A contemporary illustration (John Edmund Buckley) for Marmion (Scott used to be seen as Austen’s rival)
Dear friends and readers,
A third short blog, just to announce I’ve put onto my site at Academia.edu, a copy of the comparative review of the two Cambridge Companions to Jane Austen (1997 and again 2011) I wrote for ECCB, which will appear in due time (I hope), either this fall or next spring.
Another of the Cambridge Publications
I’ve already blogged on the individual essays in the two volumes, summarizing and evaluating them individually, but have been asked for a quick overview several times now so thought this pre-publication appropriate.
The Place setting for Mary Wollstonecraft from Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (Austen did not make the cut) — How we contextualize her today
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
From my Sylvia blog:
Jane Austen’s own comments on her dying and death at age 42 in 1817, July, were misread, turned into bland optimism on Sarah Emsley’s blog some days ago: Arnie Perlstein wrote an assessment of Emsley’s piece showing how she ignored all the ironies in the passages she quoted. I saw Emsley’s piece too, and it prompted me to write briefly (on the blog written on the anniversary) which is life-writing) about how sad and what a loss her early death was, the horror of the pain she probably knew (from the few signals that are allowed to come through), deterioration of her body, and yes rage she felt (in that poem). Even the little bit I wrote was picked up at twitter and retweeted or favorited — Austen catches attention.
It’s not just an unironic reading, what is forgotten here are the doctored quality of those last few fragments. The family let just the tiniest parts of the last letters because most of it (I imagine) was not conventional piety, perhaps included more bits of graphic description of her disease.
The point of our reading of the letters (which I posted about on my Austen reveries) was to expose and get beyond these imposed structures which get in the way of seeing Austen for real.
In the case of death, grief, pain, loss, I have found the same insistence on erasure, on imposing interpretations the opposite of what might be a natural response by outsiders – those not involved with the dying and dead person; the attitude of mind pervades the latest advice on what to do about grief and loss by the society at large.
Arnie Perlstein was showing the flattening out of irony, re-contextualization was there too, in this upbeat interpretation not just of Jane Austen’s death, but how she felt about it (!). There is something peculiarly violating about asserting Austen was upbeat about her own death. But people are asleep. And I’ve found that the misreading of Austen is more than simply not getting an irony. After all too it’s hard to prove the irony is there to those who can’t or won’t hear it, or insist on contextualizing their power away. Or say they refuse to believe such-and-such (as Austen did not despise or dismiss academic scholarship even if she says this)
Often it’s simply misquoting. A key phrase, a passage, two final sentences are omitted. For example, from Mansfield Park:
Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply, and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. Too often alas, it is so. Fraternal love, sometimes almost everything, is at others worse than nothing
This is how it is quoted at good reads and from good reads elsewhere:
Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply .,..
I found only one place where the rest is quoted (the text itself on Republic of Pemberley) and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.”
Miss Drake