Jane (Olivia Williams) greeted by Edward Austen Knight at Godmersham (he is now a widower) in Miss Austen Regrets (2008)
Dear friends and readers,
We have not reached the half-way point of Austen’s extant or the remnant of her letters that we have: that will be Letter 80 (4 Feb 1813, Jane from Chawton Cottage to Cassandra at Godmersham) out of the 161 left. By that letter and date Austen will have published S&S and P&P and be overtly working on her “ordination novel,” MP. Like many another writer who was nobody during her lifetime, a non-entity and for whom respect and fame grew well after her death, most of her letters come from the period when she was a successful writer. On top of this she’s a woman, relatively poor and powerless, and writes of this and why; she dies without having published these (like other women) and her direct relatives whose interest was not to let these letters get into public destroy most of them, at least those which told of things they had done which might conceivably hurt their reputation.
So half of the letters by Austen we have come from the last 4-5 years of her life. The length of some of the earlier ones provide some bulk for the first half, but these lack the kind of details about her novels and writing that those interested in her art seek to read.
But we have had an important turning point (Letter 60). Austen and her mother, sister and possibly Martha Lloyd are to move to Chawton Cottage. Austen has by now evolved a modus vivendi and knows how she wants to live — and that does not include marriage. She wanted to set up a life with her sister, and her beloved friend, Martha, but no provision was allowed for them; she had to remain dependent on and with her mother. Martha eventually decided it was not in her monetary interest or good for her security to live with the Austens but looked to be a partly paid companion. Miss Sharpe always knew it was a dream. So that is over and now there is this compromise: a stable place, dead cheap, in the country (which apparently Austen did love). By this time too she was writing steadily once again — 4 to 5 hours a day in the morning. She was repeating a pattern she had had in Steventon, one she had not managed again until they landed in Southampton — thanks to her brother, Francis. This has broken up: Francis’s wife was not comfortable with his female relatives; and perhaps Martha was uncomfortable because she had wanted Francis to marry her (perhaps Mrs F.A. saw this). I suggest Chawton looked even better even though it was so close to Edward and would keep them (the Austen women) involved with the family very close. Her mother in a previous letter, this one and 61 is still strongly reluctant and has to be persuaded.
We can now try to see the letters whole, as a bundle with an over-arching arc, real actions, themes, conflicts. As I’ve kept on saying (and repeat above), this is a remnant, a rump of letters, a sad left-over.
So how can we see, and then value and evaluate this censored remnant? On Austen-l the suggestion has been made that Austen continued to want to opt out from the larger political world (she would not have any influence in). That Austen retreated from having sex the way dominant heterosexual people in her era did it — marriage to someone with an income enough (Edward Bridges) is understandable always and was therefore living a truncated or maimed life. (See comments for debate between Diane Reynolds and I.)
I disagree. This is to read these letters as if they represented the whole Jane Austen. Rather let us look to see if they fit into recognized feminine forms of genres; I think if we can look to see how Austen regarded letters we will see at least why we find them disappointing. She makes several comments on letters herself, mostly each of these are that she regards herself as talking spontaneously and without guard. I think that is how she wrote, remarkably directly. The two qualifications (important) are that she is writing to her sister who is often unsympathetic, and wants to censor her; does not want her to write openly of her sadness or bitterness and (in the early letters) scolds a lot. Sided with the familiy about Lefroy. Gradually we see as Cassandra herself grew old, an old maid, and the two women endured those hard mean years in Bath, they come together. Austen on the other hand does became less angry: far fewer intensely defesnive and passionately felt comments about marriage for women in this period as enslavement to pregnancy and death and/or babies; now she is content simply to point out the hypocrisies of why people marry whom they do and their shallowness of feeling as she sees it, but is willing to do justice to those whose feelings are variously hurt or involved (like Moore’s unfortunately bullied wife).
To some readers what follows may not be seem germane as it is not meant to be directly about Austen’s life, but to try to understand the letters as art in this era. This is an era where life-writing as genre for women is emerging as a kind. It took quite a while again and is not yet respected fully today.
I’ve been reading Anne Grant’s Letters from the Mountains, and like the French women memoir writers, she creates a self-, an identity and a world (in her case the Highlands) and critiques is through her letters. She was accused of writing fiction, of making a novel, and she re-published her letters with the names of friends and herself and the real places to counter that. She did revise her
letters for publication and they were apparently written with
publication in mind.
Burney wrote hers similarly: create an identity, live through it, make a critique of her world, but she never fully admitted to herself she wanted them published. She did. Both these women and quite a number more were creating a kind of self for themselves to enjoy. Letters for women function the way poetry did. Other women who did this include Elizabeth Grant Smith (The Highland Lady), and quite a number of French women. Madame du Deffand. Carla Hesse writes of these letter and memoir writers in her The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern.
Austen’s might have been intended this way, especially the three packets of letters to Frank that were destroyed. We cannot know. Grace Dalrymple Elliot’s revolution journals (made into a film by Rohmer) help us here, as they too were savagely censored, the majority destroyed. She was a fallen woman and her book published by a granddaughter first. I suggest what when Dalrymple began to save her letters in earnest, and meant her book to be one of the many memoirs by women about the revolution (Blood Sisters is the book on this) but like Roland hers is unusual in being pro-revolution. Grace Dalrymple Eliot’s journal can still be seen to be a “blood sister” revolutionary type, unusual for like Roland, she sympathized.
Jane Austen did not think this way; she was not part of the newly re-awakened feminist movie-moment. Her remarks on letters do not show any sense of creation of a self apart from the world. Of loving self-justification, of dramatic vignettes carefully got up. On the contrary. She cannot divest her mind of the world impinging on her nor does she want to perform.
A second type of book which Austen’s probably does not fall into is the aesthetic philosophical: Radcliffe’s 1794 Journey, Helena Maria Williams, letters from the revolution (an eye witness account supposedly), Wollstonecraft’s Residence in Sweden, and Dorothy Wordswoth’s journals all are part of this. A good book on it is Elizabeth Bohls’s Women’s Travel writings and the language of aesthetics. She treats Wollstonecraft, Williams, Wordsworth, Janet Schaw (Antigua book – which Austen could have read). Bohls’s thesis is that women were relegated away from writing philosophically as well as social criticism of a larger type. One place they could do it was through the travel book, its use of picturesqueness and delineation of the history of a place though evoking the past and present.
That’s just what Radcliffe is doing; Bohls includes Janet Schaw, Helen Maria Williams (revolutionary landscapes) Dorothy Wordsworth, very poetic.
I’d say Anne Grant’s travel books, letters are not of this type. She means to make a personal story and invent a drummer personality, character and world through herself in intimate relationship with her interlocutors. This is what Lespinasse, Madame du Deffand and other French women writers do.
Nineteenth century women’s travel books and those of the 20th century often encompass both types. Austen’s letters as we have them now belong to neither. If they did, the remnant no longer shows it. If her letters to her brother were of the philosophical or critical or political type, we’ll never know. She does critique the world through landscape: her gothic book, Northanger Abbey and I suppose that could be included in Bohls’s trajectory ,but as with her literary criticism it’s not thought out in the way say of Radcliffe, Wollstonecraft, Williams. . Austen’s just savaged and destroyed away Wollescraft
My sense is it might have been the Anne Grant type if we had the collection. A curious connection is Charlotte Smith. Her letters too disappoint and they too do not belong to these evolving genres. Instead what we have of her worth real reading is her novels (where she richly creates and critiques like Austen) and her poetry. She too writes directly only in her case it’s to her publishers. Her letters like Austen’s are not performances but a self struggling in the world contingently.
The disappointment we experience is that for over 200 years we’ve had experience of women’s travel writings, and memoirs and letters where they do fall into these types. I suppose I’ve come down to a truism others have seen before me. The interest here is simply as an adjunct to the novels: they more about her life truthfully than anywhere else, they reveal her aesthetic doctrines (such as they are), we can glean little of what she read and her views of larger topics.
Anne Elliot as ignored old maid: in this scene she is not only abject but her feelings are hurt by insensitive allusions to Wentworth (1995 BBC Persuasion, screenplay Nick Dear)
Perhaps a great wrong was done to Austen. A major part of her oeuvre, the life-writing destroyed. I have suggested her there is a pattern of emergent lesbian spinsterhood in the letters which was cut off by the family. Diane has suggested the D. A. Miller finds underlying the muted apolitical character of the novels is an abject old maid. That may be. If so, no one today will talk much of this either. Miller puts it in enigmatic language. Again it’s in no one’s interest and it does not flatter anyone to tell the realities of Jane Austen’s short life.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
From a debate about the half-way point. Diane Reynolds and I: She wrote:
“I need a better vocabulary to talk about this because I am using terms that are too easy to misunderstand. I am not equating being married with being grown up but the society Austen lived in did–as does the society we live in. The equation is, of course, and I am stating the stunningly obvious, more explicit in Austen’s day, but marriage and fecundity of course are equated with fulling performing–acting the expected normative gender role in the culture–of womanhood. Playing with one’s children after one has fully met society’s expectations of womanhood through marriage and childbirth, i would argue, plays out differently than doing so when you are the maiden auntie–you’ve already definitively crossed a line–now, of course, the woman who is always “being a kid” and endlessly appropriating her daughter’s dolls or whatever would be in a different category … but this isn’t what I am getting at, and as I said explicitly in the first post, I’m not saying Austen is childish or immature–I should just drop the term chidlike as it is too easily misunderstood–so I will simply describe what I see. Of course, as mentioned, the elephant in the room are the missing letters–we could as easily as in JEAL be getting a deliberately constructed neutered Jane–but the point is, we don’t know. Did she have a nervous breakdown in the early 1800s? We don’t know. There’s only negative evidence. It’s speculation. Maybe, as some suggest, she had a baby. Maybe the letters of that period were simply angry and critical, especially towards relatives, and Cassandra knew that would cause problems. Maybe they talked a lot about sexual longings. The point is we have what we have.
What I am seeing so far in what we have–the first 60 letters–is an Austen who longs for more money and loves the material things of life–furniture, a fire, good wine–but has never, as far I can remember, ever indicated, perhaps beyond Tom Lefroy, any sort of longing for the companionship of a man, for the physical presence of a man in her life–we find this expressed in the novels, and JA’s take on it is uniformly ironic, but we see it’s not in the letters. Perhaps she displaced all these longings into her fiction writing–or perhaps she critiques these longings in her novels–perhaps letters of this nature were destroyed. But what I find is a woman who would like status and security (money), the presence of her sister and Martha, but who doesn’t long for marriage, love, sex. She turns down Harris Bigg-Wither and that’s a stunningly assertive act of rejecting society’s definition of womanhood, especially for a 27 yo. She’s turning down Manydown, money, children, status–she knows this. She likes his sisters. The marriage would have provided security for C and her mother. Why would she make this decision, so detrimental to her? So what I see is a woman happily–frozen is the word that comes to mind, but not the word I want to use because of its implications–let’s say happily adapted to the single life, happily adapted to and choosing to be forever 21. She’s comfortable with that, although her society isn’t–and therein comes the rub. To remain the forever 18, 19, 20, 21 yo as she ages, she necessarily loses status. She can live in that age in her novels. In the one novel where the heroine is older, the happy-ending romance hinges on her, in a sense, erasing, expunging, the long period of sadness that came with being over-21.
I would have to go back over the letters but I see surprisingly little change in the Austen–she is “wiser and sadder’ as she gets older, but my sense is of a sort of repeititiveness of life–which I think she liked, that she wanted–but that dulls the letters down for us as readers.
Diane Reynolds
Let me first take a stand this way. I find it highly improbable that Austen had a child during the 4 missing years. My argument is the same as I directed at the miniature. There is no argument from an absence of evidence and we fall back on probabilities. I realize my suggestion of what I called a breakdown — nervous breakdown was the term I used is subject to the same problem. I see it as much less improbable. We had a series of letters registering real distress and upset; all her things sold, they must leave their home, the first months in Bath and in the letters when they resumed there were references to Austen’s state of health as improving, and a depiction of their social life which seemed to suggest real marginalization in who they saw and what they did. I realize the term “nervous breakdown” is a modern one. But I’ve no better words except the kinds we see in novels where we see the heroines look sick, pine, grow weak or said to be ill from love usually. Gaskell has heroines who show this kind of distressed retreat and that’s what I was thinking of.
I don’t insist on it either as some life-changing transformation or not. I feel she came back from this breakdown; she got better slowly and resumed ordinary social life and we are seeing that as the letter resume in 1804. Part of this period of distress had the proposal from Bigg-Wither and her refusal which I agree must have been a real matter for argument. We see even in these later letter the Bigg sisters are thought still to be very sensitive and sore about Jane saying no while Lady Bridges a more generous and broad minded person doesn’t mind that her son was rejected by Jane; does not hold it against her.
n “performing womanhood” I feel Diane is contradictory there. It’s obvious to me she’s saying that Austen did not mature because she did not marry and then have a sexual life and perhaps have a child or not. She begins by saying these are the values of the group around Austen and they are the values of our own society too; she then distances herself from this by using these Butlerian terms, “performing womanhood,” but by the end of her message she is herself taking them seriously. She is saying the opposite of what Nancy wrote, for example:
” but marriage and fecundity of course are equated with fulling performing–acting the expected normative gender role in the culture–of womanhood. Playing with one’s children after one has fully met society’s expectations of womanhood through marriage and childbirth, i would argue, plays out differently than doing so when you are the maiden auntie–
Or Austen wants wine, clothes, food and so but “has never, as far I can remember, ever indicated, perhaps beyond Tom Lefroy, any sort of longing for the companionship of a man, for the physical presence of a man in her life–”
What’s the elephant here is fucking and sex. Diane uses the word “frozen” in the lower part of the paragraph. And that she thinks this not marrying is awful is implied. But she has herself said Austen is not maturing, a maiden auntie. The words are denigrating.
She says that the family punished Austen for this. Maybe. I see that they did not take her seriously; a tiny allowance; it was Cassandra who counted. But note Cassandra is probably a virgin too and never married though she gave herself airs as a widow and had an inheritance from him. Yet Cassandra was respected. She would have married if she could have (as Mrs Bennet said of Jane, her daughter, when Bingley deserted). Jane refused an offer (as Elizabeth Bennet does twice).
I think this an important issue for understanding the vast original cult of Austen say from 1880 until very recently. The original fan group I suggest were drawn to Austen precisely because they saw her as not sexual; that’s what they liked. She was seen as conservative politically and safe. She was likened to other women similarly conceived: Sayers (wrongly as she had a son but she was seen as a maiden kind of woman), Barbara Pym and her church jumble sales in her books.
Since the 1990s films and the new pseudo-liberation in our culture for girls and pornification of our culture, Austen’s books are being reread as romances and super-sexed up and a lot. Maybe new generation of girls is misreading her this way but I doubt it. I think the sequels function to add the sex in. Nights at Pemberly stuff. I’ve gone to JASNA meetings where I see the people there do not distinguish – they reallly don’t — between what they find in the movies and in the sequels and in Austen. It’s all “austenland.” I find the average reader often doesn’t care what the author’s meaning or themes or inferences or intentions were anyway.
I am very wary of these “performing” constructions. I used it myself but I did limit that to men and women acting on stage. These constructions are over-used. There are real bodies in the house, and real sexual impulses and real biology and hormones. We never see any frustration in Austen in her letters sexually but then in this era woman was not to write of such things. Fanny Burney never once mentions having sex with her husband in 10 volumes of diaries. There exists a poem by the husband which shows he and she used their hands to reach orgasm (“happy fingers” or some such name). And Cassandra destroyed so many of the letters.
I think Austen was as mature as any other woman of her class and type at her age level – more so than many because she was very intelligent and she had certainly suffered a good deal and since some hard things in the world because of the lack of money. People nowadays seem driven to deny the obvious: she did retreat from social life; and that is partly what Diane is probably feeling. So Austen had less direct experience. I suggest that’s because at some point she saw as a poor unmarried dead clergyman’s daughter she would get little respect. There’s an analogy with Ann Radcliffe’s retreating behavior.
This was a mean hard era for women and men without status. Jane and Cassandra certainly saw the world up close in Bath and when they left Austen never wanted to see it so close up again. She preferred the garden in Southampton, the syringa and quotations from Cowper. Crabbe’s outlook in his poems were his sustenance she says; she could have been his wife.
As to who she interacted with: yes, her family members and their few connections and friends. Who else would pay attention to her She had an intense emotional life with her sister, Martha and the women friends. She had in an intense emotional relationship with her brother Francis – reflected in the novels indirectly and directly.
Henry is misunderstood by the family’s silly way of presenting him as shallow and every happy — which Austen repeats in her letters. She does get along and writes what others want so early on we get not nice references to Eliza. Eliza was not appreciated until she married Henry and then was accepted because they had to accept her. We may see aspects of Henry here and there in the novels but it’s hard to say. His “Notice” shows a very intense man, bitter at times, caustic, resentful within — as others of his era in his position might be. He had a certain genius himself and it never found fruition. He ended a curate in the country turning to Cassandra too.
Edward is in the letters as a kind of John Dashwood and also Charles Musgrove — selfish, aggrandizing, egoistic, more than a little dim and he can be bullied by his wife, a kind of Fanny Dashwood (dboutless an exaggeration as Mrs Norris is not of Mrs Leigh-Perrot a real horror of a woman).
Diane has over-reacted to the stories fo Jane having a wonderful time with her nephews. By contrast, Tomalin goes on about this incident as the family as long last giving Jane some responsibility and her doing exactly the right thing with these children who mother has just died in miserable pain after years of such traumas and the father really intensely upset over his role in all this and her death and now being left, stuck with all these children to bring up alone.
I may be wrong to see a lesbian spinsterhood pattern but I do that. If there was sexual contact we can’t know that. There would be no proof and no record of it. On lesbian spinsterhood in this period I’ll write again in a few days.
Ellen
Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemuchus, Memoirs of a Highland Lady: from a huge cache of writing in memoir form by woman who was born at the close of the eigheenth century and wrote a memoir of her early life in the middle of the nineteenth. I think were we to have all of Austen’s letters they might fall into the type this book does.
Grant wrote this memoir in the middle of the 19th century on the ostensible excuse she was writing it for her children and niece. If you read her little epigraph, she says she began it that way, but no one goes on to write such huge amount for 2 people, even daughters and nieces. As per usual, it was not published until 50 years later, and then in an abridged, censured, and bowdlerized version where all the hard and true things she said about her family members and life itself and society were either expunged altogether or so cut you wouldn’t get it. The book immediately sold—or so we are told (I’ve come to know that books don’t sell on their own so miraculously, but are pushed and that the circulation of books is exaggerated). Four editions came out in the first half of the twentieth century.
By chance we might say the original huge two volume manuscript remained in the hands of the family undestroyed. It’s not really by chance for if it really had revealed what the family felt socially unaceptable (many things today are acceptable to say) about anyone living (the people are all long dead and the ones used for satire are more minor characters, people already not respectable quite), it would not have survived. Grant’s great-great-great-granddaughter allowed Canongate press to publish the whole book unexpurgated for the sake of the revelation of Scotland, the Highlands and (as she probably saw, as she seems to have been intelligent and large-minded) prestige to accrue for the family in the early 21st century world.
So one hundred and fifty years later the book sees the light. This is common for women’s autobiographies. By someone who perhaps does not share Grant’s outlook (a modern scholarly Scots male editor). He apologizes for the lack of annotation; to annotate this kind of book would be heroic enterprize, but he has tried to restore original spellings, and provided an appendix.
The title misleads: this is the memoir of an English-Scots woman from her early childhood to the time of her marriage at the late age of 33, turning what were apparently well-kept and voluminous entries as well as family records into a tale of growing up in the later 18th century in the context of a struggling family of a younger Scots highlander son who practiced law and sought to make contacts and money through parliamentary politics (of the usual corrupt sort, bribery, cut-throat tactics). He married the daughter of a southern gentry landowner, someone considerably above or richer than either Burneys, Austens, Smiths, or Radcliffes (women we are familiar with as novelists).
She went on to write a memoir of her time in France in the 1840s (The Highland Lady in France), recording and discussing her time there
(sick, seeking health and trying to help her family retrench), after 10 years in Ireland, about which she also wrote a memoir (it’s been published, The Highland Lady In Ireland). Whether she wrote about her time in Bombay (many years) or return to the Highlands we are not told. As this memoir of her early years has only very recently (more than 150 years after it was first found and published in a censored and abridged state) been published without cuts and as is, I would not trust that there wasn’t at some time a memoir for the very late years. You’d have to go to muniment rooms of the family and other letters to sleuth to discover.
She’s delightful, what I’d call a dry satirist who presents herself as having a warm heart, just that typical combination of sentiment and satire characteristic of the second half of the 18th century. She alludes to Sterne, but she is not lachrymose.
The book opens with a realistic picture of her grandparents’ desperate
kinds of lives in the Highlands (as she says the people owning these vast stretches of land did not know how to turn it into money—later they sold the woods), how they took military and court positions, and how her father went to London to try to make his way into wealth, prominence and find personal interest and failed, with the exception of getting married to a middling Englishwoman who he returned to Scotland with. The father was (the editor says) someone who was not a worldly success. The editor is hard on the mother, calling her an evil woman, but as yet only the mother’s rigidity has emerged.
Beyond that underneath her basically upbeat tone, she tells a hard story of often desperate people. Her mother (characterized or bad-mouthed by the editor as very cruel) thus far seems a sort of Lady Bertram who has good reason not to go out much as she has nowhere to go and is often ill from continual pregnancies, and not much to do. An aunt escapes to marriage with an older man and thus a lifetime of drudgery as an “aunt-governess,” but this is a great loss for the children for the substitute is a remarkably dense and cruel woman. I really feel shocked at the way this woman and both parents literally whip their children into eating (using cuts on the cheek), will remorselessly slap their faces back and forth, humiliate and otherwise treat them brutally as a matter of course.
Those reading this book will get a very real picture of Scotland in the second half of the 18th century and early 19th. Alas, Grant did not tell of her later life: after she married, she went to India for a while (colonialism did provide a way for these upper class types to try to make it); her book ends just as this opening phase of her marriage begins. The later part of her life would have told much more but then the book might’ve been destroyed.
Even if she herself celebrates the beautiful landscape she remembered
as a child and eventually returned to after many years of living in many different places. As the book progresses, she’s being brought up far more in London and the home counties than Scotland thus far. It’s rich in detail and tells of several different families so that’s hard to present. Beyond that underneath her basically upbeat tone, she tells a hard story of often desperate people. Her mother seems a sort of Lady Bertram who has good reason not to go out much as she has nowhere to go and is often ill from continual pregnancies, and not much to do. An aunt escapes to marriage with an older man and thus a lifetime of drudgery as an “aunt-governess,” but this is a great loss for the children for the substitute is a remarkably dense and cruel woman. I really feel shocked at the way this woman and both parents literally whip their children into eating (using cuts on the
cheek), will remorselessly slap their faces back and forth, humiliate and otherwise treat them brutally as a matter of course.
My explanation or understanding of what I read was by looking at the
behavior partly as Catherine did: in the mother’s case, something was not being explained. She had clearly been pregnant frequently and so it might just be exhaustion or some condition which resulted from the myriad of things which could go wrong from pregnancy, miscarriage, or childbirth. But I also was struck how she was given nothing to do beyond have babies. Her husband had a career outside the home so busy Elizabeth Grant remarks they hardly ever saw one another (or just enough to keep her pregnant or possibly pregnant). In the home though once the woman decided not to breast-feed a particular baby (for whatever reason) she hands them over to others to bring up. It seemed to me the description of social contact was very like that of Austen or other later 18th century women: Jane Ironside gets together with other people to network, and has to dress up extraordinarily; the whole thing is super-formal, and there seems to be no genuine companionship or enjoyment. Grant’s description of a typical evening in or out makes that clear. The mother has no friends outside the
family and inside no one congenial.
This supports the depiction of women’s lives we find in Austen’s life and in Burney’s novels. It’s rare for the heroine to come into contact with anyone congenial. Austen was so desperate she valued the woman who was responsible for parting her from Lefroy; while I wouldn’t over-emphasize the importance of the early romance, it was an act of betrayal. In Burney’s novels again and again the heroine is coerced into a relationship with a woman which is better than nothing (for the woman has some brains and contacts and interests), but as grating and sometimes destructive as it is supportive.
I was startled by the regular cruelty of the behavior of the care-takers of the children to the children and the parents’ reinforcement of this. However, if you read on you do discover the governess who was the worst (Mrs Millar) is eventually taken away to an asylum when she goes over the top. We are told in another house she held a young boy’s head under the water “as a punishment” and he nearly died. Now this offers another perspective if you think about it: we may be inclined to say what a vicious twisted cold woman, but what do we know of this governess’s life. She is given packs of children to control and little salary and kept apart from others. She has no chance whatsover of a life of her own (sexual or otherwise).
Chapter 6 in particular is superb: Grant remembers a long series ofvisits she and her family made to other Grants in and around Scotland, not just the highlands, but Glasgow and the lowlands. Her portraits of her relatives are inimitable: for the first time I came into contact with that acid satiric saturnine tone so familiar to me from the writing of Jane Austen, Charlotte Smith, and Ann Radcliffe. It seems to have been endemic for women’s style in the period as the 1808 translator of Germaine de Stael’s Corinne (thought rightly probably to have been a woman) has this tone too.
She tells it like it was: the lairds with non-aristocratic (barely named) mistresses by whom another tribe of children is had, people half-crazy, kind and stupid, hollow and successful, all types, bare homes which are yet so far above those of the peasants and “civilized” (with servants to do all the work, and hard it must’ve been) and the descriptions of land- and lake- and mountain-scape are in the picturesque style. It’s as if she does have a painting in mind. I wish I had the time to scan some of the scenes, character portraits and scenic verbal painting in.
Chapter 7 turns back to the heroine’s education and life among her relatives in London and England. (No small matter this traveling back
and forth from Scotland and southern England—it cost and was done
through huge coaches). Again harsh punishments meted out, this time
stories of desperate survival by women. Among the books Elizabeth read
and cites is Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs which Elizabeth thinks “initiates us into the realities of life and the truth of history.”
Chapter 8 (1810-1811) takes us to Oxford and Cheltenham. What happens is Grant’s family sends Elizabeth and her older sister, Jane, to stay with a relative who is somebody high in Oxford, there to be educated by him and his wife. His wife, Elizabeth and Jane Grant’s aunt, does take her task seriously, and appears to have been well-read and able herself, and tutors are hired for the girls.
This may sound strange but it was done to the Austen girls, only the Austens didn’t have the money or powerful connections to send their
girls to a decent place: the woman was a demi-monde half-crook, the
girls almost died of disease (an aunt did who came to rescue them) and
they were only sent out once more and then brought back quickly. Later
in the century the Brontes try this for their daughters (as we recall
from the horrors of Jane Eyre). Boys were not the only children picked
off in pairs and sent.
Elizabeth Grant says she and her sister felt odd being pulled out of family life and were partly relieved to return, but it seems to me this was the purpose. To get them out in the social world somehow or other. IN the case of people with more money not to harden the girls so much (that was the goal of sending boys away) Grant’s chapter is a concises and sharp and picturesque retelling of Oxford life at the time. It does indeed appear the young men for the most part didn’t study (a very few did) nor did the Dons work very hard. We get quite a revealing picture if you think about what you are seeing: cronyism or nepotism as words would have startled this era. At one point all go on holiday and we get a depiction of Cheltenham which is equally revealing. Austen’s letters do not begin to show it, and it’s clear it
was a better place for girls than Bath if only because it seems it was not so relentlessly a husband-hunting ground for women of genteel families. It was more expensive than Bath by this time.
Again an asture picturesque style recreates places and scenes. Among
other people she encounters Percy Bysshe Shelley. And how does he
emerge? Well as a bohemian young man, more trouble than he was worth.
Instead of the sensitive radical poet, we have a “ringleader of every species of mischief.” He committed (according to Grant) “wild pranks,” and instead being properly grateful to the “kind remonstrations” of his Tutor, “spill[ed] acid over the carpet of that gentlemen’s study, a new purchase, which he thus completely destroyed.” She doesn’t think PBS might have been nervous. No. He was “malicious at Univerisity … very insubordinate, always infringing some rules, the breaking of which he knew could not be overlooked. He was slovenly in his dress, nor indeed taking any pains to fasten any of his garments with a proper regard to decency.” When spoken to, he would make “extraordinary gestures, expressive of his humility under reproof, as to overset first the gravity, and then the temper of the lecturing
tutor.” When he went to really “unpleasant lengths” and “pasted up atheistical squibs,” it was considered “necessary to expel” him, but out of regard for the long-suffering father, a long conference was had with the man. What a relief when he left.
My view of TV and most films is this: they’d love this interpretation
of Shelley and would make a movie of it. Worse, yet, they’d make this
interpretation into a hero-villain of the macho-male type or neurotic
we never knew.
This little anecdote I’ve taken time to type out shows why I have said
Grant is conservative and also the irony of still censoring her
because she does at least tell the truth enough about her class and
its ways. She is writing in 1845 and it’s the prudential older
authority figure who speaks here, but she does not have the sympathy
or insight or regard Shelley’s ideas as anything anyone would take
seriously. I see this as connected with the kind of trivializing
Andrew Davies does when he speaks of his screenplays from Austen and
other high status novels to a TV audience. How sincere Davies is I
don’t know; he’s got money to make.
There is information about Elizabeth Grant Smith, and for those who’d
like to know more here it is, or three books: in The Scotswoman at
home and abroad: nonfictional writing 1700-1900, ed. Dorothy McMillan
(Glasgow, 1999), and A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed.
Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh, 1997). So nationalism
has kept her presence known in print. As I’ve suggested, in fact she
was as much English as Scots—more English than say Margaret Oliphant
by origin and background and family connections. Oliphant became
English as a professional writer and because her husband died and
Blackwood gave her a way of supporting herself by writing for him. I
was told that she is regarded as a 19th century writer by many. Here
is an argument for a long 18th century.
The third book might be unexpected if you did not know from Elizabeth
how politicking in her father’s mind meant votiing for those who would
find niches for cadets of his and his wife’s family in India, and were
you not to know she married first at 33 (not very marriageable by her
teens as her father mismanaged his property and there was a small
dowry only for Elizabeth) to a man who was hired by the East India
company and then sent out to Bombay. Well there’s information on her
in a biography of the Strachey family. Elizabeth Grant Smith was
Lytton Strachey’s great aunt.
The title of the book is Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the
Strachey Family by Barbara Caine.
Elizabeth Grant has real insight into herself and is sensitive enough
to see things but also rather thick-skinned. I guess that’s why she
survived, but her complacency about politics and sense of her position
while revealing does not make her all that likeable so much as cool,
calm. She does make a good complement to Pepys.
There’s so much here. It is rightly a classic and makes me remember
how Susannah Moodie’s Life in the Bush is a Canadian classic of a
similar type. This sort of book is what I hoped to hear about at the
Private Writings session of the ASECS.
I have yet to make time for Leonard Woolf’s autobiography (he and
Virginia Woolf belonged to the same milieu as the Stracheys) and the
novel he wrote about colonialism, The Village in the Jungle, where
I’ve a good idea he did tell the truth.
I recommend Grant’s memoir to all as enjoyable & instructive easy
reading. As on Eighteenth Century Worlds @ Yahoo, one friend, Luca,
who wanted to join in and couldn’t find or obtain Grant’s memoir, is
reading, for fun here’s a modern romanticized still of a Scots rebel
Highland laird, Liam Neeson as Rob Roy in the 1995 film with the
calendar for the time we are “in Scotland.”
Adding a few thoughts: I wrote my blog in too academic a spirit: placing the letters against two main types of letter collections that were published and have come down to us from the 18th century: the one where someone creates an interior self, a life, an identity reaching out to us; and the other where she (mostly this kind was written by women, though Southey does it in his _Letters
from London): the philosophical, political. Women were not supposed to
and did not write political treatises (Wollstonecraft was a rare darer) and they did turn to letters to express themslves this way.
LeFaye sneers at this as if it’s fake, a put-on to impress. That is a crude response to language and the way academics take taking the product for the process. She’d probably see language like “performing whatever” in the same light.
What I’m impresssed by in this letter (62) and increasingly throughout the Southampton ones and until Jane starts writing is the welter of minutiae Austen pours at us. It is tedious to go through. I suggest there’s a been a real growth in this since the letters started up again. It’s hard to put this into words but what I take away from Miller (whose words and sentences are often not parsable; you can’t parse them at all) is Austen’s intense turn away. I have said and maintain she turned away from social life; didn’t like it, shows real
Aspergers traits. I see them in this letter. She rejoices when she visits people if they’re not there. A great merit. Whew. She abides our gaze Auden or someone else said. Anne Grant, Elizabeth Grant Smith, Julie de Lespinasse, Madame de Deffand are not faking for others when they make an identity we can revel in — nor Rousseau, but reveling in the zeitgeist of their age which encourages this new individuality and exploring themselves _to us, and for us, and with us_. Similarly, Grant again, and Williams, Radcliffe, Shelley (Mary
Wollstonecraft), Thrale Piozzi (whose travel book Austen can quote nearly by heart – so I must read that one next) are not delving the political world to show off, but because they know it’s intensely important to what’s allowed them to live and experience in life.
Austen has little impulse for life-writing in these ways at all. At the end of her life Elizabeth Inchbald wrote a 3 volume memoir. Alas under the cruel repression and warnings of a priest, she burnt it. Lady Mary Montagu wrote and burnt as she went. Burney is all life-writing when she’s writing living prose. These are social acts, make no mistake about it.
It’s noteworthy that in the novels the heroines rarely write letters; when they do they are for news. What we have are letters which expose someone satirically (Lucy, Mary Crawford, Mary Musgrove) or in a spirit of showing more somberly what they lack (Edward Bertram’s obtuseness and pain). This intense hiding had only the outlet of these more than half-repressed compromising books. Miller is hiding too only he hides knowingly and she does not. I am not sure how aware she was of her lesbian impulses; it’s hard to say. Edgeworth seems unaware and yet they are so vivid in her _Belinda_. In S&S Austen is not sympathetic to transgressive sex; she shows Willoughby to have wanted to hurt Marianne and that he would have dumped her had she had clandestine sex with him fully the way Miss Williams did. Austen’s literary criticism is naive.
A few thoughts before I go through Letter 62 starting tomorrow.
Ellen Moody
More on influential women on Austen:. In my view no one seriously
interested in Austen’s novels can do without reading _Cecilia_ and
_Camilla__ (she mentions them in _NA_ as works of genius). A group of people on Austen-l thoroughly and posted on it years ago from this Austen-l site:
http://www.jimandellen.org/burney.html#Cecilia
Just tons of materials plus detailed plot summaries for every three chapters.
I have thought of a 2 women of Austen’s period who left life-writing
which is not an exploration of an interior self nor yet a loving
delineation of a place, culture, with a political outlook
(philosophical finally): Charlotte Smith and Felicity de Genlis.
Smith’s letters are business letters; she has no time for anything
else, but like Austen’s, they are from the hip, have a real
genuineness and similarly (for those who read them) when she talks of
personal matters can offend :). Genlis presents a strikinglyl false
face; all is happiness, cheer, piety. She has to lie outright
sometimes (Pamela is not hers), and skip over things every one knows:
that she was mistress of Philippe Egalite (among others) and all the
while she endlessly preaches conventional virtue. In her _Adele et
Theodore_ she justifies such performances or lying and what is
presented there is defenses of emotional blackmail as a way of
indoctrinating a child, total control over a child, and some of the
defense of meanness curiously in line with De Sade’s
self-justfications. Really stark amorality. She wrote a worthless
(from the point of view of telling her own life) 10 volume memoir; as
a depiction of her times and era when self is not involved it’s
valuable except so self-interested (but then many memoirs are), but
the lies vitiate it still.
All three of these authors were direct influences on Austen and her art.
I’ve another book to recommend: Christa Wolf’s _No Place on Earth_:
it’s every bit as good as people say and these are usually people not
18th century scholars. At its core is a depiction and analysis of two
later 18th century figures, Kleist and Karoline von Gunderrode.
Wolf’s portrait of Gunderrode is worth reading for any one interested
in later 18th century intellectual reading women. It’s startlingly
perceptive; she has studied these women. They did have it worse in
some ways than the English (and French). I was struck by one phrase
she has Gunderrode use of herself: “ignominious loneliness.”
Gunderrode lives in fear that her she will be seen as living in this
kind of state: she is unmarried and no one wants to marry her; she is
given no options she can stand. This state is one she is determined to
hide and present another face to the world. I felt that this phrase
again could be one that Miller is suggesting Austen lives in and that
he has lived in when he found she stretched out her consciousness to
him. It’s the state of Miss Bates for while the novel shows her
socializing, that’s a tiny percentage of her hours. The 2009 _Emma_
(by a woman and that’s significant) makes a point of showing us the
Bates household when alone.
My feeling is this fear of ignominous loneliness is what Charlotte
Lucas avoids. I feel too that Austen does not want us to admire
Charlotte but feel for her and see hers as a poignant case sitting
there in her room away from Mr Collins. She cannot escape Lady
Catherine de Bourgh and most of the time finds the strength to endure
the kinds of mortifying things Lady Catherine can say and bullying
things do, but in the height of LAdy Catherine’s having to see Darcy
escape her daughter, she would hate the lucky woman’s previous friend.
She would know it. She would demand Charlotte agree with her, be on
her side. Charlotte flees for a time.
So I see in the portrait of Charlotte as Martha a critique of Martha.
Martha is seeking a husband still; she should rather have held to what
made their lives worth while: the loving friendship. Like Charlotte,
she gives up what makes life sweet.
The siblings are cetainly intimate. We have no idea how intensely
intimate and what they really said to one another. Henry would be
caustic, sceptical (as we see on occasion) and more than a little
resentful (I like him for that, it’s a way of rebelling), we have too
little of the other brothers to know but certainly they’d be frank.
Ellen