Christmas in Jane Austen’s letters (and novels once again)

Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen reading and writing outside a cottage (Becoming Jane, 2007, scripted Kevin Hood, Susan Williams, directed Julian Jarrod)

Dear friends and readers,

I have over the years written several blogs on Christmas, mentions and uses by Austen in her novels (see especially her perception of Christmas in the novels) and the films adapted from them. In brief here is a sample:

Sense and Sensibility: The Miss Steeles “were prevailed on to stay nearly two months at the park, and to assist in the due celebration of that festival which requires a more than ordinary share of private balls and large dinner parties to proclaim its importance.”

Pride and Prejudice: Caroline Bingley’s cruel letter to Jane ends: “I sincerely hope your Christmas in Hertfordshire may abound in the gaieties which that season generally brings.”

Mansfield Park: Mary Crawford : “Is it Christmas gaieties that he is staying for?” (she doesn’t believe that for a minute)

Emma (chosen from the long sequence): Mr. Weston: “At Christmas every body invites their friends about them, and people think little of even the worst weather.” (Mr Weston’s benign unsubtle view is not agreed with …)

Northanger Abbey: ‘Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim. Catherine knew all this very well; her great aunt had read her a lecture on the subject only the Christmas before; and yet she lay awake ten minutes on Wednesday night debating between her spotted and her tamboured muslin, and nothing but the shortness of the time prevented her buying a new one for the evening.’

Persuasion: “Immediately surrounding Mrs. Musgrove were the little Harvilles, whom she was sedulously guarding from the tyranny of the two children from the Cottage, expressly arrived to amuse them. On one side was a table occupied by some chattering girls, cutting up silk and gold paper … the whole completed by a roaring Christmas fire, which seemed determined to be heard, in spite of all the noise of the others. Charles and Mary also came in, of course … Mr. Musgrove made a point of paying his respects to Lady Russell, and sat down close to her for ten minutes, talking with a very raised voice, but from the clamour of the children on his knees, generally in vain …”

You may skim the whole lot swiftly here.

Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth supposed reading Jane’s letters the winter after the Christmas visit of the Gardeners (who took Jane off to cheer her up, 1995 P&P, scripted Andrew Davies, directed Simon Langton)

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Tonight I went through her letters and an overview for the first time in a couple of years brings home to me once again, how much is missing. For some years and phases of the year we see a regular rhythm to the letters, say two or three journal-style over two or three days will repeat itself, and then nothing. Major events not noted because they don’t occur on the days of the letters left to us. As to mentions of Christmas or the weather, one can conjecture that if a group of balls, dances, parties, dinners are all occurring between the last week of December and first of January they might be related to a holiday and there is a feel of regularity of occurrence at this time of year, but I found but no mention of Christmas itself (the word) and it is itself a reference to a general time when someone is expected to return to where the Austens are living (Southampton). It’s almost surprising this lack of reference to Christmas in the letters; yes a majority were destroyed, even so if you read what’s there I could find but two mentions specifically.

This is the slim matter I gleaned; there is much more matter in these letters but I pulled only that which could conceivably relate:

Anna Maxwell Martin as Cassandra reading one of Jane’s letters (2007 Becoming Jane)

No 14, Dec 18-19, 1798, Tues-Wed; Tues, Dec 18, Steventon: “I enjoyed the hard black Frosts of last week very much, & one day while they lasted walked to Deane by myself.” (4th ed, p 27)

No 15, Dec 24-26, 1798, Mon-Wed; Dec 24, Mon, Steventon: Frank is in Gibaltar, she has returned from Manydown, her mother “does not like the cold Weather, but that we cannot help,” there has been a ball, but that it was for Christmas is never said. She does write: “I wish you a merry Christmas but no compliments of the Season.” Cassandra has danced away at Ashford, there was to have been a dinner at Deane the night she is writing this sentence, “but the weather is so cold that I am not sorry to be kept at home by the appearance of Snow.” There is no other mention of the holiday or weather (4th ed, pp 31-32)

No 17, Jan 8-9, Tues-Wed, 1799; Tues, Jan 8, Steventon: “a Ball at Kempshott this evening” … she had told Cassandra that “Monday was to be the Ball Night,” but no such thing.” Elizabeth has been very cruel about my writing Music; — & as a punishment for her, I should insist upon always writing out all hers and for her in future.” “I love Martha better than ever, & I mean to go & see her if I can when she gets home.” How there was a dinner at “Harwoods on Thursday, & the party broke up the next morning,” she shall be “such a proficient in Music by the time I have got rid of my cold, that I shall be perfectly qualified in that science at least to take Mr Roope’s office at Eastwell this summer … of my Talent in Drawing I have given specimens in my letters to you, & I have nothing to do but invent a few hard names for the Stars … ” Of a party at Manydown, “There was the same kind of party as last year, & the same want of chairs. — there were more Dancers than the Room could conveniently hold, which is enough to constitute a good Ball at any time.” She was not “very much in request –. People were rather apt not to ask me till they could not help it” … But no mention any of this specifically for Christmas nor the weather (4th ed, pp 34-36)

No 29, Jan 3-5, Sun-Mon, 1801; Sat, Jan 3, Steventon: What is “uppermost in my mind” is “you often wore a white gown in the morning, at the time of all the gay party’s being with you.” They visited Ash Park last Wednesday, “went off in a come-ca way; we met Mr Lefroy & Tom Chute, played at cards & came home again … ” This is letter is about what is happening at home because they are moving to Bath (providing for servants) and all the plans and doings about where they will live … (4th ed, p 69)

No 61, Nov 20, Sun, 1808; Sun Nov 3, Castle Square (Southampton): Mary Jane Fowle will “return at Christmas” with her brother.” Second and last use of the word in the collection that I found (4th ed, p 161)

No 63, Dec 2-28, Tues-Wed; Tues Dec 27, Castle Square: Eliza “keeping her bed with a cold … Our Evening party on Thursday, produced nothing more remarkable than Miss Murden’s coming too …. ” she “sitting very ungracious and silent with us … The last hour, spent in yawning & shivering in a wide circle round thefirst, was dull enough — but the Tray had admirable success.” She is talking of the food they ate, which by association leads to “Black Butter do not decoy anybody to Southampton.” No mention of any of this having anything to do with Christmas (4th ed, p 166)

A truly sparse amount of references. The novels give a sense of traditional parties, dances, festivities, rituals — as if in writing to the world she had to give such references and notice. Everything we read in other documents shows there were such, and from the early 16th century on we find such descriptions in diaries, journals, verse, documentary records. In the 1790s we begin to find references to Christmas a ritual of family getting together and a feeling of deep missing out if you don’t have such, if you live far from home (see for Southey’s Written on Christmas Day, 1795), from which I quote a passage here

I do remember when I was a child
How my young heart, a stranger then to care,
With transport leap’d upon this holy-day,
As o’er the house, all gay with evergreens,
From friend to friend with joyful speed I ran,
Bidding a merry Christmas to them all.
Those years are past; their pleasures and their pains
Are now like yonder covent-crested hill
That bounds the distant prospect, indistinct,
Yet pictured upon memory’s mystic glass
In faint fair hues. A weary traveller now
I journey o’er the desert mountain tracks
Of Leon, wilds all drear and comfortless,
Where the grey lizards in the noontide sun
Sport on the rocks, and where the goatherd starts,
Roused from his sleep at midnight when he hears
The prowling wolf, and falters as he calls
On Saints to save. Here of the friends I think
Who now, I ween, remember me, and fill
The glass of votive friendship …
Thus I beguile the solitary hours
With many a day-dream, picturing scenes as fair
Of peace, and comfort, and domestic bliss
As ever to the youthful poet’s eye …

And since in her novels, Austen characteristically tells only as much as is needful for her story in her novels, except for the scenes around Christmas in Emma, which themselves occur because the Knightley family gets together at Christmas (the way people do today), what emerges is the satiric nature of her work: most of the references are half-mocking, fatuous hypocritical meretricious behavior at Christmas is what she registered first just the way she registers this for musical concerts (when people pretend to understand and be ravished by music) or romantic poetry, except this time in the few cases of characters who can really feel sincerely: Marianne for music and poetry, Elinor for drawing, Fanny for pictures, Jane Fairfax for music, Mr Knightley for sitting over a fire, Anne Elliot music and poetry, Catherine Morland reading, but nothing for Christmas. Perhaps she did have distaste for what she saw come out of the holiday customs specifically, humanely speaking.

Comparatively, to cite a few other authors, while Trollope also dislikes all the hypocrisy and commercialism arising from Christmas, he has stories where there is quiet thematic use of Christmas attaching to it true charity or kindliness of spirit when rightly observed. Because of the strong distaste for ceremonies of lies here (and elsewhere in his fiction), I have never made a Christmas blog about his work that I can recall, but perhaps this year I’ll break that non-pattern and write about the nature of what Christmas stories he gets himself to write, and the ones that work well. A 20th century novelist who wrote a famous series of novel set in the 18th century uses Christmas regularly: the close of the Poldark books show Christmas as practiced in the 18th century Cornwall had a meaning for him. Tonight I quote Tennyson from In Memoriam where he has grieved so for the loss of a beloved friend expresses feelings somewhat like mine this morning:

Again at Christmas did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
The silent snow possess’d the earth,
And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:

The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,
No wing of wind the region swept,
But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.

As in the winters left behind,
Again our ancient games had place,
The mimic picture’s breathing grace,
And dance and song and hoodman-blind.

Who show’d a token of distress?
No single tear, no mark of pain:
O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
O grief, can grief be changed to less?

O last regret, regret can die!
No -– mixt with all this mystic frame,
Her deep relations are the same,
But with long use her tears are dry.

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In going over Austen’s letters and then my blogs on the novels, and in context of the eras nearby, what I am again impressed with, is what is easy to find in the novels registered through many pictures in the films is Austen writing of letters, reading, writing, and dramatic uses of letters (far more than books). As my four stills chosen quickly and somewhat at random revealed — from a supposed biographical movie I have discussed hardly at all here.

Olivia Williams as a mature Austen writing Persuasion (Miss Austen Regrets, 2009, scripted Gweneth Hughes, directed Jeremy Lovering)

Ellen

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The Birthday: I am excessively diverted ….

Judy Parfitt as Lady Catherine de Bough towering over, attempting to bully Elizabeth Garvie as Elizabeth out of Darcy (Fay Weldon’s 1979 BBC P&P,)

The Birthday. Whose? how can you ask? Jane Austen’s on a cold day, where much snow lay on the ground, December 16, 1775. In previous years I have remembered this day by putting here her poetry written on and about this day, or an essay about an aspect of her work overlooked (say what she said about Elizabethn queens in her History of England) or poems by others about reading her, how she loved to dance. This day I use a comic twitter thread (why not? all the rage, and she wanted ever to be fashionable or seeming so) to introduce two juxtaposed familiar scenes and my contribution to the twitter feed which asked for appropriate images of animals with an quotation from Austen:

For today a little less solemn framing: Izzy showed me a thread on her twitter feed where people were asked to cite a line from Austen and find a matching picture, preferably about non-human animals in the wild and comic. This is what they came up with, which I record under the line (one I like and quoted here):

I am excessively diverted

Alas a few of those who contributed made up lines that they thought sounded like Austen or offered lines they perhaps thought were by her. I did like “This has cheered me up no end.” There is also a gif image of someone laughing hysterically who resembles Meryl Streep (probably not her). I’d transfer that only there is no device to. So instead this quieter one: under the quotation: “On opening the door, she perceived her sister and Bingley standing together over the hearth, as if engaged in earnest conversation; and had this led to no suspicion, the faces of both, as they hastily turned round and moved away from each other, would have told it all” — Elizabeth coming upon Jane and Bingley

I’ve used this one in jest while meaning it too: “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

I end with the scene (alluded to above by the still from the 1979 P&P), a fierce confrontation, from Pride and Prejudice, Vol 3, Chapter 15, which in the book immediately precedes Elizabeth’s scene with her father where he calls her in to his office-lair because he has received a letter from Mr Collins warning him against a possible engagement between Darcy and Elizabeth, and we get this indirect meditative (thinking of our implied author) apparently lightly comic but in its true feel ironic and plangent scene:

Benjamin Whitrow as Mr Bennet regaling Jennifer Ehle as Jane (Andrew Davies’s 1995 P&P)

She followed her father to the fire place, and they both sat down. He then said,

“I have received a letter this morning that has astonished me exceedingly. As it principally concerns yourself, you ought to know its contents. I did not know before, that I had two daughters on the brink of matrimony. Let me congratulate you on a very important conquest.”

The colour now rushed into Elizabeth’s cheeks in the instantaneous conviction of its being a letter from the nephew, instead of the aunt; and she was undetermined whether most to be pleased that he explained himself at all, or offended that his letter was not rather addressed to herself; when her father continued,

“You look conscious. Young ladies have great penetration in such matters as these; but I think I may defy even your sagacity, to discover the name of your admirer. This letter is from Mr. Collins.”

“From Mr. Collins! and what can he have to say?”

“Something very much to the purpose of course. He begins with congratulations on the approaching nuptials of my eldest daughter, of which, it seems, he has been told by some of the good-natured, gossiping Lucases. I shall not sport with your impatience, by reading what he says on that point. What relates to yourself, is as follows.”

“Having thus offered you the sincere congratulations of Mrs. Collins and myself on this happy event, let me now add a short hint on the subject of another; of which we have been advertised by the same authority. Your daughter Elizabeth, it is presumed, will not long bear the name of Bennet, after her elder sister has resigned it, and the chosen partner of her fate may be reasonably looked up to as one of the most illustrious personages in this land.”

“Can you possibly guess, Lizzy, who is meant by this?”

“This young gentleman is blessed, in a peculiar way, with every thing the heart of mortal can most desire, — splendid property, noble kindred, and extensive patronage. Yet in spite of all these temptations, let me warn my cousin Elizabeth, and yourself, of what evils you may incur by a precipitate closure with this gentleman’s proposals, which, of course, you will be inclined to take immediate advantage of.”
“Have you any idea, Lizzy, who this gentleman is? But now it comes out.”

“My motive for cautioning you is as follows. We have reason to imagine that his aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, does not look on the match with a friendly eye.”

“Mr. Darcy, you see, is the man! Now, Lizzy, I think I have surprised you. Could he, or the Lucases, have pitched on any man within the circle of our acquaintance, whose name would have given the lie more effectually to what they related? Mr. Darcy, who never looks at any woman but to see a blemish, and who probably never looked at you in his life! It is admirable!”

Elizabeth tried to join in her father’s pleasantry, but could only force one most reluctant smile. Never had his wit been directed in a manner so little agreeable to her.

“Are you not diverted?”

“Oh! yes. Pray read on.”

“After mentioning the likelihood of this marriage to her ladyship last night, she immediately, with her usual condescension, expressed what she felt on the occasion; when it become apparent, that on the score of some family objections on the part of my cousin, she would never give her consent to what she termed so disgraceful a match. I thought it my duty to give the speediest intelligence of this to my cousin, that she and her noble admirer may be aware of what they are about, and not run hastily into a marriage which has not been properly sanctioned.”

“Mr. Collins moreover adds,”

“I am truly rejoiced that my cousin Lydia’s sad business has been so well hushed up, and am only concerned that their living together before the marriage took place should be so generally known. I must not, however, neglect the duties of my station, or refrain from declaring my amazement at hearing that you received the young couple into your house as soon as they were married. It was an encouragement of vice; and had I been the rector of Longbourn, I should very strenuously have opposed it. You ought certainly to forgive them as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing.”
“That is his notion of Christian forgiveness! The rest of his letter is only about his dear Charlotte’s situation, and his expectation of a young olive-branch. But, Lizzy, you look as if you did not enjoy it. You are not going to be Missish, I hope, and pretend to be affronted at an idle report. For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”

“Oh!” cried Elizabeth, “I am excessively diverted ….

And my comic rendition of Lady Catherine versus Elizabeth as well as the contemplative Mr Bennet and Elizabeth overlooking an artifical object:

Not from the wild, as that is not quite appropriate, and from her era, attached to a writer she may well have read: Madame Du Deffand who of course had the fashionable kind of cat just then. Alas, there is but one mention of cats in Jane Austen, when she observes somewhat detachedly a black kitten running up and down the wide stairway in a lodging house in Bath.

I hope someone who comes over here will close read or comment on this scene between Mr Bennet and Elizabeth in context for us by way of commemorating Jane Austen’s birthday. If not, I’ll try tonight by way of filling up my evening with Jane.

Ellen

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An EC/ASECS conference at Howard University: a tribute to John Radner, Frances and the Burneys

John Radner (1939-2017)

Friends,

Christmas is upon us, and I’ve yet to transcribe my notes on this year’s early November EC/ASECS conference, held at Howard University! I did not stay at the hotel but took the Metro each of the three trips (one evening, two days) so I arrived a bit late and left earlier than usual. We had our usual Thursday evening (Nov 2) of reading poetry aloud with a reception of drinks and snacks. It was the first time I had been to Howard University and I walked around campus too. I have about two blogs worth of papers and readings to tell of. This first one is on the first three sessions of the first day. The theme of the conference was “Capital culture and cultural capital.” I’d have loved to give a paper on Anthony Trollope’s stay in DC and his thought-provoking description of the city and surrounding environs during the civil war (including Alexandria and near where I live) but he’s not eighteenth century ….

I arrived on Friday morning, November 3rd, in time to participate in the tribute to John Radner (9:00 to 10:15 am). He was a great scholar who devoted his life to study and teaching, with his central interest in Johnson and Boswell. Last year as a culmination of a life-time of reading and thinking he published his book, Johnson and Boswell: A biography of a Friendship. He taught at George Mason for many years where I knew him. His office was across the hall from mine and we frequently talked during a few years when we were both there at the same time. He was an active and long-time member of EC/ASECS and also taught at the OLLI at AU where I teach too nowadays.

Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson (intensely reading)

The tribute consisted of four papers read aloud and talked through by four close friends of John’s. Each paper had a theme dear to the heart of Johnson and/or Boswell. Ann Kelly was just finishing hers on her first trip to the Hebrides, with her children, commemorating John through how Johnson and Boswell’s have text stirred her (and many others) into visiting the Hebrides islands, and making friends there. Henry Fulton who has just published a massive biography on John Moore used an incident where Moore and Johnson came together through a poem by Helen Maria Williams. The poem was given to Burke, Burke shared it with Moore as did Reynolds who then showed it to Johnson. Henry’s point was to show the connections between these people whom John had been so engaged with over the decades. Linda Merians then spoke: John knew more of Johnson than anyone. Walter Jackson Bate who wrote the great biography of Johnson was John’s mentor. She talked of how John empathized with both Boswell and Johnson, and wrote of how each thought “I am never with this man without feeling better and rendered happier.” Melancholy united Boswell and Johnson who had a deep fear of breakdown. Beth Lambert whose biography is on Burke spoke of the failed friendship of Burke and Boswell. They remained aware of one another is as far as it got, Boswell transgressed by using some private confidence; Burke’s Irishness made him more sensitive to spreading gossip which could be turned against him. Burke in turn doubted Boswell was “fit” (not smart enough) for their weekly clubbing. In each case the speaker talked of his or her memories of John. It was a very touching hour.

Fanny Burney by John Bogle (detail)

The panel I was chairing, “Portraits of Frances Burney” came after a short coffee break (10:45-noon). Kaitlyn Giblin’s paper, “To nobody belonging, by nobody was noticed:” Navigating the bounds of Feminine Authority and Female Authorship in Burney’s Evelina. Kaitlyn examined the depictions of motherhood in Evelina; Caroline, Evelina’s mother, is not married and thus her daughter has no identity. Her very existence is to be hidden. Evelina gains some status when she is revealed to be her mother’s daughter, but she knows a seachange only when she marries. Mr MacCartney’s story fits into the same trajectory: he too needs legitimacy, recognition, acknowledgement. Kaitlyn’s paper fit into the rebellious but 18th century Johnsonian figuring of a public reasoning Burney. Noello Chao’s “The Arts and Indifference in The Wanderer” produced a different sort of portrait. Noello made the unexpected point of the price artists have to make when they practice their art. Her spirit is annihilated when she does practice because she is not appreciated and feels profoundly divorced from herself as she tries to play in front of others wholly alien to her. Burney presents the failure of art to inspire or make others feel meaningful; Juliette feels little pleasure or solace in what she is doing; she cringes because she has to sell herself. The novel is about the hidden costs of producing art. We also see how limited are the choices upper class women are given; susceptible to assault and invective. High continental forms do not satisfy; instead Stonehenge with its ancient natural space offers calm and a quiet place to feel herself. Burney does not reject labor but wants it to have a chance to be meaningful.

Lorna Clarke’s paper, “Juvenile Productions in the Burney Family” She discussed her discovery of the early writings of several members of the Burney family. They were an artistic group living in a vibrant atmosphere, in a sophisticated London culture with professional and amateur theatrics around them. It was wonderful to listen to Lorna’s enthusiasm as she described these works; they did resemble the Brontes in how they invented a magazine and shared their writing, inspiriting one another. They drew frontispieces, made indexes, were imitating published books. The experience (as practised by these children) was educational socially; they think of their audience. Lorna then read passages to show how these works are funny, nervy, uses legends; there is a 34 stanza ballad the children seek freedom as their narrators find their voice. They incorporate violence meant to be funny; and also have blood baths at the end of a tragedy. Sophia Elizabeth produced her own anthology; we know Frances wrote a novel about Caroline, mother of Evelina. The vividness of her style is there in the earliest of her journals. You can see gender at work. The figure of Persephone is used for melancholy and romance. There is ambiguity about being a writer. One of the children writing died relatively young after a period as a governess. There are also letters.

William Hogarth, The Graham family (children)

The papers had been so interesting, full of details and varied there was much talk afterward (as moderator I didn’t get to write it down so have no details). Several questions on the Wanderer and attitudes towards art in Burney’s family. Lorna seemed to have made us all want to peruse these juvenilia far more than I have ever wanted to read the Brontes’s famous tiny-lettered children’s lurid romances (until recently when in another context I heard a paper quoting from these, showing that in there are more passages than one might expect which anticipate their adult novels). I was reminded of the March family in Little Women who produce a Christmas number (a reflection of the Alcott family); the Austens, much older, wrote a periodical which had circulation among adult readers.

We adjourned for lunch and I went with two friends to a nearby Asian fusion restaurant where we had good talk and food.

Charlotte Ramsay Lennox (1730-1804)

For the first session of the afternoon I went to Eleanor Shevlin’s panel, “Collection, Curation & Classicism.’ It had a miscellany of papers. Hilary Fezzey talked about autism in the heroine of Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote and Hugh Blair’s letters. Her argument was an interesting and worthy one, as her point seemed to be how neurotypical (as she called the non-autistic) people are treated as a norm which all others have to be like. Which is unfair. People who are autistic may be said to lack social capital. She said that from Hugh Blair’s letters we can see he was socially very awkward, dressed differently, lived a wholly interior life, did not follow social “rules.” He had no sense of social inhibition where he should have been inhibited; seemed very innocent to others. He was married for a time. She felt the explanation for Arabella’s obtuseness and obsession with later 17th century heroic romances was that she is meant to be autistic. Even if Lennox would not have used that term, Hilary seemed to feel Lennox meant to describe autism as a type of person. She does not pay attention to other people, has no idea of social conventions, and the novel condemns her at the end.

Sylvia Kasey Marks’s paper was on the 20th century great playwright, Arthur Miller and the 18th century forger, Henry Ireland. She discussed them as both appropriating the work or understood persona and style of someone else. In the early phase of his career Miller wrote radio plays, and some of these are dramatizations of someone else’s novel. She demonstrated that in Miller’s case we see him consistently change his original to fit his own vision. Unlike Ireland, Miller was not trying to find a new space in which he could create something unlike what others were writing at the time. He was building his career and operating within a considerable group of constraints (which include pleasing the audience). Sylvia told the whole sad story of Ireland, including a conflict with his father, and how we may see popular attitudes towards Shakespeare in some of Ireland’s writing.

Arthur Miller when young (photograph found on the Net)

Bill Everdell gave a detailed historical paper, excellent, on “the evangelical counter-Enlightenment.He discussed the relationship between ecstasy and doctrinal fundamentalism in 18th century Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He was exploring powerful social and psychological currents in the era. He went into the more learned treatises, attitudes towards self-determination, equality, passion, calmness. I couldn’t begin to take down the details.

There was not much time for discussion afterward so I was not able to register the serious doubt I had about analyzing a character in a novel according to 20th century diagnostic criteria in watered-down ways. I know from experience before someone is diagnosed for autism, they are interviewed and must have 2 characteristics out of six sets of them on six sheets of paper. Arabella is a naif figure in a Quixote satire. Hugh Blair’s self-descriptions are closer to possibility as he was a real complex person but we’d have to have more evidence from others. People did attempt to ask about Miller and also the Islamic Enlightenment.

More on the later afternoon and Saturday in my second blog.

George Morland (1763-1804), study of a cat

Ellen

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Autumn: Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith in Persuasion

Amanda Root as Anne Elliot walking among the autumn leaves (1995 BBC Persuasion, scripted Nick Dear, directed Roger Michell)

Dear friends and readers,

I am chuffed (proud, happy) to say two new essays on Charlotte Smith by me are now available from the power and liberty of the Internet. The first is my essay for Sarah Emsley’s new series of blogs, “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,” due to start December 16th. Mine is one of two previews;

“For there is nothing lost that may be found: Charlotte Smith in Jane Austen’s Persuasion”

The other is by William Hutchings, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK, “A Sense of An Ending: Persuasion and Keats’s “Ode to Autumn.”

It will be seen both of us chose to dwell on the autumnal aspects of Austen’s Persuasion and how she uses or provides an analogy for autumnal poetry by two contemporary or near contemporary poets. Thus Sarah put ours on her blog before Austen’s birthday in order to be seasonally on time.

I am writing this separate linked-in blog since I want to make sure there is no misapprehension about the four years worth of blogs on this site about Jane Austen’s letters and the Austen papers. The blogs came out of a group read we did on the two Austen lists (Austen-l and Janeites) several years. It was my idea to do the letters slowly, one a week. However, what insights emerged were a “hive” effect, the result of all of us putting our collective heads together to close read and add our own bits of knowledge and insight—and sometimes clashing on who Austen was as a person. It was a wonderful experience.

The second is on Charlotte Smith in a different or wider vein: I’ve decided to put my paper on “The Global Charlotte Smith: migrancy and women in Ethelinde and The Emigrants on academia.edu where it may be read now. It is also timely in a different way: for its political perspective on women and emigration.

A photograph taken in Oxford, Wytham Woods this November 19, 2017 by a friend

Ellen

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Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall: a ghostly, ever so here and erotic tapestry

From Peter Staughan’s 2015 Wolf Hall: actors dancing Renaissance dance, POV Cromwell

What sort of person writes fiction about the past? It is helpful to be acquainted with violence, because the past is violent. It is necessary to know that the people who live there are not the same as people now. It is necessary to understand that the dead are real, and have power over the living. It is helpful to have encountered the dead firsthand, in the form of ghosts.

The writer’s relationship with a historical character is in some ways less intimate than with a fictional one: the historical character is elusive and far away, so there is more distance between them. But there is also more equality between them, and more longing; when he dies, real mourning is possible — Larissa MacFarquhar on Hilary Mantel’s imagination, The New Yorker

Friends and readers,

It’s now two years since I wrote four blogs on the powerful mini-series by Peter Straughan, Wolf Hall (featuring Mark Ryland and Claire Foy) (1-2: Fathers and sons;, 3-4, Stealth Heroine and a contemporary Man for All Seasons; 5-6, what human beings are capable of). Though I had read it and listened to Simon Slater’s brilliantly interpretative reading aloud of the whole text (available on CDs), where he makes Cromwell come out much less sympathetically than Mark Rylance’s nuance kind performance in the mini-series, I didn’t blog on the novel just by itself — which I often do for other books so filmed/adapted.

I’ve just had the great pleasure of re-reading the book with a class of retired adults, 20 or so people who appeared to enjoy it very much. I would like to tell a little of what they and I said, but am realizing that we found it such fun not because of any particular insight or examination of the text we did. The fun was in learning relevant history this way. So much we saw in the tyranny of Henry, the complicity of his courtiers, the sexual exploitation of women so germane; the psychologies of the characters we could recognize in ourselves or people close to us. Then they would go off and read history and find these stories re-hashed. The amorality of these characters. They were intrigued by the actual history, the characters, the style of the book (they said this and read passages aloud from the book they were especially taken with), its participation in historical romance. A very intelligent group of people, with interesting personal histories of travel, employment, court cases themselves.

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Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell (1534)

As a historical novel:

They asked if all the characters represented people who once lived. Yes, I said. It’s the type of historical fiction which uses actual historical personages as chief characters (another is I, Claudius); all the people named existed and outwardly they did or lived more or less as we see the the characters here. Unnamed people are representative. This strict version invents almost no one. That’s hard, isn’t it? It’s like a sonnet, a 14 line poem which rhymes in a prescribed way; the villanelle that follows a prescribed obsessive pattern.

The crucial differences in the presentation of this Tudor Matter: Mantel chooses characters most people have ignored and dramatizes them through a fresh convincing, often ultimately compassionate interpretation. Not just Cromwell become hero, but Mary Tudor, Henry’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon, emotionally disabled: the pity for Mary Tudor as so twisted emotionally and her body so small and she in pain. Mary Boleyn generous-natured, frank and so become female fodder. Anne Boleyn now seen as not just sexually manipulative, and for a Protestant state, but seethingly ambitious, yet (like Cromwell, Wolsey) vulnerable so (in her case paranoaic), egoistic, losing perspective. Her helpless fall from favor. Thomas More now the fanatic and torturer. Wolsey the luxurious cat-like power-seeker, yet humane, a builder of schools.

All three books one continuous tight-knit story: a fictional biography of Thomas Cromwell based on his papers and a school of Renaissance scholarship that began with G.Elton, to whose disciple, Mary Robertson, Mantel dedicates her novel. This big fat book is Act One of Cromwell’s story, ending in the murder of Thomas More (a contrast to him). The second, Bring Up the Bodies, Act Two, worked up as dramatic clashes between Cromwell and those he’s partly framing, in order to enable the king to murder Anne Boleyn (the stealth tragic heroine, with her wry, embittered alter ego, Mary Boleyn). Act Three, not yet finished (still under construction), The Mirror and the light, ending in the murder of Cromwell himself.

Fintan O’Toole says the appeal of this Cromwell is he is a middle-class man trying to get by in an oligarchic world. Thirty years ago, Mantel’s Cromwell … of limited interest. His virtues — hard work, self-discipline, domestic respectability, a talent for office politics, the steady accumulation of money, a valuing of stability above all else–— … as mere bourgeois orthodoxy. Boring, contemptible, in a damning word, safe. But they’re not safe anymore. They don’t assure security. As the world becomes … precarious … everything you have can be whipped away from you at any moment (Anne’s tablecloth removed). The terror that grips us is rooted not in Cromwell’s … extraordinary strength. Except for the twist -— meritocracy goes only so far. Even Cromwell cannot control his own destiny, cannot escape the power of entrenched privilege. And if he, with his almost superhuman abilities, can’t do so, what chance do the rest of us have?

Wolf Hall, Act One, is made up of six parts — we read two a week. The structure so familiar from women’s writing, (l’ecriture-femme), is here: it’s cyclical, moving through repetition across eras. One realizes the title, Wolf Hall chosen to suggest how this is a world of wolves. Threes. Each of the six parts is in threes: an introductory chapter (sometimes shortish), a middle chapter (longish, the “meat” of the part), and coda (short chapter).

Part One builds the picture of Cromwell as an abused survivor of a boy, a fully mature man in the home he creates for himself and family, astonishingly a stable well educated kindly man, enacting the good father to the boys he takes in, as we see Wolsey with due irony behaved to him. “He was ever kind to me” Cromwell tells Henry in extenuation of Cromwell’s continued loyalty to Wolsey.

At Austin Friars – in very few pages Mantel has to establish a trusting loving relationship between Cromwell and his wife since she makes Cromwell grieve for his loss of Liz during much of this book. Decent feeling. Playful, sensible. Through her and her sister, Joanne we see how women looked at Anne Boleyn and the divorce — pitied Katherine for not having had a sons

Part Two all comes to grief: Wolsey ejected, the death of Cromwell’s beloved wife and daughters; the central long section (“Occult history”) explains how the ejection of Wolsey came to happen and includes extravagances of mythic history; a coda of George Cavendish (whose love for Wolsey makes him perpetually plangent) astonished to see Cromwell (also a mother figure) crying.

We talked of sources. Although she doesn’t admit them, Mantel was also strongly influenced by Alison Weir’s The Other Boleyn Girl, filmed twice, one released to the theaters with Scarlett Johanson as Mary Boleyn, and the other a BBC single episode with Jodhi May as Anne Boleyn (by Philippa Lowthorne). I read aloud to them Mary Boleyn’s letter to Cromwell when she was thrown out of court with William Stafford, a groom whom she seems to have loved (he valued her). Just extraordinary letter for a Renaissance women – I’ve read a lot of these at one time, most personal letters are guarded or hypocritical, so much verbiage out of which you may glimpse some truths. Correspondence was read by gov’t officials — there was no privacy. MB paid someone to hand-carry it to Cromwell: that she could write such a letter to him speaks well of him, for the relationship must’ve been open to it, invited it. Weir disdains it and talks of it stupid — yes she is not phonily performing (guarded, hypocritical) which is Weir’s criteria I suppose. But Mantel no more favors Mary Boleyn than Cromwell.

Cromwell was a controversial figure and had been bad-mouthed (not too much to say it was snobbery too) with an apotheosis in Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Leo McKern memorably this corrupt bully. So we have to unlearn a bit: not only was he beheaded because the king grew angry at the ugliness of Anne of Cleves, Cromwell was sincerely protestant and he succeeded largely in altering the composition of the English structure of gov’t – as is now being tried before our very eyes in the US and has been going on some say since the mid-1970s with Trump and this rump republican congress the fruits of it. How do you affect change: Cromwell did it bit by bit, each time cagily appealing to the self-interest of whoever had the reigns of what he was altering. He left many many letters, diplomat’s letters but write something down and it gives you away.

Mantel has made every effort to make us respect and like Thomas Cromwell but when it comes to the trial and beheading she does not whitewash the man. Six young man: we are shown how awful they are to those beneath them, but should they have been beheaded? it was Thomas Cromwell who made the evidence (if there was any) into a case which could withstand a trial. In other words, if you think Anne was just about wholly innocent, he framed her and killed them all. Unlike More’s behavior to those he burned alive and oversaw the beheading of, there is no evidence for torture. Still, part of the blackening of his character, paradoxically is while until the 20th century Anne Boleyn was often presented as guilty at least of sex with the courtiers, Cromwell was vilified. What Mantel does in the book and the film even more Straughan present Cromwell as doing this unwillingly; he gets no pleasure from it; he looks grave, unhappy, and after she’s dead when Henry welcomes him with open arms, he looks terrified. But he did it. In Bring up the Bodies we also see him exploit women and in general he’s more of a villain, hardening of his character as time goes on. The book takes a much shorter time. No more liaison with Johanne, Rafe and Helen are gone, Richard in another house. We can project this process might go further in the final act Mantel is said to be writing: The Mirror and the Light.

Jonathan Pryce as Wolsey (2015 Wolf Hall)

Wolsey – what kind of man is he presented as? – long effective career in church, slowly promoted up – destroyed or neutralized the positions of those around him; what religious beliefs did he have? You might say Cromwell was a son of Wolsey – a brilliant foreign policy person, diplomat, powerful administrator, he built major benefactor of arts, humanities and education. He projected numerous reforms, with some success in areas such as finance, taxation educational provision and justice. He reformed taxes—opposite of what’s happening today; before him all owed the same, now poorer much less and Wolsey collected much more for the king’s wars and luxurious entertainments, But Wolsey failed him in oen particular? The diplomatic situation was hard: Catherine a daughter of the Aragons; Charles V her nephew, and in a way Charles V besieged Rome, and took over Clement’s power for a while

Wolsey and Cromwell talk and eat together. Then as events close in, Cromwell’s helping to move the old man to Winchester and then York,
Cromwell: “Masters, I want kindling, dry kindling … Get the fires lit … Stephen, find the kitchen …. Actually, see him in first… I need the bedding … What? Who is that? … Michael? Down, off. The horses, later. We want the Cardinal in bed and warm. …Come on, come on, we’re not done yet! …”
To Wolsey now in bed: “I asked if they had nutmeg or saffron – they looked at me as if I was speaking Greek. I’ll have to find a local supplier.”
Wolsey: “I shall pray for it.”

I find it very touching the way Cromwell tries to secure creature comforts for the old man, and how the old man gently mocks his endeavours. Despite Henry’s claim that he loves and misses the Cardinal, and that he cannot bring the Cardinal back (as his courtiers, and the powerful aristocratic clans who loathe Wolsey as a butcher’s son are pressuring him), Wolsey is thrown away, humiliated, sickens and dies.

I come back to the use of Rylance as POV and his uncanny ability to convey complicated layers of thought in different scenes with these highly theatrical characters in situations of deep crisis strain, to seem out-side the action and questioning it. The character he plays, Cromwell, is himself deeply complicit, com-promised and comprising — rising, becoming wealthier, powerful, using his nephew and ward, Rafe as spies. He says at one point, now it’s his turn to get back. He participates in the neurotic fights of the Boleyns. He may tells Henry Percy (then drunk) the day of the power of the thug warrior-aristocrat as all-powerful is over: that the world also works on money, that bankers are in charge (this seems a bit anachronistic, you’d think the Italian bankers were turned into today’s European Union and World Bank).

There is his true son, Rafe, who does not have bad dreams, p 26 – we shall see how he came to live with and revere Cromwell; how did he comes to take in Rafe – it’s in the long occult history, back history :so touching every moment: Cromwell as mother – look with me on page 106-7, well into chapter

Part Three introduces the court characters, the king, Anne and Mary Boleyn, deepens Cromwell and Wolsey’s relationship (“Entirely Beloved Cromwell”), people lost along the way become ghosts haunting you (“The Dead Complain of Their Burial”).

What kind of person is Henry in this book? We talked of his sexual anxiety, his apparent timidity; how he believed the old supposedly Biblical culture. When Anne proved no virgin, and he realized how much she knew about sex, how to please him, paradoxically but in character he begins to mistrust her. Jealous. She is bitter herself. Extraordinary sequence of Cromwell taken from bed and re-interpreting king’s dream. All imagined but captures deeper truths about these people — including Cranmer who is so hesitant, young men around king obeying his slightest whims. Cromwell comes home to be haunted by Wolsey, by Liz. I read aloud from Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes on Wolsey; Shakespeare’s Henry VIII had he only served his God before his king …; Wyatt’s poem on Anne as like this deer so alluring.

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change …

Part Four dramatizes how the world is a profoundly dangerous place (you must “arrange your face”), with its long center showing people seeking love (“What shall I do for love?”), discovering enacting cruelty, torture (the burning of the old woman, a Lollard so crazed), treachery under hats. The family groups formed, with Cromwell emerging as Henry’s man (the speech to Henry Percy about where the world is ruled from a case in point).

Said to be Mary Boleyn (reprinted in Alison Weir)

Part Five with Anne now queen (“Anna Regina”), become paranoiac, losing perspective. Contrasts: she and Henry to Rafe’s calm integrity and love for Helen, ex-laundress, widow, all calm competence; Cranmer and his barmaid Margaret, he too like Rafe could not help but love her; the desperate Mary seeking a protector. “The Devil’s spit” (middle chapter) exposes the underbelly of women’s subject position: Elizabeth Barton’s malevolence allows her to take a place on the stage. Ends in Holbein’s portrait of Cromwell’s outwardly iron self.

Master Secretary,
After my poor recommendations, which is smally to be regarded of me, that am a poor banished creature, this shall be to desire you to be good to my poor husband and to me. I am sure that it is not unknown to you the high displeasure that both he and I have, both of the King’s Highness and the Queen’s Grace, by reason of our marriage without their knowledge, wherein we both do yield ourselves faulty, and acknowledge that we did not well to be so hasty nor so bold, without their knowledge.
But one thing, good Master Secretary, consider: that he was young, and love overcame reason; and for my part, I saw so much honesty in him that I loved him as well as he did me; and was in bondage, and glad I was to be at liberty.

So that for my part, I saw that all the world did set so little store by me, and he so much, that I thought I could take no better way but to take him and to forsake all other ways, and live a poor, honest life with him. And so I do put no doubt but we should, if we might once be so happy to recover the King’s gracious favor and the Queen’s. For well I might a had a greater man of birth, and a higher, but I ensure you I could never a had one that should a loved me so well, nor a more honest man. And besides that, he is both come of ancient stock, and again as meet (if it was his Grace’s pleasure) to do the King service as any young gentleman in his court.

Therefore, good Master Secretary, this shall be my suit to you, that, for the love that well I know you do bear to all my blood, though for my part, I have not deserved it but smally, by reason of my vile conditions, as to put my husband to the King’s Grace that he may do his duty as all other gentlemen do.
And, good Master Secretary, sue for us to the King’s Highness, and beseech his Highness, which ever was wont to take pity, to have pity on us; and that it would please his Grace, of his goodness, to speak to the Queen’s Grace for us; for, so far as I can perceive, her Grace is so highly displeased with us both that,without the King be so good lord to us as to withdraw his rigor and sue for us, we are never likely to recover her Grace’s favor, which is too heavy to bear. And seeing there is no remedy, for God’s sake, help us, for we have been now a quarter of a year married, I thank God, and too late now to call it again; wherefore it is the more alms to help us. But if I were at my liberty and might choose, I ensure you, Master Secretary, for my little time, I have spied so much honesty to be in him that I had rather beg my bread with him than to be the greatest queen christened. And I believe verily he is in the same case with me; for I believe verily he would not forsake me to be a king.

Therefore, good Master Secretary, seeing we are so well together and does intend to live so honest a life, though it be but poor, show part of your goodness to us as well as you do to all the world besides; for I promise you, you have the name to help all them that hath need, and amongst all your suitors I dare be bold to say that you have no matter more to be pitied than ours; and therefore, for God’s sake, be good to us, for in you is all our trust.

And I beseech you, good Master Secretary, pray my Lord my father and my Lady my mother to be good to us, and to let us have their blessings, and my husband their goodwill; and I will never desire more of them. Also, I pray you, desire my Lord of Norfolk [her uncle] and my Lord my brother to be good to us. I dare not write to them, they are so cruel against us. But if with any pain I could take my life [that] I might win their good wills, I promise you there is no child living would venture more than I. And so I pray you to report by me, and you shall find my writing true, and in all points which I may please them in I shall be ready to obey them nearest my husband, whom I am bound to; to whom I most heartily beseech you to be good unto, which, for my sake, is a poor, banished man for an honest and goodly cause. And seeing that I have read in old books that some, for as just causes, have by kings and queens been pardoned by the suit of good folk, I trust it shall be our chance, through your good help, to come to the same; as knoweth the [Lord] God, Who send you health and heart’s ease.

Scribbbled with her ill hand, who is your poor,
humble suitor, always to command,
Mary Stafford.

We talked of the attitude towards women in the novel: they get a very rough deal; Cromwell and Mary Boleyn, Elizabeth Barton Mantel’s Wolf Hall performs the function of recent sequels to classic fiction and revisions of consensus histories; she asks us to switch our allegiances to the victimized, conquered, castigated and stigmatized lives of traditional histories and in so doing discover the tragedy going on is one where the subaltern fig-ures are us. In this case these figures include several of the hitherto despised and dismissed women of Henry VIII’s court and his low-born secretary, Thomas Cromwell. My feeling is Mantel came to her very project, her very choice of historical span, by way of so many women’s identification with Anne Boleyn, and added to her Mary and Jane Boleyn, Mary Tudor (Lily Lesser) re-seen (as the product of a neurotic relationship of a profoundly sexually twisted man and woman, Henry VIII & Katharine of Aragon). Thomas Cromwell she came to by way of her insight of the deep evils religion (in her case, originally Roman Ca-tholicism) promotes and disciplines people to enact. Queen, the devil’s spit is Elizabeth Barton; that old woman burnt to death that Cromwell witnesses as a young (288-93) – it’s in the fourth part

Holbein’s 1527 Thomas More (close-up of his face)

Part Six ending in execution of More, and the sexually anxious king turned against Anne and towards Jane Seymour, is a disquisition on power (with which it begins), who has it, where it comes from. Mary kicked out; I read her letter aloud.

John Schofield’s The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell. The questioning of the previous factional interpretation begins with the great scholar Geoffrey Elton, and culminates with the work of Mary Robertson to whom this book is dedicated. All very detailed, not overtly entertaining. I’ll send along just one essay by Mary Robertson and it shows how Cromwell operated in the West Country. Since Mantel’s book there has been a revolution in how to regard Cromwell popularly; she has also been attacked by scholars and critics for being anti-catholic: she is an ex-Catholic.

The book was discussed in the US by people on opposite sides of religious politics with as I recall, an arch conservative – of all people – Jewish – attacking the book and her, “maddeningly” great fiction to distort the record so. Krautheimer likes having Sir Thomas More as a saint. Krautheimer wrote in several places attacked Mantel, he was so exercised against this portrait of More as an utterly cold egoistic torturer, fanatic, anything but the humane man for all seasons Bolt dreamed up. Mantel is closer because even though More wrote those great books he did torture and willingly, superfluously seeking people out, while Cromwell avoided it as bad policy. He’d have been against slavery in the 19th century as bad policy. I read aloud parts of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, from More’s Utopia and book on Comfort in Time of Tribulation (written while in prison).

Her interest is as much in religion as culture and politics; it’s fictionalized biography as well as fictionalized history; inspired anthropology as well as extraordinary artistry on all levels. I think it’s a masterpiece or masterwork like Swift’s Waterlands or Scott’s Raj Quartet taken altogether, at the same time as you can discern a cynical appraisal of what formula and content will attract attention, make her big money.

I think it’s more than that and wrote a paper on this – Journal of Popular TV didn’t care for it as too learned. But they liked my thesis that Tudor matter appeals because it presents “men under dire pressure” who transgress sexual and masculine norms. We have these enormously strong women and men who are allowed to dress flamboyantly, enacting abjection in poetry and stories, were sycophants at court and themselves beheaded. It’s this freedom of men to come out of their usual boring clothes and compete with flamboyant women who often win. It’s the costumes. George Boleyn said to have been gay, Smeaton the musician (Mary Queen of Scots also involved herself with a musician, David Rizzio and he was slaughtered. At the end of Mantel’s second book we have had quite a number of men beheaded, six for sexual transgression. Latest idea is that Anne may have been guilty with one of Henry’s close men – Henry Norris, Francis Bryan, William Brereton, Mark Smeaton, George Boleyn also murdereed. Francis Weston. Elizabeth beheaded Essex – rightly.

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As erotic historical romance

From 2008 The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Lowthorpe, Anne and Mary in the tower (Jodhi May and Natasha Mcelhone)

We began with Mantel’s choice of prologue: from John Skelton’s masque, Magnificence. What’s the effect of this framing? Is this tragedy, comedy or satire? For Cromwell’s contemporaries for Shakespeare a question about genre counts … What’s interesting is the allegory is brought back inside the book. Anne Boleyn is Peseverance in the masque we first her at – dancing with Percy 45-46), we are told in Cromwell’s dream mind Cavendish, George, is virtuous Councilor, Wolsey Decayed Magnificence, he Cromwell is Tempter. If you go to page 14, you find Cromwell supposedly remembering she was Beauty or Kindness (a generosity and openness of spirit). When we think of allegory, we think of simple words. Not the Elizabethans.

People in the class talked of other books “like this one.” One woman in the class gave me a copy of her published poetic narrative verse book, Barbara Goldberg, her Berta Broadfoot and Pepin the short

A 64 page historical romance made up of soliloquies. It is remarkable. Barbara’s sources are much reading in history of the 8th century and earlier in France and Norma Lorre Goodrich’s Medieval Myths. Barbara also used books of troubadour poetry — including the few by women. Her introduction tells of her archetypal Jungian interpretation which uses fairy tales which correspond to the legends and history. It has illustrations which are wood-cut like and remind me of those accompanying a volume of ghost stories by Wharton. Norma Lorre Goodrich takes a feminist or feminine view of these myths, but it’s not acknowledged as such; she puts me in mind of Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespeare Illustrated. The story as Barbara sees it is of a girl with clubfoot whose housekeeper or evil servant substitutes her own daughter in the marriage bed of Pepin the short.

The soliloquies are modern women’s poetry — not free verse, but the elegant Anthony Hecht kind of thing. The story is about the misery of these women — when the servant’s daughter is substituted for the princess and she has to go to bed with Pepin, Goldberg writes of the experience as just awful, terrible, ugly and it’s convincing. Hatred is fostered between Aliste who is the daughter substituted for Berta by her mother, Margiste; the substitution is discovered and Margiste is tortured and then burnt at the stake. She justifies herself. We feel the intensity of these women’s bodies so hurt. The true daughter, Berta, is transferred to Pepin — poor woman, her broadfoot was partly the cause of what happened; a knife would have been take to cut her foot or leg off — the sense is a clubfoot but hard to say. She is disabled and no more wants to go to bed with Pepin and have his children than Agiste. Berta has a mother Blanchefleur whose name reminds me of Arthurian matter. The core here is the erotic physical experience in bed — very like Outlander – only here not idealized at all, forced. A mother forcing her daughter to go to bed with a king is not a joke: even if the man weren’t awful, it’s horrible to be forced this way to give your body to someone to do with as he pleases:

Aliste Considers Her Position

Who was there to turn to when I found
his morning gift, a handsome brooch
encrusted with pearls, on my pillow?
Him? Not him, no morning gift, pink
and strutting, boasting of the seed
he felt spring from him with the force
of ten thousand steeds. When he forced
himself on me, pink, boastful, bent
to suckle like a piglet in his greed,
who was there? He threw his head back,
shouted, boasting of his seed, my morning
gift, and who was there to turn to? I set
my lips in imitation of a smile, spread
my limbs like any sow, but who was there?
Could I proclaim, pink and strutting, ‘This.
This is who I am, your morning gift, servant
girl who cannot sign her name. And do you
love her still? Would you leave a gift,
a morning gift, a handsome brooch, on her
pillow?’ Who was there, who, to turn to?

Not Mother, hopping about with glee, fingers
greasy from palace meat. She pokes my ribs
and cackles, ‘We fooled him, eh? We two
make quite a team.’ when, hankering for all I’ve lost, I think
of home and sister and the poor dumb sheep
I used to shear. Sister [the one she was substituted for]. Sister. Poor
dumb sheep I use to sear. Berta and I
once laughed ourselves to sleep I shuddered
when I saw her heart, darkly gleaming in
Mother’s palm. She hopped about with glee
then tossed it down her throat. ‘There,’
she said,’That’s done,’ her fingers greasy
from the meat. And poked my ribs, while I,
dumb sheep, must play the part of Queen.

This is what Mary Boleyn feels when in the book she must “service” Henry at night because Anne’s pregnancy must be protected.

Charity Wakefield as Mary talking about how she’s used, Mark Rylance as Cromwell feeling for her (2012 Wolf Hall)

I wish I had known about books like this when I read medieval poetry by women, Christine de Pisan, Marie of France, Silence (attributed to a woman, anonymous) and the women’s troubadour poems. My sense is Goldberg is reacting to these — she is by origin German and French-American and the book is dedicated to her mother and grandmother.

Lastly they were interested in Mantel and a few people said they had read other of Mantel’s books and liked them very much. So I close on what I said of her: see “Answering the Heart’s Needs: Giving Up the Ghost”

She is the daughter of Irish Catholic Immigrants into England. he daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants, Hilary Mary Mantel was born on July 6, 1952, and raised in a small provincial town in the north of England. Educated at convent schools and joining a monthly processional to the church for confession, she struggled to understand her connection to a faith that seemed at once punitive and alienating. “From about the age of four,” she writes in her 2003 memoir Giving Up the Ghost, “I had begun to believe I had done something wrong. Confession didn’t touch some essential sin. There was something inside me that was beyond remedy and beyond redemption.” She sees herself as having rebelled against systematic suppression by rules all the more adament because never articulated. She met her husband, Gerald McEwan years ago and they went to Sheffield together to law school We don’t need women.

Her physical is important; from age 20 attacked by debilitating illness and told it was psychosomatic, stress caused by over-ambition. Unbearable pain led her to do research herself and came up with a diagnosis of endometriosis; she had a hysterectomy which is actually one of the treatments but she was still in pain and hormones suddenly made her hugely fat. This happens to other women who put IUVs in themselves – she lived in Saudi Arabia with her husband at one point and didn’t go out anyway.

The first writing I ever read by her was a remarkable attack on the human dimensions of the medical establishment, the way it works by intimidation, indifference, how little they often know and how they are most interested in their place in the organization (as Cromwell might say) She immerses herself in research, in the past and writing becomes her compulsion, her liberty. There was a separation from her husband, she really hit a terrible nadir.

By the end of their stay in Africa, she had produced a huge manuscript. But after she returned to London, she found that it was not easy to find a publisher for the book she titled A Place of Greater Safety. Before A Place of Greater Safety finally appeared in 1992, Mantel had established her reputation with four other novels: Every Day Is Mother’s Day (1985) and Vacant Possession (1986), satirical thrillers about a macabre mother-daughter relationship; Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), about a Western woman’s disorientation in the Middle East, based on her own experiences in Saudi Arabia in 1982. She comes into her own when she becomes at once political and personal in A Change of Climate (1994) it considers Ralph and Anna Eldred, recently returned from apartheid South Africa, where they had administered a church mission. Ralph took the post initially to flee from his domineering father, who forbade him to pursue a career in geology. Both he and Anna struggle to justify their good works in the context of a religion from which they feel increasingly distant and a political situation that increasingly sees them as part of an endemic problem of colonialism. After they are forced out of South Africa, they accept a remote post in Botswana. Here, too, they become victims of political discontent and unrest. A disgruntled servant abducts their infant twins; only one, the girl, is ever found, and Ralph and Anna flee to the safety of home. How a woman is connected deeply to her body, her identity is her body is An Experiment in Love (1995), a law student who becomes anorexic. Her memoir Giving up the Ghost (that’s another one I’ve read).

Odd historical novels, The Giant, O’Brien – -18th century very tall man. We have a woman in drag, arguably Cromwell is a womanly man – but also stealth heroines I call them: Anne Boleyn, Mary Boleyn especially. Anne Boleyn fascinates her as she has others.

I didn’t sufficiently emphasize how this book is also historical romance but Barbara’s book and the interest in Mantel’s non-historical novel showed they got that without being told.

Ellen

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