With enslaved women their identity is reached through property papers; married, their existence can be buried. You must turn to her poetry.

Gene Hammond wanted to write about Swift as a humanist. His problems included what do you do with a series of letters widely apart in time. Where is it best to cover something? Where is it best to cover something? Swift is said to have been deserted by his mother between the ages 6 and 18; he looked at shipping records to see if she ever visited him; he found Swift’s grandmother did. Esther was illegitimate and thought Swift would marry her; they probably had an affair, and when he didn’t marry her, she threatened blackmail or to kill herself. When Swift later in life tells of his young years, you must put the information in the young years, yet the writing reflects the time it’s written in. How seriously do you take letters? His most powerful influential years were 1710-14 and later he tried to help those women who wanted to to flee the noxious town. Biography is also a story of several characters.

Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz (1772–1816

Kathryn Libin told a story about how after the communist party lost control (1989), she was hired to come to Czechoslovakia to inventory the private music papers of the wealthy Lobkowicz family. She asks us to imagine her sitting on the floor of the local large library surrounded by the papers of a Prince Lobkowicz of the Habsburg empire who had been Beethoven’s patron. The family had collected thousands of sheets of music. There had been no archivist. The archive is rich beyond belief and she has been formulating a chronology. Her difficulties included access, the ancientness of some of the materials. Her talk centered on the actual circumstances in which a research project is carried out and how that affects what the biographer can write.

Anastasia Robinson (1692-1755)

Kathryn Lowere’s subject is the 18th century soprano and actress, Anastasia Robinson. There is a story Robinson was born in Italy, her father died, and she had gone into a theater for first time in a long time. Lowere found fashion to be helpful chronological evidence. Anastasia was involved in Queen Anne’s court as a vocalist-musician and when the planes went down she broadened her appeal by learning to sing Italian opera too. This to carry on earning a living. She knew a lot of people (Mary Delany, Italian diplomats), lived in an English nunnery; her Catholicism is often marginalized in biographical sketches of her. Her letters are scattered everywhere (she is known to have asked Handel to rewrite her letters).

There was then general discussion among the panelists, and ideas thrown out: epigraphs can help you start a chapter; when a person’s life has gaps, you have to decide how much context outside to give. Who do you think your core readership is going to be controls what you write. Every biographer has to deal with a series of specific issues. Leave no stone unturned. You have the right to take control of your narrative. You can treat something as a mystery as long as you are forthright about it. When and where people are born limits their life’s choices. You can write a biography of someone from different people’s points of view.

The audience did join in: a few people told of their projects and the art of biography was defended as the basis of understanding a writer or his or her text in fundamental common sense ways. I told of my work on later 17th century women’s life-writing, Anne Finch, and how I had to have a story of a life in my mind to annotate Anne Murray Halkett’s remnant autobiography and the poems I have translated by Colonna and Gambara.

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Later that day (11:30) I went to a marvelously informative session on a form of writing related to biography and autobiography: travel-writing is a special form of memoir. This particular set were by women, where 3 were seen as offering knowledge of “exotic” places (Fay, Clive, Falconbridge), 1 seemed wildly adventurous (Ashbridge) and a last by someone thought to be a poetic genius and is filled with intelligent political thought (Radcliffe). They are all joined by the reality that what influences them most on their journey is the male closest to them. Abusive male sexuality, a domineering presence, or (in the case of the lucky Radcliffe), a kindly husband who is equally intellectual but just as cautious. This relationship remains what counts most — unless the woman goes out on her own.

Melissa Antonucci spoke about Elizabeth Ashbridge’s (1713-55) conversion narrative as moving into “self-authorship.” Ms Antonucci felt that women who move away from home to another place, usually stay, and develop for themselves a new world and life. When a girl Ashbridge had a love affair that made her resolve to elope with him; he died young, and what was left were painful memories. She found herself financially destitute, homeless, and relied on neighbors until she left for Ireland for the first time. She seems to have remarried a stocking weaver, and had a conversion experience into Quakerism. She went to the US through indentured servitude, and when she got there was sold illegally by a man called Sullivan whom she did not love. They moved to Rhode Island, and again she joins with someone who is not good for her. She and her husband kept moving, partly because the husband wanted to jolt her out of her religious piety. They go from Boston to Pennsylvania. A story is told of how her husband tried to get her to dance at an inn and she refused. They went on to Freehold as teachers, again among Quakers, and he threatens to kill her. They moved again and she genuinely tries to reform him, but he gets drunk, enlists, moves to Cuba. He died. She returned to Ireland and became an itinerent Quaker preacher. Ms. Antonucci suggested an early exclusion from the dominant community had led to Ashbridge choosing quakerism and here she could “share the light” with like-minded people.

Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)

JoEllen Delucia discussed Ann Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794. Ms Delucia suggested this text feels anomalous after her gothics, but that this text has gothic, picturesque and sublime description. Radcliffe availed herself of antiquarian sources and history, and held onto her native tongue. Mr Delucia felt this book was written to change the way people were regarding Radcliffe who wanted to present herself as British foremost. In her journeys Radcliffe comes close to genuine want, hunger, and does not seek to be picturesque. She goes through zones of war and sieges and suggests that as a nation we are an artificial construct, easily dismantled bit by bit. She also knew fear: she and her husband were stopped at the Switzerland boundaries, and the roughness with which they were treated made both of them fear imprisonment in a place where the individual has no or few rights. So they turned round and went home. As far as she gets Switzerland is described sublimely. In the later journal (it’s not clear when she went) through English lake district she was seen to anticipate Wordsworth and looks at her books once again and seeks history and place. Ms Delucia’s insight was to notice how the aesthetic categories of Radcliffe’s usual modes dissolve away once she moves into an imaginative passionate encounter with experience, history, past people.

I suggested afterward that the Journey book is not anomalous but rather another way of presenting the same violent and disquieting matter. Even in the lake district she visits dungeons and shows how rituals are forms of tyranny. Ms Delucia agreed that the Journey book is another face of the same gothic artist.

Henrietta Clive, Countess of Powis (1758-1830)

Mona Narain told us about two women British travel-writers who went to India: first, Eliza Fay. Fay’s book was published posthumously. Fay was alone, a daughter of a sailor; she had married “up”, a lawyer who hoped to prosper with her. The marriage was unhappy; he had an Indian mistress and child. She conveys her personal feelings. When she and her husband were imprisoned for a short time, she seemingly couldn’t believe treatment could be this bad. Later she finds her husband cannot make a living as a colonist, most cope with his intemperate behavior, and slowly return home (England). She discovers she is more at risk from her husband’s failures than from Indian people about them. Henrietta Clive published more than her travel book; at the time of her arrest by her husband she was reading Birds of Passage. Gender is but one valence by which we understand a travel book: class position, reasons for travel, stance in writing all affect and shape the process and thus product. She shows us the national pleasures, cultural aspirations, and argues for spontaneity and heterogeneity. Her aspiration is everywhere. Seh married Edward, Lord Clive’s oldest son who was appointed governor of Madras; they travelled richly with a huge retinue to impress the Nawab. Nonetheless Lady Clive wanted to return home but they had to stay to recover costs and get out of debt. She learns material circumstances are not enough as a basis for existence and that she was fooled by Mary Montagu’s Turkish Letters. Her framework with her husband fell apart too. For both women male sexuality was central to their experience, and they find they can activate their own agency only by travelling alone.

Elizabeth Zold’s topic was Anna Marie Falconbridge’s (1769-1816?) 2 voyages to Sierrra Leone. For the rest of this summary see comments.

Ellen

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The problematic nature of life-writing & Frances (Burney) D’Arblay’s on-going ever-changing epistolary novel

Frontispiece of an inexpensive 1854 7 volume reprint of Charlotte Barrett’s edition of her aunt’s life-writing

Dear friends and readers,

A careful reading of the 5th volume of the Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 1782-83, ed. Lars Troide, Stewart Cooke, gets me thinking about the multi-level problematic nature of all life-writing, especially Frances D’Arblay’s.

I am wondering if this or the other volumes can be said to have had a single or even a double author. Volume 5 has several including Frances at several stages of her life. This is not just a matter of how far Frances D’Arblay later re-wrote her early life-writing books or at the time made up what she was putting down, but when did she do it. There is the year of the first brief entries: 1782-83 when she was Burney. There is the time after her husband’s death in 1817 when he conjured her to go back to the life-writing and write up everything. Then she is writing in the 1830s, when, as D’Arblay, she is known to have rewritten much or written up for the first time and did destroy much of her father’s writing insofar as she could and wrote her own autobiography as his biography. I’ve seen so much evidence to show she revised and imagined over and over, coming back with inserts at a later time again and again. Frances as Burney and then D’Arblay inserts the letters she was responding to or talking about; she inserts letters that shed light on what her letter is about; she is thinking of us, her later reader she’s planning on. She destroys thinking of us too.

She dies and others get to work. 1841 when Charlottte Barrett
made the first edition and used the term “Diaries.” She emphasizes the Evelina, Streatham and Court journal years. Then the later 19th century, with an edition of earlier journals than CB started with by Annie Raine Ellis, and the new re-editions by Dobson. The small amount of the later years known are again re-done, this time rescuing much destroyed or half-destroyed material in the 1980s, with three different teams doing it — under Joyce Hemlow. Then in the 21st century under Lars Troide, there’s a return to 1768 and a newly determined “full book.” Now with Troide’s retirement, Peter Sabor and Stewart Cooke seem to have taken over as general editors. Each time there’s something of a name change.

Not only are we back to Frances since the retierment of Troide, the silence over how much is made up, or the stubborn insistence that Frances had a miraculous memory such as is rarely seen so that we are to believe if not her every word, her every nuance or implication.

The kind of recent changes I’m thinking about is seen in both Betty Rizzo’s heavily-annotated fourth volume (Streatham, 1780-1781) and Lars Troide’s 5th. Just one small example, Troide (and Stewart?) seem to belive that Hester Thrale and Frances Burney were not that close friends at the time — I see all sort of tones and evidence that there really had been intimate liking and trust and closeness. Well, what is done is Troide inserts in a footnote a diary entry by Hester Thrale Piozzi 17 days after she has sent strong praise to Burney about Cecilia. The letter to Burney shows Hester remembering the characters, living through them, admiring this and that in the book, showing that it came alive in her mind. The footnote (not to Burney) is strongly critical and suggest the book is limited: the types of characters are time-bound and the novel will not live. The effect is to make Hester seem insincere when she’s writing Burney. This is making a different story from the one we’d come away with were we not to have this note.

It’s the insert that makes this effect. There are so many different kinds of motives for these inserts and erasures. I’ve now read a long one by Betty Rizzo where she (in effect) lambasts James Burney for his rebellious behavior which was but one reason his promotion was delayed. In comparison, Troide is silent when Frances tells Susan about Jem’s struggles and politicking.

Eventually Susan’s husband so outrageously mistreated her, it’s not exaggerating to say he caused her early death

And I’ve noticed that Frances does not reprint her sister, Susan’s letters nor insert them, and the editors have followed suit. They can now use them for a separate two volume edition of Susan’s life-writing, but originally they probably just imitated Frances. But why did she leave these out? Was her sister quickly not as happy as she asserts? it seems so if her sister’s need for her and then the other sister come to subsitute is a sign.

John Wiltshire in a particularly insightful essay in The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney on the journals and letters in a throw-away line says the editors have continued the tradition, begun by Barrett, of making an epistolary novel by many people, constructed out of materials gathered together. I own a copy of Barrett’s book and read much of it some years ago. To me it read like a mid-19th century epistolary novel, differentiated from others by the determined innocence of the perspective of the editor. Wiltshire’s comment reminded me of Richardson who said writing Clarissa gave him such pleasure because he could personate so many voices and then the reader could enter into contrasted characters. These modern editors think of themselves as so objective, trying to present truth’s full complexity. But these are books in the tradition of the niece, Charlotte Barrett’s 6 volume book?

So who is novel-making here?

Come to that in Burney D’Arblay’s case of voluminous writing, to what extent are the novels life-writing? In the 5th volume, when Frances finishes her re-writing of Cecilia, her corrections, and it is published, she refers her sister, Susna, to Cecila’s “project” in the 5th volume of the novel where Cecilia vows not to waste her time on ignorant “underminers of existence” (people who are vain, proud, people who drive you to network, to waste time) but instead follow her own spirit in reading and enjoying the deeper pleasures of existence among friends and in solitude. Unfortunately that’s just what Frances Burney didn’t do when she took a job at court. But she means to. The section shows she wrote Cecilia as an alter-ego.

So where does life-writing end and how are we to judge it? I have yet to read the article suggesting an early experience of disability partly accounts for Frances’s long-time compulsive writing. So much to do, so much to think about when writing a review of such enrichened life-writing.

Of course I have in mind what we’ve seen in Austen’s life-writing, only there the problematical nature of the life-writing takes on a very different aspect: among other things, she didn’t live to doctor the stuff, others did …

Ellen

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Austen’s letter 98: 5-8, Sat-Tues, March 1814, Henrietta St to Chawton, Jane to Cassandra

Excellent Letters; & I am sure he must be an excellent Man. They are such-thinking, clear, considerate Letters as Frank might have written …

Aunt Jane (Olivia Williams) and Fanny Austen (Imogen Poots) conspiring
(Miss Austen Regrets 2008)

Dear friends and readers,

Another two weeks, another letter. Two days have passed since the last letter, and we have an even more snowy journal letter. It consists of four entries over 4 days; she begins on Saturday, and for the next three days, the day she sits down again is underlined: Sunday, Monday,Tuesday. This time it’s confusing to go strictly chronologically (close read in the order of the letter) as the letter is disjointed, moving back and forth associatively and according an immediate stimulus; but to go thematically altogether loses the sense of context. So I move back and forth.

Topics include: personal relationships that count, two court cases, snowy weather, literary remarks. This is interwoven with telling of social visiting (or entertaining the courted Fanny Austen Knight), theater going, visits, walking, shopping and clothes.

Here is the full text.

The particular interest of the letter is Henry is reading Mansfield Park and Austen watching him keenly; he tries to please her. She has begun Emma; Emma is on her mind and we see her going to the theater where she sees plays that influenced her conception and shows familiarity with a number of actor and singer’s careers; Robert Wm Elliston, Edmund Kean, Catherine Stephens.

Robert Wm Ellison

It may not be a coincidence that she named her secondary heroine, Miss Smith, after seeing a Miss Smith on the stage.

Young men are courting her niece, Fanny, and she must stand by, be chaperon, facilitator, watch Fanny make choices she would not make, go out in the snow to keep Fanny active. Edward is involved in two court cases and writing a woman friend. She is famously unimpressed by Byron’s Corsair and plots her and Cassandra’s movements around what they surmize Henry wants and, together with Madame Bigeon, are sure to get raspberry jam for him.

I am again close reading with Diana Birchall.

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Ford Madox Ford, The Corsair’s Return (1870): Pre-Raphaelite painting of an episode from Byron’s The Corsair

We might compare this rapid getting down of journal entries, to be sent to her sister, to Frances to her sister, Susan. The comparison falls down here, though, as I do not recall Fanny Burney ever apologizing to Susan for writing to her or deprecating her anger or scolding for writing too much. “Do not be angry with me for beginning another Letter to you.” Jane and Cassandra’s relationship is still fraught with opposing attitudes and needs.

Diana remarked: “It is two days since the last letter, and Jane Austen is still at Henrietta Street. And she begins with one of her most famous sayings: ‘I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do.’ This is usually taken to mean that she was not overly impressed by Byron, and we can easily imagine it would have been a very Sir Walter Elliot/Admiral Croft situation (“reciprocal compliments, which would have been esteemed about equal”).

Since the poem quickly became well-known and was seen as seethingly exciting & lurid, Austen is making a statement by making it the equivalent of mending her petticoat. Maybe Austen senses what others feel are false titillation while they sit in their secure parlors.

Diana: “Nasty weather, “Thickness & Sleet,” and “Getting out is impossible,” but yet social life goes on. Young Wyndham Knatchbull accepts an invitation and is thought of as “he may do for Fanny,” but she will later marry his older brother, whose wife will die first. They are to see friends, Mrs. Latouche and Miss East, and to avoid Miss Harriet Moore, friend of Henry’s. A domestic detail: Henry is out of Raspberry Jam, Madame Bigeon offers some – so will Cassandra bring a pot when she comes?

They are expecting and on Sunday considerably after four o’clock Edward and Fanny arrive. For their sakes young Wyndham has been invited (for Fanny), they are stuck going to Mrs Latouche and [her daughter] Miss East in two weeks. She groans (half-dreading it already), and is not made more sociable by Miss H. Moore’s (Harriot’s note) apologizing for not returning Jane’s visit and says they (Henry and Jane) can come this evening. “Thank you says Jane” ” but we shall be better engaged.” Not keen on any of it as usual.

Edward (Pip Torrens) talking amiably with Jane (Olivia Williams (Miss Austen Regrets 2008)

In this letter we see that Fanny Austen Knight was the object of courtship by three suitors: Wildman, Wyndham, and Plumptre — not to omit the presence of George Hatton hanging around at a distance. She was an heiress, young, very conventional, pretty enough. What’s not to like? for a similar kind of male.

First, it seems that the niece did not share her aunt’s taste in men. We’ve seen this before and the first candidate is reacting to what happened before: Jane on Saturday: “Young Wyndham accepts the Invitation. He is such a nice, gentlemanlike unaffected sort of Man, that I think he may do f for Fanny; — has a sensible, quiet look which one likes.” Fanny had discouraged the young man previously, for on Sunday we read: “This young Wyndham does not come after all; a very long & very civil note of excuse is arrived. It makes one moralize upon the ups & downs of this Life … ”

As Jane turns away from, dismissed Byron’s Corsair with remarks on mending her petticoat, so on Sunday what appears to me her own disappointment — she would have enjoyed the conversation of an intelligent young man — is turn off by talk of clothes. I have determined to trim my lilac sarsenet with black sattin ribbon just as my China Crape is, 6d width at bottom, 3d or 4d at top. — Ribbon trimmings are all the fashion at Bath, & I dare say the fashions of the two places are alike enough in that point, to content me.” The “me” is underlined in the original. The whole utterance connects back. She, Jane, is content with this fashion, but not Fanny is what’s implied — just as Fanny didn’t want Mr Wyndham but Jane had looked forward to him.

But note Diana’s reading of the break aways in Jane’s later talk on the theater: “Then the inevitable topic of finery arises again, and it is amusing that a letter or two ago she was talking of how vulgar women are who wear veils, but as is only human, she now proposes to buy one herself! … More finery – lilac sarsenet, black sattin ribbon, China Crape, and the bon mot, “With this addition it will be a very useful gown, happy to go anywhere.”

Then on Sunday, the two Austens, Henry and Jane, waited until after 4. Imagine them watching clock as they sit and say read (Henry reading Mansfield Park) or write: Jane writing Emma and letter to Cassandra: a “grand thought” for her and Cassandra’s gowns (Cassandra not forgotten). The “roads were so very bad! as it was, they had 4 horses from Cranford Bridge [expensive]. Fanny was miserably cold at first, but they both seem well” — – No possibility of Edwards’s writing.” Now recall Austen has just apologized for writing again so soon, so it’s she not Cassandra who is expecting this writing. He’s had enough apparently.

The court case: Robin Vick (N&Q)explains that James Baigen, “the boy,” was 10 when he stabbed Stephen Mersh who did not die; James’s father was a yeoman farmer. Wickham who sent a letter advising a second prosecution against Edward’s view was a Rt Honorable, served on the Grand Jury under Sir Wm Heathcote for 1814 summer assizes (he’s in the DNB, diplomat, gov’t minister), recently retired a few miles from Chawton. There was no second prosecution. Chapman though there was but the later trial Austen mentions is of her brother, Charles, a court martial.

We may speculate it was two boys fighting; it’s obvious the right thing is to let him off; he’s 10 and prisons were terrible places (you could get a disease; you had to have money for food). We don’t know how old Mersh was but he was okay at the time of the trial. Mr Wickham’s letter which so entranced Jane might have been a philosophical punitive point of view (from which perspective hard to say). Wiser heads prevailed. Quietly again and again we glimpse a Tory/conservative Jane (imperialist, anti-Rousseau new ideas about children). Austen calls him and “Excellent Man” and says just such a letter would Frank have written. It might be he concedes a humane point of view well. Frank I recall was a flogger to the point he was warned he had better restrain himself.

“Excellent Letters; & I am sure he must be an excellent Man. They are such thinking, clear, considerate Letters as Frank might have written.” Were I Marianne and this an utterance by Elinor I would find her cause for starting to ask about the state of my interlocutor’s heart. Frank’s letters (those left) are simple and direct; he’s another “not clever enough to be unintelligible” so Austen would like that, and he is often humane when he writes — he remarkably writes eloquently against bombing as particularly vicious (you don’t risk yourself, you kill non-combatants who don’t have a chance against you) which is however the opposite of what Jane’s admired Paisley advocated.

There is one cross-out — it’s a reference to a Bridges named Edward. So here we have this antagonism to Edward Bridges again, this needling souring of a romance once he married his “poor Honey” (Austen’s famous nasty slur) and then seemed to show up as a flirting man to Jane. In context “Edward is quite [About five words cut out]” is not a reference to Austen’s brother but the party coming.

Frank an excellent man through and through and Edward Bridges a grating annoyance.

Frank as reflected in Jane’s Persuasion (Ciaran Hinds as Wentworth talking of Benwick to Anne Elliot)

Bridges as seen in Miss Austen Regrets: from Nokes’s reading of the letter via Gwynth Hughes’s script (Hugh Bonneville as Bridges)

So much for the aunt’s imagined male love life.

Because Edward and Fanny have come there is therefore much theater-going, visiting and visitors, which requires fixing clothes and shopping with local news from Edward and his worries over a coming lawsuit seeking to unseat him from Godmersham, indeed take all his income. Looking ahead thematically to the other court case mentioned later in the letter: Austen was not correct as Edward did not escape the lawsuit; his opponents did not “knock under” easily but had to be paid a cool 20,000 pounds before they would go away. Before Wyndham’s letters arrives, it is good to see both Edward and Jane agreed on not prosecuting the boy further. I note Edward is friendly first with Fanny Cage and now Louisa. He keeps writing to Louisa. I take it he did think about remarrying, but 11 children and one dead wife was enough (as we are told in the family hearsay)

Diana on Sunday: “Some observations of Fanny, how she liked Bath, the play, the Rooms, the company, the accounts of Lady B. After a break, Jane writes, “Now we are come from Church, & all going to write.” She continues, remarking that everyone has been in mourning (for the Queen’s brother), “but my brown gown did very well.” Another mention of General Chowne from the last letter, “he has not much remains of Frederick,” she says, belaboring the joke that probably refers to his playing that part in Lovers Vows. Young Wyndham makes his excuses after all, and Jane exclaims mock-melodramatically, “It makes one moralize upon the ups & downs of this Life …

Back to domestic matters – buttonholes, travel (Cassandra will travel post at Henry’s expense), a rise in the cost of tea, and inquiries about the Mead and a cook. Then she moves on to Monday …”

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

Temple of Bellona, kew Gardens, London in winter

In numerous passages in this letter Austen registers the state of the snow.

Sunday as they wait: “Getting out is impossible. It is a nasty day for everybody. Edward’s spirits will be wanting Sunshine, & here is nothing but Thickness & Sleet; and tho’s these two rooms are delightfully warm I fancy it is very cold abroad.”

Monday: “Here’s a day! The Ground covered with snow! What is to become of us?– we were to have walked out early … Mr Richard Snow is dreadfully fond of us. I dare say he has stretched himself out at Chawton too.”

Gentle reader, have you ever been on a vacation or holiday with people about whom you are kind of burden you must entertain and the weather gets in the way. What shall she do with Fanny who wants thrills and people. Go out anyway. And close reading has turned up another negative use of Richard. I should add that to my blog on negative Richards in Austen’s fiction and non-fiction (from clergyman to Dick who if the Musgraves had any sense they are better off without)

They went as far as Coventry anyway but that was it; they had to put a visit to Spensers off: “It was snowing the whole time”.

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Henry Austen (Jo Anderson) takes his sister, Jane (Anne Hathaway) to the theater (Becoming Jane, 2007)

It’s in this section we again have signs of this awkwardness between her and Henry or Henry and everyone. He does not say what he wants to do. They cannot just ask him it seems. They must listen carefully for hints. Now Jane realizes by this “careful listening” that Henry really wants to go to Godmersham for a few days before Easter & has promised to do it.”

This being the case Cassandra need not worry she’ll have to stay in London after Adlestrop and she must hurry to come. Indeed it might work out easier if she Jane does not return from Streatham to meet with Cassandra to go home to Chawton but rather Cassandra can join her at Streatham.

Such a “great comfort” to “have got at the truth.” Really? She means temporary relief.

They are very chary around this prickly Henry. And she falls to working out that Henry cannot leave for Oxfordshire before the Wednesday which will be the 23rd — we are talking two weeks ahead and more and he is a mercurial man. That I do agree, mercurial is the word for him (reminding me of Henry Crawford in these movements of his). If he does, they will still not have many days together. It seems she would like to enjoy London with Cassandra and this is not something the sisters are openly willing to admit. They are to be used by others first.

Henry is meanwhile omnipresent as he is in all the letters — coming down the stairs — where she lives with him. She’s intently aware of his presence. Maybe he’s only mentioned twice, but we are to recall (as Cassandra would) that Gen Chowe is a Tilson, and therefore Henry’s business partner. He makes the second directly literary remark of the letter:

– Henry has this moment said that he likes my M.P. better & better; he is in the 3rd vole. — I believe now he has changed his mind as to foreseeing the end; — he said yesterday at least, that he defied anybody to say whether H.D. would be reformed, or would forget Fanny in a fortnight.

Jane pleased; he’s gotten the point. The novel is built on real life contingency, and Henry from all we’ve seen no one to trust at all. Despite her fears that the first part of the novel, the play acting, would be seen as far more entertaining, Henry has in fact liked the courtship and ball part and Portsmouth too. he says “better and better.” That must have pleased her too.

No raspberry Jam for the master of the house says Mme de Bigeon. Cannot Cassandra bring a pot? She is still recording Henry’s state of health as dubious: as he comes down the stairs, “seems well, his cold does not increase.”

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Edmund Kean (1787-1833) as Shylock

Austen jumps about as usual (writing associatively) and when Henry comes over “just this moment” to make his remark about MP which means he’s reading it while she’s writing this late Sunday entry (late in the evening we must imagine) her mind reverts to “Kean” who “I shall like to see again excessively, & to see him with You too; it appeared to me as if there were no fault in him anywhere; & his scene with Tubal was exquisite acting.”

So she’s moved by the man’s loss of his daughter. This is a new attitude (I did talk today of how there is no monolithic 18th century).

Sarah Smith Bartley by Samuel Lane

We were quite satisfied with Kean. I cannot imagine better acting, but the part was too short, & excepting him & Miss Smith [Sarah Bartley], & she did not quite answer my expectation, the parts were ill filled & the Play heavy. [We were too much tired to stay for the whole of Illusion (Nourjahad) which has 3 acts;-there is a great deal of finery & dancing in it, but I think little merit. Elliston was Nourjahad, but it is a solemn sort of part, not at all calculated for his powers. There was nothing of the best Elliston about him. I might not have known him, but for his voice.-

Diana: "A spirited discussion of an evening at the theatre; about Kean she says enthusiastically "I cannot imagine better acting," but apart from that "the parts were ill filled & the Play heavy." They were too tired to stay and see another spectacle, "the whole of Illusion (Nourjahad) which has 3 acts; - there is a great deal of finery & dancing in it, but I think little merit." Theatrical evenings must have been lengthy! She writes animatedly of the actor William Robert Elliston. "Elliston was Nourjahad, but it is a solemn sort of part, not at all calculated for his powers. There was nothing of the best Elliston about him. I might not have known him, but for his voice." Jane Austen has seen him before, more than once; and we may satisfy our curiosity on the subject because the "Austen Only" blog has an excellent piece on him and what Jane would have seen and known.

I'll add that Nourjahad would be one of these oriental allegories, perhaps ultimately from Francis Sheridan. Kean was in temporary decline by this time. We see in the life Diana said how hard life was for theater people. Theater was a many-hour experience, with the first play, afterpieces -- often mocking. She did not like the performance of MofV except for Shylock, "heavy".

Catherine Stephens

On Monday they went again and saw "The Devil to Pay" a comic farce. "I expect to be very amused. -- Except Miss Stephens [later Countess of Essex], I dare say Artaxerxes will be very tiresome.” so she saw Dora Jordan who was said to be inimitable in farce (Coffey’s Devil to Pay). She’s not keen on the pantomime or famous clown cited by LeFAye, but now likes the actress she expects to see best.

Penny Gay and Paula Byrne in their respective books about Jane Austen and the theater have written about this farce and the comedy. Gay provides a picture of Dora Jordan in the role (p 21). Remember she was then living with the prince and often pregnant; so this is idealized. Bryne goes on about Jordan and makes much much more about Austen’s remarks on the play here. I see nothing in Austen’s letter to justify saying that she is using her time at the theater as a point of reference. The point of references are the people around her who matter to her, their strong concerns (next time Fanny and her beaux) and hers (her book which Henry is reading, Edwards’ problems and doings, with Frank as our star to aspire towards).

The last reference to the theater is on Farmer’s Wife by Dibdin which again has Miss Stephens, the entry is Tuesday . Read the lines: Austen is going to see Miss Stephens and does not think the interest she feels warrants a Box which Henry wants:

Mr J PLumptre joined us the later part of the Evening — walked home with us, ate some soup, & is very earnest for our going to Covent Garden again tonight to see Miss Stephens in the Farmer’s Wife. He is to try for a Box. I do not particularly wish him to succeed. I have had enough for the present.

Mr J. Plumptre is one of the suitors vying for Fanny’s hand. Wildman, Wyndham, Mr Plumptre. He was the suitor used in Miss Austen Regrets as he did get further and they were serious for a while — we will see this in Austen’s later letters. Plumptre clearly wants to go to the theater to be with Fanny and he is getting a box to please Fanny and her family. As the article cited by LeFaye in the notes will tell you it’s not The Farmer’s Wife that influenced Emma, but The Birthday which is a translation from Koetzbue anyway, not a farce either.

Byrne does deal with The Birthday, but Margaret Kirkham’s section on Emma on both Barrett’s burlesque novel, The Heroine, and Koetzbue’s play and Dibdin’s free translation is much more to the point. See JA, Feminism and Fiction

Dora Jordan as Rosalind by John Hoppner

Not to say that Dora Jordan is not of real interest as a performer and for her life story as a woman of Austen’s time (see Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography). She worked very hard, lived well for a short time, very well, but she was providing the ready money, and then she was dumped, was badly treated at the end, her children taken from her. She had no rights that were respected at all. But Austen does not mention her name. It’s Miss Smith who disappoints her and Miss Stephens whom Austen says goes to the theater for — as well as Edmund Kean.

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From Diana’s conclusion: “By a little convenient listening,” she tells Cassandra candidly, “I now know that Henry wishes to go to Godmersham for a few days before Easter, & has indeed promised to do it.” This gives Cassandra fore knowledge, so she and Jane can better contrive and make plans. “It is a great comfort to have got at the truth,” says Jane. A very clear glimpse of what maneuverings and uncertainties surround their movements.

Now who gave her the ermine tippet? “You cannot think how much my Ermine Tippet is admired both by Father & Daughter. It was a noble Gift.” Father and daughter being Edward and Fanny I suppose.

A knitted tippet for ladies

A brief mention of the lawsuit Edward would become involved in, not amounting to anything yet. In the next sentence she anticipates seeing The Devil to Pay, and expecting to be very much amused. Artaxerxes she dares to say will be tiresome. More finery – “I have been ruining myself in black sattin ribbon with a proper perl edge; & now I am trying to draw it up into kind of Roses, instead of putting it in plain double plaits.” This has to do with Caps, very fancy affairs at that date.

Now she hastily and effusively thanks Cassandra for a letter, and passes on news and messages from Edward – he is amazed at “64 Trees,” and gives directions about a Study Table that is to arrive at Chawton. The evening has been rather tiresome: “Mr. Hampson dined here & all that,” and she was “very
tired of Artaxerxes,” as she thought she would be, though “highly amused with the Farce, & in an inferior way with the Pantomime that followed.” Mr. Plumptre wants them to go to Covent Garden the next night to see Miss Stephens in The Farmer’s Wife. “He is to try for a Box. I do not particularly
wish him to succeed. I have had enough for the present,” Jane Austen finishes.

Her appetite for plays and London is evidently not insatiable.

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Fanny and Mr Plumptre (Tom Hiddleston) dancing at Godmersham, Jane in background (Miss Austen Regrets 2008)

If you go through the thread of just this you discover that much of it is the result of trying to entertain Fanny amid the persistent snow and the mentions of clothes come up either as a way to turn away from the disappointed romancing (Jane is the one sometimes disappointed as when Wyndham doesn’t come) or fill out where she is bored or to address Cassandra.

Skating Lovers, around 1800

So Jane is not only trying to satisfy Fanny but is soothing Cassandra whose letter arrives the very moment they return from the theater and she hastens to thank her. So good of her, “Thank you thank you.” Casssandra home with Cassy with those fleas. There might seem to be a disconnect here because at the opening Jane is so worried lest Cassandra get angry at her writing. But there is not.

What we have in Austen in this letter is someone trying to please others. No wonder she didn’t get to write as much as we’d like (or she would have).

In this letter the underlying temperament is closer to Fanny Price and Anne Elliot than many would be willing to acknowledge … she is trying to get out of the time there what she can. She likes Miss Stephens, she likes Kean, she likes the landscape. She does not tell us about her writing Emma – that’s hers to keep unspoiled. She is working with Madame Bigeon and Cassandra to supply Henry with raspberry jam.

There Jane did not have to produce acquaintances, she could make them up. There her satire could make her powerful — within limits for after all the NA manuscript was not returned. I sympathize very much.

Olivia Williams as Jane Austen taking deep pleasure in seeing her books

in the prince’s library as laid out kindly by his librarian, Mr Clark (Miss Austen Regrets 2008)

Ellen

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Frances (Burney) d’Arblay: “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose … “; Thaddeus & McMaster & Kris

Frances Burney by her cousin, Edward Francesco Burney (c. 1784-85)

Friends and readers,

My subjects: We ought to be calling “Fanny Burney” Frances D’Arblay with Burney in parenthesis because of the long mistakenlly Anglo nomenclature — the choice of “Burney” privileges her English family and Anglo-side; a review of Thaddeus’s Literary Life (good on criticism, but presentist; excellent article by McMaster on Camilla, and Kathryn Kris’s insightful article on Frances as having a disability: the article has needed explanatory power.

It’s time to confide something: it’s not just the reading over the past two weeks that has brought to the surface my conviction that we ought to be calling Fanny Burney Frances d’Arblay; rather seeing that Burneyites are still fighting over this, and coming across different ways of referring to Miss Burney, I decided I might as well stop this discretion which has made me chose the half-way house of Fanny Burney D’Arblay. I agree we can no longer call her Madame d’Arblay, the name she apparently choose for her memoirs as brought out by her niece, Charlotte Barrett. Certainly we’re not going to go around referring to her as “Frances Piochard d’Arblay, otherwise La Comtesse veuve Piochard d’Arblay,” the way she signed herself in her last quarter century of life. But the great happiness of her life began at her marriage, she called herself d’Arblay ever after, she chose Frances for public life. Burney in parenthesis preserves the tradition of her as Burney for scholars. I suggest it was chosen to make her sound English and differentiate her from French women writers and emphasize her family and father. Since then there’s been readers calling themselves Burneyites and using the parenthesis keeps them in the picture (they would not want to be D’Arblayites and it’s too late anyway); it does preserve the link central to her life of her brilliant clan.

You think I’m mad. Have a look at the Burney Centre website at McGill. I am morally persuaded that the Burney team did not go on to do a 6th Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney when Lars Troide retired because they wanted to change her name. They skipped the two years and renamed what was to be the 7th in the set as The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney until 1791, when Joyce Hemlow’s later 12 volume Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney begins. They will then return to the end of the story of George Owen Cambridge’s ambiguous romancing of Frances Burney and the tragic misery of the lead-in to her taking up the position of Keeper of Robes for Charlotte, queen of George III, to be called Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney. In the introduction to my Vol 5 she is no longer called Fanny even if the title of the volume to be uniform is Early Letters and Journals of Fanny Burney. She is Frances (Fanny) Burney.

But it’s hypocritical to leave off the last name she wanted too. I suppose the Madame d’Arblay grates as the Victorian icon, but we can drop the Madame as is nowadays done for 17th through 19th century French gentry women of letters. Fanny Burney d’Arblay is contradictory. I have discovered here and there a simply “Frances d’Arblay” in my reading.

And we might as well admit she loved big hats. When she does not have a big hat on in her portraits, she wears a wig and her hair piled so high, it’s like a crown.

Frances is also drawn by her cousin in a straw bonnet: these from The Duchess (Keira Knightley and Hayley Atwell, Georgiana and Bess Foster)

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From Juniper Hall: the layout of the world that allowed Frances to create a life she liked

The last couple of days I more or less finished Janice Farrar Thaddeus’s Frances Burney: A literary life, read again in chapters and essays and other books, most notably the best essay I’ve read on Burney in a while: Juliet McMaster’s “The Silent Angel: Impediments to Female Expression in Frances Burney’s Novel,” Studies in the Novel, 21:3 (1989):235-252. I thought I’d report on these tonight — to help my thinking.

Thaddeus book has value: she does situate Frances Burney in the context of recent literary critical traditions, and for each of her sections she briefly reviews the critical outlook for each novel or phase of d’Arblay’s existence. Since Joyce Hemlow’s restoration of Frances Burney’s life and later papers, the feminist movement has rescued Frances; some of the finest essays and work on her has been by feminists. It begins in the 1970s with Rose Marie Cutting’s “defiant woman” and her revaluation of The Wanderer.

Alongside this is the supposed apolitical criticism. The first stage (Hemlow, Sherburn, Hester Davenport, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Kate Chisholm): This gives us a Fanny who enacts a conduct-book woman. “The fear of doing wrong” is what controls her behavior. In her Imagining a Self, Spacks was able to use a reading of the dynamics of fear in Burney to elevate the value of the novels over the journals and diaries, take The Wanderer seriously: “more clearly [much more] than the letters and diaries, the novels betray her anger at the female condition.” She was unable to “integrate her deep perceptions of the female condition into a believable fiction and instead set up fiction as a debate between defiant insightful women and silent exemplary conduct-book heroines who suffer a helluva lot.

Second stage is a double Burney emphasizing the violence underlying the controlled surface. Now it’s fear responding to outside forces. Repressed desire also creates narratives where the point of view that matters comes out indirectly — in the masculine” Mrs. Selwyn, the outspoken Mrs. Arlbery, and the rebellious Elinor Joddrel. In the novels “volcanic spillage produced when female desire is yoked to the service of female propriety.” Here we have Julia Epstein and Kristina Staub’s books.

Third stage might be called finessing it: the many-sided Burney, “protean, wildness, striking sudden ranges (especially in the fiction), repressed undersides, we get not just “comic individual aberration,” but grotesque and macabre symptoms of society’s own perverseness.” Claudia Johnson, Margaret Anne Doody (the best), Barbara Zonitch; a way of reading the plays (Barbara Darby)

Thaddeus says the task now (hers) is to bring all three Burneys into one: the one fearing to do wrong, the one repressing rage, the one unleasing it. Having now read her book I have to say while she does in each of her chapters try to justify all outlooks, her real thrust is to show us a 20th century strong careerist: her opening story exemplifying d’Arblay through D’Arblay’s winning out over a customs officer and keeping her manuscript through nuanced manipulation and tenacity says it all. Frances as businesswoman recurs repeatedly.

In her urge to make d’Arblay “like us” Thaddeus’s occasionally absurd: she declares how Frances must’ve love her husband’s poem, “Happy Fingers” (published only in the 21st century) about the joys of mutual masturbation (pp 111-12). It was found among papers apart from those Frances controlled. If this poem tells us how the pair managed not to have any more children after the birth of one son (Frances was 42 and could presumably have gotten pregnant a couple more times), it’s egregiously obvious she would have been mortified to see this written down. She might have just pasted it over as in his handwriting; OTOH, she burnt and cut and destroyed papers by her beloved sister, Susan and her father (there though I’m with Doody and see repressed hatred even, a desire to wipe out the small mean mind of the man who had shown an endless willingness to allow her life, writing career, emotional needs to be crushed).

Thaddeus cannot bring all three Frances’s together (she opts for Frances), for she basically skips the journals and letters which she appears not to value. She has a long separate chapter just on the admittedly dreadful as dramas plays — which she says Frances wrote because she knew such writing when successful brought in more money. Did it? The life-writing is important for historians (p. 101). She will admit Frances “theatricalised” her dialogues in her journals (p. 52) but then treat them as literally factual documents. For 23 years after her husband’s death as she rewrote the manuscripts, she was revising facts. I suggest the passionate interjections of this prose (e.g., pp 321-22) are a woman re-living as heroine’s agony and heroism the prosaic realities of her life. Thaddeus “may trust” her as she catches each coach seconds before it leaves because she finds the value of the journals can be only in their historicity and say her behavior examples of courage in the face of hazards unspeakable or daily (p. 223). The truth is she was romancing, creating the elegiac, the satiric, the people all around her adulating her and transparently making up to others (Mrs Delany before the Duchess of Portland).

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Said to be an unknown lady dressed as Evelina by John Hoppner (1758-1810)

I’m giving the jist of Juliet McMaster’s “The Silent Angel: Impediments to Female Expression in Frances Burney’s novels,” Studies in the Novel, 21:3 (1989):235-252

McMasters says “To examine Burney ‘s concern with expression, I find, is to arrive at a further feminist reading. For the impediments to expression that she presents with such variety and vividness in her novels are peculiar to women, and a source of agonizing distress to each of her heroines … their fables have dramatized the injustices which by good fortune they survive.”

Burney “won’t make her heroines feminists, or overtly be one herself. Instead she creates heroines who suffer under the social sanctions that maintain women’s subordination, and are conscious of them as disabilities; but like their author they abide by them …”

From the Early Journals and Letters:

O! how I hate this vile custom which obliges us to make slaves of ourselves! … [my ellipsis] Yet those who shall pretend to defy this irksome confinement of our happiness, must stand accused of incivility,?breach of manners?love of originality,?and… what not. But, nevertheless… they who will nobly dare to be above submitting to chains their reason disapproves, they shall I always honor if that will be of any service to them …

From McMaster:

Her heroines are not authors, but they too are made to feel guilty about self expression. Propriety and their authority figures declare that they must never tell their love, even though their happiness and often that of the men they love depends on their declaration. They abide by the prohibition, but it takes its toll in their emotional stability, and produces severe distress, neurosis and even madness. There are other reasons, too, for their silence. Often they must withhold explanations of their behavior, even when revelation is crucial to them, in order to shield some third party (always a male, and usually a brother); or they dare not speak for fear of provoking male violence (usually a duel). These are the typical ordeals of Burney’s heroines. Their lips must be sealed, and because of the men. One aspect of Burney’s growing sympathy with the silenced woman is her progressive disenchantment with male authority …

The text that most makes McMaster’s case is Camilla:

In Camilla the hero, Edgar Mandlebert, intends to be, like Lord Orville, both lover and moral guide. But the emphasis shifts from his pleasure in promoting Camilla’s right conduct to his desire for her unquestioning obedience for its own sake. By the end of the novel he has more need to reform than she; and he must finally admit that his conduct has been “a fever of the brain, with which reason had no share.”11 The novel presents besides a whole array of defective authority figures of the older generation, including Edgar’ s mentor Dr. Marchmont, a bitter misogynist, the absurd pedant Dr. Orkborne, and one female, the spiteful governess Miss Margland …

Between the writing of Cecilia and Camilla Frances Burney experienced for herself, and in an acute form, a relationship in which expression was painfully inhibited: The young clergyman George Cambridge paid her marked attentions; Frances responded, and everybody expected them to make a match of it. But, for whatever reasons, he failed to exercise his male prerogative of choice. Agonized under the scrutiny of curious onlookers, Frances had to act as though she didn’t care, and treat him with a proud aloofness, as Cecilia treats Delvile. According to her biographer, Joyce Hemlow, the situation was painful on both sides, torture” on hers. A timely explanation on the state of their feelings would no doubt have cleared the air and eased them both. In her next relationship she resolved to be less inhibited by convention and the spectators.15 This change in her position informs Camilla, which is a long and bitter consideration of the burden of silence imposed on the woman. Too long, perhaps. Some modern readers have been apt to agree with Jane Austen in noting a certain laboring to “keep [the lovers] apart for five Volumes.”16 But Burney is giving full treatment to this particular female difficulty.

For the woman in love, according to Camilla’s father, mere silence is not enough. She must guard against any inadvertent revelation, by any sign whatever, for “There are so many ways of communication independent of speech” (p. 360). Such a policy must involve an elaborate cover-up amounting to deceit. Self expression is so far from being approved that Camilla is exhorted to “struggle then against yourself as you would struggle against an enemy” (p. 358).

Agonies of silence and body repression.

McMaster does falter over The Wanderer, for manifestly the woman who argues for liberty, Elinor, is castigated and the silent woman, Juliet, rewarded. She writes:

If the fable of The Wanderer rewards Juliet’s terrific obscurity, the rhetoric allows Elinor the best lines. And in fact the two positions are almost evenly balanced as two ways of looking at the same problem; so much Burney signals by the similarity in their names, Elinor and ‘Ellis’ (as Juliet is called for most of the novel).

She instances Austen’s similar balancing of Elinor and Marianne and says it’s enough to give the position of liberty a “sympathetic hearing.”

Here, having tried to read the book, I’m not convinced: too much weight given to similar sounding names and what Austen did in her book will not prove D’Arblay did it in hers.

I also know that for long stretches Burney’s books after Evelina are flat, have (to quote John Dussinger) “a machine-like smoothness that deflates the emotion it attempts to describe.”

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View of Fauconberg Hill in Cheltenham: Majesties taking an airing; Frances’s room at the top of the building; the stairs at the bottom where she and Stephen Digby would sit talking

There is a solution of sorts. As I say, the value of Thaddeus is how she reviews the criticism repeatedly. At one point she quotes Kathryn Kris who in “A 70 Year Follow-up of a Childhood Disability: The Case of Fanny Burney” (The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, ed. ASolnit, R. Eissler, P.Neubauer, 1938) argues that Frances’s life-long compulsion to write is a product of a temporary childhood disability, a dyslexia until she was 8 where she couldn’t learn to read or to write. Kris sees “a life-long propensity for shame and cognitive disorganization” (p. 17, 229, n36).

Of course Thaddeus rejects this; she’s not have her tenure material have an actual disability — just as the Austen scholars and Janeites are not having their heroine have Aspergers traits. The dislike and shame before a disability suddenly flares before us.

There is much evidence for a cognitive disconnect and disorientation. Having read Hester Davenport’s convincing description of Burney’s behavior at court where a parallel maybe seen between her loss of Stephen Digby and her loss of George Owen Cambridge — and it’s not the easy one they never wanted her because they were such snobs (even Rizzo likes this one). Rather she couldn’t connect to them. She couldn’t see what was in front of her and didn’t know how to respond, to reciprocate. Cambridge later in life grew close to Frances and was an active mentor and patron of her son, providing for him the one decent position he had. Digby asked Miss Gunning to marry him only after Fanny refused to visit his family and many years of courting; after she died, he came back. She then froze him off.

Explain her blindness in front of her father. How her books do not come alive; that the characters are often despite her pellucid analytical efforts two-dimensional exaggerations. I will next week obtain this book from the GMU library.

Cela suffit.

Ellen

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Austen’s letter 97, 2-3, Wed-Thurs, March 1814, Henrietta St, to Cassandra, now at Chawton

Walter Launt Palmer (1854-1932), Snow and Sunshine (1909): we have several snow-y letters coming up

Dear friends and readers,

A snowy letter. So is the next.

Three months have passed, and according to LeFaye and the evidence of this letter itself Jane did visit Henry in late November after all. We will recall by early November she had been eager to go for 3 weeks, apparently she did go after all and LeFaye thinks one thing she did was contact Egerton over the coming publication of MP in May. We have no letters from this time, no sign of it anywhere, and no mention by Jane. Henry and Jane are clearly getting along but why the letters were destroyed we can only guess. At any rate she went home and did not return until spring.

In this letter Austen appears to have the proofs of Mansfield Park — or at least a copy for Henry to read. She is reading The Heroine, and presumably in the throes of early composition of Emma. She goes to the theater to see the great Kean, enacting Shylock in a new psychologically sympathetic way. She visits with Henry’s friends. She hears from Cassandra: poor Cassy stayed at Chawton after all – and was de-flea-ed. Jane discovers she is without her trunk of small clothing items so she must borrow or re-buy.

After reviewing this letter (with Diana Birchall), I attempt a comparison between Burney’s journalizing letters and Austen’s — this comes out of my reading of Burney the last month or so.

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Farnham, 19th century print

Diana went over Henry and Jane’s itinerary according to the map:

“A gap in letters of three months. We left her at Godmersham in November; Christmas is long past, she has gone to see Henry, and is staying with him in Henrietta Street. She has just arrived: Cassandra was wrong to think of them at Guildford last night, they stayed at Cobham. Cobham is 20 miles
southwest of London, and 10 northeast of Guildford, which shows us their route from Kent. Earlier they went through Farnham, which gives a picture of their mode of carriage-traveling, from village to village. Everything at Cobham was comfortable, and it is pleasant to think of the party sitting down to a “very nice roast fowl.” We don’t know why she could not pay Mr. Herington (a Cobham grocer, Deirdre guesses)”

I too was happy for Henry and Jane they “had a very nice roast fowl” (she likes to eat), “very good Journey, & everything at Cobham was comfortable,” but it would seem to have detracted from the atmosphere that she could not pay her bill. What bill was this? I assume Henry paid for the food and lodging. It was over £2, the amount sent by Mrs Austen which is now returned as useless. So she’s not a rich lady, is she? Why is Cassandra to “try her luck?” Is there some dispute over the amount? So we are still in the Bath world of tiny amounts — people made fun of the 1995 S&S film for having Emma-Elinor worry over the price of sugar and meat. It was true to Austen’s continuing experience.

But they did not begin reading until later, Bentley Green not far from getting back to London. Is it a proof of MP he has? If so, how do they have it? It is improbable that it’s a copy for selling, for then it would be put on sale. A MS? not likely as the revision process would make them a mess unless this was a copied out fair copy. Sigh. (Partly over the idea that this fair copy was not saved if it was one.)

Anna Massey as the scolding Mrs Norris (1983 MP)

“Henry’s approbation hitherto is even equal to my wishes; he says it is very different from the other two [P&P and S&S], but does not appear to think it at all inferior. He has only married Mrs. R[ushworth]. I am afraid he has gone through the most entertaining part. – He took to Lady B[ertram] & Mrs. N[orris] most kindly, & gives great praise to the drawing of the Characters. He understands them all, likes Fanny & I think foresees how it will all be.”

Angela Pleasance as the self-absorbed Lady Bertram (same production)

People talk to please. Henry says he foresees how it will be to please. He sees (Austen says it was kind in him) that she labored hard over Lady Bertram and Mrs Norris — so we see how the hard comedy of the novel is what she is conscious of. For Fanny-haters, note she is pleased he “likes Fanny.”

Her doubt in herself is seen in her comment on Henry’s reading, but more than that is suggested by her her comment: “I am afraid he has gone through the most entertaining part.” If you go to my calendar, you will find the calendar of the book shows what we have falls into three distinct parts:

1) Sotherton, the play, 2) the aftermath of Henry breaking off and then Mary stuck there, he returning to fall in love with Fanny, her growing up and ball, and the proposal, with the 3) last section in Portsmouth that forms an sub-epistolary novel suddenly not fitting the 1806-1809 calendar of the rest of the novel at all, but one for 1797-98.

My calendar shows (like as several other studies before me have done) the play sequence was written at a different time from the courting, and the real result of the play, Henry and Maria’s encounter in London and elopement part of the text written at the time the play was written. So the middle section (Henry going off, return, Fanny and Mary’s difficult friendship, his courting and falling in love with Fanny, the Ball, the trip to Portsmouth) are later interwoven stories filling the book out to 3 volumes and making it into a conventional novel about a nearly coerced marriage (between Henry and Fanny) which was luckily avoided.

Austen here shows she thinks the earlier material will be much more entertaining for her reader. It’s brilliant, the play within the play, the salaciousness, the investigation into the nature of love and marriage in Inchbald’s Lovers Vows as in the speeches rehearsed by Edmund and Mary, maybe too she liked the Sotherton sequence leading into it.

Diana’s comment: “If he foresaw all that, he had the cleverness of a Frenchman or an elf, because people have been debating for two centuries about alternate endings to MP!”

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Diana: Austen adds that she finished The Heroine last night and was very much amused; she wonders James did not like it better. . This is a novel by Eaton Stannard Barrett, an Irish lawyer and poet. The subtitle at the time JA read this was “Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader,” and was changed in a later edition to Adventures of Cherubina.

My commentary: The Heroine by Barrett was an influential book on other books beyond Austen’s, Austen used the previous text from MP to help her give structure and patterning to Emma. See my Barrett’s The Heroine … . The Heroine is a deeply conservative, nay reactionary text in the tradition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (as pointed out by Gary Kelly among others)

I’m not surprised Austen’s oldest brother, James, didn’t like it. He writes sensitive melancholy landscape poetry.

I leave those who are interested to read the plot-outline of The Heroine and how it parallels Emma’s (destructive finally) friendship with Harriet and how Cherry-Emma learns a lesson and to depend on the sensible male Stuart-Knightley.

What it’s not is a parody of Radcliffe. There are allusions to Radcliffe’s book but what is sent up is not her style rather the outlook which makes important the heroine’s sensitivity and the whole exploration of sex is dismissed. From my blog:

“The text is presented as a series of letters from Cherry to an unnamed correspondent and begins as a transparent parody of Pamela. The style is nothing like Radcliffe; the prose is simple and direct. These really could be renamed Chapters as there is little use of epistolarity, but the mode combined with the obvious caricatured presences does has the effect of ironic distance.”

Austen is ever the partisan and just cannot see what is in front of her if she is herself involved — or she refuses to (as in the case of Byron in the next letter where she seems to shut her mind, snap it goes.) She is endlessly jealous of Radcliffe as a rival. Barrett is burlesquing many books, and the kind of attack he mounts would also skewer her Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park too. He is at his funniest when at the opening when he alludes to politics of the day (as in the idea that while other characters can appear in his hell, Junius remains invisible). Again my blog:

Barrett is enormously well-read in romance; my edition by Sadleir includes pages and pages of allusions from major (Goethe’s Werther) to minor and popular books (Children of the Abbey). If anything Radcliffe is a minor presence in his book; he may be thinking of her when he writes against “impassioned sensibility … exquisite art … depicting the delicate and affecting relations between the beauties of nature and the deep emotions of the soul” that seduce female readers sexually (“voluptuous languor”), but his text is far more like Walpole’s Otranto. Barrett’s hostility to the gothic, though, is undermined by his fascination with it — though he does not go so far as to enact it quite in the way of NA.

Austen also enjoyed The Female Quixote where the heroine is similarly taught a lesson against reading women’s romances and how she must depend on sensible men. FQ is exquisitely funny when it parodies later 17th century French heroic romance, but it has nothing to do with the gothic; about a third of the way into the book Charlotte Lennox can no longer keep up the burlesque, and her text becomes a domestic courtship romance.

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A. d’Arnaud, The Sleigh. 1776. Image @Marie Antoinette’s Gossip Guide

Back to the trip where Diana enjoys the line: “I was very tired, but slept to a miracle, & am lovely today.” I agree Jane is luxuriating and the allusion to Mr Knight (rich, he left Godmersham to Edward let’s recall) is to the rich way she feels herself traveling. “Bait” means to refresh the horses. They are wiped down, allowed to rest, given water. The next passage shows us they went on with the same pair.

They arrive, the upper servant, Mr Barlowe, knows his place, Austen unpacks, sends out letters to friends with the letter P (I feel like Mrs Jennings because LeFaye is no help. She does not like the Papillons, makes fun of them. My guess is single women of the type she has been visiting and visited by in towns she stays at for years.)

It is snowing. – We had some Snowstorms yesterday, & a smart frost at night, which gave us a hard road from Cobham to Kingston; but as it was then getting dirty & heavy, Henry had a pair of leaders put on from the latter place to the bottom of Sloane Street. His own Horses therefore cannot have had hard work

I like that Jane is aware of how the horses did suffer. Though they did not change horses, he paid for two more to pull them. She remembers there is a slaughtering colonialist war going on in Portugal and Spain — though she does not use this term she does show interest in it again and again throughout the letters though her reactions are not exemplary (how wonderful we know so few who are dead, her attack on that general). For those who don’t know about this war it was deadly and had slaughter after slaughter; Goya’s paintings and famous May 2nd comes from it. (A busy year Diana puts it — so too this year in Syria and Afghanistan — the latter a real equivalent. Bigland’s book (see letter 90) read aloud by Jane by the way includes a large section on European politics; and the stuff on Paisley connects too.)

So I take the unusual explicit reference to the weather (but remember the last letter registered the cold) as part of her awareness of the world around her. Horses overworked in the wretched raw March snow, men dying still not so far away.

Her “veils” reference is not so decent. She is making fun of how lower class people are getting above their station by wearing fancy hats with veils. She watches for them and takes pleasure in the women’s attempts to get above their stations because she feels so secure in hers.

All this brings to mind some worry Cassandra had yesterday and Martha Lloyd. Not exactly rich and easy Martha’s life (as we’ve seen) — that’s the association. Austen’s letters move by association. Jane hopes Martha had a pleasant visit to them or somewhere else and thus Cassandra and Mrs Austen could sit down to their beef-pudding without too much guilt. This cold and train of thought brings on the misery of the chimney sweep to her mind. She says she will think of his cleaning the chimney in Chawton tomorrow.

About the end of the first page, she turns her attention to London. Crowds are enormous for Edmund Kean. It’s probably worth it to say a new style of acting was coming in: not so much more naturalistic, but more willing to open up the inner vulnerable psyche. That’s what Mrs Siddons and it led to Shylock being presented no longer as this comic or vengeful villain, but a sympathetic outsider. This was only the beginning, but it was important. You can see a reflection of this in Scott’s Isaac of York in his Ivanhoe.

Diana comments:

“A good play for Fanny. She cannot be much affected I think,” she comments. Fanny is now aged twenty, and I suppose Aunt Jane is looking out for her, to see that the impressionable girl won’t take in anything she shouldn’t – which is pretty rich coming from someone who’d been reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses when she was several years younger than Fanny!”

I don’t see what one text has to do with the other> Why Fanny cannot be much affected by this play and therefore it’s good for her to watch is a puzzling statement. If Austen means to suggest she is aware Fanny is not exactly a sensitive original type when she watches a play then why is it good for her to watch this one? It had not yet been interpreted to be anti-bigotry.

Mrs Perigord was Madame Bigeon’s daughter who had left her husband (probably over his abuse of her). She cannot have much money so it’s important that Austen pay this bill for a willow for hat-making and she does. Muslin was delicate material and Austen has not yet allowed it to be dyed although “promised” by others several times. She probably means she wouldn’t let them. Why are people wicked for dying cloth? It may be a joke, word play as Diana says, with the underlying idea that white is pure:

Diana:

“Now comes another quote I love, and it is rather startling to see it in context of a fairly prim and prosy paragraph; we are suddenly moved to remember that the maiden aunt is Jane Austen, capable of anything. For Mrs. Perigord has come, bringing some Willow, and she mentions that “we owe her Master for the Silk-dyeing.” Jane, however, protests that her “poor old Muslin has never been dyed yet,” despite several promises. And then she says: “What wicked People Dyers are. They begin with dying their own Souls in Scarlet Sin.” This can only be written for the pleasure of the word play, the fancy.”

I don’t get it as dyes come in all sorts of colors.

In the evening Austen tore through The Heroine and Henry read more of MP “admiring Henry Crawford” only “Properly” “as a clever pleasant man.” This does sound priggish — she is saying that he does not admire Henry Crawford as a rake or cad who uses women (the way a man might).

The last sentence suggests that Austen is telling only the good things that are occurring or occurred that night or over the days: we have seen many times that Cassandra wants upbeat stories and what is not upbeat given a virtuous turn or told not at all. This is the best she can produce about their evening is another way of paraphrasing this.

And now a paragraph about Henry’s friends and business associates who naturally are invited — and just as naturally may well refuse. Performative behavior is nothing new.

I suggest by-the-way that Fanny Price and Henry Crawford would not do as partners because Jane does not herself find Henry that congenial nor he her. That’s (Jane and Henry Austen’s relationship) an undercurrent in the novel. All her novels are rooted in her life-story. She is attracted to Henry, he is amusing, but her dream life declares it would never do. — unlike dear Frank.

Austen does not expect John Warren and his wife actually to come. The implication of the next sentence is that she at least (and maybe Henry) regards this socializing as an affliction. It’s said in a jok-y way: “Wyndham Knatchbull is to be asked for Sunday, & if he is cruel enough to consent, someone must be sent to meet him.” The Knatchbulls were upper class people and Wyndham a learned man from Oxford (in Arabic no less). Fanny Austen Knight would marry into this family and become a Lady.

From The Loiterer I’d say Henry was a reader and fit into Oxford so I assume this joke is for Austen’s benefit who is not keen on social life. Then Kean mentioned with a sarcastic voice, as if she’s repeating other people’s cant. I do think LeFaye guess may be right: that Henry’s friend may have played in a performance as Frederick. I think it’s the MP Frederick referred to, so it may be that the friends joked that Tilson or Chownes was a Frederick-Henry Crawford type (rakish).

At the end of the paragraph we see Austen still cannot get over being someone who moves about in her own carriage: she is to call upon Henry’s friends this way: “Funny me.”

The next fortnight tickets for all good seats gone at Drury Lane but Henry means to buy ahead for when Cassandra comes. He does seem to like Cassandra; she was his choice when he was ill.
A pathetic vignette occurs right after a mention of Sarah Mitchell who LeFaye has discovered had an illegitimate child. So a servant whom Cassandra has had to hire (and didn’t like this at all): Jane wonders what “worst thing” has been forced upon Cassandra.

Well Cassy springs to mind. Let us recall how badly Cassy did not want to be left with her Aunt Cassandra. Well she was left and is apparently treated as someone with fleas. No wonder she was not keen to stay. I feel for the child who had wanted to be with her parents. There are not many beds at Chawton we see and she got her aunt Jane’s.

Then Austen answering some joke about grotesque looking people; Austen is alive to people’s bodies and she says she has not seen anyone in London with quite Dr Syntax’s long nose or as montrous as two figures in a comic afterpiece burlesque.
The whole paragraph is to me distasteful, unfeelingly jocular.

And so the evening comes to an end.

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A still extant modest 18th century trunk

The following morning she reports her trunk has still not come. A loss of her clothes could not be a small thing to Austen. Apparently she did not bring a second set of small things with her in case the trunk was lost or stolen, and now she may have to borrow “stockings & buy Shoes & Gloves for my visit,” but she says (ironically) that by writing about it this way (berating herself for her foolishness) that will make the gods relent and it will show up. There’s nothing the gods like more than people admitting to learning lessons

There’s a decidedly irritated undercurrent here starting with the mention of the “Warrens, or maybe it goes back to where Austen admits she is not telling what happened in the evening that was not good.

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19th century drawing of a “lady writer”

I’ve been reading Burney’s diaries and journals and thought I’d end today’s offering with a comparison. Austen’s letters contrast to Burney’s journals which are far more formal, self-conscious, fictionalized in part. Austen is immersed in life and reflecting it in her words. In some ways I much prefer Austen’s though concede the general public would find Burney’s “more entertaining” to use Austen’s diplomatic phrase

It’s sometimes said that Boswell’s Life of Johnson, huge as it is, once you see all Boswell’s journals emerges as an interlude where a secondary hero takes the stage, but it is no different in feel or outlook from the rest. I suggest that Fanny Burney’s novels — huge as 3 are — and her plays too — might be considered as interludes, special episodes in the 50 volume book that was her life. It’s easy to discover there’s a preface to Cecilia not printed in the present editions, but found in the diaries and journals, a previous partial manuscript of Camilla extant in the diaries and journals; you might say the novels spill over into the journals or the novels spill out. The plays are notoriously life-writing spilling out expressionistically. Burney saved the drafts of her plays.

By contrast, Austen’s novels not interludes or continuations in a new spirit within her epistolary writing; I have (I think) demonstrated that both S&S and P&P were originally epistolary (and so have others) and think parts of MP were epistolary, but they are no longer. The novels do not spill out of the letters, anything but … at least as we now have the letters. Once her book was published, Austen did not save her drafts. Perhaps she had only one fair copy or two at most and Burney had many more. Burney appears to have been given so much more time and liberty to write.

One problem we are having reading these letters is Austen is journalizing just as surely as Burney, loving to put down her life. But Austen appears not to have had as much time to work out her vignettes, she gets them down rapid-scapid. Austen died young and when Burney’s husband died (November 1817, a few months after Austen), she worked for 23 further years elaborating her 50 volume + work.

That Austen is aiming at the sort of thing Burney was but didn’t have the time or life span to work it out expresses one we have such trouble going over these letters. It’s like we have drafts of letters. And of course our editor is not only not up to it, she doesn’t want to help us for real. I had really meant to go through this letter thematically not chronologically (section by section), but it seems to me demand the step-by-step or sentence-by-sentence approach. I will however as in the previous two letters reprint the text in the comments.

An interesting parallel: Austen has one beautiful fair copy of a text prepared as if a presentation copy; clearly she wanted Lady Susan to last. So Burney did precisely that with one of the plays her father and “Daddy Crisp” repressed (Witlings?)

Of course it might be Austen poured herself into the novels while Burney poured into the life-writing. We don’t know this for sure as we are missing the majority of the letters and all but a few drafts.

I was amused to discover in A Scribbler’s Life, a one volume excerpt from the 40 volume set (before the court journals came out and emphasizing the earlier years) that Burney as a girl would “always have the last sheet of my Journal in my pocket, & when I have wrote it half full — I join it to the rest, & take another sheet.”

These pockets are great bag-like things inside one’s skirt — no need for a handbag and reticule just for show.

The niece who described Austen at Godemersham in the visit we’ve just read about (her hair long and black) also said that she remembered Austen walking about with her writing desk at Godmersham. It is somewhere in the family papers.

A comparison: for both the life of a courtier is a death-in-life.

Ellen

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Davenport’s Faithful Handmaid: Burney at the court of George III

Dear friends and readers,

When I finished this book I found I was enjoying it in the way I had enjoyed reading Burney and about Burney when I first read her — when I was 18 and reading a 3 volume version of her diary taken from Charlotte Barrett’s edition by Austin Dobson. I felt strongly sympathetic to Fanny especially in the last sad and deeply felt entries. So I thought I’d make a blog recommending it even if it is no longer a new book for most Burneyites or people interested in the area or women’s studies.

I write to recommend Davenport’s book on Fanny Burney d’Arblay at the court of George III. It’s one of the new books (for me) I chose for my reading towards my review of Volume 5 of Fanny’s early journals. From her book emerges a perspective on Fanny’s 5 years at the court I was unaware of and suspect has not been sufficiently emphasized in the reviews; of those who take the older or “first stage” view of Fanny in the modern scholarship (as Janice Thaddeus puts it); hers is a convincing and appealing portrait of Fanny as a women who did follow a conduct-book set or norms. I then try to explain why Davenport was able to made me feel warm towards Fanny as I had not done for quite a while, revivified in me the liking for Fanny I used to have when I first read Fanny’s journals when I was 18.

What’s original is the idea that two relationships Fanny had while Keeper sustained her and it was when they vanished, she became psychosomatically ill, unconsciously pushed herself into death rather than remain at court, and thus roused her friends and family to help her free herself of her life in perpetual service to the Queen. The first was Mary Delany, who was (it seems) largely responsible for Fanny getting the position in the first place. Fanny lives for these meetings she has with Delany, a woman of genius, an artist like herself, and when Delany dies, Fanny is devastated.

Paul Sandby’s romantic picture of Windsor Terrace (one of the king’s houses) at night

The other was the courtship of Stephen Digby, the trajectory of which, ins and out, nuances and outward events, Davenport traces with care. Fanny really thought Digby loved her, felt deeply congenial with him, was thrilled by the high status (though careful to avoid being snubbed by his family, which attitude he didn’t understand and so was hurt when she did not come to visit the family castle when the Royal Family stayed nearby); nothing anyone could hint or say (particularly her man servant, Jacob Column, who detested Digby) could rouse any fundamental distrust.

Stephen Digby by Joshua Reynolds (date unknown)

Further, as told by Davenport by no means was Digby all hypocrisy which I gather is becoming the consensus point of view. It’s said that like Cambridge, Digby never seriously considered marrying Fanny. The time he spent with her over several years belies this. Digby was really engaged emotionally and genuinely tempted and only towards the very end when perhaps they had had too much of one another without marrying and they had some misunderstandings, did he turn to Miss Gunning with finality. Digby was like George Owen Cambridge who similarly is presented as on and off again by Fanny: intelligent enough, sensitive, melancholy, just enough alienated form the stupidities and irrationalities of social life. From this point of view the relationship did not move into marriage because Fanny couldn’t act on what these men offered, did not know how to cope, only the overt direct, ceaselessly emotional d’Arblay could capture her.

It was not long after he disappeared Fanny’s condition turned deadly.

It was not that she did not value serving the king and the queen; again as told by Davenport and shown in Fanny’s own words, she clearly did. But it was a distanced relationship demanding self-effacement and repression on her side which was utterly stifling to her deeper private self, the one Proust so famously said was the important “true” self. Madame d’Arblay and Monsieur Proust where they count for us and for themselves live in the same terrain here.

Trial scene of Warren Hastings: Fanny a major witness during and after her time at court

Which leads me to the second perspective, one which shapes this book: Davenport makes a strong case for regarding the 5 years at court not as a loss but gain. For 5 years of work, Fanny gained 55 years of pension which enabled her to marry; the queen was centrally instrumental in providing Fanny’s son, Alexander, with a Tancred scholarship to Cambridge. It helped her brother, James, become an Admiral after years of being passed over (just before he died). The years brought her into contact with fascinating events and a made her into a independent woman (even if as a court servant) who was given fine quarters, servants, and a good deal of free time to write even if hardly any day was completely free of a schedule of tasks. She stays in fine places, has a summer by the sea. Meets interesting people. Everything she wrote testifies to how much she valued the position, the royal family; she learned to be a polished fine lady there. There is no proof she would have written another novel during the five years, and if she had, would that have been valued for more than adding another line to a biography.

Kew — another of the three houses Fanny lived in, from 1735 print in Dugdale

What Fanny has been valued for and made her written about is her time at court and connections. Her way of weaving her own life in with the signal events she saw close up makes them alive. Would five years more of tea-drinking, visitings, and bluestocking gossip have been better?

I realize this resembles the kind of justifications one comes across of governess servitude for poor gentlewomen, but in this case she is not just a governess of children in an obscure household. Further, Davenport is clever or sound enough to do justice to the other nowadays conventional standpoint and a much more critical one: Fanny did rightly feel imprisoned without air to breathe or anything to live for because cut off from her family and friends and close emotional ties; she was isolated from her status and the court atmosphere, one of intrigue which she tried to keep away from (as beyond her). That such a job could destroy someone like her, especially subject to the bullying of Mrs Schwellenberg. The Queen was capricious, not open, Fanny didn’t dare small talk. She was not of high enough status to get any extended vacations to visit friends and family.

Davenport does not dismiss the conventional ambitious perspective either. Novelists were not respected, especially not women. In the first phase (earliest) Fanny was Keeper of the Robes, she may have been buoyed by the prestige and hope she could actually perhaps help her family, and compensated a bit by her beautiful quarters, servants, periods of free time. Fanny was respected. Davenport’s insinuation that Fanny was exaggerating her misery does slide us into her strong pro-monarchical stance (at moments unself-consciously idealizing). She does see how the queen controlled her daughters so much that they led infantile lives and some were never permitted adult independence, but the year 1789 is described simply as filled with “terrible” events. Everything about the revolution is quickly deplorable. Davenport is a partisan for Hastings, like Fanny, turning him by implication into a benign misunderstood scapegoat — when he was a tough, controlling, exploitative man (he likes to take his lower colleagues’ wives).

Clare Harman identifies this as a portrait of Fanny in later life — after 1812 say.

Why did I finish and find I’d enjoyed it so? The portrait makes effective emotional as well as practical sense of Fanny’s whole life, the time before the court, and importantly the time after when Fanny did all she could to maintain her court ties and the royal family when it could reciprocated. Davenport’s book includes an opening chapter about Fanny’s life and family before she entered the queen’s service (a sort of prologue) and several chapters about her life afterwards. Like Clare Harman, Davenport does justice to Fanny’s later years. The journals from the later years are quoted to great effect: Fanny did become warmer, less inclined to laugh at people. I remembered the moving passages when Fanny’s husband, close siblings, and then her son predeceased her. I agree with her Fanny’s face in John Bogle’s portrait with its wistful “amused quizzical expression,” not a beauty, slightly pursed lips, a “marking” face is that of an individual not a generic beauty with great hat.

I’ve one more book to read, Janice Thaddeus’s Literary Life before I return to Volume 5, skim, outline it and write.

Ellen

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