Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood as she resolves to accept a future with her mother, where she on herself can live (she thinks Edward has married Lucy) (2009 BBC S&S, scripted Andrew Davies)
“‘It is not every one,’ said Elinor, ‘who has your passion for dead leaves …
“Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition …
“‘We are all offending every moment of our lives’ … (Marianne Dashwood)
“‘We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing’ … (Elizabeth Bennet)
“She regained the street — happy in this, that though much had been forced on her against her will, though she had in fact heard the whole substance of Jane Fairfax’s letter, she had been able to escape the letter itself … (Emma Woodhouse)
“‘We all know at times what it is to be wearied in spirits. Mine, I confess, are exhausted’ … (Jane Fairfax)
“‘But why he should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable! How were people, at that rate, to be understood?’ … (Catherine Morland)
“‘One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering….’ (Anne Elliot)
Dear friends and readers,
Every once in a while it is good for me to remember why I’ve had two blogs dedicated to Jane Austen and art I connect to her and her books, and films made from these. Last night I was in a zoom group yesterday (a nowadays not unusual experience) where we were asked this question as a sort of topic for us to discuss and share; “Who’s inspired or guided you?”, and I was surprised to discover that most people either didn’t have or didn’t want to talk about a person or book or specific event(s) they could cite. All day long today that realization was reinforced when I threw the question out on face-book and my three listservs. Only now I feel it’s not that people don’t want to tell of such an experience, most people apparently don’t have one major intense experience or person who made such an impression. I know I am more intense than many about many things.
For myself upon my eyes reading the question, my answer came out in my mind almost before the words for it: my father and Jane Austen’s six novels.
This image of the RLS book is not the one my father read to me, but I cannot replicate a book cover from the old-fashioned sets of English classics he had on his shelf, often published by do-good organizations like the Left Book Club …
I know I have mentioned about my father here before, but not said much for real. Despite spending 44 years in close friendship-love-marriage with my late husband, Jim (whom you are tired of hearing about), the true core influence on what I am, how I came to have the stances I do, political, areligious, social, were the result of my relationship with my father: from my earliest memories, he was the person who understood, companioned me, yes mothered me. Like Edmund with Fanny, he read with me, and reasoned with me about what we read together, read aloud to me — some of my happiest memories of my girlhood come from when he read aloud to me Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Sire de Maltroit’s Door” and “A Lodging for the Night:” since then I’ve been a reader/lover of Stevenson’s style, stance, pizzazz. My father took me to the library, told me of his boyhood during the 1930s depression, explained the politics of the 1950s and early 60s we were experiencing. I left home in 1963. But there was a year after Izzy was born where he phoned me every week on Sunday and we’d have a long satisfying talk.
Emma Thompson as Elinor writing to their mother to tell of what has happened in London to ask if they can come home (1995 Miramax S&S, scripted Emma Thompson, directed Ang Lee)
Then Jane Austen’s 6 famous novels. A couple of people in the zoom registered puzzlement. How could a book (maybe they meant also one so old) influence, guide or shape someone. To some extent this shows how for some people books mean nothing vital to their lives. I read today in one of the papers how public figure was influenced by a book or event — what was cited were famous people, widely know fairly recent books, fashionable, movies. So I tried to tell of how I had first read these books at age 12-13 (S&S & P&P), then 15 (MP), that as a teenager of 17 or so when I was in need of a way of responding to social life and the hard abrasions of people, I’d think of Elinor Dashwood and her stance in life, and how this character (an aspect of Austen herself I still believe) gave me a presence to emulate, to aspire to come up to to protect myself (self-control, prudence are strong themes in Austen embodied in Elinor). How often while I don’t say to myself, How would Elinor or Anne Elliot or Jane Fairfax, or even Fanny Price have acted in this situation, nevertheless parallel situations in the books come to mind when something is happening to me that have some meaning. They need not involve these central figures, but they often do – as well as some of the heroes. Lines from Austen’s books come into my mind unbidden — I remember (or half remember) what seems to crystallize or capture an aspect of the situation. What a given character said.
This is probably why I have so little patience with preposterous interpretations and some of the uses made of her text to forward careers or fill a fashionable niche, or turn her into a whipping post for someone’s feminist thwarted career, or even the hagiography which turns her into an unreal omnipotent presence, which leads to extravagant claims. And as to the solemn moralizing one comes across in some JASNA groups, how can they be so moronic to have missed the core continual anarchic ironies of the text.
To explain this to others I had to fall back on using words like role models — though that’s too crude; I know I don’t imitate these characters in literal close ways. It’s not quite the way I conceive of myself understanding how literature functions, but as a rough and ready analogy that others can understand from their own experience comes close enough. The deepest thing is view of Austen herself that I feel throughout the novels.
By the way: My father did very much like Jane Austen. But there was no need for him to introduce the texts to me. The first time I read Pride and Prejudice I identified my relationship with him with Elizabeth’s with her father. My sympathies have ever been with the father; and it’s clear to me Austen understands what pain and counterproductive humiliation Mrs Bennet puts both her older daughters through. He also was one of those who introduced Trollope to me, with words about The Vicar of Bullhampton to this effect: Trollope has much wisdom.
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But during the talk of the group, I was led to remember how in my first year of full time college I had a teacher for an introductory course in literature where we read Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and I was shocked to hear someone (a group of people) assert how boring the book had been, and I protested and defended my favorite book. (Something similar happened to my daughter, Izzy, in a summer night-time class she took (post graduate) where she gave a paper on Elizabeth Bowen’s Last September and astonished the class by talking about it as deeply sexual. Clinton F. Oliver, an elegant black man, Henry James scholar, born in one of the Carribean islands (he once said). When I came to his office one day he suddenly said to me, major in English literature and be a college teacher. I was so touched, the first teacher to pay attention to me — tellingly a black person.
One memory: we had one class in a big auditorium (the other two were break-out sessions where I was lucky enough to be in his). One day a student came with so many lollipops and gave them out to everyone but me. I was somewhat older than the others — not as much as they thought, dressed in a skirt, probably all in black, anorexic then, but harmless. Anyway he came from behind his lectern and secured two and gave me one and smiled and we both sucked on lollipops with everyone else. It was in his class I first read Henry James: The Princess Casamassima. Also Conrad’s “Secret Sharer.” He was the only black teacher I ever had in all my years in school — until now at OLLI at AU I’ve had a class in August Wilson’s plays taught by someone who is retired military and now a librarian at Howard University
This is an image of the copy I read in that class, edited by him, which I cherish the way I do my first copy of Dr Thorne (edited by Elizabeth Bowen)
One person in this zoom group told me I was lucky to have had an experience with a teacher like that. One experience I never had was of a mentor: by this is meant not only someone who is older, wiser, and counsels you on careers, but helps you create one. Izzy had that: a Mrs Kelly who hired her for her 1st gov’t job, and helped her transfer into the library where she is now (though working remotely from home). Mrs Kelly had real feeling for Izzy and Izzy still goes to Mrs K’s yearly Halloween parties.
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And then reversing perspective: eleven days ago, I came across a posting in that excellent blog, Kaggsby’s Bookish Ramblings, on Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story. Pray read what Kaggsby writes so eloquently, from which I quote her opening paragraph:
It tells the story of a pivotal event in young Annie’s life when, at the age of 18, she spent a summer as an instructor at a camp for younger children. A naive only child, Annie is instantly taken advantage of by H., the head instructor; though remaining technically a virgin, she is used sexually by him, and as the summer goes on, by plenty of others in the camp. Overwhelmed by these experiences, she is unable to recognize how she has been abused or see herself as a victim; she thinks instead she’s now experiencing freedom from the repressive control of her parents, and cannot understand why she should be labelled whore. Her humiliation at the mockery and contempt of the rest of the instructors is almost as strong as her pain at being used and abandoned by H.
As I wrote here, when I reviewed Anne Boyd Rioux’s book on Alcott’s Little Women, the problem with the books I was given, including Little Women, was this aspect of female adolescence and teenagehod, the experience of predatory punitive patriarchal sexuality that not only are boys encouraged to inflict on girls, but girls collude with, are complicit to, is omitted. It is at least hinted at in Sense and Sensibility, and in movies like Lee/Thompson and Davies brought out fully. I wish I had had as well Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia, Naomi Wollf’s Promiscuities. Kaggsby does not see that Ernaux is Aspergers but her description of Ernaux’s horrible time in camp and as a girl growing up is an Aspergers experience. Kaggsby has her limits, but she often goes beyond what she consciously says or sees by the thoroughness of her analyses. In France too although the medical community knows about autism and Aspergers, the general population is unfamiliar with the term. I’ve had a few close French friends and only one knew the term; the other two were uncomfortable with the idea of a disability. It may be Ernaux knows and doesn’t say aloud — but I doubt it. I likened the book to Reviving Ophelia because Mary Pipher at no point that I can recall talks of autism: her book is an expose of the predatory punitive patriarchy that not only many men inflict on us, but many women are complicit in.
This disability puts girls at a frightening disadvantage before boys in our predatory sexual culture. I feel so for her. I have read two others of her books, both life-writing, which I associated with gothic; another I don’t have is Englished as I remain in Darkness; now I think that’s because perhaps she has not been willing to move out into rational diagnosis – the next step would be a book like Annie LeBrun’s
.
I had not thought of Aspergers but now this Kaggsby’s blog provides a comprehensive perspective for all Ernaux’s work. Of course it’s possible she was just naive and inexperienced with no social skills and a very protected upbringing, but I doubt it. At any rate she was a ripe target for experienced and cruel others.
This past summer a woman in my Bloomsbury class at OLLI at AU startled me by in front of the whole group online (another zoom experience) revealing she is lesbian by saying how she wished she had known such Forster’s Maurice when she was girl, and how much it would have helped to know others who are LBGTQ. I responded in kind: that in the 1990s when I first read Reviving Ophelia, I just cried to realize there was a large world of women experiencing what I did. This woman is in her 60s and probably has far more friends and is far more effective in life (may have made real money) than I’ve ever been. Every single person who comes out helps the rest of us.
Not that I think Austen understood herself to be coming out with the depths of her own experiences to help others but rather she began with sharp satire, and revised and revised, until the tone of mind of her book was to some extent also the opposite of where she had begun so deep empathy becomes the mode towards the vulnerable heroine.
Ania Marson as Jane Fairfax, barely but firmly self-contained (BBC Emma 1972, scripted by Denis Constantduros)
Laurie Pypher as Jane Fairfax explaining to Emma that she needs to get away from this wonderful gathering at Donwell Abbey & losing self-control (BBC Emma 2009, scripted by Sandy Welch)
What was wonderful about Andrew Davies’s development of Sanditon was he brought out this paradigm in three of the heroines (see my exegesis of Episodes 1-4, By the Sea …; and Episodes 5-8, Zigzagging). It is central to why Jane Austen has meant so much to me. This is not all she offers, but this is the core.
Ellen
My day’s journey has been pleasanter in every respect than I expected. I have been very little crowded and by no means unhappy. — Jane Austen, Letters (24 Oct 1798)
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
See Time In Jane Austen: http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/emcalendars.html
An Austen miscellany: http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/misc.html
I should say I found students in my classes would cite favorite movies — as inspirational, and I have thought of a fourth project for this blog. Go through all the Jane Austen movies once again, in date order …. (The other three are foremother poet postings, women artists, actresses ….)
http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/SourceFilmography.html
Maybe in general younger people (people born starting in the 1970s) would cite a movie or series of movies, showing that movies have replaced books as central to peoples’ imaginaries.
On another note: I came to Trollope too late for him to affect me this way — I first read the Pallisers when I was in my late 20s. The scene with my father where he gave me a Dover copy of The Vicar of Bullhamton (one I still have) occurred in a hospital in 1989 — I was 43. But recently (last couple of years) I’ve found myself better understanding and much admiring Madame Max Goesler — like Elinor Dashwood she has an integrity I could aspire to emulate were I able to feel this way. I am too old for this kind of thing now.
Tyler: “This is an interesting question, Ellen, but I’m not sure I can answer it. I can’t say I have anyone I would consider a major mentor in my life on a personal level – if so, probably my mom – she and I agree on most things. I was also close to my grandpa and probably got my work ethic from him. I could list many authors who I am conscious of having influenced my own writing but I can’t say there’s one whose worldview became my inspiration.
Tyler”
After talking and/or writing to/with a number of people on this, I’ve decided that perhaps (hedging) the kind of experience I thought not uncommon is not common. That is many or even most people don’t have a single person or people who meant so much to them as children, and fewer a book or books or author. Many may have favorite books, several favorites but that they can say this book, author shaped my life and continues to be a presence to me, no.
Yes I think writers must have a closer analogy. I didn’t talk to many writers — I am not a novelist but I would and have inferred that novelists do have an author or authors or type books central to them.
Tyler, you use the word “mentor.” Maybe one reason I assumed so many would have this kind of experience is in academia over the last 15 years the term “mentor” is frequently used for the person (or persons) who helped you make the subject your career, and then helped you forward your career (advice and phone calls, introductions). I was not fortunate enough to have that or know how to draw such a possible person to me. As I say in my blog, Izzy was lucky to have a Mrs Kelly who identified Izzy with her son.
It may take a certain intensity of feeling and thought towards life to have these experiences. I daresay the person who thought up the topic thought the experience more common though.
Ellen
I first read Trollope at 24 when I read the first two Barchester novels but I didn’t start to feel attached to him until I joined this group in 1998 and we read all 6 of the Barchester novels here in 1999-2000. I would have been about 28 at the time. I do know Trollope has deeply influenced my writing, especially in terms of creating recurring characters, but he is not the one who made me fall in love with literature. I would say Gone with the Wind did that in terms of historical fiction when I was about 12. I also love fantasy and credit the Oz books primarily for that, which I read beginning about age 8. What really turned me onto British literature would have been the Brontes, Dickens, and Austen, all of which I read from about age 12 or 13 through my teens.
Tyler
From a reply off-blog: “Perhaps using the word influential would have resulted in more responses. A guide connotes for me a more explicitly mentoring relationship. Inspired just sounds to me too theatrical. Also, I think that people and events can be influential without our even realizing it at the time, and perhaps never unless we reflect on what type of person we have become. For example, my father always discussed with me educational and career plans while I was growing up. He didn’t just presume marriage and children would be my career choice or only option. My mother could be said to be a role model because she was a working mother, by her choice. But we did not have a relationship I would consider mentoring or guiding at all. If I had grown up with different parents who intentionally or unintentionally cultivated different ideas about what a girl growing up in the 50s and 60s could or should do, I might have made different life choices.
As for books, I can’t limit influence to any particular one or author. I can say that I was attracted to books with independent, smart female main characters. Even if that character was Nancy Drew!”
In reply: But I did mean more than influential. I really meant shape, stay in one’s mind as a sort of implicit guide. And a relationship with a person or persons. I could cite Jim but he is the equivalent of saying my life from age 23. I could say with Jane Eyre, Reader I married him ….
I didn’t formulate the question; it was the leader of this zoom group (or leaders) who formulated it. I agree “inspired” is too theatrical; I would have used a word someone on FB responded with: he aspired to be a character whose integrity made this person want to emulate her. My father never discussed careers with me until very late — maybe I was over 20 and I have to admit what he had to say I tell as a joke, and as to taking his advice at that point I saw what he was saying as destructive of all I wanted in life: he urged me to leave college and learn to be court reporter because of my strong talents in strong stenography. His argument: Just think, Ellen, $40,000 a year. I never made anything like that; years later he told me he had been all wrong in his suppositions of what a court reporter’s life was like and then realized I would never have made anything like that money: it’s entrepreneurial; you sell your notes, plus there are few gov’t positions. My mother was ever useless to me except when she nagged to do something that embarrassed me into it — for the wrong reasons as I thought — she was the one who urged me to start night college and took me to the college at night and embarrassed me so to stop the scene I filled out the papers. I never took any SATs. For better or worse, no one cultivated me in a money direction. Oh yes, my mother said, marry a doctor (they make money), be a teacher (you have the summer off) — but she was repeating cant.
I began reading Austen at age 12-13 (P&P and S&S among my first adult books), then age 15 Mansfield Park (it made a deep impression). The other books I was reading faded in my mind in comparison — except maybe GWTW for a couple of intense years, and then at age 15, Jane Eyre. There were some books of the month club items, but my mother persisted in throwing them out (when I was not looking) and I can’t remember the title and author of the one I read at 14 — takes place in Italy, WW2, the heroine a peasant — that made a real impression. My attraction to characters was not general — it was ever connected to my own particular personality, needs, and desires. I often feel to today what is identified as strong is a superficial idea of strength. I think Fanny Price an enormously strong personality. The most wretched and vulnerable of characters can draw my deepest sympathies and even admiration — depends where they started in life in the book, what were the expectations they were surrounded by
And I’ll add one can outgrow people. When I was in my 40s (finally?) my father began to appear to me more what he was: an ordinary flawed human being, very good man, better than many, but with his own faults and blindnesses. I never fought with him, the respect and gratitude were too strong, and at times I carried on taking his advice (which still to my mind could be very good — especially as respecting my personality), but I did began to walk away from him (which hurt him) but towards the end he began to walk away from me, the way I was leading my life being beyond his acceptance. Ellen
I’ve had two moving commentaries off blog by Bob and Judith.
Bob’s reminded me of when in classes we were called by our last names. I wonder how that dissolved away — before I went to the UK teachers were still addressing me as Mrs and then Ms Grube (my first husband’s name) but when I came back it was Ellen. As a teacher I never called students by their last names with titles — for I started teaching afterwards. I’ve been lucky or single-minded. I probably never considered a different major than literature. The question whether it would be English or French was decided by my inability to pronounce French well enough. I had teachers who stay in my mind strongly — especially some from graduate school who had some fame (as poets)
To Judith, I was wondering when and if someone would bring up Jo March. In Rioux’s book she seems to feel lots of girls find in or feel about Jo March what I found in or felt about Elinor Dashwood. I can see that your parents fundamentally shaped you, and guided — that’s beautiful the way you feel today.
I did say in this zoom group that when on a few occasions a student seemed to regard me as a model or told me it was I who was “responsible” for their choosing to major in English — well the classes I had taught them — it worried me. It’s a sort of responsibility if you take it very seriously. Especially after the year 2000 I was so aware that to be an English major or want to teach this subject in a college was courting a life of poverty unless you had a partner who made good money and then you were at risk because what if you got a divorce or the partner died young. You had to really want this life and not care about the money or status. I would tell students this. They had to realize that they would probably pay a price for this choice they might not find it easy to live with. The same sort of feelings — slightly differently — but analogous directed my attitude towards my daughters — I worried about what I should say, what do — was this or that the right thing for this person and so on. It was my idea for Izzy to become a librarian. I now tell myself I should have told Laura to be a lawyer, she might have been a very good one but I console myself she would not have paid me any attention 🙂
Ellen
Linda: “Yes, Jo March was a literary heroine for me as well. I think I read pretty much all of Alcott’s books (not the sensational ones!) when I was in elementary school. Katharine Hepburn as Jo remains my nostalgic favorite. June Allyson not so much.”
Me: “When we were reading Rioux’s book together I re-watched a few of the Little women movies — I have a number of them as I have a number of the Bronte movies (so to speak), and while my memory tells me I loved the book as a whole, did not particularly want to be a tomboy (I never was) but a reading girl (another phrase), so was put off by Jo, I know that I did concentrate on Jo a couple of years ago — especially Jo in the second volume (Good Wives). I feel Katharine Hepburn overdoes it, and June Allyson underdoes it (plus the cast of that one and the whole ambience drip with 1950s): my favorite is Angela Down whose version many Americans may not have seen. It’s a 9 part, half an hour each BBC series, 1970s. Down was Sylvia Pankhurst in the 1970s Suffragettes — and other roles I’ve loved. I also felt strongly for Jo in the 2018 Maya Hawke as Jo and Emily Watson as Marmee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Women_(1970_TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Women_(2017_TV_series)
I did read two other Alcott books beyond the Little Women/Good Wives, Little Men and Jo’s Boys: Eight Cousins, and Rose in Bloom. More recently her powerful short story: Countraband (The Brothers it’s sometimes called) about two half-brothers, one with white not enslaved mother and the other with a black enslaved mother, same white father. Her Hospital Sketches are too determinedly upbeat but as she tells enough truth, they are even significant (I’d say)
Judith: “The 2018 version is my favorite of all I have seen. I haven’t seen the BBC 9 parter you mentioned. But I agree the June Allyson version is dated & too 50ish & Katharine Hepburn overdoes it for me now, though she used to be my favorite. Yes Maya Hawke & Emma Watson are the best of all. I was a confirmed tomboy until about 12 & not after that.
Another aspect of this is a given actor or actress can interpret and embody the character or reflect aspects of the author and that in itself becomes extra meaningful (?) or we can get angry or feel frustrated if an actress/actor is chosen and interpretation that ruins our dream of the book. Happily most of the actresses playing Elinor Dashwood I’ve fallen in love with, but it is true that almost any part Hattie Morahan or Emma Thompson play I have strong tendency to like or to bond with. That’s why I mentioned Angela Down: in the 1970s she was a repeating presence in the BBC dramas. At age 13 I had an unusual taste I know: my favorite actor was Ronald Colman.
An instance of irritation: I did and still can love Alice Vavasour, but the actress chosen in the part, Caroline Mortimer is made to look homely and act priggish: that is the way many readers see her, not me. Until very recently as a character I preferred her in Can You Forgive Her? to Lady Glen. I hope no actress is ever chosen to play Lily Dale (Small House of Allington) — I cannot imagine any wider audience understanding and truly siding with Lily as I do.
Ellen
Interesting post. I have never thought of Austen’s characters in that light–either as influential or inspirational. I suppose I did want to be as witty and articulate as Elizabeth Bennett and be the apple of my father’s eye, but it was just a passing thought, never to be. I did study 19th c. literature and found the inspiration I came away with was “fortitude.” Those Victorians/Romantics had so much of it. Not to mention the wise, omniscient narrators who guide you by hand–that’s what I want in life now. In particular, I think George Eliot’s Middlemarch gave me wisdom.
Yes I would say that the ideal or norm of fortitude is an explicit one in both 18th and 19th century books by serious women authors. I still read some of these older 19th century novelist with articulate appealing narrators for wisdom and among them Trollope and George Eliot come to mind. I say of such authors books they both solace and strengthen me. I also imaginatively seek friends when I read — imagined friends in authors — in moral or ethical fiction.
John Major in the Daily Mail online writes he first read Trollope at age 13. So here we have someone who did read Trollope at this impressionable age. Others on the Trollope face-book page professed disagreement over Major’s continuing favoring of The Warden – the first one he read. He then goes on to characterize Trollope’s other works in the context of his life.
https://tinyurl.com/y5c8d59s
My reply:
It’s interesting that was his first, that he read it so young. This brings me back to my question on another thread: when does the average reader come to Trollope: John Major came much earlier. A given character may dominate book and I’d say though The Warden is not my favorite book, I find Mr Harding to be a centrally significant character for Trollope. He has the unconventional deep strength to walk away from things others would not have the courage to walk away from because others admire ambition, high place at any cost, big salary/money no matter how unfairly gotten. He is quiet, unaggressive, but has no need to press his non-conformity on others, no macho male. Above all he has integrity; one cannot image Mr Harding lying. And I think this stance is one which is at the core of Trollope’s ideals.
Ellen
John Spender called my attention to this beautiful essay on Literary Hub: Ellen, this reminds me of your recent post.
https://lithub.com/she-said-she-would-write-the-essay-herself-reading-virginia-woolf-in-middle-age/
To which I replied: “If this reminded you of me, John, I am flattered. It’s a beautiful essay about one’s selves across time, framing each one back against the original novel and re-realizing it. Yes, that is probably the way I’ve reacted to Sense and Sensibility over the years — or all six of Austen’s famous novels, as now one and now the other means more to me. And I do like some of the films: I’m just now re-watching the 1972 BBC Emma: no one would today just on account of the costumes. But it is an intelligent thoughtful interpretation (John Glenister and Denis Constantduros with very good actors) and today in an unhappy moment parallel to Harriet Smith in Part 3 of the series where she asks Miss Woodhouse, to make her feel more comfortable, I thought to myself, I need Miss Woodhouse just now too.”