Videos of A Song for Austen; an opera; those Magical time-travellers Constance & Ellen Hill

Deane House: a slightly antiqued reprint of Ellen Hill’s illustration

Dear friends and readers,

I assume none of us has forgotten this year’s 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, with its outpouring of books, meetings, events, including lectures, parades, dances. I wrote no less than three blogs, one on the books and reviews published on and round that day, and Austen’s own last lines, in her novels, and that last week she lived one final parting shot (an ironic poem), the discovery that a picture long known is of Austen’s aunt Philadelphia, cousin Eliza, the aunt’s husband and Eliza’s legal father, Saul Hancock, and the maid, Clarinda, and the first where I sent along Chris Brindle’s poem and “Song for Jane.”

This evening I’ve two videos to share, one of Clara Chevallerau singing Chris’s song with herself in iconic places in Bath:

The other the Annual Jane Austen Festival Regency Parade, Bath, for this 200th year:

Chris is the author of the script and the director of the filmed play for Sanditon based on Austen’s fragment and her niece, Anna Lefroy’s continuation. Chris writes about the filming and Clara. She is “an intelligent girl; from Switzerland she speaks French, English, German and Spanish fluently. Only 20 she has already toured Europe and the USA in musical theatre productions. She read Pride & Prejudice at School (in English) and carried on to read Sense and Sensibility.
I wrote all the lyrics for the song, apart from the French chorus which is pretty much a literal translation of the English. Clara contributed:-

“Comment une jeune enfant, fille de vicaire
Née dans un petit village du Hampshire
A pu autant, changé la face de cette terre”

The filming took place in a day. I had caught the 6.30 from Colchester and had met Clara at Paddington and together we caught the 8.30 to Bath getting there at 10 o’clock. We caught the 5.43 back. I was carrying the guitar, my camera and a tripod, whilst Clara carried a bag which seemed to contain half her wardrobe. I had my phone and a bluetooth speaker and through that we played the song which Clara sang along to in numerous relevant locations. The glory of doing this is all the little incidents that you capture quite by accident.

You see all the tourists enjoying Bath in large part because of the association with Jane Austen, and which Clara sings with the Pulteney Street Bridge in the background, through which the Austens would have walked into town from their house at 4 Sydney Place.”

The reader may also want to know about a new opera adapted from Mansfield Park: in The Guardian Jonathan Dove explains the sources from Austen’s novel of his inspiration

To me, her reticence invited music, a way of revealing those hidden emotions.

Two scenes stood out as especially poignant – and musical.

In the first, Fanny’s beloved Edmund is distracted and entranced by the vivacious Mary Crawford, but one evening he joins Fanny to gaze out of the window at the stars. Fanny is overjoyed – but then Mary starts to sing, and Edmund is drawn back into the room away from the window where Fanny now stands alone, looking out into the night.

This follows a scene in which Fanny – alone, seated on a bench – helplessly watches Edmund as he walks off to explore a wilderness beyond the garden with Mary Crawford.

These scenes have haunted me for years

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/11/the-silence-of-the-lamb-opera-jane-austen-mansfield-park-fanny-price

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I’m just now reading one of the books reviewed at the time: Devoney’s Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen in order to review it for an academic periodical. Physically, the hardback is a beautiful book, good paper, sewn signatures, with good illustrations. As I do when I take a book seriously, I’m going to follow Looser on some of her trails. Most of the reviews remained on a level of generality where they did not tell the specifics of her arguments so that’s one way I can differ. Her tone (by-the-way) is anything but snarky or belligerent in the way of Helen Kelly in her JA: Secret Radical; Looser projects such generosity, benignity and charity to all, she makes the reader who might complain (or differ irritatedly) into someone grumpy.

In her first chapter, she adds a third text to the crucial early ones shaping the Janeite view of Austen first announced in modern terms by G. B. Stern and Sheila Kaye-Smith in their first published departure from male academic critics’ high-minded close-reading of the generally moral thematic kind, Speaking of Jane Austen: they openly sided with this character and against the other from a woman reader’s point of view; more importantly Austen’s books and the worlds she presented were refuges, sanctuaries. Looser says this began with two we know well (the “usual suspects”), James-Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir ofh his aunt, and the sanitized, cut, rearranged presentation of her correspondence by Lord Edward Brabourne, the son of her niece, Fanny Austen Knight. But Looser insists there was a third: Constance and Ellen Hill’s Jane Austen: Her Home and Her Friends. The book is by both sisters, Constance wrote the text, and Ellen drew the crucial picturesque illustrations.

Looser does sort of dismiss Margaret Oliphant’s keenly insightful review of JEAL which anticipates some of the arguments D.W. Harding was to make in his transformative “Regulated Hatred” (a paper published in Scrutiny): Oliphant understood Austen’s text clearly as acid; the work of a sharp satirist and skeptical female. I think Oliphant important but I agree her review was not influential. (It was only reprinted and noticed after Southern published his Jane Austen’s Heritage two volumes.)

Looser claims the Hill book was innovative, original — went beyond the family view — because they visited the places Austen lived in, visited, and they read original sources (borrowed manuscripts from the family). They were trying to evoke the past for us to enter into and picture places perhaps we have not the money or wherewithal to go to. In lieu of photos lovely picturesque illustrations. This is before cameras became so ubiquitous. Looser says they invented the term “Austen-land” (used recently by Shannon Hale in her book and then the film adaptation).

So I began the book. The Hill’s opening chapter shows the ploy. They are tracing the footsteps of the Austen ghosts: where did Mr and Mrs Austen drive that first night they were married. Ellen and Constance are seeking Steventon. But the sky darkens. There is no roadway, no map. Nothing where Steventon was either. The place they are told they can stay at has no room. But wait, the people suggest another, an inn in Deane! Was not Deane a place Austen stayed at? It’s nighttime but they forge on. You see all the world is good and all is right with the world now. They have trouble finding this place too, but not to worry, again they encounter good people who are eager to take them in. When this happens they know they have arrived in Austen-land.

Their destination: the pump where the vicarage stood (as drawn by Ellen in the original book)

The Hill sisters go beyond reinforcing JEAL; they are turning his view into something magical magical. This is time-traveling criticism. And it has been influential in anticipating a whole way of picturing Austenland.

Again a fan has worked on one of Ellen Hill’s illustrations: Ellen had pictures Manydown Park in the snow in the evening from the side; here it has been made more dramatic:

And of course I hope my reader will not define me as grumpy when I inject a note of somber realism: the 1790s was a period of severe repression of any political movement for social justice and equality in England, pressings were frequent and massive (read Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers), mutinies punished harshly, the life of the average person, from whom Austen was not and never wanted to be immune was hard long working hours for a subsidence existence, women had no rights under the law and by custom. See Carolyn Steedman’s Labours Lost on the working livese of women in this era and until the mid-20th century. Let us not forget the Hills’ Austenland was a fantasy then too. Photographs (were there any) could have shown this. Those are real 21st century people walking in that Jane Austen parade got up somewhat incongruously in an attempt to wear styles from another era.

Ellen who loves pictures