How I came to Austen, Radcliffe & the 18th century; or, On Never Tiring of Ann Radcliffe

Elizabeth Bennet (Elizabeth Garvey) brooding over how wrong she has been: she has had postures like this since she read Darcy’s first letter about mid-point in the mini-series

Elizabeth Bennet stands up to and defies Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Judy Parfitt) (1979 BBC P&P by Fay Weldon)

Dear friends and readers,

Late yesterday afternoon I read the following passage:

Her judgment approved of the frankness, with which she had asserted her rights, and of the firmness, with which she had reproved a woman, who had dared to de­mand respect from the very victim of her cruelty and oppression. She was the more satisfied with herself, because she had never, for an instant, forgotten her own dig­nity so far, as to degenerate into the vehemence of passion, or to faulter with the weakness of fear. Her conviction of [his aunt’s] unworthy character was too clear to allow El[izabeth] to feel abashed in her presence; for she regarded only the censure of the good, to which she had ever
been as tremblingly alive …

Wait, someone asks? I don’t remember that passage from Pride and Prejudice. It fits but then I can see that some cunning substitute has been made.

Yes. This comes from Radcliffe’s The Italian and is Ellena thinking about an encounter between herself and an abbess which parallels not only in thematic resonance but place that in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Only the last phrase is out of whack with Elizabeth v Lady Catherine, though a case can be made for Elizabeth being as firm against the censure of the good as Jane Bennet, her sister. Elizabeth Bennet is to Lady Catherine de Bourgh as Ellena Rosalba is to the Abbess of San Stefano

Radcliffe meant to allude to the great Venetian painter, Rosalba Carriera by her heroine’s name

The difference between Radcliffe and Austen is Austen does not have such a passage. She does not assure us that this encounter is central, an important moment in the growth of the heroine’s integrity in a moral and psychological sense; rather she leaves people to flounder and assume “Till now I had never known myself” and take away abjection, mortification from Darcy’s lesson and a lesson in humility as a central node in the novel. And following suit the 1979 and 1995 film de-emphasize the moment between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine (Judy Parfitt comes closest to the woman and the longest rendition is in the 79 P&P) and make the letter from Darcy central; the 2005 film almost eradicates it: the moment must be there as it really is the pivotal moment of the book’s close, but is less than one minute long, done swiftly in epitomizing form in the dark.

Lady Catherine (Judi Dench) (2005 P&P by Joe Wright)

No I don’t think Austen was imitating Radcliffe in this novel as I don’t think she was imitating The Mysteries of Udolpho at the close of Persuasion when very like Persuasion where while walking Captain Wentworth and Anne talk of what has happened to them for the last 8 years, & Anne defends her decision to obey Lady Russell Radcliffe in the penultimate chapter of Udolpho has Valancourt and Emily go for a walk and discuss what they have been through and by contrast Emily says she was wrong not to trust Valancourt and take her family’s screwed-up values as her guide.

The question here is not which writer is more proto-gothic or feminist but to show the real obstacles of demonstrating Austen’s feminism and egalitarianism in her novels. It’s been argued by those who read Radcliffe (not enough, most read about her through Austen’s Northanger Abbey) that she is among the most radical of the women novel and gothic writers of her era (among them, Rictor Norton in Mistress of Udolpho, Robert Miles in The Great Enchantress, and to cite but one article, Sydny [Cindy] M. Conger, “Sensibility Restored: Radcliffe’s Answe to Lewis’s Monk,” reprinted in Graham’s Gothic Fictions, Gothic Transgressions), but that is not how she is remembered so to look back at the actual novels and compare (since Austen learned much about subjective narration out of a central consciousness from her).

I returned to Radcliffe yesterday in order to complete my paper, “The Content of Ann Radcliffe Landscapes,” and probably ought to have entitled this blog,”On Never Tiring of Ann Radcliffe” to match my “On Never Tiring of Jane Eyre …” and “On Never Tiring of Austen …. They all never fail me.

Have I told the story gentle reader of how I came to Austen? Probably on Austen-l and other listservs where we’ve read and discussed her novels and (I know) in the preface to my book, Trollope on the ‘Net.

It’s this:

It was quite simply personal need and identification (however ignorant of her era): I saw in P&P an idealized much softened version of my parents’s misery, my father’s boredom with a unintelligent tenaciously conformist wife; I saw Elinor as someone to imitate in order to protect myself and I know the ideal of this character lodged in my mind helped me fend off abrasiveness and guard myself. I was Fanny who couldn’t cross thresholds and have experienced this since even 10 years ago where I teach where it was still hard to go into a room to be with the “higher-ups” (tenured types with whom I & another adjunct lecturer were on a committee on). After my first reading of MP and coming across the words how we find ourselves born to “struggle and endure” I immediately turned to its first page and re-read. The book is never far from my mind; all my life it’s there latent, easily called up to consciousness.

Between the ages of 17 and 19 I don’t remember much. It was a bad dark period for me. But I know I read Northanger Abbey and Persuasion during these years for at age 21 when in an English class I was assigned Emma I remember thinking it was the only one I had not read. (In those days I didn’t know of the juvenilia or unfinished novels.)

Looking down at Bath from Prior Park heights (photo taken by Laura, my older daughter)

Recently the opening of my unfinished book, Jane Austen in Bath, was published in a newsletter by the JASNA-DC people:

We stood high above Bath looking down. It had been an arduous climb. About a third of the way up my husband, Jim, had suddenly suggested ‘maybe we should have gone round’. Even our sturdy sixteen- year old daughter, Isobel, might not have made it up had not a stairway moulded out of the hill’s earth and stones, to which continuous wooden rails were attached, been provided by some prescient civic body. Northanger Abbey had not conveyed how steep this hill really was. I had attributed Catherine Morland’s satisfaction on Beechen Cliff almost wholly to the lingering memory of a hard-won battle: to go on this country walk with her real friends she had had to fend off the pressure and deceits practised upon her by a brother and two false friends. Also unemphatically in the text then was the achievement of the walk itself. And unlike another famous eighteenth-century walker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Catherine had gotten to share her reveries with congenial spirits.

The reader would laugh could I say for how long I had almost let myself dream of standing on this green hill so that I too could reject ‘the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape’ (NA, 111) with the splendid effortlessness of a touchingly innocent heroine.

Emma remains my least favorite of the books.

I never wanted to work on Austen academically — it meant too much, was too close was my naive idea, and I only began to be active and write (most of my writing is on the Net and I imagine will continue to be so until the end of my chapter, meaning my life) when I came onto the Net and the truth is I did this because I found a world of people to be with daily and I felt intimately (however wrong I may have been). I have since learned (using Bronte’s Jane Eyre) that teaching what you are passionately engaged with produces the finest experiences, but did not know that then.

I first read Ann Radcliffe when I came across an exquisitely lovely 3 volumed medium-brown (textured covers) copy of the boo on the open shelves of Brooklyn College! Yes, in 1974 gentle reader a 1797 copy of The Romance of the Forest was available to students and faculty alike on the open shelves of Brooklyn College (CUNY). I was teaching there. It was so lovely I took it home. I was riveted by its nightmares and it too has never been forgotten by me. I’ve taught it, read it several times, once on the Net, put here all the postings I wrote then. Along with Wordsworth’s “Michael,” landscape poetry and my love of bitter melancholy satire, other later 18th century French and English women’s life-writing, this book led to my majoring in the ” long 18th century” (beginning with the later 17th and going onto 1820) with my emphasis on 1760 to 1815.

Elizabeth Bennet (Jennifer Ehle) in the beginning phase of her long moving trajectory of self-examination and regret, remorse: “Till now I never knew myself … ” (1995 P&P by Andrew Davies)

When I was younger and knew people face-to-face or not at all, it was not uncommon for people to be surprised when I told of my love for Austen — as I am a socialist by ideology (there is no party allowed in the US which is even pro-labor or working and lower middle class). Until today I am in my gut not persuaded Austen is not conservative and deeply so in some
fundamental ways that go beyond but also includes ideology; Radcliffe is openly deeply liberal in a modern way in her travel book (I’ll be making a blog on this soon), but she too shows the same rooted impulses for retreat, security in a stable situation with people she can rely on and who are kind enough and have some minimal integrity in the home and in their ideals. Both their feminism is also muted. We can say all we like that Austen wrote this way out of her dependent position but what exists of documents does not bear this out enough. The family has indeed been thorough and destroyed all that might be used persuasively — we have been seeing this in Austen’s letters.

When Elinor awakens in the 1995 S&S by Ang Lee and Emma Thompson, and finds Marianne yet living and having passed her crisis, and looks out the window this is what she sees

No it’s the presence of both women in these books, their stance of sheer non-corruption, and seeking a refuge in beauty, taste, humane feeling shared with a few others that was and remains the deep appeal. I’ve read The Mysteries of Udolpho now at least 4 times, once half-way through in French (Madamde de Chastenay’s translation) and it’s transcendent landscapes live still in the Jane Austen movies (ironically).

My first attempt at a blog, dear reader, was called “Udolpho” (on livejournal some 12 years ago); the livejournal people recently reminded me of this when they deleted it as unused.

Ellen