Chris Brindle’s Song for Jane

18th century print illustration of Weymouth, fashionable spa resort where Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax become engaged ….

At one point, ten years ago things looked very precarious when the majority of our residents had their accounts at the Bank of Eastbourne. I had borrowed heavily to build the foundations of this resort and was nearly forced, through no fault of my own, into bankruptcy. Fortunately we had a major investor from Antigua, the famous anti-slavery campaigner Miss Felicity Lambe, who was prepared to invest in our resort, and our new bank, “Parker Brothers – The Bank of Sanditon”, and that saved the day. It gives us great pride that the dividends we pay Miss Lambe fund her great campaign: – and her model plantation for free-men labourers in Antigua — from the concluding scene of Chris’s Sanditon

Friends,

Some six months ago now I posted a review of Chris Brindle’s play’s Sanditon, or The Brothers. It was filmed as a play, played on British TV, and a DVD was made available of the play, as well as a 40 minute documentary narrated by Amy Burrows (who plays Charlotte Heywood in the film). I thought it a splendid adaptation, which used the continuation by Anne Lefroy (published in an scholarly edition of Sanditon), which shows a real feel for the original and some knowledge of what her aunt intended. The documentary told of Anne Lefroy’s life as well as some of the circumstances surrounding Austen’s writing of this last unfinished work. Among these that Austen was dying and knew it, and at times in great pain before (and probably) during the writing of this fragment. The way Austen seems to have dealt with pain as seen in her writing was to distance herself, make an ironic perspective which both reflects on the issues at hand, and mocks them (see my The Depiction of Widows and Widowers in Austen’s Writing).

In the same blog I uploaded a beautiful song sung by Burrows and Nick Thomas, “The Blue Briny Sea,” a composition enacting what seems to have been Austen’s longing to be beside the sea far more than she had been able to. Emma Woodhouse’s longing is repeated in Sanditon where the wish fulfillment element is the town is by the sea.

Since then I’ve been able to read Chris’s script of the play, and an outline of how to turn this 2 hour script for a play or single movie into a mini-series (it looks very doable). Chris explains how he originally wanted to develop a play about Anna Lefroy, but there was insufficient interest — and how he came to develop an ending for Sanditon. He sent me a pdf of his book, Hampshire: Discovering the 19th century world of the Portsmouth artist, R.H.C. Ubsdell in which he recreates intimately the local world of Hampshire both Jane and her niece Anna spent much of their lives in through Ubsdell’s pictures (from the gallery). Finally, a musical rendition (words by Amanda Jacobs) of Austen’s Three Prayers combined into a hymn of praise, “Father in Heaven.” All this material shows immense sensitivity to underlying motifs and feelings of Austen’s works as well as the subtle felt realities of Anne Lefroy’s relationship to her aunt, a real knowledge and empathy with one another.

So when Chris sent me another song he wrote re-imagining aspects of the completed Sanditon, re-enacting Austen’s deep grief at dying so young, looking to understand how she dealt with this seriously (partly by writing), what compensations she saw (her work), I was eager to listen. I was much moved. — among other picked-up suggestions from Austen’s later work, the song remember the poem Austen is said have written in the last day or so of her life, “Written at Winchester on Tuesday, the 15th July 1817,” with phrases like “When once we are buried you think we are gone/But behold me immortal!” With his permission, and encouragement, I upload the new song here: It is written by Chris Brindle, with a brilliant 20 year old Swiss French girl called Clara Chevallerau, and sung by her. (Although only 20 Clara has toured Europe with a Swiss version of “William Tell” and sung for Musical Theatre impresario Bobby Cronin on a Europe / U.S. tour.)

as well as the words:

When did you realise
That you life would soon come to an end
Did you always know your life would be so short?
What is a life what is it worth
– Is it what you leave behind you
When you take nothing with you at the end?

PRE-CHORUS

Your books and letters were your children
Left to others to inspire
– And maybe carry on your work

CHORUS

Do you die if a bit of you will live in others
Or memories of you will still remain?
How do you spend your last few moments
on this earth
When your journey has to come to its end

BRIDGE

In your pain you left us biting satire
A town built on sand in need of hope
But you left us characters who could save it
If in our imagination we could see how they would cope

May the Lord look on you with grace and favour
For this was the world you created
Reaching out for your future
A century or more away
When your pain was most intense
And your time was running out.

FRENCH CHORUS

Est-ce qu’on meurt si un peu de nous reste dans nos oeuvres
Ou des souvenirs de nous survivent encore?
Comment passe-t-on nos derniers jours sur cette terre
Quand le voyage arrive à son terme?

FALSE OUTRO:
Comment une jeune enfant, fille de vicaire
Née dans un petit village du Hampshire
A pu autant, changé la face de cette terre?

REPEAT CHORUS (last time)

Recent photo of Winchester — where Austen lies buried

As we near the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death ….

Ellen

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