Recovering with Austen: post-texts, detective & other archetypes, & literary feminist books

Dear readers and friends,

I’ve been slowly recovering since I last wrote and will soon tell that autobiographical story on my Sylvia II blog. Here I want to return to our more usual postings: life as I see it through my reading and writing about Austen and all that concerns her, women’s art across the Ages, admittedly a Eurocentric, and Anglophilic point of view, and through my long 18th centuries studies. The slant here is how I am recuperating through several interconnected pathways at once, some of which I am in the midst of and not sure what I shall eventually want to do more of and where and how. Through Austen, women’s art and extensions from my first interest, among these, the 18th century, I, another women writer and reader, am coming back to myself and rebuilding my life (once again).

I will be teaching this summer: online I’ll finish that women’s detective course I had begun, I’m working on two reviews, one about how Austen’s unfinished books (which arguably include Persuasion), manuscripts, and some of the intelligent post-texts (book or video form) sometimes use these to enable us to learn more about Austen.

First up, Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen, which title refers both to Cassandra and Jane. This is the story of Cassandra returning to Kintbury in 1840 — PBS/WETA will be presenting an adaptation featuring Keeley Hawes. I like the book. I feel the tone is appropriate, which is always central to my response to these things. The last one I tried which I also liked is The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow (reviewed here under the Observer) imprint: Hadlow’s deeply sympathizing with the plain intellectual Mary, rightly (I think) critical of Elizabeth’s failure in understanding. Hadlowe transformed elements of Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney’s stories in a plot-design which in part follows the outline of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. it takes elements of Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney’s character in a plot-design that revamps P&P.

This Miss Austen, I hope, will be a new story using elements of the traditional biography. I agree with the reviewer Miss Austen is actuated by a spirit of deep kindness towards its principal characters; it also reveals hoe few opportunities for even any fun, much less an individually fulfilling existence, women of Austen’s class and income level had. Hornby has imbibed the lessons of Charlotte and Anne Bronte’s novels. Soon after the opening, Cassandra is finally reading Jane’s letters. The great joy I too felt comes from how frustrating it is to realize two-thirds of Jane’s letters have gone and from a point of view that seeks to hide Austen’s authentic ideas and feelings from us with a view to destroying them. We are made to see how perceptive Jane was — already there are hints hoe much she is attached to Martha Lloyd. I want eventually to compare this book to the coming film and an overview of Jane and Cassandra’s letters.

Hornby sees Cassandra compassionately as a tragic figure … You will love this recreation of Jane’s voice.

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I’ve stayed with my studies – and enjoyment of women writing and how they appear in both detective-mystery-thriller (today called crime novels) and the political-nationalistic (most of the time – though anti- and post-colonialist points of view are dramatized increasing, as begun in the later Prime Suspect and Foyle’s War seasons). Instead of extensive (trying to cover lots of authors) I’ve been proceeding intensively, that is going deeply into one or two authors, because, honestly it’s easier to do.

I am trying to read as much Dorothy Sayers and books about her as I can. I admit sometimes I love the studies of her fictional work, more than the work itself – and her non-fiction essays, which have such an authentic living voice. Unnatural Death is a case in point. She shows us the plight and anger of unmarried women, lesbian as well as heterosexual: Miss Climpson and her Cattery (an agency for women to give and receive support for one another), supported by Lord Peter. We see their peculiar predicaments (Valerie Pitts, “Dorothy Sayers: The Predicaments of Women,” Literature and History, 13:2 (1988), 172-80). Now I’ve begun the entertaining epistolary novel, The Documents in the Case where she alludes to Walter Scott’s epistolary Redgauntlet with its ant-macho male characters.

The trouble is the book is written early in the 1930s, at the height of the puzzle-clue narratives which can be (to me) so tedious we lose sight of what makes the book important. Here I recommend Catherine Kenney’s wonderful The Remarkable Case of Dorothy Sayers. Here is a succinct synopsis

I’m combining this with reading Cornish texts (I’m taking via zoom an OLLI course, from York University in Northern England) with its inspiring readings from Marsden’s Rising Ground (what kinds of landscapes attract to them mythologies?) to Virginia Wool’s To the Lighthouse, to Graham’s Poldark world, DuMaurier’s Cornwall (with A. L. Rowse and a Blakean visionary John Betjeman thrown in). The result: I’ve begun P. D. James’s The Lighthouse, and returning to Josephine Tey’s Shifting Sands, set in the Highlands, edge and liminal places of the mind heart and in reality.

So that’s where I am. Medicine for my still somewhat muddled soul. Haunted stuff. How I long to be haunted by my Clarycat and even Jim, painful as such ghostly recreations might be (I do not reread his letters or listen to his voice, though I keep pictures of him all around the house). They did not survive their encounters with death; it seems, with help from my loving daughter, Laura, I may have Here is a poem by Charles Causeley, a relatively unknown (outside Cornwall) poet

Who?

Who is that child I see wandering, wandering
down by the side of the quivering stream?
Why does he seem not to hear, though I call to him?
Where does he come from, and what is his name?

Why do I see him at sunrise and sunset
taking, in old-fashioned clothes, the same track?
Why, when he walks, does he cast not a shadow
though the sun rises and falls at his back?

Why does the dust lie so thick on the hedgerow
by the great field where a horse pulls the plough?
Why do I see only meadows, where houses
stand in a line by the riverside now?

Why does he move like a wraith by the water,
soft as the thistledown on the breeze blown?
When I draw near him so that I may hear him,
why does he say that his name is my own?

My territory includes the dream landscapes of historical and modernist Bloomsbury fictions (like Hilary Mantel’s, E.M. Forster’s, mentioned in my postscript in my return to Ellen and Jim blog), realism, long-inhabited hard-worked worlds and haunting music

Elinor Tomlinson as Demelza in Poldark

A Cornish church filmed in the 2015 series

Ellen

A neglected Jane Austen text! — Catherine, or The Bower

Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland reading a gothic romance (2007 Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies) — the closest image to Austen’s conception of Catherine Percival (named Kitty Peterson by Jane Austen, the more dignified romance name is given her in the ms by JEAL) …

Dear friends and readers,

What more appropriate to start the new year with than a neglected Jane Austen text? But can this really be? a text by Austen not close read exhaustively, elaborated upon recklessly, post-texted, edited with devotional minuteness? yes. One of the four admittedly unfinished novels: Catherine, or the Bower, probably because it has been dated with the juvenilia, published with them, and not paid sufficient attention to? Why until recently has no one has why Austen didn’t continue with this one? I suggest it’s the early date — the other three come from her mid-career or Bath (The Watsons, begun 1801), post Bath (Lady Susan, 1806-09), and just before death (Sanditon, 1817). It’s seen as juvenile.

I think it was left off for at least one of the same reasons as The Watsons was abandoned after such thorough work and Lady Susan hastily finished: not socially acceptable to her family because the themes too frank about the family, too radical about women’s position. I have been reading a book whose title and author I am not at liberty to disclose which has the idea that faithful sequels meant to fulfill the original, done very well, can shed light on where the text was going. This is not an original or new idea. It was this thought that led Chris Brindle to produce his play of Sanditon: he read Anna Lefroy’s continuation in Mary Gaither Marshall’s edition; long ago Catherine Hubbard finished The Watsons as The Youngest Sister out of the offered endings Austen told Cassandra (as reported by James Edward Austen-Leigh).

I’ve also noted in other studies of sequels and post-texts and extrapolations from the finished novels, that movement of types or characters from one to another of her novels shows us (as Q.D. Leavis showed so long ago in Scrutiny) how Austen repeats her patterns and types. So by looking at the other probably finished books and their continuations, we can understand better what lies there but as yet not fully developed in Catherine, or the Bower.

But first, there is something beyond the poverty of the George Austen family in the father’s youngest years and after the father died and a sexually transgressive mother standing in the way of discussion: the refusal of the Austen family and its conservative pro-family stalwarts, among which Deirdre LeFaye was an adamantine presence: the reality that Eliza Hancock was the biological daughter of Warren Hastings by Philadelphia Austen who just like the eldest Miss Cecilia Wynne (become Mrs Lascelles) at the opening of Catherine, or the Bower, was shipped out to India and married to a man much older than she, not congenial, and found solace and a modus vivendi through her relationship with Hastings. They were also not eager to have it known that like the younger Miss Mary Wynne, George and Philadelphia’s youngest sister, Leonora, farmed out “as a companion” to a Mrs Hinton, had (like the second son of George and Cassandra) apparently been dismissed to the lower status hardship of a servant’s life and simply never mentioned again. Austen is clearly making up for this because she provides a specific fate for the younger Miss Wynne too: taken by the Dowager Lady Halifax as a companion to her Daughters,” and had accompanied her family into Scotland” (Doody & Murray, Catherine and Other Writings, Oxford, 1993, pp 187-189). (For full details of these two young women, see Maggie Lane’s Jane Austen’s Family Through Five Generations, 33-34, 42-43)

These two fates — not atypical for women of this era — are emphatically at the opening of Catherine, or the Bower. It is the Wynne sisters’ companionship in which Catherine takes delight. It is against the Wynne sisters Catherine compares Camilla Stanley, for, unlike Catherine Morland, but very like Charlotte Heywood (from Sanditon), Catherine sees through Camilla’s lies sufficiently not to like and to distrust her. This earlier Catherine was not to be a naif in a Gothic parody, but a real girl suffering from a repressive aunt’s sexual paranoia. She also recognizes the flaws in the overbearing too self-confident hero, Edward Stanley (as her aunt fails to appreciate). We are fooled because it seems that the Wynnes are dropped in the text we have. We are also fooled because the portrait of the male Stanley is not a caricature in the manner of John Thorpe or obviously subtly manipulative in the way of Willoughby or Henry Crawford. If you read with attention, you find at the end there is hope for Catherine to escape her aunt in the country and come to London. We are told Catherine has received a letter from “Mrs Lascelles, announcing the speedy return of herself and husband to England” (p 229). We are also told that the Stanleys are intimate with the Halifaxes; clearly Catherine, though dubious and hesitant about Camilla, and while recognizing that Edward Stanley leaves a lot to be desire morally is not going to give either of these connections up.

Rose Williams as Miss Heywood early on makes friends with with black Miss Lamb (Crystal Clarke) — she is never silly just unexperienced as yet (Sanditon, Season 1)

The novel has only begun. The continuations and sequels to the other unfinished novels can also serve to remind us that more characters would have turned up in Austen’s book. So as with Sanditon as Austen left it, we had only Sidney Parker slightly delineated and none of his hinted-at associates, but have been taught by 3 seasons of a semi-Davies product, that many other characters were in potentia, so in this Catherine, or the Bower, I speculate that either Edward could have had an internal reform such as we see in Darcy and Wentworth, or another worthier suitor come upon the scene. I also suggest that as with the other Austen novels, Catherine, our heroine, would have had to learn to distinguish between different circles of friends to which she can belong. So the Stanleys and Aunt Percival’s relations in London say would have been but two circles; the Wynne sisters would have brought the Lascelles from India, and the Halifaxes from Scotland. One of the more prominent qualities of Edward himself most prominent quality is self-satisfaction, something we see in other heroes, which is got over, but also different ones not exactly villainous but not personality characteristics which bode well for later like (rather like Frank Churchill): Edward Stanley shows a superficial willingness to play on the emotions of others, a kick out of alarming people (p 219)

Within the scenes we have other interesting themes: Charlotte Smith’s novels are admired and perhaps genuinely understood by Catherine; we have not yet seen her discuss them with anyone with a real knowledge of them. There is the question of Catherine’s inheritance (if any) from her aunt, the possibility of Catherine being left propertyless should her aunt die without making adequate provision for her. Catherine herself, rather like Marianne Dashwood (and Fanny Price, Anne Elliot, Jane Bennet) likes to have quiet moments in retreat and the question of the nature of social life, the place of imagination (as in a bower — I remember a play by Jane Bowles about what can emerge from summer and a bower, In the Summer House) are adumbrated. There is much here that remains unwritten about because the fragment is not taken seriously.

Which takes me to my last new comment for the new year: I think the juvenilia have been over-rated in the last thirty-five years. There are inspired moments of high brilliance, irresistible comedy, parodic insight, aesthetic deconstruction of the elements of fiction, but many of these fragments are scraps — and I have come across pages of solemn hagiographical talk and speculative elaboration not admitted as such. Cassandra’s drawings once and for all let’s admit are dreadful. This desire to distance Austen from sentimentality and the conservative politics of the Victorian realistic novel also get in the way of acknowledging the first achievement of Austen in Catherine, or the Bower. As Juliet McMaster has said, Catherine is the first of the texts to have psychological depth that is persuasive enough to allow us to enter into it in a reader-like reverie.

Let us hope someone will see their way to a film adaptation of this one — it will have to be someone willing to overcome the immediate objections of the family and conservative fans eager to protect the “respectability” (which Austen makes fun of in Catherine, or the Bower) of the Hancocks, Hastings, and anyone else whose prestige they fear is in danger from anyone anywhere. Let us recall Marianne Dashwood’s response to Elinor’s fear lest they offend Mrs Jennings, as criteria for their conduct and/or thought: “we are all offending every moment of our lives” (S&S, Chapter 13).

A favorite still for me: Sophie Thompson as Miss Bates looking up, enjoying a pleasant moment, just before she is humiliated by Emma at the Box hill picnic (1996 Emma, scripted Douglas McGrath)

We find thus early in her life, early in her writing career (for she carried on writing for the rest of her life and had yet to begin one of her six great novels), a serious criticism of the way her society treats women, looks at relationships among people, an adumbrated examination of what a well and worthily live life could be. I also like that thus early we see that she is prepared to use autobiographical material centrally. What a radical serious and potentially fine novel it could have been.

Ellen

John Wood Sweet’s The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A story of rape, gender, & class in late 18th century New York City

The reader will notice that a dazzling number of prizes are listed …

Dear Readers and Friends,

This in the spirit of say the TLS’s recent issue where supposedly famous people who are themselves often writers are asked what was your favorite, or did you think was the best or most important book(s) you read this year? For once I have a single candidate, and for once the number of prizes given are not in inverse proportion to a book’s merits — though I admit I am a year late. The Sewing Girl’s Tale was published in 2022.

But it’s as fresh and excellent and relevant a book as it was the day it was published, and as the story that’s recounted of a long series of connected events 230 years ago. Sweet offers a fully researched and documented account of the rape of a lower-middle class young unmarried female seamstress Lanah Sawyer by a well-connected upper class or aristocratic male — he led a life of privilege with access to opportunities for power and wealth — that occurred Wednesday-Thursday, September 4-5, 1793, in the late mid-night to dawn hours in a locked room in the brothel of Madame Carey in lower New York. What makes it doable is that her stepfather, John Callahan, a successful ship pilot (no easy job — he boarded other men’s vessels, assumed command, and guided the ships safely into or out of port), went to court to accuse Bedlow of rape; the case actually was tried at length, and much of what was said written down by an ambitious young lawyer, William Wyche. The jury’s decision resulted in angry class-induced riots and extended newspaper debates. The members of all the involved families, other individuals testifying, variously involved by proximity, family, friend, professional relationship left papers; that stage of capitalist colonialist society is already wash with property and other kinds of documents.

John Wood Sweet has studied all these to show in a rivetingly supple prose how from the outset Lanah Sawyer was at a severe disadvantage because the stance set up demanded she prove she had resisted vigorously, sustained conspicuous physical injuries, reported the crime quickly, and her “side” could not be shown to be going to court to destroy the reputation (life, career) of the male accused, especially if he was a man of property or standing. It never mattered that Bedlow lied to Lanah to lure her to walk out with him, intended to seduce and/or rape her, or any of the unfair tactics he used. All the savaging of her character that his side could do is listened to; the lies, for example, that the brothel madam concocted against Lanah are given credence after she is shown to be a liar. We see how much on top of gender-distrust of women nuanced levels of class, connections, mattered every step of the way. How important intelligent lawyers with teams of people providing evidence. Sweet remarks “the fact that Lanah Sawyer managed” to win over enough people is a “testament to her courage, to her emotional endurance, and to her ability to inspire trust and sympathy” (122). And none of it would have happened had her stepfather not been himself a man of strong determined character who would “not be circumvented.”

The case did not stop there Callahan went on to sue Bedlow in civil court (where point of view of the legal precedents were not so much about women’s sexuality as the loss of income) for seduction of his stepdaughter, damaging both her and her family’s reputation, loss of time and labor (equals money); and this time Callahan and Sawyer won an enormous sum for the time, $4,500, the payment for which landed Bedlow in debtor’s prison. So after all there were many people in the court who found Bedlow’s masculine predation unacceptable. Bedlow countersued over Callahan’s assault (now alleged) of him; more fascinatingly, one of the lawyers involved on Bedlow’s side of the case, Alexander Hamilton (himself), may have been involved (and was accused by Callahan’s lawyers) in the production of a forged letter allegedly written by Lanah retracting all she had said as lies. This takes us into one of the more sordid love affairs of Hamilton, which itself involved clearly forced “love-sick epistles” written by Hamilton’s possible mistress.

Wood’s narrative study has been widely reviewed for such a book (e.g, New York Times, Kirkus, Amazon Publishers Weekly), the Gotham Center for New York City history, with interviews on C-Span, YouTube.

Sawyer’s is not the only non-fictional case of this type to have attracted a couple of centuries of attention: another is that of Elizabeth Canning who claimed to have been brutally abducted, and kept in a locked room for a full month, beaten, threatened and starved. I found the books on her and studies a lot less satisfying as there is seems the young woman has not been fully vindicated despite Henry Fielding’s heroic attempts to rescue her (whose pamphlet I’ve read) from calumny after a Lord Mayor and judge at the trial decided they could try her for perjury and won a verdict of guilty, whereupon she was transported. I’m as relieved as Sweet to be able to say both young women eventually married and seem to have lived a calm respectable life eventually, but sorry to have to say Canning’s case was taken up by Josephine Tey in her fictionalized version of it as The Franchise Affair where class more than gender prejudice led Tey to re-smear the girl and resurrect the seemingly deathless idea that women are prone to make false accusations to cover up their transgressive sexual activity.

Moore’s book is a study in the ambiguities of all the testimonies and how what people paid attention to tells us more about them at that moment, who they are, how they relate, and the class impositions of variously prejudiced attitudes towards far more than sex itself at the time

That Sweet firmly believes Lanah’s story and sees the trial’s first outcome as the result of misogynistic and class prejudice enables his book to have the clarity it does. I think it also part of the book’s singular virtues that he does see what happened in terms of today’s psychology as it comes down to us from the eighteenth century — as for example, found in Richardson’s Clarissa, which I wrote my dissertation on and have written two recent papers, one directly on rape in the 18th century and today, and the other the film adaptation by David Nokes.

A scene from the movie where the brothel prostitutes help the rapist hold Clarissa down

Among the pleasures of this text are revealing descriptions of the places in New York City where all the different scenes take place; it is written like a mystery-thriller so we never learn what is going to happen next until it happens. So at one point we are told evidence shows that Lanah Sawyer hanged herself, and we have to read into the next chapter, several paragraphs on to discover that she survived. Sweet’s research went well past immediate documents; he discovered this act of Lanah’s by a couple of lines written by the novelist, Susannah Rowson (Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, 1797), who happened to be in New York at the time of the Bedlow trial, and was the cousin of the editor the Vermont Gazette where this detail was published as “the event that provoked the riots — news of the inconsolable young lady’s suicide attempt” (219-220).

The kind of dress Lanah would have been wearing: printed cotton held together with straight pins and drawstrings — from Sweet’s book

Here, though, we do come upon the one drawback of the book: all the words we have left by Lanah herself are the testimony she gave that was written down, testimony necessarily shaped the questions put to her. We are left without any look into the real tone of her mind, the subjective thoughts she must have had; we are left to guess why she does what she does by what is left of her outward actions. We have a great deal — like who she went to directly after she escaped the locked room, and the sequence of events that transpired among her relatives and associates, but nothing of a subjective inwardness. The book is not a novel, and my guess is that Sweet decided not to fictionalize at any point on the grounds it would weaken the effect of his book, and I think he made the right decision.

At any rate, no woman reader or anyone interested in the issues the case swirls round upon, should miss this book. An appendix tells of where Sweet did his research and what he found of particular interest; the notes include full sources and are of great interest in themselves.

Ellen

Halloween/Samhain & a talk on Bookstore fiction: includes ghosts, historical fiction, mysteries

Opening episode of Outlander: Frank in the rain sees a ghostly highlander looking up at Claire through a window, he enters the room which feels haunted … (Outlander s1:E1, Sassenach)

Fantasies of the Bookstore: combine community & retail space, with meaningful location; you know you are in one when you walk in. Where it is on the planet, what’s across the street matters. The staff, which kinds of books, the atmosphere, language behavior of everyone … (see below, 2nd half of blog)

Isabella Thorpe (Carey Mulligan and Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) in a Bath bookshop, Northanger Abbey, 2007, scripted A Davies)

Dear Friends and readers,

I’ve been meaning to write a blog for ever so long — on a foremother poet, Anne Stevenson (1933-2020), whose poetry tribute to Jane Austen I’ve put here more than once (“Re-reading Jane,” scroll down), but it is taking me time to read through her collected poems, essays on her, and essays by her (on Elizabeth Bishop, the biography of Sylvia Plath). Tonight I am only ready to share one poem by her, which relates to my eventual topic for this blog: bookstore fiction

Paper,

the beauty of it,
the simple, strokeable, in-the-handness of it,
the way it has of flattering ink,
giving it to understand that
nothing matters
until it is printed or written down
to be cherished on paper.

The way old paper levels time,
is the archive’s treasure,
is evidence talking to your fingers
when passion, two hundred years dead,
filters through the ink-net that,
pen in and, a lover once spread for his mistress,
ignorantly scooping the archivist
into his catch.

The connoisseur of wine
keeps company with the connoisseur of paper,
as the typesetter, rag-testing, rice-testing,
escapes from the glaze of the computer
to explore with a fingertip
an elegant topography
reserved exclusively for types he likes
and faces that delight him.

All the same,
the virtual truths of the TV
and the on-going game of what happens
sluice through the global drain
in a torrent of paper.
Throw it away or save it,
every day as it dies
instantly becomes news on paper.

Why, say the silicon people,
keep house in a paper graveyard?
The future is digital, clean indestructible,
the great web’s face book and bird’s nest.
No fingerprint can be lost,
no fact of identity missed.
All’s for the best
in the best of all paperless worlds.

The afterlife? To live on, on line,
without a mind of one’s own?
I can’t love these fidgety digits!
I want to go home,
I want to keep warm in my burrow
of piled up paper —
fool’s passion, dried grief, live hands of dead friends,
story I’ll keep turning the pages of,
until it ends.

You cannot have a bookstore without paper.

I had been thinking — as appropriate to Halloween — to write on the connection of ghosts to historical fiction, how the deep roots of historical fiction is the ghost, a desire to bring to life revenants who once lived and the world they inhabited, so author and her readers can take refuge there too. The best historical fiction writers, and in my view, these include Winston Graham, Diana Gabaldon (who Anne Stevenson wrote a short column in praise of), Hilary Mantel and Penelope Fitzgerald, are aware of this, discuss it, exploit it.

Only the second writes nothing but historical fiction, but all discuss ghosts in, and sometimes while they as author-narrator, are in their historical novels. Thus it is at Halloween, Samhain in Outlander that Claire is spirited away to the mid-18th century in Inverness, Scotland by means of an ancient or neolithic circle of stones. In the third episode of the first season, Claire listens to a bard sing in Gaelic, the core of the journey story she has just begun as one repeatedly met with:

[audience muttering] [singing in Gaelic] Now this one is about a man out late on a fairy hill on the eve of Samhain who hears the sound of a woman singing sad and plaintive from the very rocks of the hill.
[eerie music] [Gaelic singing continues] “I am a woman of Balnain.
“The folk have stolen me over again, ‘ “the stones seemed to say.
“I stood upon the hill, and wind did rise, and the sound of thunder rolled across the land.
” [singing in Gaelic] “I placed my hands upon the tallest stone “and traveled to a far, distant land “where I lived for a time among strangers who became lovers and friends.
” [singing in Gaelic] “But one day, I saw the moon came out “and the wind rose once more.
“so I touched the stones “and traveled back to my own land “and took up again with the man I had left behind.
” [applause] She came back through the stones? Aye, she did.
They always do.
It was a folktale, madness to take as fact, and yet half of what Gwyllyn had described had actually happened to me.
Why not the other half, the part where the woman returned home? What had Geillis said? As I told you, there’s many things in this world we can’t explain. (Outlander S1:E3, The Way Out)

Elinor Tomlinson and Aiden Turner as dream figures, Demelza and Ross Poldark (2016 Poldark season)

I know more than a couple of times Winston Graham has thoughtful discussions of how difficult it is to know the past, how much of what we think we know about it is more than half-imagination, and dreaming imagination at that. See my paper called “After the Jump.” Historical Fiction and Films seem to exist at a kind of cross-roads of remembered and researched revenants and today’s analogous worlds — sometimes inhabited by sleuths and book writers and lovers (as in A. S. Byatt’s Possession). See my blog quoting a wonderful evocation of this by Caryl Phillips (on Crossing the River).

How I love especially to go back to the 18th century and Scotland: I reveled in Naomi Mitchison’s Bull Calves and the movie, Chasing the Deer (about Culloden). I told of this in my blog on a paper (linked in) and conference and (would you believe?) actual real trip to Culloden.

Yesterday afternoon I was much stirred by books on Mantel’s fiction by Lucy Arnold: Haunted Decades and a collection of essays gathered by Eileen Pollard and Ginette Carpenter where spectral realism is the terrain re-imagined. Thomas Cromwell becomes more crowded in by ghosts as we move through his life, and that of Mantel’s stealth heroine, Anne Boleyn, whom Henry Fielding wrote a ghostly history of in his A Journey from this World to the Next. Haunted all her life, says a Slate column.

Mark Rylance and Natasha Little as Thomas Cromwell fearful as he walks up the stairs to where Elizabeth Cromwell now dead has become a ghost (Wolf Hall, the serial)

My previous blog is about my friend Tyler Tichelaar’s fiction and non-fiction, which moves between historical and gothic supernatural stories.

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Early important writer of these books in series forms

But today I was stirred by a talk I heard (on zoom) with a Book History group, the WAPG (Washington Area Print Group) I’ve long attended (though the last three years online): by Dr Eben J. Muse, who has recently written a study of the bookstore novel, Fantasies of the Bookstore. His book is partly a bibliographical tool for finding these books, for which he provides two sites on the Net: a full bibliographies of bookstore novels: https://bit.ly/bookstore_novel
And a bookselling Research Network: http://booksellingresearchnet.uk

And now I finally have a topic for blog fitting for the autumn season — and Halloween.

His talk was about the other part of his book: in “In her Own Right: Women Booksellers in the Bookstore Novel” he described what he said was a intertwined set of tropes found across bookstore novels, especially when they are owned or managed by women, which motives seemed to me are all found in one of my favorite of all books, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop: I’ve taught the book and film more than once, and written about it here too.

What is a bookstore today? why, it’s a cultural interaction space, combining a community with retail space, whose location, kinds of books, atmosphere, staff and customers’ behavior matters. They are usually indie stores, with the subgenre beginning in 1917, becoming more widespread in the 1980s, and reaching a high peak of numbers first between 1985-1995, and since then multiplying especially 2016-17. They are often series, combine mysteries with ghosts (Fitzgerald’s book has a spiteful poltergeist). What happens is the heroine invents an identity for herself by becoming a bookstore owner and manager, who knows how to make a profit from books, how to sell them, make them appealing. She often herself does not care for them herself as reading matter (Fitzgerald’s Florence Green does). The bookstore becomes her way of integrating with the community at a distance, and is often an act of defiance (which in the case of Florence, she tragically loses), but can also be her sanctuary. When there is a murder, it may be that the bookstore becomes a place where someone abusive is killed. There is a deep intimate tie between the place, the space, and the heroine’s role in the story. They are frequently literary fictions, often romances too. We should ask why is the central figure repeatedly a woman?

It’s in the last 30 years that women authors have begun to dominate this subgenre — though it would seem the bookseller character has usually been a woman

Afterwards the talk ranged far and close. We talked of how Victorian got Their Books (the title of someone’s paper published in a book on Victorian bookselling, buying, reading. Bookstores on Cape Cod recently where one kept a map of other bookstores. Someone mentioned The Ghost of Mrs McClure by Cleo Coyle, pseudonyn of Alice Kimberley. Peter Shillingsburg’s formidable sounding Textuality and Knowledge was mentioned: if you don’t know the original form the book took when printed (unabridged, uncensored) you are not grounding yourself in reality. So much for what passes for a book with so many people now. The way we read now.  Shorter, easily more entertaining try this book chapter: Schillingsburg, Peter. “The Faces of Victorian Literature.” The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998. pp. 141-156.

Well, Muse just made me want to rush over to Amazon and buy some of these — in practice I have read a few — the apparently early Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (the grimness or “grumpyiness” as Dr Muse characterized its aging bookseller is another trope of such books), but mostly non-fictions, which seem not to count as they do not have this mythos at their center, though they may well tell a tale of publishing, what books are, the bookish life which has many elements found in the fantasy book. For example, Marius Kociejowski’s A Factotum in the Book Trade: A Memoir. They may tell a cultural anthropology tale.

While this bookshop name was cited as the title of a book by Deborah Myler (Stephanie Butler our heroine) — this does look like a real bookshop in Lyme Regis

And this its inside

In practice I also used to be a constant visitor of bookstores. Hours in second hand bookstores were the delight of my life here in Alexandria, in DC, in New York City, and in many places in England. I remember those blocks on Fourth Avenue, in lower New York, ancient, filled to the brim with books, some of which were rotting. The Argosy is a rare one still to be found in business (59th Street on the East Side). Blocks in Edinburgh harbored stunningly expensive ancient tomes (Renaissance) normally found in research libraries. How few are left in London; our recent visit took us to one small store, beautifully culled books, but it was the same one we visited the last time we were in London, 4 years ago. Can London be reduced down to one or two (Foyle’s) bookstores when it comes to independent ones? I enjoy the chains but the ambiance and feel and purpose of the store is quite different: they are more for casual visitors, tourists; they do not function as a home away from your library home.

My happiest hours have been spent in bookstores (as when I find a book I didn’t know existed but when I saw it, knew I would enjoy it so mightily) — and yes libraries. My favorite place in Washington DC is the Folger Shakespeare Library (or was, as I’ve no idea what it’s like in the new renovated building). It was my idea for Izzy, my daughter, to become a librarian. And she loved when she was an intern in Fairfax and worked in the children’s area of the library.

Someone at the WAPG asked if there is a subgenre of books about a heroine in a library: he said the problem is the library is usually an institution, and right away it cannot be the expression of just one person’s character or outlook, but of course (thought I) it can have a “body” in it (as do an early Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers book). There seems a link between the amateur woman sleuth and the woman bookseller.

This is one Prof Muse recommended — I didn’t catch the heroine’s name

So these bookstore fictions may be included in all my favorite kinds of books, first of all heroine’s fictions, second gothics and ghost stories beyond the traumatic uncanny kinds, from M. R. James to Edith Wharton about which I’ve written much here in these blogs too. And most recently women’s detective fiction. This week I’m rereading P. D. James’s even profound A Time to Be In Earnest.

Our WAGP used to meet at the Library of Congress itself, the concrete building at 3:30 and by 5 walk over to a nearby Asian restaurant and eat together. We are hoping to do that for the first time in three years this coming spring.

Ellen

Foremother poet: Mary Chandler (1687-1745): a disabled and by choice unmarried poet, milliner, shopkeeper

The better known women writers across the century

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been a long while since I wrote a foremother poet blog and so I am happy to contribute this one, though I don’t have the extensive or full printed sources I like to have before writing one of these.

Mary Chandler (1687-1745) was one of a growing number of women poets of the 18th century who were working women, not pseudo-gentry, not gentlewomen. It’s usually put (and was at the time) that because she “had a crooked spine,” she did not marry but instead opened a milliner’s shop in Bath (nearby the Pump Room where Elizabeth Montagu and her friends, in history called the Bluestockings would sometimes meet). From Chandler’s poems she seems not unhappy (a number of friendship poems of great warmth), and the most famous is her long comic (and successful) “Description of Bath.”

However, it’s also said (remember what Virgil said about Rumor) that under the “care” of George Cheyne (famous physician who recommended dieting and exercise), she became anorexic (a girl who wanted “out” or was continually
made to feel her body was unacceptable). Let us hope not, and I doubt this because there are records to show she stayed in business successfully for 35 years before that. Her life and publications are told in detail in Roger Lonsdale’s excellent anthology, Eighteenth Century Women Poets, pp 151-52.

Her epitaph (18th century poets would write their own ironic epitaphs) does harp again on her looks. It does not begin with her life and success but rather “Here lies a true maid, deformed and old …” Is not it terrible a woman should endlessly judge herself as an object a man might want to go to bed with? Like the comic Horatian “True Tale,” her epitaph does have a combination of wry self-acceptance and stalwart Horatian ideals of being content with what you can manage to wrest from life: “Her book and her pen had her moments of leisure” is apt line expressing this idea.

Here is a central online source for her life, poetry and criticism about her: Eighteenth Century Poetry Archive. Out of all these I feature her A True Tale:

To Mrs. J-S.

Written at her Request

Why, Madam, must I tell this idle tale?
You want to laugh. Then do so, if you will.
Thus take it, as it was, the best I can;
And laugh at me, but not my little man:
For he was very good, and clean, and civil,
And, though his taste was odd, you own not evil.
You know one loves an apple, one an onion;
One man’s a Papist, one is a Socinian:
We differ in our taste, as in opinion.
Not often reason guides us; more, caprice,
Or accident, or fancy: so in this.
His person pleased, and honest was his fame;
Tis true there was no music in his name,
But, had I changed for A the letter U,
It would sound grand, and musically too,
And would have made a figure. At my shop
I saw him first, and thought he’d eat me up.
I stared, and wondered who this man could be,
So full of complaisance, and all to me:
But when he’d bought his gloves, and said his say.
He made his civil scrape, and went away.
I never dreamed I e’er should see him more,
Glad when he turned his back, and shut the door.
But when his wond’rous message he declared,
I never in my life was half so scared!
Fourscore long miles, to buy a crooked wife!
Old too! I thought the oddest thing in life;
And said, ‘Sir, you’re in jest, and very free;
But, pray, how came you, Sir, to think of me?’
This civil answer I’ll suppose was true:
‘That he had both our happiness in view.
He sought me as one formed to make a friend,
To help life glide more smoothly near its end,
To aid his virtue, and direct his purse,
For he was much too well to want a nurse.’

He made no high-flown compliment but this:
‘He thought to’ve found my person more amiss.
No fortune hoped; and,’ which is stranger yet,
‘Expected to have bought me off in debt!
And offered me my Wish, which he had read,
For ‘twas my Wish that put me in his head.’
Far distant from my thoughts a husband, when
Those simple lines dropped, honest, from my pen.

Much more, he spake, but I have half forgot:
I went to bed, but could not sleep a jot.
A thing so unexpected, and so new!
Of so great consequence. So generous too!
I own it made me pause for half that night:
Then waked, and soon recovered from my fright;
Resolved, and put an end to the affair:
So great a change, thus late, I could not bear;
And answered thus: ‘No, good Sir, for my life,
I cannot now obey, nor be a wife.
At fifty-four, when hoary age has shed
Its winter’s snow, and whitened o’er my head,
Love is a language foreign to my tongue:
I could have learned it once, when I was young,
But now quite other things my wish employs:
Peace, liberty, and sun, to gild my days.
I dare not put to sea so near my home,
Nor want a gale to waft me to my tomb.
The smoke of Hymen’s lamp may cloud the skies
And adverse winds from different quarters rise.
I want no heaps of gold; I hate all dress,
And equipage. The cow provides my mess.
‘Tis true, a chariot’s a convenient thing;
But then perhaps, Sir, you may hold the string.
I’d rather walk alone my own slow pace,
Than drive with six, unless I choose the place.
Imprisoned in a coach, I should repine:
The chaise I hire, I drive and call it mine.
And, when I will, I ramble, or retire
To my own room, own bed, my garden, fire;
Take up my book, or trifle with my pen;
And, when I’m weary, lay them down again:
No questions asked; no master in the spleen
I would not change my state to be a queen.

Another beautiful poem on how much friendship meant to her:

A Poem on Friendship.

Written in 1729. [*from The Description of Bath* (1736)]

Friendship! the heav’nly Theme I sing;
Source of the truest Joy;
From Sense such Pleasures never spring,
Still new, that never cloy.

‘Tis sacred Friendship gilds our Days,
And smooths Life’s ruffled Stream:
Uniting Joys will Joys increase,
And sharing lessen Pain.

‘Tis pure as the etherial Flame,
That lights the Lamps above;
Pure, as the Infant’s Thought, from Blame;
Or, as his Mother’s Love.

From kind Benevolence it flows,
And rises on Esteem.
‘Tis false Pretence, that Int’rest shews,
And fleeting as a Dream.

The Wretch, to Sense and Self confin’d,
Knows not the dear Delight;
For gen’rous Friendship wings the Mind,
To reach an Angel’s Height.

Amidst the Crowd each Kindred Mind,
True Worth superior spies:
Tho’ hid, the modest Veil behind,
From less discerning Eyes.

From whose Discourse Instruction flows,
But Satire dares not wound.
Their guiltless Voice no Flatt’ry knows,
But scorns delusive Sound.

While Truth divine inspires each Tongue,
The Soul bright Knowledge gains.
Such Adam ask’d, and Gabriel sung,
In heav’nly Milton’s Strains.

Such the Companions of your Hours,
And such your lov’d Employ;
Who would indulge your noblest Pow’rs,
But know no guilty Joy.

And thus as swift-wing’d Time brings on
Death, nearer to our View;
Tun’d to sweet Harmony our Souls,
We take a short Adieu.

Till the last Trump’s delightful Sound
Shall wake our sleeping Clay; [hmm…]
Then swift, to find our Fellow-souls,
As Light, we haste away.

I speculate that Mary Chandler belonged to one of several circles of “learned” and unmarried women at the time whom Emma Donogue has identified as conforming to patterns we may call lesbian spinsterhood. See also my Lisa Moore’s Sister Arts, the Erotics of Female Landscape; and Lesbian aesthetics: an aspect of women’s art. We need not of course reify any rigid categories to enjoy this woman’s art, but rather see her as a proto-feminist avante la lettre and rejoice for her that she enjoyed her life, fulfilled her gifts, and can speak to our eyes today.

The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain by Richard Samuel, 1779. The sitters are (standing, left to right): Elizabeth Carter, Anna Barbauld, Elizabeth Sheridan, Hannah More, Charlotte Lennox; (seated, left to right): Angelica Kauffmann, Catherine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith — there was a strong tendency in 18th century portraiture of women artists to idealize them in classical garb

For other 18th century working class women poets, see my blogs on Mary Leapor; Mary Whateley Darwell; Mary Collier; Elizabeth Hands.

And don’t miss a treasure of a book: Donna Landry’s The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-class women’s poetry in Britain, 1739-1796.; a wonderful literary study (filled with close readings of other women’s poems and all sorts of historical and autobiographical details): Reconsidering the Bluestockings, edd. Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg, and Elizabeth Eger’s Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings, an art book chock-a-block with pictures of the people and their surroundings.

18th century image of a milliner’s shop in the US

Ellen

Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister

A rare sympathetic portrayal of Mary Bennet may be found in Fay Weldon’s 1979 P&P (that’s a young Tessa Peake-Jones)

‘The big and urgent human task then becomes the effort of finding a spiritual ‘home’ within the small human round’ — Josie Billington, Faithful Realism (a close reading and philosophical study of Gaskell, Eliot & Tolstoy where many final remarks apply to Austen)

Dear friends and readers,

Some time has passed, my passionate advocacy of Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister has somewhat cooled, and I can see this blog offers a thorough-going adequate summary of The Other Bennet Sister until near the end when the novel becomes a romantic re-write of both the ending of P&P and Henry Tilney (Tom Hayward) and Catherine Morland’s (Mary Bennet) romance.  A Mr Ryder (a cross between Wickham and Mr William Elliot) is a central obstacle to the romance because his presence makes Tom jealous and insecure and thus retreat. There is no need for me to re-do the hard work of this redaction.

I’m consciously departing from the way I have been doing reviews of books in my blogs — to, in those cases where I can find an adequate redaction (blow-by-blow account) of the story or plot-design, to no longer repeat that kind of work myself. Instead I’ll concentrate on my inner experience of the text and evaluation.

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So, as I did for Sanditon, the third season, I’ll convey my reading experience. First the reason I liked it so is Hadlow apparently reads P&P in the same spirit I do — I share Hadlow’s values and norms. This is very important in liking a sequel: it is not a large plain mirror found in an author’s spirit held up to the natural world, but an interpretative reframing mirror held up to another author’s work (either a single text or group of texts).

I am surprised to find how good it is — it has artificial enough language imitative of and evoking Austen, manages to stay within the worlds of the original, with crucial difference of developing a depth of feeling for and in Mary as the book opens. Without departing from our memories of P&P suddenly we see how indifferent Jane is to Mary, how cool and hurtful Elizabeth’s remarks, the mother hard and mean. I love the way it condemned Mrs Bennet – which aligns with how I think Austen presented her — ceaselessly mindlessly mercenary and silly too. There is more sympathy in this novel for Collins than in Austen where he is a caricature but then again as with Mary Hadlow has changed the character conception.

This would make the new book or new version of P&P more melodramatic but that the style cuts through sentiment to keep the tone of book until the Gardiners and Mary go to the lake district relatively cool. The author avails herself of patterns in language and event and ironies (ditto), which all remind me of Austen but is at the same time recognizably 20th-21st century language that too cuts down on the recognizably sentimental (there is nothing wrong with emotional feeling). Hadlow’s book is like D.W. Harding enacted in fiction — all these people surrounding Mary are outrageous in their explicit insults and transactional values — I can see what is critiqued in line with Charlotte Smith’s values and so Austen’s book w/o overt politics becomes political — set in the later 18th century of course.

It’s like reading what was left out of P&P — as was Jo Baker’s Longbourn — but from another angle. Longbourn too shows up the Bennets (as utterly class-bound, not even condescending to see the servants) but not inwardly the way Hadlow does.

We are well into the assembly where the Bingley-Darcy party enters the community when Hadlow begins to track the original P&P closely and many of the original most famous scenes or sentences make it into the narrative, only now from the POV of the humbled and awkward and (so she is ceaselessly reminded) plain Mary – how transformed it becomes. It does make for painful reading. I keep reading to see the other characters shown in this light of the indifferent, cruel and jeering, or at best neutral (that’s Elizabeth). In this version Mary had worked very hard to play well that night at the assembly, and in fact had played well, but not in the mode that was wanted; she also made the mistake to try to sing. Afterwards — the next day, Mr Bennet tried indirectly to apologize and compensate but we can see how little he does there — even Elizabeth recognize the excruciation of Mary has gone too far.

Charlotte Lucas too emerges in a different light: ever guarded, and ever harping on staying within conventions to be safe. She has also we see been led by her society’s norms make a wrong decision: she and Mr Collins are not happy as we are to feel they are at the end of Austen’s novels where they share a strong ambition “to get ahead.” Where? What we have to concede is she had no good options but spinsterhood and this book understands how awful was that for young women of this class at the time — except of course they had an income or were lesbian spinsters (which Emma Donoghue thinks Austen was and so do I as a pattern of her existence)

Claudie Blakeley’s Charlotte also resembles Hadlow’s Mary in her exacerbated self-defense shielding conventions from justifiable criticism (2005 P&P, Joe Wright)

Now at the point where Mary begins to dress herself better, do her hair, and receive kindly reciprocation from those around her, when she meets Tom Haywood in a scene directly alluding to Catherine Morland’s first scene encountering Henry Tilner.

I keep reading this, almost I cannot put it down, and this is unusual for me nowadays and even more so for a sequel — for this is a kind of traditional sequel. We are going through the Pride and Prejudice story, much as one does in Jo Baker’s Longbourne. Daringly Hadlow quotes more than you realize from Austen verbatim, which shows how her artificial language is up to accommodating 18th century style. What I like — and this will seem odd – is that the angle Mary’s experience projects turns out to be a real critique of Austen herself. You’d think a Janeite would not like that — think again. From Mary’s POV we see how cruel Austen’s favored characters can be — of course her non-favored characters have long been shown to be outrageous (D. W. Harding was showing that too). Hadlow is revealing Austen herself to be skewed — valuing Elizabeth because much of the misery of life Elizabeth simply shoves off as so much water off a duck’s back. We see the hypocrisy of many social pretenses — so Hadlow goes further than Austen.

The Other Bennet Sister thru Mary’s POV becomes a serious critique of Austen herself: Austen’s favored characters seen to be as callous as rest of the world. It rivals P&P, goes further than Jo Baker’s Longbourn in its exposure of Austen’s P&P favored characters & norms. One reason I’m so involved with this book is I identify with Mary: and this makes me say that the reality is except for Emma, I identity with all Austen’s central heroines. That is a key to my pleasure I looked at the sequels or post-texts I’ve liked and I have a bunch I’ve found unreadable or I disliked very much and the difference is I can’t identify with the central heroine and find myself alienated from the implied author.

Once in London, living with the Gardiners and persuaded to allow Elizabeth (who comes out very well here, she sends money with the awareness of she should be making compensation for how Mary was treated at that assembly ball), Mary becomes willing to go out and she meets – a Mr Tilney type. Mr Hayward is a kind of Mr Tilney to Mary’s Catherine Morland in their first encounter. There are direct parallels in the first talk of both sets of characters. We might say the journey of this heroine is to go visiting to several groups of people and out of each have a learning experience which prepares her for the next, culminating in the visit to London and the Gardiners. With the Gardiners Mary also travels to the lake district — there are moving sequences across its natural world, and also realistic ones where the group finds it is too much work and danger to climb high over a mountain and come back again. Rain and night exhaust and bring out the worst in everyone.

I’m now on the last stretch of this remarkable novel: Hadlow now has me on pins and needles worried that after all Mary and Mr Haywood (Tom) will not overcome the obstacles separating them, and what is remarkable is how closely these in type resemble the obstacles between the typical Austen heroine and the hero — Catherine v Henry Tilney, Anne and the Captain. Neither can break the barrier of manners and the being surrounded by others –these sorts of misunderstandings are the cruxes of romance in Austen’s fictions.

She has made me really care about Mary Bennet. I imagine Rose Williams as her — an updated Austen heroine.

Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) headed off for self-supporting work as a teacher-governess of Mr Colbourne’s daughter and niece (Sanditon, Season 2, midway)

The ending has Miss Bingley playing the confrontational role of Lady Catherine with Mary. Miss Bingley desperately wants Mr Ryder to marry her, and has come to upbraid Mary for luring Ryder to marry her; Mary denies this and in the heat of their anger (and opposed values), she admits she loves Tom. Like Lady Catherine who rushes back to tell Darcy what she has learnt and what Miss Bennet said, so Miss Bingley sends Tom a letter revealing Mary does not like Mr Ryder, but is in love with Tom (!). Like Darcy, this kind of information about what is going on in the other character’s mind is all he needs to set out to propose himself. How moved and relieved I was, how gratified that unlike several of Austen’s proposal scenes (exceptions are those in Persuasion and the recent 2023 Sanditon film adaptation between Charlotte and Mr Colbourne), the two new lovers express themselves explicitly — what they have felt, why they did what they did — at the moment of high passion and joy. In the final chapter we discover Miss Bingley is living with Ryder without marriage in Italy — and luxuriously. Ryder’s first proposal to Mary was not marriage but to come and live with him. The ironies recall the ending of Persuasion for Mrs Penelope Clay and Mr Elliot (on whom Mr Ryder is partly modeled).

The last chapter is beautiful closure, our two left together for their quiet life, to pick wallpaper together for their home, him with a good job as a lawyer and her with true friends from her family group. Mrs Gardiner as her best friend and mentoress. Women’s friendship matters in this novel as much as any heterosexual love relationship — as they do more hintingly in Austen’s novels.

It’s worth noting that Hadlow worked for the BBC for many years, and her other books are all set in the later 18th into 19th century, some are sequels, some historical fiction, and some biography.

Ellen

Sanditon, 3rd & last: who survived, who won, did anyone lose? perhaps the beach

Who emerged as the heroine(s) and hero: Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams), Georgiana Lambe (Chrystal Clarke), and Arthur Parker (Turlough Convery) as the kindest truest bravest soul across all three years … all grown older (Sanditon 1-3)

What is needed is a blog which brings all three seasons together … see what you discover, gentle watcher

Dear friends and readers,

Lest there be any doubt in anyone’s mind, as with the two previous seasons, after a while, the third won me over — but again it took time, and it was clinched late in the season, for this one Episode Five. A great help was American bloggers (professional ones too) writing out skeins of recaps, often by way of complaining, but who seemed unable to respond to key Austen-patterned successes.  They did not seem to recognize them.

This last season in particular needs to be watched as a whole, and as it were, superficially, for archetypes and high scenes. There is much richness in moments that are not developed enough, and too many scenes that work as quiet filler; within episodes too, you can have too much switching back and forth as when Georgiana’s mother finally appears, she is made to disappear and we are to ask if she is genuine, and then she appears again, all strong sincerity.

As in previous seasons, you must slide over the over-the-top melodramatic extravagance (there is less of this).  You must dismiss from your mind many characters we have lost along the way.  This season is jagged (with climaxes of an episode coming half-way through, e.g., Georgiana’s trial), as if it were a hurried first draft, and when I’d finished I thought to myself perhaps someone or a team of filmmakers should watch all three seasons, and then carefully revise.

So I admit I have not taken it as seriously as I have some of these Austen film blogs. We will move two episodes at a time, for that is how I saw them, all across one week, back-to-back every other night. I did not try to take notes towards an accurate sequential blow-by-blow account (see recaps) as I’m not sure that would help appreciation.

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Sanditon 3:1-2

All along I have felt Rose Williams captures the old spirit of the Jane Austen heroine as few have done since 2009 — Andrew Davies’s Sense and Sensibility with Charity Wakefield as Marianne and Hattie Morahan as Elinor. Only somewhat updated — as to independence over money and taking a job especially. As people ask and say yes or no about the chemistry between an actor and actress over a central pair of loves, I’d say the chemistry between Rose Williams and Crystal Clarke has been wonderful throughout and continues here. The sister, women’s friendship relationship.

That is the core of the series finally, with Turlough Convery as the central helpful brother-type male. Now that is precisely the true role Mr Knightley plays for Emma, and somewhat less kindly or loyally Edmund for Fanny, and Henry Tilney for Catherine.

I began to notice as I did throughout the second season that patterns of scenes in this season imitate patterns of scenes in the Austen film canon itself. So the way they are dealing with Ben Lloyd-Hughes as Mr Alexander Colbourne is to make him behave emotionally in scenes the way Colin Firth did in the 1995 P&P — the same intense emotionalism, and an act of intervening rescue: he stretches back ten years to make up a quarrel with his lawyer-brother and brings him to defend Georgiana’s rightfully inheriting her father’s property.

Colbourne brothers: Alexander and Samuel

Jack Fox as Sir Edward Denham is our film Wickham up against Anne Reid as our film dragon-lady (from Judy Parfitt as Lady Catherine de Bourgh on), softened towards the end just the way he was in Lost in Austen.

From the heart’s core of the series, the fifth episode (which I advise you to begin with) — Sir Edward and Augusta Colbourne (Eloise Webb) who begins like one of the sisters in P&P but develops intense poignancy

The worst weakness is the character of Ralph Starling (Cai Brigden), a thankless role of a male type who must recognize that after all Charlotte is not the girl for him or his way of life (he is already recognizing this) — for whom I don’t think there is an equivalent in Austen films or the books.  Jane Austen’s Sanditon did introduce a new way of life (commercial ruthless) in her 12 chapters, which became thoroughly weakened ever since the ending of the first season when Theo James as the rough mean thoroughly competitive Mr Sidney Parker dropped out. I’m glad he dropped out for his part was to be the modern male bully who now inhabits costume dramas like Miss Scarlett and the Duke.

From the end of the second season, a momentary coming together of minds — in what seems to be very much an Austen-like pattern

I find the new updated Austen patterns in the depiction of a deserted mistress of the king done too weakly at first, but wonderfully thickening the bringing back of an actress from the first season, Kayleigh Page-Rees as Lady Julia once Beaufort but now Clemente, tenuous mistress to the king; the eager to-be-sexualized spinster, Sandy McDade as Miss Hankins; the quietly homosexual Lord Montrose (Edward Davis) brought in to partner Arthur at series’ end; and a new obnoxious Dowager, Emma Fielding in the thankless role (she is even superfluously spiteful), whose her put-upon daughter (remember Anne de Bourgh from P&P), Lady Lydia is too thin as a character, not given enough storyline. The black housekeeper, Flo Wilson, Mrs Wheatley and her young charge, Colbourne’s daughter by his first wife, are now given nothing to do — that’s why I thought maybe Mrs Wheatley would turn out to be Georgiana’s mother but not so.

Lady Montrose (Emma Fielding); Lydia Montrose (Alice Orr-Ewing); Henry Montrose (Edward Davis) — the stylized presentation recalls the way Mary and Henry Crawford are often presented in Austen films

Others make the piece seem too busy — but I think most of the characters are not quite superfluous or prove they have important roles by the end — even Lady Montrose as our soft-spoken dragon-lady trying to get rid of Georgiana’s mother as an embarrassment (last episode). James Bolam (! — he was in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and partnered Barbara Flynn in the ever-to-be loved Beiderbecke Tapes) appears as Rowleigh Pryce, old friend or suitor for Lady Denham’s hand before her second husband, come to invest unscrupulously. As Chris Brindle showed in his development of Sanditon, the new commerce of the era, the patronage banking, without controls, so that corruption was endemic, was meant to be central to Austen’s last novel. So how can we do without Mr Pryce? if only as continuing support for Kris Marshall as Tom Parker and his ever patient far more decent Mary (Kate Ashfield), with him once again embarked on fleecing the vulnerable, this time not the workers but desperately poor people living near beachside.

To the side we see Cai Brigden as Ralph Starling

Along with keeping to the fore the weakened original commercial critique of Austen’s twelve chapters (however attenuated), there is something new worth noting: the case of Charles Lockhardt (Alexander Vlahos) against Georgiana Lambe trying to break the will so he will inherit her property. I’ve discovered Austen is not alone in having “mulatto” characters in her text: you find mulatto women once enslaved as the child of an enslaved concubine, at one point never discussed, probably not recognized in plays such as Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers. In real life such people were often fleeced of what the white person who has married, or adopted or tried to make a relative of left for them: this is the case of Johnson’s adopted son, Frank. Not enough time is given to the trial (they do want to get in too much), but its presence like that of Mr Pryce is significant & links us back to the realities of the 18th century (prettied up).

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Worried for Georgiana: Charlotte, Georgiana, Mary Parker (Kate Ashfield) and Samuel Colbourne (Liam Garrigan)

Sanditon 3:3-4

Now having adjusted myself into the series once again, I reminded myself of what the editor of the original Companion to Sanditon began with: they were “trying to present a genuine Austen story, only updated.” For these two episodes I felt the inner life of Charlotte was skirted for too long; best, though, was its Episode 4’s ending where Ralph has arrived to bring (drag) Charlotte back and we see so clearly she wants to live an independent life in Sanditon: she would like to run a school; and despite what seems a genuine sincere nature and love even, Ralph wants to make her into his subject, instrument for life. There is no compromise because there is no modern life back on the farm. Sanditon has become home to several of the major original characters, of whom eight have lasted: the homebodies are now Tom and Mary Parker (2 of the originals), Charlotte (another) yearning for Mr Colbourne (certainly staying put), Arthur, perhaps with Georgiana (2 more) as stout friend or Lord Montrose (not part of original eight), and Lady Denham and Sir Edward (they really have chemistry as aunt and nephew now) and not much noticed but not going away, Adrian Scarborough as Dr Fuchs, beginning to be signed on as the joy, gilding, friend of Miss Hankins (Sarah McDade).

Miss Hankins signalling her concern to Mr Fuchs (this is episode 6 where Mary has become seriously ill), the disapproving brother by her side

We get only so few inward phrases to explain to us why Charlotte hangs on to an an engagement she obviously wants deeply out of: how did it happen; why does she feel she is bound by her parents’ need suddenly; the break with Colbourne over her originallhy thoughtful and feminist governessing was very hurtful for her, but it is so clear he regrets it and at the end of episode 3, he rushes out to encounter her on the beach (stops her coach)  and speaks the Darcy/Wentworth-echoing words: how “devoutly he admires her,” she “pierces his soul,” but the lack of any verbal originality is overcome by the physicality of the kiss and the way the two actors do have real chemistry as they close in on one another. I loved this moment. I re-watched by pressing pause, rewind, and then moving forward.

Episode 3 had the dramatic climax of Georgiana’s inheritance vindicated. Colbourne’s brother, Samuel (Liam Garrigan) is a good barrister: the case involves displaying before us misogynistic attitudes towards women, ugly acceptance of slavery, and everyone close to Georgiana is involved. The reality is Charles Lockhardt has no case: there is the will, there are her father’s letters.

The trial scene

Woven in with this is the romance of Lady Denham with Mr Pryce: it is sweetly and wittily done. We watch Lord Montrose slowly awaken Arthur Parker to his feelings, and then when Henry Lord Montrose’s coming marriage to Georgiana is announced. Both Henry and Georgiana are trying to use this as a cover-up, as protection (Montrose’s awful mother threatens him), Arthur is very hurt — this character’s feelings are done more justice to than Charlotte’s. Colbourne understandably (you are to think of him as a Darcy character protecting a niece rather than a sister) refuses permission for Edward to court Augusta, and Edward proposes he and Augusta run away, and they elope towards the end of Georgiana’s second (!) party (how many parties does this young woman need?). I cannot tell if Sir Edward is doing this coolly for the money or has any feelings for Augusta: he wants to escape the tyranny of the aunt and the shallow or seeming hypocrisy of Mr Hankins (a quiet satire on evangelism going on). Miss Hankins becomes the person who aids and abets Edward (quite like a Henry James story, the older woman enlisted to help the dubious young man)

To enjoy it you as in the first season have a lot to overlook. I’d like more on Colbourne’s brother Edward and his friendship with Lady Julia de Clemente (cast off mistress of the king). A genuine relationship of compatibility is developing. I’d like to know more about the intelligence and understanding of Lady Lydia: does she know Colbourne loves Miss Heywood — does she have real feelings one way or the other about marriage for real — or is it all pretense to keep the mother at bay?

Lady Julia and Charlotte as older woman friend (mentor) and our heroine (the type Mrs Gardiner and Elizabeth, showing a knowledge of the original P&P)

Meanwhile Tom is fighting with, berating Mary for fighting his plan to knock down a poor settlement (the original one) near the beach of Sanditon or at least force him to find other housing for these people. So Mary is asserting who she is and this is couched in these terms. The show does care for the poor woman we see and it’s Charlotte who wants to educate another young daughter who is a member of a far too large family with a mother over-worn with care.

I liked the attempt to link back; Charlotte’s relationship with Lady Julia is like Elizabeth Bennet’s with Mrs Gardener. Otis turned up again (played by the same actor, Jyuddah Jaymes) and so he is made real. There are several references to characters we met in the first season: Edward we find feels guilty about Clara, who gave birth to his “son” (his first acknowledgement of parenthood meant seriously) and gave the baby to Esther to bring home to Lord Babington.

OTOH, another melancholy thread is pulled through so that at the end we are grieving for Georgiana’s loss of trust, Mr Colbourne’s love of Charlotte now said so passionately aloud (echoing Darcy) but which she feels unable to accept out of betrayal of Ralph, Augusta’s grief over her uncle (right) rejection of Sir Edward. The Duke of Buckingham has approached Arthur and we realize for teh first time Arthur has not confronted his homosexuality. Mary is rightly horrified at Tom’s agreement to pull down old Sanditon to make way for a grand hotel. The two couples coming together are Mr Pryce and Lady Denham (but sarcastically) and Sir Edward and Lady de Clemente (cordially with understanding). Half way, the climax of episode 3 we see the dominating threads are the love relationships.

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Sanditon: 3:5-6

Alexander Colbourne (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) & Charlotte Heywood — the depth of natural interdependence & trust & understanding that has grown

The fifth episode is the center of season: finally throughout the inner lives of these characters were ripped out before us, in different ways of course, depending on their nature. What happens is for the hour we go down “rabbit holes” for just about all the characters’ in conflict or who are unresolved or unhappy in some way, and while they are confused, disoriented and don’t quite known how to climb out (especially w/o some searing humiliation for both or either), we, the audience, are made to be anxious, to fear they will not be overcome by the obstacles they can’t seem to get over. I particularly loved the scene between Colbourne and Charlotte in the carriage while they are on the successful hunt for Augusta and Edward.

Colbourne and Charlotte are on time: they confront Edward and Augusta and to his credit, Edward says he does not love Augusta

The characters (and the same actors) from the first season who had been brought back (Lady Julia de Clemente and Otis) now are part of what’s centrally happening in their sub-stories; in addition, mention is made of other vanished characters, accounting for them: Edward shows that he does have a heart and remembers in his kind refusal to take advantage of Augusta Clara, Esther, and “my son”; of course Sidney was never forgotten. And not everyone could be brought back, e.g., Mr Stringer (Rob Jarvis), the working manager for Tom Parker’s building. The actress playing Georgiana’s mother, Agnes Harmon (Sharlene Whyte), at the last hour (you are not supposed to introduce a major character in the second to last scene of a play) performs miracles of depth, persuasion, without being over sentimental. Emma Fielding’s use of the pretend apology, the soft tone as a cover for continual spite was convincing. They showed what the series has been capable of.

In the end the series was humane and kindly.

The ending was hard to pull off because all these rabbit holes had to be climbed out of plus the characters had to re-assert who they really were and why they wanted to be in the particular relationship for the rest of their lives. They did it. There are character types who are commenting choral characters: that has been the new lawyer-brother Samuel Colbourne (Liam Garrigan) and Lady Julia da Clemente who keeps to her role a Mrs Gardiner to Charlotte-Elizabeth. When she finally gives up her relationship with the powerful king for Samuel Colborne, I like them the distanced shot of them as a pair walking along the beach.

Lady Denham started out as a harridan (as in the book), hard and mean, but by the middle of the 2nd season, the financial reasons for this were gone; Tom Parker was also at a loss by the middle of the 2nd season. That’s why Mr Pryce was brought in but James Bolam just couldn’t get the capitalist juices up.

There was too much play over Georgiana’s mother, was she or was she not authentic? But when the final scenes of them together emerged, the actresses did it creditably

The sixth episode begins with Mary Parker coming near death: so hard worked has she been is the idea, and so desolated by her husband’s conduct to her. She has caught the disease from the children she visited. I found very moving how Arthur stayed by her side as well as Georgiana and Charlotte.

I kept coming close to tears and rejoiced when Colbourne came out with an original eloquence worthy his Darcy-Wentworth presence with Charlotte who has matured into an individualized forceful woman resolved never to hurt others. Their backdrop the wild landscape and beach — as it were forever. I loved his (absurd) line about how he cannot imagine how fathomless their feelings for one another will be once they have spent a lifetime together.

She didn’t break with Ralph apparently because he loved her so — I don’t doubt if someone where to novelize this you’d have had to have flashbacks of their Fanny Price-loving-Edmund type childhood together.

Arthur and Harry Lord Montrose — at last

One last moment returned us to the old tongue-in-cheek wish fulfillment scene of Charlotte having it all — the adoring husband, the beautiful baby, the job she has always wanted. I liked the floating stills of Arthur-Harry Montrose happy at last, Georgiana with Otis (the actor is much better dressed than 4 years ago and very elegant) and her mother on their way to dedicating their lives to ending slavery. Mr Fuchs coming to dinner with the Hankins, Mr Pryce vowing to visit Lady Denham (no longer the harridan she began as) and Tom at last handing over reins to Mary.

Georgiana and Otis married

Charlotte and Alexander leaving the church

Only Edward was left out with Augusta handed over to a new actor who looked appropriate. That was/is a mistake. We should have been shown Edward and Augusta getting together on new frank grounds at last, and there is hope because improbably Lady Denham has given him an appointment as a curate — we glimpse him in grey at the back of the church.

Mary and Tom watching the others — as a heroine, Mary was there the most, endured the most, is my choice as survivor because of the difficulty of living with such a husband

All have won and all must have good prizes. No one lost who deserved to win — I’d instance Charles Lockhardt and Lady Montrose as two who deserved to lose, and they are lost to view at the close. One loss was the beach. Amid all the working hard at stories and characters, the sheer energy and vitality, the invitation to enjoy the beach vicariously of the first season is what I’d like to remember. So in honor again of that the long shot of Lady Julia and Samuel Colbourne congratulating themselves on their and his brother’s happy ending

Ellen

Christmas in the Poldark World brought back (or forward) from December 2017

Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) singing, after Christmas dinner (2015 Poldark, episode 4)
Someone — a Latin poet — had defined eternity as no more than this: to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come — last chapter of Ross Poldark)

Ross (Aidan Turner) with Aunt Agatha (Caroline Blakiston) at dinner (again end of Ross Poldark)

Gentle Friends and devoted readers,

I have said I mean someday or time to return to the Poldark novels and write half a book on them (the other half to be on the first four Outlander novels). One of the deep pleasures of Graham’s series is his recreation of the rituals of the era in terms of feelings then and feelings now. There was nothing he enjoyed better to do than recreate Christmas as a way of marking time and showing the community getting together in however compromised terms. So this year instead of bringing back (as I have in other years) Jane Austen Christmas blogs, I’m bringing back one (2017) from the Poldark novels. Here is a second (2018).

I’ve been rereading the novels again, and have confirmed an old memory that while Christmas is in itself not valued for any kind of religious belief, a number of the novels end around Christmas time with the characters gathering together to enact a yearly ritual, and memories, and talk emerges far more for real at moments than other times of year. Some of these endings are melancholy sweet, strained, or near breaking point: Ross Poldark, Demelza and Warleggan (1st, 2nd & 4th Poldark books) respectively. At the close of Demelza:

“They watched the scene on the beach.
‘I shan’t have to finish that frock for Julia now,’ she said. ‘It was that dainty too.’
‘Come,’ he said, ‘you will be catching cold.’
‘No. I am quite warm, Ross. Let me stay a little longer in the sun.

Some are bitter, and then the emphasis is on winter itself, December into January, dark, cold, bleak or wild: The Angry Tide (the 7th) when Elizabeth has just died.

All we know is this moment, and this moment, Ross, we are alive! We are. We are. The past is over, gone. What is to come doesn’t exist yet. That’s tomorrow! It’s only now that can ever be, at any one moment. And at this moment, now, we are alive — and together. We can’t ask more. There isn’t any more to ask … Demelza to Ross (last page of The Angry Tide).

Some are quiet-reflective, The Miller’s Dance and The Loving Cup (the 9th and 10th books). In The Twisted Sword (the 11th), the deep tragedy of Jeremy’s death continues to the end, only lifted somewhat by the birth of Lady Harriet Warleggan and then Cuby Poldark’s baby, while Demelza keeps the festival.

Deliver us from swords & curs — The Twisted Sword

Lastly, Bella (the 12th) just after Valentine’s death and Ross’s nightmare, the characters all return to Cornwall for Christmas. We pass a bleak Christmas in the second half of the novel Jeremy Poldark, but it is not emphatic, just part of the year made much harder because of desperate conditions during this festival time, and we observe Christmas more emphatically in The Black Moon during the birth of Clowance when the news comes to Nampara that Dwight Enys is still alive.

I’ve only followed the devices and desires of my own heart … Demelza, again the close)

So only four novels do not end in December/January or Christmas: Jeremy Poldark (a christening), The Black Moon (very bitter at the close), The Four Swans(very uncertain, all the women having been forced into bad choices), and The Stranger from the Sea (an uneasy unsettling).

A painting of Cornwall, the shore for fishing, early 20th century impressionism (photographed from a visit to a Cornish museum, summer 2016)

As important, all the novels are carefully keyed to seasonal time-lines, from autumn to winter, winter to spring and summer again; attention is paid to the relationship of what’s happening to daily customs, agricultural and other rhythms, the weather, and Christmas is part of this, and made more of when it coincides with some crisis. I conclude the natural world as central to human existence (and Graham’s love of Cornwall), and holiday rituals meant a good deal to Graham for their creation of a sense of community and humane comradeship, for their enacting memory and for hope of renewal.

Stanhope Forbes, Fisherman’s wife (Cornish painter, 1890s – 1910s)

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Even among my nearest and dearest there is no transference — can be no transference — of experience. One can feel empathy for someone suffering, but one cannot feel the suffering. We are all alone —- desperately alone. What are we in this world? A conjunction of subjective impressions making up something that is accepted as reality — Graham, Memoirs of a Private Man

One reason these patterns may not have been noticed is they are not observed in the either the older or newer serial drama. When Christmas does emphasize something special in the story at the moment (new marriage, desperate poverty, worry over the life of an imprisoned friend), then it’s there. But not the seasons and no sense of a sequence of customs to which Christmas belongs for themselves. The interest in Cornwall is decorative; in the older, there is reveling in the place, in the recent they attend to the workaday world.

We don’t have adaptations past The Stranger from the Sea for either series, but looking at the older 1975-76, 1977-78, the only transitional moments from one novel to the next where this kind of coda is observed is in a mid-book, the bare bleak half-starving Christmas from Jeremy Poldark, complete with a family dinner, caroling, Demelza wanting to ask the Brodugans for money).

Bare strained family dinner (1975-76 Poldark, Part 11, Episode 3)

At Nampara, Demelza (Angharad Rees), pouring port, asks Ross (Robin Ellis) why cannot they ask other friends for money (1975-76, Poldark Part 11, Episode 4)

One could cite the mood and bleak outdoors in the final episode of the second (and as it turned out) last season (1978), The Angry Tide, which ended, with Demelza and Ross looking at their children holding hands, and George grieving at the window from which the camera takes us to gaze at wild waves and rocks. Except it is not Christmas nor December as it explicitly is in the novel. A good deal of the original series was filmed on sets, and the focus was strongly on particular personalities in a story. So even just two scenes from the older Poldark show the intense attention paid to interweaving a Christmas piece with the realities of the characters’ dispositions, circumstances at each moment.

Christmas dinner at Trenwith (2015 Poldark, episode 4)

The recent 2015-16, and now 2017: in the first season (2015), the fourth episode near the end corresponds closely to the end of Ross Poldark, Ross and Demelza now Poldark go to Trenwith for a visit and (as it turns out temporary) reconciliation, and details from the book are dramatized, such as Demelza’s singing (above), though not Elizabeth on the harp.

Then again in the second season (2016), scenes corresponding to the observation of Christmas during a hard time in Jeremy Poldark, and the third season (2017), scenes corresponding to The Black Moon and placed just before the rescuing of Dwight Enys where there is a quiet Nampara Christmas and Caroline and Demelza and Verity seek funds at a party.

For all the rest while we might have a funeral at a close of an episode (we do twice, Jim Carter and then Julia), nothing is made of the year’s seasonal patterns nor Christmas. The perpetual coming out on the cliffs is not keyed to any season, any activity but the openings of the episodes at the mines. Scenes are not complexly nuanced in quite the way they were in the older series.

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Elizabeth Adele Armstrong Forbes, later 19th century woman painter in Cornwall, a Ring of Roses

What this suggests is how different are the rhythms and internal structures of the episodes of both Poldark film series from that of the novels: the exception in the series is Jeremy Poldark and The Black Moon in the first iteration (1975, 1977), and Jeremy Poldark and The Black Moon in the second (2016, 2017). But also how important season, time, holiday ritual was to Graham and has not been to the any of the film-adapters of his work thus far.

A curtain of mist hung over the Black Cliffs at the further end of Hendrawna Beach, most of it caused by spray hitting the tall rocks and drifting before the breeze. There was a heavy swell which reached far out to sea, and a couple of fishing boats from St Ann’s had gone scudding back to the safety of the very unsafe har¬bour. Gulls were riding the swell, lifting high and low as the waves came in; occasionally they took to the air in a flurry of flapping white when a wave unexpectedly spilled its head. No one yet expected rain: that would be tomorrow. The sun was losing its brilliance and hung in the sky like a guinea behind a muslin cloth.
Clowance squinted up at the weather. ‘Have you got a watch?’ ‘No. Not one that goes.’ — Bella

It might be objected, Does any movie? some do, and some film adaptations. One set that comes to mind are the film adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma, especially the 1996 ITV by Andrew Davies (with Kate Beckinsale as Emma, Mark Strong as Mr Knightley, Samantha Morton, Harriet) and the 209 BBC Emma by Sandy Welch (with Romola Garai as Emma, Johnny Lee Miller as Mr Knightley, Tamsin Grieg as Miss Bates), keep to seasons and emphasize Christmas or the winter holiday, snow. Have a look here: Jane Austen’s Perception of Christmas. And now Graham:

So they all went to look, at least as far as the stile leading down to the beach)· further it was unsafe to go. Where the beach would have been at any time except the highest of tides) was a battlefield of giant waves. The sea was washing away the lower sandhills and the roots of marram grass. As they stood there a wave came rushing up over the rough stony ground and. licked at the foot of the stile) leaving a trail of froth to overflow and smear their boots. Surf in the ordinary sense progresses from deep water to shallow) losing height as it comes. Today waves were hitting the rocks below Wheal Leisure with such weight that they generated a new surf running at right angles to the flow of the sea) with geysers of water spouting high from the collisions. A new and irrational surf broke against the gentler rocks below the Long Field. Mountains of spume collected wherever the sea drew breath) and then blew like bursting shells across the land. The sea was so high there was no horizon and the clouds so low that they sagged into the sea (from The Angry Tide, quoted by Graham at the opening of Poldark’s Cornwall, 1983 version).

This matters because these books are in the peculiar position of fake knowledge. A lot of people think they know them because they’ve seen these film adaptations. Others may read the books after the adaptations and have their understanding framed by the films. What they remember is what the film emphasized. There is a long respectable history of publication for the first four books from 1945 to 1953; and the second trilogy (the novels of the 1970s, Black Moon, Four Swans, Angry Tide) have been in but watched partly as a result of the films and seen through the films. The last five are much less well-known.

Many classics are in effect in this position: far far more people saw the film Wuthering Heights in 1939 than had read Emily Bronte’s book in the previous 150 years of publication and availability. But the Brontes have true respectability and people went on to read WH and other Bronte books; they have now gotten to Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the film adaptation was made as a result of Bronte popularity. That’s not the case with Graham’s books. For my part I’d love to know what sales of the books have been like over the past 60 years and have a way of measuring how much that reflects actual readership.

To return to the book’s several Christmases; this first one has the depth of particularity and realism. I have not begun to go into the feeling Ross Poldark and Elizabeth have for one another, how suddenly embittered Ross appears because life has not gone as he had wished, and the hurt Demelza feels, caught up in these two stills from the 1975-76 serial

Real feelings during these ritual times as are found in Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale

On New Year’s Eve I will recreate the 2018 blog I wrote concentrating on just two of the Christmases across the books.

Ellen

My review of the Cambridge edition of the works of Anne Finch

Said to be a portrait (miniature) of Anne Finch; the portrait resembles in features a miniature of her father …

Friends and readers,

Here is the second paper that connects to the EC/ASECS meeting this year which I didn’t go to. It is a review-essay which I worked on and off for 2 years or so, and was published in the Intelligencer that was published just before the meeting, NS Volume 35, No 2, September 2022, pp 25-35. It’s obviously too long and complicated for a blog, so here too go over to academia.edu to read it:

Editing the Writings of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

Digital photo from Northamptonshire MS

Ellen

On sequels: Joanna Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility, Cathleen Schine’s The Three Weissmans of Westport, and Kathleen Flynn’s The Jane Austen Project

friends and readers,

For the last couple of weeks on and off I’ve been reading and considering Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope post-texts; to wit, Joanna Trollope’s Sense & Sensibility; The Rector’s Wife and The Choir, not to omit Joanna’s central contemporary fiction, thus far Other People’s Children. I’ve been surprised in how gripped I’ve been over these four books. While I have before on this blog written strongly praising this or that Austen sequel or film appropriation of a sequel (Jo Baker’s Longbourn, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, Cindy Jones’s My Jane Austen Summer: A Season in Mansfield Park, the film Julie Towhidi made from PD James’s Death Comes to Pemberley), I’ve never been quite so taken as I have by Joanna Trollope’s book. Trollope’s book is part of the reason I’ve been equally taken by the much more decided updated Schine book (I know I often like her book reviews for the NYRB.)

So I’ve been trying, you see, to think why people enjoy reading prequels, sequels, plain rewrites, or rewrites from a particular political POV of their favorite author, and how, also what precisely they find deeply appealing (or, contrariwise) deeply appalling. (Recall this summer I read and taught Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly a post-text to R. L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.) I truly loved Towhidi’s film, and have truly regarded as uneven semi-imbecilic complacent gush other sequels recently written and much praised, or older and still frequently cited (as Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister [Mary])

That Anna Maxwell Martin came closer to the way I like to imagine Elizabeth Bennet than any other actress helps account for my response to Death Comes to Pemberley, the movie

It’s obviously in the interplay between the originating book and this one that the pleasure, insight and compelling interest forward lies. We relive a favorite book from a modernized POV, we discover what happened to our beloved characters after the original author brought down the curtain, or we discover what they were like well before our favorite book began. One element, however, important, that explains why such wildly different reactions to the same or different sequels to the same book can occur is we (at least I) expect that the new author will be reading the original book in the spirit we have, that the new author share our POV on our favorite author or her books or life’s experiences or lead heroines. Once that is kept to or satisfied, it’s fascinating to see what a different genre shaping the same material can throw out (P&P as mystery thriller, or time-traveling tale, e.g, P&P as Lost in Austen, Persuasion as Lake House; the Austen matter as science fiction, Kathleen Flynn’s The Jane Austen Project)

This is also a time-traveling tale (very realistically imagined)

For me it’s probably important that my favorite among Austen’s six (more or less) finished mature fictions is Sense and Sensibility; that’s why I delighted in Trollope’s rewrite and Schine’s Three Weissmans (Margaret is omitted, the third main heroine is now the Mrs Dashwood figure). Also I find I compulsively read and become deeply engaged by Joanna Trollope’s contemporary fiction (e.g, Other People’s Children), about which she talks very insightfully in this video of hers, a contribution to the Literary Lockdown festival at Chawton House, done in the second year of the pandemic. Listen up:

She is a British variant on what Anne Tyler tries to provide American readers with (I loved Tyler’s Amateur Marriage, among others)

Tonight remembering my promise to keep these blogs reasonably sized, and because I’m tired over my day of exploring this topic across many Austen sequels (and the two Anthony Trollope’s, Rector’s Wife and The Choir) I will just thoroughly cover only one: Joanna Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility. See briefer comment on The Three Weissmanns in comments and The JA Project (when I’ve read it in a coming blog.)

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What Joanna Trollope does marvelously well in her Sense and Sensibility rewrite is extrapolate out of the psychological analysis Austen suggests to offer us a contemporarily worded version; she is franker, more candid, more critical of those hurting the heroines as well as the heroines themselves. We come away more satisfied by the discourse surrounding the scenes, though (especially in the central sequence of Austen’s novel, from the time of Lucy inflicting knowledge of Edward’s engagement to Lucy upon Elinor, up to Marianne nearly bringing death upon herself in her humiliated grief) Austen has more bite, more acid, more visceral vividness, more sheer grief.

She read Austen’s book from the same angle and in the same light I do. For Joanna Trollope the central event of the book occurs when at the end of volume 1 Lucy forces on Elinor the knowledge of Lucy’s long term engagement to Elinor; I still remember how shaken I was reading Volume 2, Chapter 1, how searing I found Elinor’s agon and vigil. No one comes as close as Emma Thompson to capturing this emotional torture hidden. As in the old fable, like a wolf hugged to your chest, devouring your innards. Joanna Trollope has the revelation also as placed in last chapter of her Volume 1. Trollope takes equally seriously the humiliation of Marianne in a London public assembly — it occurs in a fashionable church wedding at the center of the book.

There is also more than a whiff of memory of some of scenes of the different film adaptations (she has watched many of them) and I can see the 2008 Andrew Davies’ cast in a number of the roles: it’s Hattie Morahan and Charity Wakefield’s voices and gestures and words she remembers; it’s Dominic Cooper’s crude cad for Willoughby; but she takes the elegant Robert Swann from the 1983 dark S&S by Alexander Baron for her Brandon). The lingering memories are from the exquisite beautiful photography of the Thompson/Ang movie. Mrs Jennings is tamed down (a loss there). Gemma Jones’s sense of bereftness in Mrs Dashwood remembered (1995 film).

For me an entrancing aspect of Joanna Trollope’s book is how closely she followed her original text; it’s as if she taxed herself literally to rewrite in 21st century terms. Keep as close as she could. So I made another outline of the type I have for Austen’s own books, not of a timeline this time, but of the parallels.

Trollope’s chapters much more of a consistent length, all longish, developed chapters; both novels divided into 3 volumes; these are consistent in length in Austen but not Trollope. In my old Penguin, Austen’s book is 323 pages; Trollope’s is 361.

Cooper as Willoughby and Morahan as Elinor in the confession scene, the angry paradigm adhered to (only softened from Austen’s austerity)

Volume I

First phase: Norland

Austen, Chapters 1-5 the time at Norland.

Trollope, Chapters 1 to the opening of 4: Trollope has Sir John Middleton come for a visit to invite them to Barton Park; she includes the beginning of the romance of Edward and Elinor; Chapter 2, Edward goes and comes back from Devonshire where he reports are affordable cottages (excuse is this is where he went to school); he is not on Facebook …

Second phase: Early phase of Barton Park and Cottage

Austen, Chapters 6-8 first experiences at Barton Park (meeting Mrs J, Brandon), Chapter 7: very brief, insipidity of Lady Middleton; Chapters 9-10 walk in rain where Willoughby rescues Marianne (car an Aston Martin) and then Willoughby’s first visit, romance begins quickly;
Austen, Chapters 11, 12, 13: offer of horse, are they engaged?, the broken off picnic and visit of Willoughby and Marianne to Allenham Chapter 14, dialogue on the merits of a cottage, Chapter 15 Willoughby suddenly must go; half way through 16 Edward arrives and stays until most of 18, into 19 when Elinor alone …

Trollope, Chapters 4-5 first experiences at Barton Park, meet same people (Brandon p 70). The treehouse from 1995 movie brought in. The walk in rain where Willoughby rescues Marianne (he rescues, comes to Barton cottage and leaves within a few minutes);
Trollope, Chapter 6 Elinor gets a job with Peter Austen firm; broken up picnic, rivalry of Willoughby (very nasty) and Brandon; time at Allingham where we learn later they did fuck in a bed there;
Trollope, Chapter 7 Marianne and Willoughby left alone, they return to find he’s gone, and no explanation just briefest of words; Marianne in tears but stubbornly says he is true; second half is Edward’s visit, thin, tired, in battered old Ford Sierra (p 141); he is gone early in Chapter 8, “no unhappier than usual.”

Gemma Jones as bereft Mrs Dashwood at Barton Cottage (1995 film)

Third phase – coming of Lucy and Nancy Steele, and proposal to go to London

Austen, Chapters 19-22: Coming of Palmers, then Lucy and Nancy Steele, then Lucy forcing confidences of engagement on Elinor (long almost 3 chapter sequence).

Trollope, Chapter 8 Among other things Elinor says Edward’s mother is his problem not mine and he’s got to stand up to her (a motif in the novels by Joanna Trollope I’ve read thus far: people have got to stand up to other people in order to survive); the Palmers and Steeles’s arrival, also ends on Lucy’s forcing confidences on Elinor.

Volume II

Austen, Chapters 23-25, p 117: Elinor’s vigil, dialogue with Lucy, enforced trip to London.
Trollope, Chapter 9, p 175: Elinor’s vigil, she caves into pressure to go to London.

Fourth phase: London

Austen, Chapters 26-29: Marianne seeking Willoughby; Brandon shows up; the climax at assembly; Willoughby’s letters …
Austen, Chapters 31-32: Aftermath, Brandon’s history of Willoughby and Eliza Williams; Chapter 33: John and Fanny Dashwood in town; Chapter 34 now Elinor supposedly humiliated by Mrs Ferrars over Miss Morton, but it’s Marianne who collapses (called “the important Tuesday to meet the formidable mother-in-law); Chapter 35 again Lucy visits, the encounter of the two rivals with Edward Chapeter 36: forced to spend time with Middleton’s and Dashwoods while Mrs Jennings tends to Charlotte and her new baby, they meet Robert; Lucy invited to stay with Fanny Dashwood.

[It does seem to me these central chapters of S&S are inexpressibly superior to the rewrite, and that the rewrite depends on our memory of these central chapters]

Trollope, Chapter 10 Much more interweaving between London and Barton Cottage before leaving London for Cleveland Park; London, Marianne with Mrs Jennings, Elinor visiting weekends begins and, in this chapter, the public humiliation of Marianne occurs at a wedding, it is caught on video and appears on YouTube, here it’s Tommy Palmer who rescues Marianne (imitating the 1983 movie where Brandon scoops her up);
Trollope, Chapter 11, p 207: Brandon offers modernized version of Eliza Williams and Willoughby’s betrayal of Brandon’s ward become a drug addict, John Dashwood’s urging Brandon on Elinor and ugly warning she cannot have Edward;
Trollope, Chapter 12, p 225: this includes brief return to Barton Cottage (as in 2008/9 film) and second climactic humiliation by Mrs Ferrars of Elinor with Lucy watching – ludicrous rivalry over children, Bill Brandon here (Bill as a name made me cringe; I much preferred Emma Thompson’s choice of Christopher);
Trollope, Chapter 13, p 251 – they are leaving London, destination Barton cottage, Fanny’s absurd invitation to the Steele sisters, Elinor resolves not to be victim any more – so at the end of Volume 2 we are at the same place in this new book as Austen’s.

Volume III

Austen, Chapter 37 (starts at 1 again), p 217, and we have Mrs Jennings running in breathless to report the debacle at the Dashwoods over Nancy telling Fanny that Lucy and Edward engaged, the child with red gum (or something else) and John Dashwood’s outrageously amoral response (which he thinks pious); Chapter 38: Elinor’s meeting with Nancy Steele at Kensington (the information about Edward used best by 1971 production; Chapter 39: Colonel’s offer of vicarage position to Edward and Lucy; 40-41 Dashwood’s astonishment, Edward’s despair and all ready to leave for Cleveland Park.

Trollope, Chapter 14, p 261: now it’s after birth of Palmer child, and Mrs Jennings’s to and fro, that Marianne learns of Edward’s engagement to Lucy and Elinor insists Marianne not humiliate Elinor further or harass Edward, insists Edward, however mad in this, doing the right thing –- against all his family’s hideous values. Elinor explicitly stands up for a different set of norms (which Austen does not); Marianne’s beginning her slow self-regenerating conversion to a better person;
Trollope, Chapter 15, p 273: Marianne and Elinor (& Margaret there so too Mrs Dashwood) – action back at Barton and also Exeter – Brandon and Elinor meet (she is now Ellie all the time, and a new take on Edward’s behavior: although on principle admirable, psychologically and sociologically deeply self-destructive, a form of madness understandable from his background and present circumstances (I did think of the 1971 Robin Ellis in his attic); Elinor tells Edward of job offer from Brandon.

Fifth phase: return to Devonshire in stages, denouement and quick coda

Austen, Chapters 42-43: The trek to Cleveland and Marianne’s semi-suicidal walk, deep illness, recovery; Chapter 44: Willoughby’s visit, confession, Elinor’s forgiveness (irritating, scene skipped in 1996 and finally made condemnatory in 2008); Chapter 45: mother’s arrival; Brandon begins ascendancy with mother; Chapters 46-47: home again, Marianne improving, Elinor reports Willoughby’s confession and we are to understand but Marianne now determines she was herself in the wrong when compared to Elinor (Imlac like); Brandon hanging about; Thomas’s tale of Edward’s marriage to Lucy;
Austen, Chapters 48-49: Elinor’s distress until Edward’s return; the renewal and engagement; 50: coping with Mrs Ferrars; Lucy wins out, as a coda too quickly put there Marianne we are told succumbs to Brandon.

Trollope, Chapter 16: Marianne still at Cleveland and catches bad cold, moves to pneumonia (possibly), but Elinor does not realize, only with her asthma takes turn to where she must be hospitalized in emergency room, in time to be saved – whole long sequence here; does recover, Bill goes for Mrs Dashwood; Chapter 17: another packed chapter with Elinor’s inward soliloquy, talk with mother, the news of Edward’s marriage, Marianne back, and then Edward shows up, unmarried to Lucy but eager for Elinor;
Trollope, Chapters 18-19: there are analogues for each move in the last chapters of S&S including John and Fanny’s despicable norms (made explicitly obnoxious), Mrs Ferrars’s despicable (made contemptible) consistency, the coming together through a walk of Marianne and Brandon, of talk and joy in Elinor and Edward (they take over tree house), but alas Trollope is much weaker than Austen’s; one factor is that Austen is much quicker at this ending because Trollope concerned to build up relationship between Brandon and Marianne, to bring Marianne back down to reality much more slowly; make more understandable what happened to Edward.

[Trollope’s Elinor only central presence from Volume II opening on but not quite the suffusion across and within the text of that Austen’s Elinor is.]

And yet at the end of the book, it is not Austen’s POV that lifts our hearts, and makes us feel the troubles we have been through with our heroines are endurable; it’s Trollope’s. For the style is finally her deft one; several attitudes of hers rather than Austen’s — her characters are far more intertwined with one another than most of Austen’s (except when it comes to a sister, close friend in suffering). Class injuries are at the core of Austen’s books, gender inequality (except for female bullies) Trollope’s.

I have been told the 6 writers chosen for this project of rewriting, modernizing Jane Austen’s novels were told to keep the new books “light” — I’m glad to report Joanna Trollope didn’t do this.

Ang Lee’s landscapes from 1995 felt remembered

Ellen