JASNA 2017, at Huntington Beach Hotel: an Austen watershed, donor, the fandom — and my own story

Chawton House — somber photo (the way the house looks today)

The Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach hotel — patio and lounge

Dear friends and readers,

One last report about the JASNA 2017 held at a Huntington Beach hotel. I’ve one session, a lecture, and an interview-talk group held during the ball to cover, which I’ll add to (as I did in two of the other reports) with related material from one of the recent books about the worlds of people forming around Austen’s name, and texts; houses, relics and sites de memoire, writing scholarship, sequels, making films:Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites. Her book enables us to ask a fundamental question about the people who form Jane Austen’s followers, who have through their earnestness of approach, true belief in Austen’s “greatness” or their view of her, said she and her books have functioned centrally in their lives. To see this almost unbelievable truth can make more serious the existence of this cornucopia of scholarship, sequels, heritage behavior, and events as a result of Austen’s celebrity.

Virginia Woolf laughed at the fanaticism of “certain elderly gentleman” in upper echelon neighborhoods in London and said she had to take care not to offend them by what she had to say about their favorite female author (perhaps the only female they read). But she does not explain it. I end on my own journey through life with Austen as a sustaining presence and her books as what have never failed me, and my own theory about a code in them. The first book I’ll discuss was written by two British novelists during World War II, a horrific catastrophe coming out of the worst impulses of humanity, and one could look at as touching because Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B. Stern seem sincerely to believe and act on the idea that Austen’s texts if probably understood form a bulwark against seeing and/or experiencing the full evil of the world.

First edition

Saturday afternoon Annette LeClair in her “In and Out of Foxholes: Talking of Jane Austen During and After World War II,” discussed a bellwether book, Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern’s Speaking of Jane Austen. I wrote a thorough summary and assessment of Kaye-Smith and Stern some years ago now; LeClair differed from me in that she contextualized K-S and Stern by other 1930s and 40s critical reactions. First Kipling’s “The Janeites,” arguing that an analogous perspective on Austen as refuge and support was first described in this semi-parodic endorsement. E.M. Forster began this way, but after he read Chapman’s unabridged and uncensored edition of Austen’s letters, he found himself alienated from the narrow, snobbish, and spinsterish mind in the letters. Ms. LeClair did not counter this view by saying (as I have done), remember most are to Cassandra, written to please, impress, and interest her, plus she destroyed what she thought might hurt her sister’s and/or family’s reputation. So the letter mirror Cassandra more than Jane. We learned about collectors, scrapbooks, libraries bombed and flooded out; during WW II committees sent books to the troops: Pride and Prejudice was one of these. 1944 brings us K-S and Stern; Ms LeClair found a “diversity of topics,” Austen treated with respect, but she denied any gender faultline in what they wrote (!),and did not differentiate their books from others at the time or more recently. It seemed the books attracted attention because they were all there were at the time book-length. This is not quite true: a vast Austen industry did not exist, but Mary Lascelles on the art of Austen’s books, D. W. Harding’s essays. These were harbingers of what was to come in the 1960s, e.g., J. Walton Litz on Austen’s art, Murdock on her vision. She did talk of emails on Austen-l about Stern and K-S and I saw one of mine put on screen, but LeClair did not read these aloud or say who wrote them or what they were precisely about.

The 18th century printing press brought along looked like this

Hard upon this was a lecture and demonstration of how books were printed during Austen’s era by Mark Barbour of the International Printing Museum in Carson, California. Mr Barbour took us through the history of printing from inception (1450) to shortly after Austen published her books. I’d never seen a demonstration using one of these presses before, and he provided much information about paper, how multiple pages are printed at a time, were interwoven, what were the costs of printing, typical numbers printed, what profits were made, and then a brief summary of Austen’s dealings for the four books she brought out in her lifetime, and the posthumous novels and biographical published by Henry and Cassandra a year after she died. These are readily available in a number of sources, Jan Fergus’s book is the most thorough and concise I know of.

During the ball, there were two events in another room. The one I attended was intended to be a panel of fan fiction writers, with Diana Birchall as moderator. What emerged was Diana talking to the group of people (fairly large) who made up the audience. The topic became what kinds of sequels (or post-texts) there are, which books is most re-written or expanded (Pride and Prejudice), and what kinds of sequels characteristically produce the best books. For me the last question made for the most content-rich and revealing replies, though it seemed a continuation (say Diana’s own Mrs Darcy’s Dilemma and P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley) was as likely to be strong as a wholly new invented book (Cindy Jones’s My Jane Austen Summer, Kathleen Flynn’s The Jane Austen Project) as modernizing rewrites (Joanna Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility) or rewrites from another or questioning perspective (Jo Baker’s Longbourn).

Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood and Gregg Wise as John Willoughby suddenly unexpectedly finding themselves partners at the assemble ball in the 1995 S&S (perhaps it’s not irrelevant to say they fell in love during this movie and have been married happily enough ever after since)

I always enjoy the kind of dancing done during Austen’s era, and left the panel for the ball (where I danced for a couple of hours); and was sorry I and Izzy couldn’t stay for Richard Knight’s history of the Chawton estate from he Knight family’s point of view (it was the Knights who adopted Edward Austen enabling him and his heirs to inherit Chawton and Godmersham), which he briefly anticipated during the dinner. Again on papers I wish I had heard and somehow overlooked: as I’ve written and delivered a paper on widows and widowers in Austen’s fiction and family, for Saturday I regret missing Jackie Mijares’s talk (apparently) on how Austen characterizes widows and widowhood, portrays dependence and independence, and uses widows “to facilitate action.” Probably the title, “Mrs Jennings & Company: Husbands in Paradise” misled me; Sara Bowen’s “Writing on Austen’s Coattails in the 1930s: Angela Thirkell and the Austen revival” was about Thirkell’s work; sometimes seen as continuations of Anthony Trollope in a narrower veing (schools for example), these are novels which feed as much on the desire for more texts by or in the Austen vein as do the sequels, post-texts, variations and movie and play adaptations.

On the whole it was a very rich conference which covered many aspects of Austen’s work, life, era, and (especially) legacies. As usual, I wish there had been twice as many sessions, so only four papers were on against one another, making for less free or (for me) empty time. If they would begin officially on Thursday instead of Friday, and organize Sunday so that the earlier morning (before “brunch”) had sessions, this could easily be accomplished without disturbing the “sorority party” atmosphere, inconveniencing or making for conflicts for the private parties and networking that does on (which I take no part in), or interfere with the tours (which begin on Monday and carry on to the following Monday). Still this time the excellent special lectures and late night talks and activities (the movie with Whit Stillman as introducer) made up for this wastage. I missed the semi-serious participatory singing around a piano we enjoyed in Montreal one night (and remember occurred in Portland). Those were good inclusive moments.

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Staged, colored promotional shot of David Rintoul and Elizabeth Garvie as Darcy and Elizabeth (1979 BBC P&P, scripted Fay Weldon) — this is said to be Sandy Lerner’s favorite Austen film

Richard Knight and Sandy Lerner

I’ll conclude with with two stories, the first about someone who because of her immense wealth and/or income and willingness to build and to fund a new Austen institution is now an important person in the kinds of histories of the “Austen aftermath” this conference centered on. She is also someone others want to meet and who can get famous people to come to her when she wants them to. And Sandy Lerner is a fan wedded to her conception of Austen (as opposed to others), a personal view that has functioned centrally in some choices in life she’s made. She forms a whole chapter (“Sandy’s Pemberley,” pp.45-64) in Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites (Mariner Books, 2015): this is a very readable “journey” through the “fandom” surrounding Jane Austen, mostly found through the Internet, going to conferences and festivals and interviewing people (Yaffe is a journalist); she sought after named or somewhat well-known listserv owners, bloggers, published post-text writers, whatever actors or people involved with films she could get to talk to her, scholars she could send up, or writers on the Net who have made a splash or seem to stand out for peculiar or “outlier” ideas (Arnie Perlstein gets almost a whole chapter, “The Jane Austen Code,” pp 216-37). She presents her as a quietly fervent — and reasonable — fan since she was a teenager.

Sandy Lerner’s story as told by Yaffe also sheds light on Richard Knight who was at the conference as a key note speaker and we can here gather a few truths about him. He had “inherited a crushing estate-tax bill and a `16th century house in need of a million British pounds’ worth of emergency repairs.” A developer’s plan to turn the place into a golf course and expensive hotel had collapsed by 1992. Enter Sandy Lerner. She had made oodles of money off an Internet business, is another fan of Austen, one common today who does not like the idea of Austen as “an unhappy repressed spinster,” something of a recluse, not able to see the money and fame she wanted. When Dale Spender’s book, Mothers of the Novel, presented a whole female population writing away (as Austen did), a female literary tradition, she found a vocation, collecting their books. After she heard a speech by Nigel Nicolson, where he offended her (talking of a woman who thought Jane Austen didn’t like Bath as “a silly, superstitious cow,” described himself as heading a group who intended to open a Jane Austen center in Bath even though Edward Austen Knight’s Chawton House was on the market (too expensive? out of the way for tourists?), she decided to “get even.” When she had the money two years later, she bought Chawton House. She wanted to make it “a residential study center where scholars consulting er rare-book collection could live under 19th century conditions.” This super-rich woman loved the sense these people would gain “a visceral sense of the historical moment,” wake up to “frost on the windows, grates without fires, nothing but cold water to wash in.”

She paid six million for 125 year lease on the house and its 275 acre grounds; another $225,000 for the stable block. She discovered it to be badly damaged, inhabited by tenants she found distasteful, “ugly,” rotting. Crazy rumors abounded in the village she was going to turn the place into a lesbian commune, a Euro-Disney style theme park, her husband testing missile systems in the grounds. She thought of herself as this great philanthropist. Culture clashes: the Chawton estate sold its hunting rights for money; she was an animal rights activist. Disputes over her desire to remove a swimming pool said to be a badger habitat protected under UK law. I saw the Ayrshire Farm here in Northern Virginia that she bought during the protracted lawsuits and negotiations over Chawton: an 800-acre spread in northern Virginia, where “she planned to raise heritage breeds under humane, organic conditions, to prove socially responsible farming was economically viable.” She started a cosmetics company whose aesthetic was that of the Addams Family (TV show). Chawton House was finally built using a sensible plan for restoration; a cemetery was discovered, a secret cupboard with 17th century telescope. Eventually Lerner’s 7000 rare books came to reside in a house you could hold conferences, one-day festivals and host scholars in. It had cost $10 million and yearly operating costs were $1 million a year.

Lerner’s Ayrshire Farmhouse today — it’s rented out for events, and hosts lunches and evening parties and lectures, has a shop ….

Lerner is unusual for a fan because she dislikes sequels and does not seek out Austen movies; it’s Austen’s texts she loves — yet she too wants to write a P&P sequel. I sat through one of her incoherent lectures so know first-hand half-nutty theory that every concrete detail in an Austen novel is crucial information leading to interpretation of that novel. I’ll leave the reader to read the details of her way of research, her travels in imitation of 18th century people: it took her 26 years to complete. How she has marketed the book by a website, and how Chawton was at the time of the book thriving (though her Farm lost money). Yaffe pictures Lerner at a signing of her book, and attracted many people, as much for her Internet fame as any Austen connection. Yaffe has Lerner against distancing herself from “our distastefully Twittering, be-Friending world, for the e-mail boxes overflowing with pornographic spam.” But she will buy relics at grossly over-inflated prices (“a turquoise ring” Austen wore) and give them to friends. She launched Chawton House by a fabulously expensive ball, to which Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul (dressed as aging Mr and Mrs Darcy) came. A “prominent chef” made 18th century foods (“nettle and potato soup, pickle ox tongue, sweetmeats”). She was in costume: “a low-cut, pale-blue ball gown. She even went horseback riding with Rintoul. Tremendous thrills.

The house rented to use as Longbourn for the 1995 P&P (scripted Andrew Davies — a older woman needed the money and lived upstairs in a sort of attic while the filming went on all over the place)

I am told as of this year Lerner has in the same spirit in whch she got rid of her cosmetics company (for a big sum) when it went utterly conventional – she tired of it, it grated on her — she has withdrawn (or threatened to) her support of Chawton House, and they will have to find an enormous sum yearly to make up for the gap.

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Izzy, Diana Birchall and myself during a lunchbreak

Yaffe often refers to herself as a humble fan unlike Lerner content to express herself through some “community service,” “modest local efforts;” she satisfies her “acquisitive urges with coffee mugs and tote bags:” “What would I do with an Elizabethan manor house anyway?” (p. 61) I’m not this reasonable. I have satisfied my urge to do something by writing thousands of emails over the past 22 years here on the Net, filled three blogs now with material on Austen, and (connected) the 18th century and women’s art. Ive bought hundreds of Jane Austen books (nearly 500), many editions of novels by her, and a wall of a bookcase and a half of books on her, sequels (not that many of these), DVDs, screenplays, books on her films and stenography notebooks filled with hand-written screenplay and notes from hours, days, weeks, years of watching.

Austen has functioned centrally in my small life too: I believe her character of Elinor Dashwood helped keep me sane and from sucide at age 17. Fanny Price makes me feel I’m not alone; the world is filled with others like me, or at least one other who empathizes: her author-creator. I can move beyond, put aside my wretchedness over my disabled psychological state when I lose myself in her books, watch some of the movies. I’ve made a few friends through my obsession — though I often find these JASNA AGMS places I feel and am much alone in (as I would be had I ever been invited to be in any sorority). I’ve played in my car audiotapes and CDS so many times and with such passion that my younger daughter, Isobel, is a genuine fan, has herself written much fan-fiction published here on the Net. She once attempted to publish a book which incorporated part of the Sense and Sensibility plot-design.

And I have a theory too: that in all the novels but Persuasion, Tuesday functions in the calendars as a day when crucial, often humiliating life-transforming events happen (This includes two of the fragments, Lady Susan and The Watsons). I must write a book too — if I can ever find a publisher, though mind would have a shorter title than Arnie Perlstein’s: it’d be called “The Important Tuesday.” The whole purpose of my doing my timelines was to show to the world how serious Tuesday is in Austen. Another hidden code no one but me wants to take seriously. Perhaps someday I’ll get up the courage to propose a paper at a JASNA AGM on the topic of Tuesdays in Austen. I don’t because I fear ridicule, find being laughed at emotionally painful so don’t think I could do it. But perhaps my proposal would be rejected; a couple of those I’ve offered have been, e.g. “Disquieting Patterns in Jane Austen” (on parallels between her and other spinster-sisters like Dorothy Wordsworth), “The Value and Centrality of Jane Austen’s letters” (where we find frankly stated the brutality of the world towards women, something crucially implicit in the books) . This thought could embolden me.

Enough,
Ellen