Online Jane Austen and the 18th century: virtual meetings, conferences, a review

Admiral Crofts (John Woodvine) amused at the picture he describes to Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) in the window shop (1995 BBC Persuasion, scripted by Nick Dear)

Dear friends and readers,

Literally for months now the talks I’ve heard online in zoom lectures and conferences have been mounting up. My spirit quails before the hard and probably impossible and nowadays redundant work of transcribing my notes. Why hard or impossible: my stenography is no longer up to true accuracy and specific details. I’ve let them go for a while so while I have the Jane Austen talks in one place, the Anne Radcliffe in another, the “rest” of the 18th century in a third, they are not in the order I heard them and not always clearly distinguished. Why redundant: nowadays many of these (as in my own case) are recorded, and put online videos on various appropriate sites, ending up on YouTube (and elsewhere, like vimeo). Sometimes these videos are (as in my own case) accompanied by the text that was read aloud or a fuller longer corrected text. The days of my performing a useful service for those who couldn’t get to the conference are over.

Still I was not transcribing and or generally describing what I had heard just for others. I did it for myself. Once transcribed, the search engines of these word press blogs enabled me to find a text, and sometimes I’d copy and paste them into an appropriate file, if the particular blog-essay or summary meant a lot. This has been especially true of my original reviews of Austen films, of the two Poldark series, of Outlander, and historical romance and fiction and films.

Tonight I’m finally facing a decision I should have made earlier because I do have on hand as just published a review I wrote of Art and Artifact in Austen, ed. Anna Battigelli (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2020. 267 pp. ISBN 978-1-64453-175-4), the book that emerged from a conference in Plattsburgh, SUNY, NYC that I was supposed to go to and worked hard on a paper for (see the paper itself on academia.edu), including writing a few blogs here on ekphrasis in Austen and the picturesque in Austen. It’s now published in the 18th Century Intelligencer (EC/ASECS Newsletter NS, 35:1 [March 2021]. I still want to link this kind of thing into my blog to tell others who might be interested.

So I’ve decided each time I put a published review up, I would take the opportunity also to simply list the talks I’d recently heard and taken reasonable notes on and confide the names and titles here

So to begin, here is my thorough review, which I’ve put it on academia.edu and link in here

A Review of Art and Artifact, ed Anna Battigelli

Tonight I am also (with this review)

1) listing the talks on Jane Austen I’ve attended (that’s the verb I’ve used) in JASNA meetings — about 5 such meetings altogether. If anyone is interested, and finds he or she cannot locate the content or video of the talk here on the Net, let me know and I will write out the gist (a summary).

2) listing the talks on the 18th century I heard at the recent (April 7-11) and made good enough notes and would be interested in going back to. Again, if anyone is interested ….

3) briefly describing the nature of what I observed in a few lectures and conversations I observed at last week’s Renaissance Society of America conference.

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Joshua Reynolds, Tysoe Saul Hancock (completely idealized [he was fat & sick], Philadelphia Austen, Eliza Hancock, & Clarinda, their Indian maid — Paula Byrne made a great play with this picture (see below), hitherto thought to be George Clive & his family

Jane Austen:

Tim Erwin gave a talk on “Seeing and Being Seen in Northanger Abbey” (mostly about the art of caricature).

Elaine Bander gave a talk on the relationship of Austen’s Catherine, or the Bower, and Charlotte Smith’s novels, particular Emmeline; or the Orphan of the Castle, and then for two weeks led a reading and discussion of this, Charlotte Smith’s first published original novel.

Gillian Dow gave a talk “Why we should not trust our authoress on her knowledge of language[s, especially French]” (she argued the animus and distrust the people of Jane Austen’s milieu manifested towards France and French novels would make Austen leary of admitting her fluency and extensive reading in French novels and literature of the era).

Paula Byrne gave a talk on Eliza de Feuillide (Warren Hasting’s biological daughter by Philadelphia Austen, Jane’s paternal aunt) and two of Austen’s characters: Mary Crawford and Elizabeth Bennett (she felt these characters are modelled on this woman who made such a favorable impression on the young Jane and who was her friend in later life).

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ASECS 18th century virtual (for these– date, panel, other papers, see the CFP online at the ASECS site): These are placed in the order I attended the panels, or saw the play. Of course there was much more to see and hear and I hope that the videos stay up past May. This list, together with the CFP, will enable me to go back to my steno pads (I still do use stenography partly) and retrieve something of what was said. It was a stunning achievement. So many participated (950); there were sessions on how to proceed from here: should we alternative and every other year become virtual.

Ragazza che legge: A Girl Reading by Jean Raoux

Presidential Address: a plenary lecture given by Jeffrey Ravel, On the playing cards of Citizen Dulac in the Year II

Rachel Gevlin, Monmouth College, “Horrifying Sex: Paranoia and Male Chastity in The Mysteries of Udolpho”

Phineas Dowling, Auburn University, “‘Gentlemen, I Shall Detain You No Longer’: Performance, Spectacle, and the Execution of the Jacobite Lords

Greg Clingham, Bucknell University, “‘St. Quintin and St. Aubin’: Making and Memory in the Manuscript Book of Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard (1750-1825)”

G. David Beasley, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, “A Heroine Educated by Warrington: The Romance of the Forest and Dissenting Education”

Jan Blaschak, Wayne State University, “Extending the Hand, and the Power of Friendship: How Women’s Friendship Networks Extended the Reach of Warrington and the
Bluestockings”

Yoojung Choi, Seoul National University, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Cultural Images of a Celebrity Female Traveler

Elizabeth Porter, Hostos, CUNY, “From Correspondence to the Conduct Book: Women’s Travels in Text” [Mary Granville]

Kathleen Hudson, Anne Arundel Community College, “A Heroine’s Journey: Female Travel, Transition, and Self- Realization in Eighteenth-Century Gothic”

Joseph Gagne, University of Windsor, “Spies, Lies, and Sassy Nuns: Women Resisting Conquest at Québec in 1759-1760

Katharine Jensen, Louisiana State University, “Moral Writer to the Rescue: Madame de Genlis Takes on Madame de Lafayette

Ellen Moody, Oscher Institutes of Lifelong Learning, American University and George Mason University, “Vases, Wheelchairs, Pictures and Manuscripts: Inspiring, Authenticating and Fulfilling the Ends of Historical Romance and History”

Tom Hothem, University of California, Merced, “Seeing through the Claude Glass”

William Warner, University of California, Santa Barbara, The Enlightenment’s Invention of Free Speech was Vigorously Productive, but Can We Still Use It?

Jason S. Farr, Marquette University, “Samuel Johnson and the Rise of Deaf Education in Britain”

Teri Fickling, University of Texas, Austin, “‘Difficulties vanished at his touch’: Samuel Johnson’s Ableist Vision of Milton’s Misogyny”

Berna Artan, Fordham University, “Frances Burney, Camilla and Disability”

Jeffrey Shrader, University of Colorado, Denver, “Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Depiction of His Deafness”

Martha F. Bowen, Kennesaw State University, “Finding Fabular Structures in Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia and Old City Manners”

Susan Carlile, California State University, Long Beach, commenting on all the papers of the panel and Lennox

Susannah Centlivre, A Bickerstaff’s Burying, produced by Deborah Payne

Sara Luly, Kansas State University, “German Gothic as Post-War Trauma Narratives: The Works of Caroline de la Motte Fouqué”

Katherine Ellison, Illinois State University, “Daniel Defoe’s Mediations of Trauma through the Subjunctive Mood”

Geremy Carnes, Lindenwood University, “The Eighteenth-Century Gothic and Catholic Trauma”

Kristin Distel, Ohio University. “‘She Owes Me Her Consent’: Trauma, Shame, and Internalized Misogyny in Richardson’s Clarissa

Deborah Kennedy, St. Mary’s University, “Frances Burney’s Adventure at Ilfracombe

Rebecca A. Crisafulli, Saint Anselm College, “Revisiting Miller and Kamuf: A Pragmatic Approach to Balancing Biography and Textual Analysis”

Annika Mann, Arizona State University, “Reading Stillness: Biography and Charlotte Smith’s Late Work” (I missed from Panel 99, Annika Mann, Arizona State University, “Heart[s] Still Too Sensibly Alive to Misery’: Immobility and Charlotte Smith’s ‘Beachy Head’”

Lise Gaston, University of British Columbia, “Inviting Conflict: Charlotte Smith’s Biographical Aesthetic

Dario Galvao, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and University of São Paulo, “The Animal as Mirror of Human Nature and the Enlightenment (Animal Consciousness)

Donna Landry, University of Kent, “‘In one red burial blent’: Humans, Equines and the Ecological at Waterloo

Jane Spencer, University of Exeter, “Animal Representation and Human Rights in the Late Eighteenth Century

George Morland, A Cat Drinking (one of the earliest accurate depictions of a cat in painting)

And from a Digital Seminar in the 18th century series: Madeline Pelling, Women Archealogists in the 18th century

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Rachel Ruysch

As for the Renaissance Society of America, I did watch a couple of videos of talks about paintings, and listened in on a couple of conversations on the Sidneys. Some of these were done from Italy or places where the pictures or artifacts concerned are. It was far more of an expensive conference, the attitude of mind more narrowly high culture, elite, and necessarily archival oriented. At the ASECS everyone was recorded, all sessions by ASECS itself. (Wow.) At RSA, only those people who recorded themselves or the panels where this was decided for the group, were there recordings. Other than that you could read summaries or what was said. There were podcasts. So it was not online in the same way, but persistent browsing could you give a good feel for what was happening or had happened, and I watched a couple of marvelous videos on paintings.

The last time I went was in the 1990s when I had a nervous breakdown from trying – I knew no one, had no one to talk to for hours. Was so lost, felt so isolated. Years later (mid-2000s when we first had much more money), Jim proposed we both go to Florence, where they were having a conference, and foolishly, still mortified before myself over what had happened, I demurred. Now how I wish I had gone: I simply should have asked him to join; he would not be refused; there is probably a cheap rate for a spouse. But I didn’t know that then. Since then I have been going to conferences for 15 years and understand them so much better. He would so have enjoyed it — seen Italy the right way, with wonderful talks led by people who know about the history of the place in places of real interest. Too late — I learned much later or over the course of a decade how to do these things (even if hard I can and now find I can do them alone).

Well it was very nice to see the way the Renaissance scholars talk today, the contemporary discourse and attitudes — which are very like those of ASECS. I did not see anything of my particular interests beyond the session on the Sidneys (I was looking for Renaissance Italian women poets, perhaps Marguerite de Navarre), but I was heartened to be able to take part. I won’t take notes on most of what I hear (as I did not for the whole conferences), but I have another month to watch some more videos and listen in on the RSA too. And if I do take notes on something I discover connects to my own interests, I’ll come back and put the titles here so I can keep track — and offer commentary to anyone coming here interested. I doubt there will be anyone, gentle reader — they can contact the speaker through the information on the CFP (nowadays there is a cornucopia of names, titles, email addresses &c).

For someone like me these virtual conferences, lectures, social get-togethers, are a silver lining in this pandemic. No ordeal of travel (I am very bad at liminality); no discomfort, danger, mistreatment on planes, no anonymous (to me) given the state of most of the world tasteless hotel, no hours alone (especially the JASNAs where there are either at most one paper or when there are more, too many hours inbetween with nothing for me to do, some of this from my inability to go anywhere without [usually] getting lost), no large expense. I do miss the very occasional lunch with a friend or occasional meaningful private talk with someone. These usually go unrecorded — except perhaps my autobiographical blog. OTOH, I’ve become sort of friendly with people during these zooms, and have gotten to know new pleasant and interesting acquaintances I’d never have talked to much before. This is also true for my Trollope excursions (so to speak), which I write about on Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two.

Ellen

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Persephone books is sadly moving from London to Bath

For three days I could find no information on the Persephone Books’ move to Bath. But this fourth day I got a letter from a company representative to say yes, sadly, they are are moving. I had concluded that I fell for an April 1st fools day hoax. No such luck, they have been driven to the smaller city, away from Bloomsbury and the nearby British Library. I include my correspondence with them in the comments

Nicola Beauman (b. 1944) recently

“I like books that tell me how we lived,” says Persephone’s founder Nicola Beauman.“I’m very, very interested in the novel as social history.”

Dear friends and readers,

This is a shorter blog than I’ve been in the habit of writing, more in the nature of an item of news, followed by context suggesting the meaning of the news. I’ve been very frustrated since the YouTube of Nicola Beauman announcing the move of the Persephone bookshop located in Bloomsbury (Lamb’s Conduit Street, near the British Library), London to Bath, which I saw on twitter and was able to trace to a Carol Shields site on Facebook, is not movable — I cannot share it, nor can I link you to it, except as a tweet (on twitter — do click as of this morning the video is still there). I cannot even find the originating story in any of the major online newspapers I read. No wonder; there is no originating story there. The Video says nothing about moving; it is about why and how Beauman started Persephone books and that is is managing to survive during the pandemic though online sales and its reputation among a select loyal group of readers. I was correct to surmize that economics might driving the shop from its present location to this western spa city, only it was quietly announced in a newsletter that goes out to members of the Bookstore and potential customers who subscribe.

Why make this blog. Because the marginalized announcement together with the way the store is tactfully run, and the people are careful to control how it appears and is discussed — is indicative of the continued marginalization of women and their justified apprehension of the way they will be presented. And yet it has been since the beginning of the 20th century and the suffragettes’ presses, and until now, so crucially important that women have their own presses.  As I cannot be sure you will heat the YouTube yourself, I’ll tell you what she says below. I will “flesh out” some of the points she makes with my own experience.  Then add some information on other presses publishing women’s and feminist books.

A photograph from one of the corners of the bookshop

Nicola Beauman started the company in 1998 because she had long loved 20th century women’s books, and finding for decades that most publishers would publish very few books by women of them, especially if they were about mothers centrally, that at long last (like the little red hen) did it herself. She says what is unique to the 20th century is women are still strongly constrained by all sorts of inhibiting conventions and until the 1960s/70s could get good jobs or into professions, were not seen or active widely in public life in general the way they began to be as of the 1980s. Yet they were going to public school up to university, working “outside the home” (“out to work”) in large numbers before World War Two, had the right vote and many rights and liberties that men have. So knowledge, self-esteem, self-confidence were within their purview regularly.

The result is a peculiar angle on life. I have discovered in teaching 20th century political novels by women this term, I just love not only the books I’m teaching, but to read about and some of other 20th century women’s political books.

I’ve twice taught a course I called 19th Century Women of Letters, and once Historical Novels by Women, especially set in the 18th century and dealing with war. I moderate a small modest listserv on groups.io I call WomenWriters.

All other things being equal, I often prefer women’s prose texts and poetry to men’s. They are inwardly much richer by virtue of the aesthetics that often informs them. Why not plays? because until recently almost all stage plays were written from a male angle even when women got a chance to write and to be staged. Women have, it seems to me, broken into screenplays for movies much quicker than for plays — less money, less prestige.

The Carlyles at Home by Thea Holme, a partial view of the cover — see excellent blog —

my other Persephone books are Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy, The Making of the Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Miss Pettigrow Lives for a Day by Winnifred Watson, Susan Glaspell’s Fidelity, Beauman’s own The Other Elizabeth Taylor, a book of short stories, and a lovely catalogue.

I love that the covers of these books are grey. Virago had a policy of choosing for covers paintings or images by women, or the kind that a woman would not — not a woman as a come-hither-fuck-me sex object. They seem to have given that up and turned to more abstract designs (as has Oxford of late), as if the publishers fear that younger adults today will not be attracted to a picture that depicts the 19th or even 20th century — as too old-fashioned. Grey solves the problem I have had many a time: a book I long to read comes with a soft-core porn image of a woman on its cover.

I am now reading a very good translation of Tolstoy’s Anne Karenina by Richard Pever and Larissa Volokhonsy, in a deluxe Penguin edition. In order to be able to endure the physical object, I put over the image of a woman’s knee which suggested what was up her thigh, a still from Joe Wright’s film adaptation of the novel featuring Keira Knightley looking desperately calm. Sometimes I can’t find an image that fits, so I just have to cut the cover off — weakening and eventually ruining the book. Grey reminds me of the old sets of good book sold in the 1930s and 40s by Left Book Clubs with soft brown or beige covers, sometimes with soft gold or silver lettering.

Beauman says that Persephone has kept up their high standard of choice and their have been sales sufficient to stay in business, even during this pandemic. But they will have more budget to publish and do more of the things they like to. They miss the in-coming customers and occasional events (book launches, talks). IF they had to they could succeed in Bath & spread their wisdom, and splendour there. But after all, they do not. Mockers may find their presence absurd, but I don’t nor their shop.

The New York Times had a spread of pictures and story to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the press and bookshop: A Bookstore of One’s Own by Sarah Lyall. Over on Twitter, Elaine Showalter tweeted to my comment that I like the shop, love the imprint, prefer to read good books by women most of the time, that I’ve covered wonderful lists, and there “really should be a book about the great feminist presses;” I replied there is a fine book on Virago: Catherine Riley: The Virago Story: Assessing the Impact of a Feminist Publishing Phenomenon. This retells the origins of the press, its struggles to stay true to its mission, good books by women, its morphing into divisions of larger publishers and its stubborn integrity until today, the specific women who have made it what it is. I own too many (cherish most) to enumerate. An essay on the authors favored who resemble Austen can be found in Janeites, ed. Deirdre Lynch: Katie Trumpener, The Virago Jane. But a full scale book would be enourmously helpful in understanding one important strand of feminism today: other presses born around the time of Virago were Spare Rib, Pandora (“Mothers of the Novel” were the older books), Feminist Press of NYC. Anyone coming to this blog who can think of others, please supply the title in the comments.

As for Beauman herself, I’ve read her superb (highly informative) A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel, 1914–39, Virago (London), 1983 (about early and mid-20th century women writers and their books); The Other Elizabeth Taylor, Persephone (London, England), 1993 (did you know Taylor was a communist? and had affairs — you wouldn’t realize this from the surface stories of her books unless you think about them a bit); and Morgan (on EM Forster as seen and realized through his imaginative writings). The first and third have meant a lot to me. I have been to the shop twice, once with a friend I’d never met face-to-face before, knew for years here on the Internet. We had coffee and some kind of cake.

Ellen

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