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

Sexual & familial subversion in Elizabeth Gaskell’s & Andrew Davies’ Wives & Daughters

Molly (Justine Waddell) helping the much debilitated Mrs Hamey (Penelope Wilton) up the stairs early in the serial (and book)

Molly and her father, Mr Gibson (Bill Patterson), rebelling against the rigid and jealous Mrs Gibson (her father’s second wife) to grow close and have loving comfortable supper together while she is away, later in the serial (1999 BBC Wives & Daughters, scripted Andrew Davies

Dear friends and readers,

I trust I’m not exaggerating when I say I just finished a delightful, companionable and very instructive time with a class of older adults (around 23-26 people) reading Gaskell’s final novel masterpiece, Wives and Daughters. This long (some 650 pages) mid-century (written 1864-66) seeming pastoral novel took us some 6 weeks; some of us watched the film adaptation during the last 4 weeks. I found for us some very readable good essays on the larger more abstract themes of the book: the decline of the older gentry against the money-based agricultural new science; a world view which is based upon, and a landscape growing out of, early evolutionary theories about people’s relationship to animals, a Darwinian outlook (Roger Hamley, the second son, is modeled on Charles Darwin, Gaskell’s cousin whom she was friendly with, and some of whose work she had read); the new credit economy.

The class discussed at length the character-based ones: the education of a young woman in this society, what should it be like to lead her to a fulfilling and productive life — something far more useful and stimulating and even career-oriented than making hats and spending time on fashions or being sheerly idle; the importance of mothering, mothers, caring for one another truly as the basis of social life, sisterhood and women’s friendship. Of course the class system and importance of money, individual conflicts, gossip and communities — no English novel can be written without these.

Mr Gibson (Bill Paterson) introducing the two new sisters, Molly and Cynthia Kirkpatrick (Keeley Hawes)

To some readers the above may not sound exciting or absorbing — it may today seem commonplace as ideas to assert. I admit I left out what counted most in the class out of Gaskell and especially this novel: her astonishing creation of believable complex elusive personalities changing and developing in interaction with other personalities; the exquisite precision of her style and use of the just the right word to capture moments of being; the beauty of the evocative landscapes. The book is Tolstoyan in its memorable characters (who does not love Molly? detest Mrs Gibson, feel there is much in Mr Gibson and Cynthia Kirkpatrick we can’t get near), various intriguing depths of this and other sorts — from the book’s uses of memory, time passing, slow changes, and its surprisingly wide range of reference and radical ideas mingled in conversations at dinner tables too.

Osborne Hamley (Tom Hollander) manifesting that what is being asked of him, to be proud hierarchical obtuse master is beyond him

Tonight, though, I’d like to call attention to what is often overlooked in this book: it is assumed the book’s depiction of family life and sex is strictly conventional, with what we see of family life basically good for everyone, and a depiction of readily binary normative heterosexual sex for just about everyone with restrictive norms for controlling (keeping “safe”) women. Not so. In fact what this book calls attention to is how women (take Mrs Hamley) and young girls can be driven to illness, an early death, by the “killing” (Molly’s word) demand the individual sacrifice him or herself (more often her) for authority figures who turn out to be quietly predatory and bullying (Mrs Gibson) or noisily an ignorant (hard word I know for the squire who means very well). It is arguable that the Squire’s insistence he control his older son’s marriage choice, and dissatisfaction over who and what Osborne is, killed Osborne. The book is often discussed as one where lying and keeping secrets are shown to be the coward’s way of avoiding reality, but it is also one where these techniques are shown to be self-protective defenses against people close to you who cannot understand you and the large community. Mr Gibson may be too loving a father: his bad marriage choice results from his sexual panic when he finds Molly, age 17, is attracting suitors; he is as controlling as Mrs Gibson and his attitude towards “the sex” (“women”) is condescending, narrow; he marries badly because he does not begin to think of having a wife as an intimate partner. He does not expect women to be equal to men.

At the same time sexuality is fluid and gender roles too. Mr Gibson mothers Molly; Roger and Osborne both have many “feminine” characteristics too: nurturing, tender love. The women are forceful and strong. Lady Cumnor runs her big household; Mrs Hamley ran the business side of Hamey house; for better or worse, Mrs Gibson takes over the housekeeping in the Gibson household. The unmarried women seem to do very well.

Rosemary Pike as the independent-minded young Lady Harriet whose attraction to Molly signals Molly is potentially such another as she

This in a book where the central characters and interests of the story are feminocentric. The small, intimate, daily domestic behaviors and words and art are those that truly count. Lady Harriet, unmarried (and likely to remain so) Cumnor daughter, occasionally a mouth-piece for Gaskell, tells Lord Hollingford (amateur in the best sense of the word geologist, biologist, botanist) his finds may be the important intellectual truth which account for the attitudes and forms our society takes, but hers, about the daily ephemeral yet endlessly repeating living acts, however small and intimate, are where life is lived. Gaskell does write of industrial strikes and strife, abysmal poverty and early death from the unameliorated capitalist manufacturing system the characters live in (Mary Barton, North and South); of 18th century mutiny and pressing (Sylvia’s Lovers), of witch trials (misogyny and crazed religion — “Lois the Witch”), meditations on the 18th century enlightenment and revolution (My Lady Ludlow). But in all these books what makes us so deeply engaged is the same deep textual matter (the text itself, the scenes, and dialogues and meditations) left “richly indeterminate” that is the basis of Wives and Daughters (see Jose Billington’s book on Gaskell’s books as Tolstoyan). It should be no surprise that Gaskell can manipulate these kinds of texts to contain the funniest of scenes amid scenes of death, distress, bankruptcy, loss and change in Cranford too

We turn to Davies’ movie, which develops just the subversive material I’ve been talking about, which relies on the production of stress and sympathize to make us enter into any critiques of novels turned into films.

*************************************

Roger (Anthony Howell) and Molly early in the film sharing a vision of real nature in the microscope early in the film

Roget enabling Molly to have educated herself, and now travel with him as a collecting scientist

Davies’ commentary on why he did what he did, the analogues to other films and books he relied upon give us useful insight into Gaskell’s book and how he treated it. What he said about Molly Gibson shows how in his mind Gaskell’s book is such another as Austen’s books (written we should remember half-a century earlier):

It’s a pretty close run between her and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice for the most appealing heroine in English literature. I’m the father of a daughter, and Molly brought out those feelings in me. You feel very protective towards her, even though she can stick up for herself. She’s not the prettiest girl in the story, and you sympathize with her when all these chaps look past her and see Cynthia and immediately stop paying her any attention.

Of Osborne Hamley:

He was the character who gave me the most problem with the script, because when I read the book, I thought: “My God! This is the first gay character in 19th-century literature!” Then I thought: “No, it couldn’t be.” You get the feeling when Osborne comes on that the revelation about him is going to be that he’s gay, because in the book he really is quite effeminate in his manner. He seems to be a caricature of a gay character. He’s always talking about the opera, he’s very good with older ladies, he has a very close relationship with his mother, he can’t stand his father. The secret French wife and the child seemed a bit unlikely to me, and so I tried to make him more Keatsian – not a drooping spirit, but a passionate, poetic character, who just had the bad luck to have a growing and fatal illness.

Analogously, Davies dwells more on the sister pairs of Molly and Cynthia than Gaskell and he makes Cynthia more sympathetic, the feel of this relationship is also homoerotic and deeply sympathetic to women as his portrayal of the Misses Browning (Barbara Flynn and Deborah Findley)

Davies is working with a modern flexible sense of what a family and friends group truly consists in:

It’s about second families, isn’t it? In the book, of course, you’ve got second families because of people dying young. Nowadays, it’s because of divorce and remarriage. But the problems are the same, aren’t they?

I would call attention — and Davies does too — to how Mr Gibson and Molly are the central bonded pair of the book. This is one of the subversive areas of the novel. Is Mr Gibson doing the right thing the way he persists in trying to keep Molly a child? He can’t, and his attempts at procuring a dragon-lady chaperon lead to much unhappiness and sickness in Molly. The book’s first climax of the book is Mr Gibson confronting Molly with what he has heard about her “loose” behavior with Mr Preston; the second of this Gibson plot is supposed probably to be Mr Gibson accepting Roger’s explanation for why he has realized it was not Cynthia who would make him happy but Molly.

I noticed again the book’s other story, the Hamley and mostly male one, had been rearranged so as to make the Hamley story as and more important than the Gibson one. Davies often takes the male story of a novel by a woman and makes it central where in the original novel it is subordinate or at least very much secondary — though this is not true of Gaskell’s book. The last part of W&D is more changed from the book than the earlier parts — it is after all unfinished and Davies takes more open liberties than with Middlemarch or other of his adaptations of older classic novels. Not only is Preston made sympathetic, but as Gaskell didn’t get to finish the book, Davies choses his own ending and alters matter coming up to it to fit — Molly becomes free to explore and wander around the world (as a married woman). All book long she was educating herself under Roger’s tutelage and in the film adaptation we see her reading, copying out picture; Roger’s first present is a wasp’s nest (dead).

Molly has received a wasp’s nest from Roger, delivered to the Miss Brownings (that’s Phoebe, Deborah Findlay) while her father has placed her out of their house

Nonetheless, as I’ve suggested, this is very much a woman’s film, showing a woman’s world and it is at the intimate level of reality such things are experienced as destroying life. Mothering is central to everyone’s experience of growing up. Today the home is hard for many women to escape still.

In the book (softened in the film into comedy) Mrs Gibson is made one of the obtuse unchangeable horrors of life: a continual liar, deceitful, obtuse to all but her ugly way of seeing the world (not just utterly materialistic but everyone and thing is measured by rank – it is a misogynistic stereotype), but now the sexuality between Mr and Mrs Gibson (why he lets her get away with what he allows) complicates it as it’s brought out. In one manuscript the book was called The Two Mothers: the other would be Mrs Hamley who is seen comforting Molly several times and Mrs Gibson never. In the modern sense Mrs Gibson is allow to inflict emotional abuse on Molly by continually objecting, over-riding, mocking, complaining, demanding, controlling.

Mrs Hamley and Molly

To turn to a few particulars, Davies develops further his depiction of the father and daughter as intensely loving and interdependent, this really revelatory of Davies’ preoccupations and presentation of him self in his work. IN the film Mr Gibson believes Molly’s story, accepts her refusal to tell it all and immediately guesses the real culprit is Cynthia – – it is so painful in the book where at first he does not believe Molly. In the film Molly is not quite as ill (in the book she seems to come close to dying), and in the film Mr Gibson is using the illness that to try to keep Roger and Molly apart. It is in the film more emphatically than the book Lady Harriet (Rosamund Pike) to the rescue of Molly, Osborne dies, and Molly and Roger (Anthony Howell) marry: we are spared the wedding (though we do have the reception afterwards — see the comments below) and instead have that appropriate expansive walk into an Africa sunset (I doubt it looks like Ethiopia). The growth of new enlightened attitudes in medicine and respect for science (this is part of Mr Gibson’s role), is part of the novel, and the film adds this is the age of women travelers (see some of the film studies in my supplementary reading list). Much of the proto-feminism of Molly’s remarks are in Gaskell, not made up; the dialogues we hear are often in the book.

In this retelling Davies, the film-makers, and actors combine to make Osborne’s death and his father’s grief very like Shakespeare’s Lear. Gambon has Lear in mind as he staggers home with the corpse in his arms; when Gambon as the squire howls; when he realizes Osborne will never eat again.

Cardwell’s Andrew Davies includes a few remarks on this film. She singles out strong female protagonists but does not sufficiently see the weak males which hold center of films: emotional men, needing ties — the Squire, Osborne. Strong men are men who follow a work ethic — Roger and Mr Gibson

Davies also builds up Preston’s (Iain Glenn) relationship with Cynthia, and shows sympathy for Preston in insisting on his point of view: he loved her, thought she loved him, is intensely enamored of her sexually, won’t let go. This is very like Davies 2002 Dr Zhivago (Granada/WBGH, Giacomo Campiotti, Anne Pivcevic, discussed in another blog) where the same interaction of feeling and sentiment informs Davies’ conception of Lara (who like Cynthia at first loves and then turns to hatred) and Komarovksy (Sam Neill was more subtle about showing this, but then he’s the older man). (This emphasis and perspective is a development out of Elizabeth Gaskell, but one could read Gaskell’s text quite another way — as sheerly hostile to Preston as a cold unscrupulous cruel ambitious man.)

Although in black-and-white this still captures the aggressive sexual energy Ian Glenn projects as Mr Preston

The sexuality of a man (Preston’s) gripped by a woman is repeated in Davies’s portrait of Mr Gibson’s (Bill Patterson) marriage to Mrs. Gibson (aka Hyacinth Kirkpatrick, Francesca Annis)

The film genre is richly pastoral, indeed Arcadian environment, with richly colored flowers and much dark greenery. The houses of the wealthy are ornate; there is much scientific equipment to be seen, books, botanizing in the Hamley as well as Gibson household. When we are in Africa, we move to a burnt-orange, yellow and brown palette, but there too intense beauty is caught. All this is fascinating and well-done.

It’s telling that in an interview with Nic Ransome Davies says he’s usually rejected from fully American projects, and himself called “effete.” The demands for intense physical masculinity in American typologies are often avoided by Davies. But Davies is talking of how this very macho culture precludes doing sensitive perceptive film-adaptations of better novels in the US cinemas — and tells one story of his own experience of rejection and its grounds.

I noticed the music echoed music in Brideshead Revisited and nostalgia was worked up, use of blurring, the mise-en-scene rich and ornate greens, and this was done especially in the sequence where Mrs Gibson went to London with Cynthia and we have a few minutes of the renewal of Mr Gibson and Mollys’ relationship. Davies is daring here — he again and again in his series broaches this area of the older man loving the young girl, here really a father and daughter. It reminded me of Sebastian and Charles Ryder sequences with a use of voice-over too as the father and daughter revel together at a picnic in a meadow, and eating before the fireplace alone.

The film also exhibits intertexuality with famous books: Squire Hamley (Michael Gambon is just brilliant) coming out with Osborne in his arms, and the use of “never” shows Lear and Cordelia are meant. Osborne’s death with the fly over him is naturalistic death. Strong secularism in Gaskell’s book becomes a lack of providential patterning. Davies turns to Austen for some of the bitterly ironic but subdued lines of Gibson to his wife. Brideshead Revisited techniques are seen in the build up of Roger and Molly’s romance, but also the use of dance from Austen, and the final “yes” scene is clearly James Joyce’s Ulysses’ Molly. Roger and Molly are modelled partly on Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price, but it’s clear Roger is also another Yuri Zhivago or Arthur Clenham (Davies has also made a brilliant Little Dorrit).

Squire Hamley (Michael Gambon) and Molly reading a letter of congratulation for Roger together — reading letters together is all about memory, bringing the past and the absent one close in our imaginations

But finally or for the Gaskell fan, constant reader or watcher, it’s the film’s coterminous terrain with Cranford Chronicles and the Return to Cranford (where letters are central), or Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters with her Cranford stories that provides the subterranean basso continuo of the book and film. I am back with how feminocentric Wives and Daughters is. However blurred, this still captures that: another “Amazon’s” world. But this would require another blog (unless I’ve already written on these parallels in all the Gaskell material on this and other of my blogs) on the marvelous Cranford Chronicles and Return to Cranford. Here is one I wrote with a friend long ago, before I started on my journey through Gaskell’s writing.

Molly, Cynthia, Mrs Gibson (Francesca Annis), and the Miss Brownings (Barbara Flynn and Deborah Findlay)

Ellen

Prelude: Jane Austen sequels or post-texts

Darcy grown older (Matthew Rhys) facing Elizabeth (Anna Maxwell Martin)’s demands (Death Comes to Pemberley, Towhidi’s film out of PD James’s sequel to P&P)

Dear friends and readers,

I recently finished Janice Hadlow’s excellent sequel/post-text to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, The Other Bennet Sister: Hadlow rewrites, re-sees Pride and Prejudice from a thoroughly conceived and believable Mary Bennet: it’s a deeply empathetic take on Mary Bennet inside the world of Austen’s P&P which brings out Austen’s blindnesses in not acknowledging the whole Bennet family colludes in an emotional abuse of Mary. Hadlow also reconceives the story while using Austen patterns across her oeuvre (as so many of the film adaptations do) and echoing specific scenes and plot-lines in the various novels. Yet it is a wholly satisfying Austen sequel novel (almost as they all are) in its own right.

But before I write an account of the story, characters, revived and new themes in Hadlow’s novel, I thought (because I’ve been asked to do so) I’d produce a list of those Austen sequels I’ve read which I consider to be good books, worth reading as post-texts to Austen’s works and good stories with interesting characters in their own right. For once I am just going to list them with the prefacing comment that I’ve tried many many of this type of book and most I’ve found to be poor to embarrassing. The question for my next two blogs will be what qualities are found across these books as well as what do we mean by a sequel or post-text (a few thoughts on this), and then an analysis of The Other Bennet Sister in terms of these criteria I tease out.

I have listed them in the order of last read:

Janice Hadlow, The Other Bennet Sister (P&P)
Cathleen Schine, The Three Weismanns of Westport (S&S)
Joanna Trollope, Sense and Sensibility (S&S)
Jo Baker, Longbourn (P&P)
P. D. James, Death Comes to Pemberley as the basis for the film by Howdidi (P&P)
Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club (all 6 famous novels)
Cindy Jones, My Jane Austen Summer (MP)
Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary, together with The Edge of Reason (P&P, then Persuasion
Whit Stillman, Love and Friendship In which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon is Entirely Vindicated (Lady Susan); Metropolitan (a full screenplay basis of the excellent film)
Diana Birchall, Mrs Darcy’s Dilemma (P&P with MP and NA)

The book needs to be readily recognizable as interwoven from and with Austen’s work, so, although excellent, I exclude Trollope’s Small House at Allington and E. H. Young’s Jenny Wren (both out of S&S)

To see my full library of these sequels, most of which I’ve tried (the list excludes for the most part, the graphic novels, those screenplays I have as part of a Making of or Companion book to a film adaptation), go to Libary Thing under austen sequels. Of these the ones I’d like to try again are Kathleen Flynn, The Jane Austen Project; Gina Fattore, The Spinster Diaries. I’ve a new one I’ve never tried that sounds intriguing: Charlie Lovett’s First Impressions, a Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love and Jane Austen.

There are scattered short story versions of post-texts found in places like the journal Persuasions (a brilliant one by Margaret Drabble both extending and parodying Persuasion), anthologies of sequels, and (listed in Library Thing) screenplays for the appropriation type Austen movie (like Ruby in Paradise) under austen screenplays, but these are different experiences from attempts at a novel which is a sequel or post-text to Austen’s own. I’m not sure Henrie’s Doomed Bourgeois in Love, essays on Whit Stillman’s films, which include good essays on his first two film adaptations, for Last Days of Disco is in part an adaptation of Austen (S&S and Emma), for which there is a good novel, Whit Stillman, The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards.

Finally, there are the continuations of unfinished novels by Austen listed in Library Thing as austen continuation (when they are a separate book); I’ve at least three of Sanditon, one unfinished by Anna Austen Lefroy; one of Mansfield Park (providing an Alternative Ending). Catherine Hubback’s The Younger Sister is by one of Austen’s nieces, Francis’s daughter,  a minor Victorian novelist; the book is almost a sequel because The Watsons comprises so little of Hubback’s book in comparison with the very long continuation and is itself partly rewritten.

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.

*******************************************

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).

******************************

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.

********************************

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

A Virtual Prelude & Bath 250: A Woman and her Boxes: Space and Identity in Jane Austen (1)

18th century writing-slope: sometimes called a writing-box, or writing-desk

Hans Mayer had written: “Identity is possible only through attachment.” Christa Wolf responds: “What he does not say in so many words but knows from experience is that identity is forged by resisting intolerable conditions, which means we must not allow attachments to deteriorate into dependency but must be able to dissolve them again if the case demands it (Wolf, Parting with Phantoms, 1990-1994)

Austen could not dissolve these attachments but resisted mightily and yet without admitting resistance. This idea can be also applied as a general summation of part of D W. Harding’s famous essay on Austen’s satiric comedy, “Regulated Hatred.”

Dear friends and readers,

You may be yourself in your own life tired of virtual life and longing to turn to in-person life: I am and am not. Over the past two weeks I had a number of wonderful experiences on-line, virtually, which I would not have been able to reach in person: a London Trollope society reading group, a musical concert at the Smithsonian, a good class at Politics and Prose, held at night when I cannot drive. I also longed to truly be with people too — it’s physical places as much as communicating directly with people, casually, seeing one another’s legs and feet, but for even most the alternative was nothing at all. I think I am enjoying these virtual experiences so because they are laid on a groundwork of memory (I’ve been there or with these people), imagination (extrapolation), much reading (shared with the other participants) and visual and aural media.

All this to say I’ve been attending the Bath250 conference, officially held or zoomed out from the University of Liverpool, for several late nights and for the past evening and two days I’ve attended a full virtual version of the EC/ASECS conference. I’ve gone to EC/ASECS almost every year since 2000, and since Jim died, every year. This is the second year in row we (they) have postponed the plan to go to the Winterthur Museum for our sessions, and stay by a nearby hotel. Our topic this year has been what’s called Material Culture: A virtual prelude, but there was nothing of the prelude about the papers and talks. I will be making a couple of blogs of these in order to remember what was said in general myself and to convey something of the interest, newness and occasional fascination (from the Educational Curator of Winterthur) of what was said — with one spell-binding Presidential talk by Joanne Myers, “My Journal of the Plague Year.”

18th century lined trunk

For tonight I thought I’d lead off with the one talk or paper I can given in full, my own, which I was surprised to find fit in so well with both what was said at Bath250 and the topics at EC/ASECS, from costumes in the theater as central to the experience, to libraries and buildings, to harpsichords and pianofortes now at Winterthur. This is not the first time I’ve mentioned this paper, but it has undergone real changes (see my discussion of early plan and inspiration), and is now seriously about how a study of groups of words for containers (boxes, chests, trunks, parcels, pockets) and meaning space shows the significance for Austen of her lack of control or even literally ownership of precious real and portable possessions and private space to write, to dream, simply to be in. I’ve a section on dispossessions and possessions in the Austen films now too.

I’ve put it on academia.edu

A Woman and Her Boxes: Space and Identity in Jane Austen

Marianne Dashwood (Charity Wakefield) packing her writings away in the trunks in what was their Norland bedroom (2009 Sense and Sensibility, scripted Andrew Davies

At the last moment I added a section on women’s pockets and pocketbooks in the 18th century and as found in Austen’s novels. An addendum to the paper.

And a bibliography.

Ellen

A class on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, with a few remarks on Andrew Davies’ fine film adaptation

New Penguin Edition

Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea hard at work on plans to build cottages for tenants on her and relative and friends’ properties (never actually done by her)

“There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it … the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone” (the last page of Middlemarch)

“Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances” (Bk 8, Chapter 73, Middlemarch)

Dear friends and readers,

The high moments of this summer (more than half-way over now) have been an eight-session hour-and-one-half class given online from Politics and Prose bookstore (Washington, DC) where Prof Maria Frawley (of Georgetown) held forth and talked of George Eliot’s transcendent masterpiece, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. I didn’t think I would but under Prof Frawley’s tutelage and inspired by her class, I reread it for a third time — it was my fourth time through if you count listening to it read aloud beautifully by Nadia May while I was studying and writing on Andrew Davies’s film adaptations.

The first time age 18 in a college class on the 19th century novel, the second on Trollope listserv with a friend, Martin Notcutt and a few others around 1998 (I was 52), the third listening in an early year of the 21st century, but none of them was the experience I just had where I know my attention was alerted sympathetically to much that intelligently and idealistically apprehended on the many realistic (psychological, social) levels of this novel’s language.

I became far more open to what is in the novel than I ever had before — as in the depiction of the Garths, which I had been inclined to see as simply unconvincingly exemplary. I reveled in the movie serial twice through(!) with a renewed enthusiasm. Saw its hour-long feature along with a BBC4 special: Everything is connected (on Eliot) . I reread some of the criticism, and biography, including the now famous My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead. Had there been no pandemic, I might have re-listened to the CDs in my car.

For myself I find Middlemarch a transcendent book because of the in-depth understanding of human nature all its complicated ideas are based upon; and the intent to offer this kind of knowledge, which the reader can use to find some happiness or ways of coping with unhappiness in his or her life. The deeply humane and forgiving point of view is one human society is in need of — as long as the line is drawn at giving into evil and harm to people to gratify the greed and cruelty and egoism also found in groups of people who band together or individuals who inflict pain on others. It must also be drawn at self-immolation and self-sacrifice of the type we find in Dorothea at first, and Lydgate at length driven to. So on my own statement, the heroine who comes closest to staying with the good is Mary Garth; the heroes Farebrother and Ladislaw. Not that Lydgate does not do some good when he writes a treatise on how to cope with gout.

This blog is rather about the content of the class and how the book emerged through that.  So what can I convey of such an unfolding and complicated nuanced conversations (the class was filled with thoughtful readers too).  I shall have to revert to my compendium method for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala because there is far too much to tell of what was said.

Douglas Hodge as the yet unbowed eager Dr Lydgate (his is made the central shaping story paradigm of the serial)

As luck would have it, the online Literary Hub led this week with a much linked-in couple of columns, “George Eliot begins writing Middlemarch this week.” The site tells the familiar story of how Eliot began by writing the story of Lydgate (an aspiring young doctor), then separately “Miss Brooke” (an ardent young woman with no outlet for her intelligence, imagination, desire to do something for others in the world with her wealth), with Eliot afterward seeing how the two characters’ personalities and stories could be situated in one place, and then fit together in a artful design.

But it adds that there was a fragment written earlier — about Mr Vincy (Walter, the Mayor of the town, and hard-working merchant) and old Featherstone (the miser the Vincy family hopes to inherit a fortune and a house, Stone Court, from). Featherstone torments his young housekeeper, Mary Garth, who links to Mr Vincy because Featherstone enjoys humiliating the Vincy son (Fred) who loves and wants to marry Mary, among other things bringing her books, like Walter Scott’s Anne of Geierstein, which Featherstone forbids her to read, lest she have any enjoyment of her own during the time she is supposed working for him. So there are the three story matters. Eliot did keep a notebook of quotations, so you can try to follow her creative process just a bit. She meant it to be a study of provincial life.

*********************************

From Book I: Now Prof Frawley emphasized the metaphoric and inward perspectives embedded in these stories and ethnography. And I here present her ideas as they worked out during class discussions in which I participated too. Eliot presents herself as watching human lots (in the Greek sense of your fate, what cards you were handed) organically inter-related. Yes the biological connections are real: Lydgate is deeply erotically attracted to Rosamond Vincy, the Mayor’s daughter; his patron, the evangelical town successful man, Nicholas Bulstrode, is married to Vincy’s sister, Harriet. Dorothea becomes enamoured of the aging scholar, Casaubon, whose nephew, Will Ladislaw, comes to work for Dorothea’s uncle, Mr Brooke, who, running for public office, hires Ladislaw to edit and write articles in a newspaper on his behalf; Ladislaw is emotionally drawn to the idealistic Dorothea, and flirts with Rosamond Vincy once she marries Lydgate.

But Eliot is representing the interactions between their inner worlds and realities of outward life (class, money, rival ambitions); the way society distorts (town gossip is central to what happens to these people) their awarenesses and conscience; how their consciousness distorts what they see of and in society, how they understand it. Mirrors are an important metaphor in this novel (as is tapestry, webs of interconnections). Casaubon also shows an ability to feel for Dorothea when he realizes he has made a mistake in marrying her: she is too young, too eager for him to be a great hero, and the mirror she shines up in his face mortifies him so he strikes out to silence her.

We have characters to compare: three central women: Dorothea (Dodo), Rosamond (Rosie), Mary Garth, heroines, and with them Celia (Kitty), Dorothea’s sister, Rosamond Vincy, Fred’s. Three men: Lydgate, Casaubon, Ladislaw, and against them, Bulstrode (as a hypocrite, hiding his criminal past used to rise in the world), with them, Rev Farebrother, Mr Brooke, Dodo and Kitty’s uncle. We see what six center presences do with their lives, what they make of them. We are led to ask by the narrator, Who among us could stand close scrutiny? to think pride is not a bad thing as long as you do not hurt others or yourself with your own. Some of these characters are given beauty in their thoughts, aspirations, generosity, but others show them unable even to understand the person right in front of them at all and no toleration at all for anything that might endanger their position in the world.

Both Lydgate and Dorothea make bad choices for their first marriage. Lydgate cannot escape his partly because of his conscience; Dorothea when she realizes she has make a mistake, recalibrates (like a GPS). The petty perspectives of a Rosamond, the small ones of the local rector’s wife, Mrs Cadawallader, and Celia’s husband, Sir James Chettam, a conventional county leader, matter too. We looked at beautiful statements in the first book about self-despair; Farebrother, the vicar, who while a humane man, has no real vocation to be a clergyman, found himself in studying insects, but he is deeply thwarted in his secular scientist study because he must spend time as a vicar, gets such low pay and is trying to support his mother, her sister, and an aunt. But also the inner rapture as the self involves its consciousness in study, which will also result in nothing practical. We are seeing the ways people struggle with their lives. We see our friends change, grow, mature as they try to follow a career.

From Book II: It is a novel about vocation; and for me, it is also about the enemies of promise that stand in the different characters’ ways. I loved how Eliot captured inner moments that can mean so much to us as we define who we are and follow a road possible for us — as when Lydgate realized he wanted to be an original researcher in medicine. Eliot writes:

“Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within (Bk 2, Ch 15, p 143)

I did tell of how after I read a moving passage in Wordsworth’s Michael, I knew I wanted to be an English major, to study literature.

There is a comfort in the strength of love;
‘Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would break the heart … “

The intense emotional pain caught up in those lines took my breath away. The pain for me comes in how the words capture also the opposite reality: that few feel this love, and since Luke (Michael’s shallow son in the poem) had not, the lines are also about how at times we come near into breaking or our hearts are broken and we can scarce understand how we bear up.

Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw

While in Rome with Casaubon, who is spending most of his time researching in the libraries, Dorothea meets Will Ladislaw, there to study art, and he glimpses in her a buried, a repressed depth of emotion; Dorothea will find it like death, like a nightmare of dread when Casaubon attacks her for her nature. Prof Frawley said many times the book explores what it is be alive. The deeper question here is how we know others; a lot of 19th century novels are about characters some characters thought they knew but did not; how we really get to know who somebody is: in the case of Lydgate and Rosamond, they knew so little of each other, they understood so little of each other’s character. Rosamond is not interested in any character or desires but her own, and her dense tenacity triumphs over the sensitive Lydgate who yearns for her validation of him, and cannot bear her misery, no matter how stupid (he knows) the causes. Of course it is Lydgate who choose her, who is dismissive of women and yet she becomes his trap. The often-quoted passage is about how were we to be able to know the miseries of others (including the animals around us), we could not keep our equanimity

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity (Bk 2, Ch 20, p 194)

We had talked about the novel as historical, set back in time from the era Eliot was writing in; it is also devotedly realistic, turning away from romance, ever aware of actualities (as an artful norm discussed by her in Adam Bede). You can see her practicing her awareness of the natural world around her in her Ilfracomb journal. The question here is what can a novel do? how does one make a character resonate with a reader? She says her mirrors are doubtless defective however earnestly she commits to faithful accounting. The mirror is a mediator, not the thing itself — now it’s Dorothea who remembers Rome so intently vivid; it is an epoch to her, while to Casaubon, absorbed in his own central self in years of arcane study, cannot respond with any immediacy to what is around them, is imprisoned in self-preoccupation, thoughts of gaining fame and respect from others, fear he never will.

From Books 3, 4 and 5: We moved into how Eliot works up, depends on our responding with sympathy so that we may pass over this egoism. She shows us Dorothea aware of what another character is feeling through her sympathetic impulses; sympathy just erupts, but equally characters fail in sympathy. Frawley defended Eliot’s narrator as not intrusive, and there in the text tactfully, but also rightfully there, to thicken out the novel, to share things with us. She numbered the ways the narrator adds to our understanding and pleasure in the book. I remembered the narrator’s sense of humor at the auction later in the book where we invited us to laugh with her at the absurdity of the inflated descriptions, what the seller said about the items from people’s houses to push the price bidding/war up. She lends life to all the minor characters in the Featherstone story, the Garth family: Caleb sees the potential and real goodness in Fred, Mrs Garth feels the loss of money she has saved for months to enable her boy to become an apprentice

Jonathan Firth as Fred Vincy being bullied by Michael Hordern as Featherstone, Rachel Power as Mary Garth looking on, Trevyn McDowell as Rosamond Vincy keeping well away

The medical history context as such becomes more important as Lydgate becomes part of the Dorothea/Casaubon story after his heart attack. Specifics go beyond Lydgate trying to institute reforms as Lydgate gets involved in individual characters’ health (like Fred’s, which leads to Lydgate’s engagement with Rosamond). Gossip begins to play a major role — how we come to talk and to know about one another (Book 4, Ch 41, p 412: the world as a “whispering gallery”). Last debt and obligation — how we can be saddled with moral as well as financial debt. Invalidism as a form of identity emerges in Victorian novels; epidemics are part of the this 19th century realistic world, and we see Lydgate struggling to be professional, to be taken seriously. Now the question is, What good can people do for one another in this world. We did talk of a Medical Act trying to set minimum criteria before a man can call himself a physician.

Ladislaw, Robert Hardy as Mr Brooke, and Stephen Moore as Mr Vincy on the hustings

Where does progress happen? Certainly Mr Brooke makes no progress on his estates nor does he help his desperate tenants to live at all better lives. Prof Frawley saw Brooke’s disastrous speech as an example of how hard it is to to get a society to support progressive legislation. She pointed to a debate between Lydgate and Ladislaw about measures, men voted in to pass them (Bk 5, Ch 46, p 465), which did remind me of debates between characters in Trollope’s political Palliser fiction, only here it did seem to me that the measures the characters were talking of were genuinely capable of helping vulnerable individuals (to be honest, I’ve never seen that in Trollope’s fictions — perhaps in his travel books, yes). The existence of (stupid) gossip connects here: ignorant people attributing malign motives to other people; people who make a living selling useless products. Change is therefore glacial. Lydgate finds himself attacked for dissections.

A Middlemarch grocer appeals to Lydgate to prescribe Mrs Mawmsey’s strengthening medicine, next to Lydgate, Simon Chandler as Farebrother

Prof Frawley called Eliot’s a “curative vision,” and admitted there is a conservative thrust to her work; she takes a retrospective POV and sees elements in community life as entrenched deeply. Middlemarch as a community is a social body. What can you change among such people? what do they value? (I’d say speaking general individuals their position and status first of all.) Characters find themselves powerless to stop ugly gossip. Dorothea can act once she is a wealthy widow, not before. She can decide on what she wants to do as social obligations once Casaubon has died; she would have obeyed him out of a deep feeling of pity and duty she had to him, but we see in her meditation how she is alienated at long last when she realizes how he thought so meanly of her. Meanwhile she is coming to defer to Ladislaw as he proves himself to her, and she wants to think so well of him. I’d put it Dorothea needs to, as part of her make-up and the way she needs to see the world. She applies an ethical compass to what Mrs Cadwallader tells her of others; at the same time she is realistic about people around her, and we see her hesitate when Chettam or Farebrother advise caution.

***********************************

From Books 6 and 7: I’d say the central most fascinating character in the last books of the novel is Nicholas Bulstrode; Frawley showed how Eliot’s analyses here are extraordinary for insight as well as compassion for a distasteful often petty cruel and power-mongering man in the way she enables us to see how he sees himself. (Cont’d in the comments.)

Clive Russell as Caleb Garth, Peter Jeffreys as Nicholas Bulstrode, and John Savident as Raffles

From Book 8: how we find all the preoccupations and themes brought together in this deeply felt consoling vision of acceptance (also Cont’d)

The 1994 serial: one of the best adaptations of a novel thus far ever made — if faithfulness, wonderful artistry appropriate to this book’s tone and feel, and depth of understanding matter (third continuation).

The coach loaded down with people and whatever goods they can carry, bringing people into Middlemarch and out again — the first thing we see when the film begins ….

Ellen

Unusual movies or untold kind of stories & patterns: Finding Alice — Come See the Paradise — I remember Mama — & the Austen films

IAlice (Keeley Hawes) and her daughter, Charlotte (Isabella Pappas) (Finding Alice, Episode 1).

1940a photograph of Japanese Americans being forced into internment camps; the basis of the film, Come See the Paradise

“Something had been done in the way of raising money by selling the property of convicted secessionists; and while I was there eight men were condemned to be shot for destroying railway bridges. ‘But will they be shot?” I asked of one of the officers. ‘Oh, yes. It will be done quietly and no one will know anything about it. We shall get used to that kind of thing presently’… It is surprising how quickly a people can reconcile themselves to altered circumstances, when the change comes upon them without the necessity of an expressed opinion of their own. Personal freedom has been considered as necessary to the American of the States as the air he breathes.” — Trollope on the civil War in North America

Portrait shot of one of several variants 1949-1957 TV versions of I Remember Mama

Elinor Dashwood (Hattie Morahan) looking up at Marianne and hearing her extravaganzas with patience (2009 BBC S&S, Andrew Davies)

Dear friends,

Tonight, I thought I’d bring together three movies which center on women or can be related to women and seem to me good and significant movies to watch relevant to us today. As an experiment, for fun, I’ve been watching the Austen movies (a subgenre, some 37 at this point) and end on a pattern others may not have noticed. As I’ve been doing, the blog will not be overlong.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been watching a 6 part ITV (British) serial story, Finding Alice. I was drawn to it because its central role, Alice, a woman at least in her later 30s, whose husband dies suddenly from a fall over a steep staircase, which he deliberately built without a bannister is played by Keeley Hawes, one of my favorite actresses. She used to garner central roles in costume dramas based on masterpiece books (Cynthia in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, as scripted by Andrew Davies); or moving series on remarkable books (Louisa Durrell in The Durrells). Now she is more often found in mystery thrillers which are just that little bit better (more intelligent) than the usual. So this series sounded like a return back to her more thoughtful rich programs. Perhaps the problem with the series is it is too rich, takes too much on, and does not resolve enough of what is presented. This Guardian review by Lucy Mangan is unfair (and shows itself to be a little stupid) by singling out Nigel Havers and Joanna Lumley as superior actors to all the others (I wondered if that had anything to do with their race and age); they are no better or worse at acting their roles, their roles no less or more jarring or uneven than the other characters: but she does outline the story, and I can vouch for many shining moments beyond the ones Mangan allows for.

The film plays variations on how difficult it is to accept the death of a beloved person; it projects different modes of grieving and bereavement. Rashan Stone as the man who is in charge of a hospital morgue and runs bereavement groups is superb in his role; he comforts Alice as well as himself exemplifying how someone else can deal with devastation (his daughter killed herself) and a wife whom he does not get along with (one of the variations on a daughter not able to adjust to a mother who is hostile to her). The hardest hit is Charlotte, Harry and Alice’s teenage daughter, upon whom much of Alice’s earliest antics fall — she insists on burying Harry in their garden turns out not to be such a bad idea after all. But she also wants to impregnate herself with the sperm Harry froze so that she could have another child by him — since she was (rightly) refusing at the time.

Alice in Episode 6, learning to stand alone

After the 6th episode was over and nothing much had been resolved, of several emerging conflicts, except importantly Alice had taken responsibility for all those things her partner Harry had supposedly been doing just fine, only he wasn’t. The story is the sudden death by falling down a steep staircase of the heroine’s partner. We learn pretty quickly both Alice & Harry have taken no thought for the possibility he might die — he has (it emerges by the last episode where we hear him speak his last words) regarded and treated her as a child. Been false in the way he appeared to love her. His bank account does not have her name on it, she has almost nothing in hers; he left this house he and she were supposed to be so proud to live in to his parents. His business dealings he does with women, one of whom turns out to be a semi-mistress — who may have bought (?) his sperm to impregnate her female partner with. The business is near bankruptcy. An illegitimate son appears who thinks he will inherit — but that is not accurate. If she never married Harry and so can’t automatically inherit whatever is left, how does an unrecognized bastard son inherit anything? Harry’s parents are hostile to her, want to sell the house out from under her to pay their inheritance taxes; her parents (Havers & Lumley) consist of a mean-mouthed bullying mother and a weak father who finally seems to leave his wife who openly cuckolds him in the last episode). Many episodes contain such a multitude of complex emotions one cannot begin to cover the ground so richly sown.

This review by Reece Goodall falls into the very trap I suggest the movie wants to preclude: the idea that people don’t let go a lot when they grieve; that they know to be tactful and to live in and within themselves. Anything else is not adult. Sure, in public, but not in private which is where these scenes delve. I grant at the third episode I began to feel this was an attempt to present ever-so-modern patterns of living and taste in a voyeuristically morbid vein, but then in the fourth an upswing begins where we see the point is to show us Alice slowly discovering she is an individual, what kind of person she is, what are her real tastes. I don’t think the only way you can assert your independence is to give other people who are trying to cheat you a hard time, but it is one of those things a woman living alone will have to deal with alone.

At its end you get a message telling you where you can contact counselors to help you through bereavement — quite seriously — the creators just did not know how to cope with what they are presenting to a wider popular audience so they become “constructive.” I see another season is planned (or was). I hope it comes back and becomes less unsteady, giving more time to each set of characters and incidents.

****************************************************

Movie poster

Coherent and beautiful is the indie, Come See the Paradise, written and directed by Alan Parker. It opens with a mother in her early 30s walking with a young adolescent girl child. They are traveling by train to re-meet the father and husband whom they have not seen for years. The mother tells the girl the history she does not understand for her father was take away when she was around 4. This flashback movie then tells from the point of view of the Japanese woman who is attached equally to her family and American husband and is herself self-sufficient, upright.

Hers is the story of them as a young couple, American young man who was involved as a non-professional (non-degreed) lawyer in a union in the 1930s who falls in love with Japanese girl whose parents are about to marry her off to a much older man. In 1942, over 100,000 Americans were interned in prison camps in the USA. Well this extraordinary complete violation of human rights (it was against the law in many states for a white American to marry a Japanese person and they were not permitted to become citizens unless they were born here) hits hard on these lives that are slowly presented. We see the young couple try to persuade her parents; they cannot so they elope. Several years go by and Jack (Dennis Quaid) has involved himself again in striking; Lily (Tamlyn Naomi Tomita) disapproves, is frightened, and when he is taken away to be arrested, flees home to her family (whom she was very attached to). When he finally gets out of jail, he comes to find her and is slowly accepted into the family by all but the father. Then the war breaks out, the internment begins. Everything is very harsh; they have to give up all their property and live in a camp in crowded impoverished conditions. Eventually the young men are coerced into fighting for the USA or accept being sent back to Japan. Jack finds he cannot stay with them and spends most of the war as a soldier. He is finally recognized as a labor agitator and re-sent to jail. So the film is pro labor too — like his Japanese brother-in-law, Jack has a no-choice: go to jail or endure military service. The two stories intertwine and reinforce one another. There is a fine use of music; some of the scenes are very moving; the use of colors is careful and effective. I do not think think it at all exaggerated or exploitative or smug or over-angry. The Karamura family slowly changes; they learn to appreciate Jack; they hang together and they also make individual choices that bring out their characters and need for usefulness, joy, respect.

One of several parting scenes

Recently there has been an increase in violence towards Asian people. Incited by the truly evil man, Trump, to blame Asian people for the coronavirus, older atavistic prejudices have come forward.  This time it was a massacre of eight people, six Asian women, in Georgia by a young white very sullen-looking man. In his recent speech before this incident Biden mentioned the way Asian-Americans have been treated since the pandemic started and said this has got to STOP! Tonight he and the Congress are working on helping Asian-Americans and doing what they can to discourage this virulent racism. So this film’s story is not at all obsolete. There is a sneer (!) in wikipedia: the movie is called “oscar bait” and I dare say it won no prizes because of its strong Asian theme. It is a bit long because it wants to get us to the qualified happy ending — retreat for this intermarried family.

Here is Ebert’s excellent review (1991): how easily it seems our assumed liberties can be taken from us; Caryn James of the New York Times: when our people were victimized right here; Frederick and Mary Ann Brussat of Spirituality.

Mr Karamura accepting Jack who tells him that this family is his family, he loves them and they love him ….

I don’t know how or why Roosevelt could have allowed this — it is a blotch on his record, very bad. I know how he (in effect) threw Black people under the bus (what an inadequate metaphor) to keep the southern democrats with him. Also how social security did not include cleaning women and other lower end self-employed people — often Black people.

*************************************

The political story of I remember Mama is told here It immediately belongs to the history of suppression of any socialistic feelings which came to a head in the early 1950s with the McCarthy hearings of the HUAC; long range it belongs to women’s studies: Gertrude Berg invented, wrote, starred in this development from an earlier genteel white stage play and made a resounding hit of it — despite studio feeling that Americans don’t want Jewish stories either. Berg had a very hard time getting the shows any sponsorship originally.

Then after the success, the show was forced off the air — in effect. The executives cared more about stamping out socialism than monetary success when it came to a Jewish ethnic show. I love Lucy wasn’t touched because it was seen as all-American (but for the unfortunate Cuban husband). The man playing the father, Philip Loeb, a professional stage actor was active in the labor movement; that was enough to get him was black-listed; the show never recovered from his departure and other changes insisted upon. It’s all lies that Americans would not tolerate a divorced person, a Jew or a person from NY on their TV shows. This shows how the channels and big media colluded absolutely with the wave and institution across the US in the fifties of anti-social democratic movements everywhere in every way. They wanted it to be that US people not tolerate Jewish people. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong does tell us that in life Gertrude Berg did not wear housedresses, but swathed herself in silk, furs and jewels.

I did not know this story. I do remember some of the earliest sit-coms, replaying on morning TV — there was one about a daughter and father with a matinee idol as the father (My Little Margie?); another about a secretary (Suzy?); of course I Love Lucy. A Jim Bakkus. Amos ‘n Andy was still playing at night in 1955/56 when we got our TV.

**************************************

Elizabeth Garvie as Elizabeth (1979 BBC P&P, Fay Weldon)

So to conclude, once again watching all the Austen movies (I’ve watched more than these, see my blog with more recent Austen movies, viz., P&P and Zombies, Whit Stillman’s Love and Freindship, Sanditon, &c I own or can rent: in general, just about all Austen movies made for paying cinema are versions of Screwball comedies or high erotic romance, from the 1940s P&P, to McGrath’s 1996 candied Emma, Wright’s 2005 Lawrentian P&P, to Bride and Prejudice and the recent travesty 2019 Emma, not to omit the 1995 Clueless and P&P and Zombies. Just about all the serial TV Austen movies are centrally melodramatic, presenting Austen’s material as familial drama exceptions are the occasional gothic (Maggie Wadey’s 1987 NA) and but once only a genuine ironic but gentle satire, the 1972 Constanduros Emma (it falls down today on the visuals, the way the characters are dressed just won’t do). This is true of the three short 2007 films (MP, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey; Wadey, with a spectacular performance by Sally Hawkins, and Andrew Davies) and the 2009 Emma (Sandy Welch) and Sense and Sensibility (again Davies) Many have been made by women, and even in the cinema versions, one finds that women’s aesthetics predominate: the use of letters, a voice-over female narrator, a pretend diary. The Jane Austen Book Club belongs here.

Romola Garai as Emma practicing after the assembly (2009 BBC Emma, Sandy Welch)

For my part in general I vastly prefer the TV choice of genre, though neither captures Austen’s inimitable mix. Perhaps the closest that ever came to her were a few in the “golden years” of the pre-Thatcher BBC — the 1971 Sense and Sensibility (again Constanduros), the 1979 Pride and Prejudice (Fay Weldon) with its emphatic bringing out of Elizabeth’s inner sensibility and quiet wit and also the 1995 A&E Pride & Prejudice (Andrew Davies) taken as a whole. I am a real fan of Andrew Davies (there are a large number of blogs dedicated to films by him, and one of my published papers is on his two films from Trollope (HKHWR and TWWLN)

Wonderful passing time moment: Jane (Susannah Harker) and Elizabeth (Jennifer Ehle) walking and talking

That’s all from me around the ides of March.

Ellen

On-line: “Her 1st & her last, Northanger Abbey & Sanditon” (Janet Todd) & “Jane Austen’s Feminism & Its Relevance to Girls Today” (Georgina Newton)

Catherine (Felicity Jones) and Isabella Thorpe (Carey Mulligan) in the circulating library at Bath (2008 NA, scripted Andrew Davies

Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) arriving near the sunny beach in Sanditon (2019 Sanditon, scripted by Andrew Davies, among others)

I would bring together Janet Todd’s talk and Georgina Newton’s to suggest that it is a sort of betrayal on Austen’s part to erase all details of books she read, and plays she went to, and not make any of her heroines serious readers or writers. I wish there were a heroine somewhere in her oeuvre who ends up happily without marriage. We will not have such heroines until the mid-20th century.

Friends and readers.

There is a sliver of a silver lining to this frightening pandemic and its necessary quarantining, many lectures and talks many could never reach, virtual conferences, plays operas concerts are turning up on-line. I’ve told how enjoyable I found the Chawton House Lockdown Literary Festival (Part One, Part Two). Chawton House has gone on to set up further talks over the summer, and this past week Jane Todd gave a quietly suggestive talk on Sanditon and Northanger Abbey: A Shared Pen, aka “On her first and last novel.” I spent a wonderful week in Bath in 2002, but never had time or occasion to go to one of the regular talks on Austen that occur there; this weekend the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute sponsored a second talk (I missed the first) on Jane Austen’s feminism and how it relates to girls today on-line. As the presenter said, hitherto they would get a small number of people who lived in and around Bath or made it their business to come from not too far off UK; now they had people a zoom session from literally around the world.

I took notes on both and am glad to record what was said for my memory’s sake and share what I remember for others who are interested. Remember my hands can no longer taken down stenography in the precise way and with the quickness I once did, so these summaries and comments are meant to be only suggestive, the gist of what was said. Both were thoughtful, stimulating talks

Janet Todd: Her first and her last, Northanger Abbey and Sanditon.

Prof Todd began by saying it’s not clear that NA is finished (see my calendar) and Sanditon is an unfinished fragment (no precise calendar is possible).

Austen, she felt, puts all her novels into dialogues with one another: S&S with P&P, the title shows a clear pair; MP with Emma), and the sister-Bath books, NA and Persuasion. Then we have heroines teasing each other across the volumes, themes and types contrasting and paralleling, with heroines within the novels further patterned. Northanger Abbey is far fuller than Sanditon, but Austen was not satisfied with it in 1816 when she put Miss Catherine “on the shelf” and felt she might not take it off again. I add Austen in her letters has a way of identifying a novel with its chief heroine as she sometimes refers to the novel by the heroine’s name.

First of NA draft began in 1794; she returned to it and wrote full length book after or during her second Bath visit of 1797-98. Coming to live in Bath, she starts writing in 1802, and sends it to Crosby to publish as Susan in 1803. It may have taken her a while to realize the book was not coming out from this man’s press. So in 1809 they are moving to Chawton, and she wants to procure ms of Susan to work on it; sneered at by his son, she does not pay the £10 asked back. In a preface written in 1813 she worried parts of this book had become obsolete. She had much admired Burney’s Camilla, mentioned in extant NA, and the heroine finds a copy in a bookshop lending books in ,Sanditon 1817.

Todd also felt Austen revised her manuscripts continually (I agree), and that they all had far more literary allusion and specifics than they had when published. These were pruned away in all but NA and Sanditon. They all also seemed to have had names which connected them to her family, to Austen’s life: The Watsons was The Younger. Well Sanditon was The Brothers. We may imagine (from the dates on the calenders and extant manuscripts) that Sanditon was written not long after Emma, which had been followed by a revision of NA as a similarly satiric text (heroine a romancer). I suspect (Todd did not say this) that Persuasion existed in some draft form earlier on, as that would be the only way to account for its extraordinary depth and suggestive detail (squeezed in between NA and Sanditon). Henry Austen said all her novels were gradual performances.

Henry Tilney (J.J. Feilds) dancing with Catherine at their first ball together

Sidney Parker (Theo James) meeting Charlotte at their first ball together

Some strong over-lappings: Both NA and Sanditon are rich in material items. We have a common sense heroine with parents who say put and are sensible prudent people (contrast the Bennets who are not). The Haywoods and Morlands economize; they have dowries for their daughters, the Morlands a sizable sum to set James up with. They are both off places associated with holiday and fanciful time: an Abbey, a spa town. If it was Henry who gave NA its name; it is a tale of a place, and ditto for James Edward Austen-Leigh’s naming of Sanditon (if he did name it) There is in both a comical sense of adventure; there is no abduction in Austen (though there is one in Marie Dobbs, and also now in Andrew Davies’s TV series, of Miss Georgina Lambe). Davies makes Sidney into useless guardian for Miss Lamb, but from what we are told of Sidney in Austen, it seems that he may have the same kind of slightly jaundiced witty, a teacher. Inadequate chaperons for both heroines in both books.

Some differences, with other novels brought in: Charlotte & Catherine have good hearts and thinking minds, but after that they differ. Catherine is the butt of the NA narrator, at times the naif and does not satirize others; by contrast, Charlotte is capable of he ironic put down, but gives people want they want, supports nutty people with a quietly thinking satiric voice. Austen wants us to take Charlotte’s presence seriously throughout; for Catherine, she is mocked in the first chapter of NA, a heroine device and we are back to that in the penultimate chapter. In Sanditon it’s Charlotte who keeps seeing Clara Brereton as a sentimental victim-heroine type, while Catherine has to be prodded by Isabella into seeing Isabella or the Tilneys into romance figures. Emma, on the other hand, has dangerous ideas about Jane Fairfax (dangerous for Jane) Todd felt that Emma protested too much how comfortable she was seeing so little from her window, while Charlotte is a realist. She does not need to read books to calm her mind the way (say) Anne Elliot does

In all Austen’s novels she works up anxiety for heroine; nasty domineering older woman throughout the fiction is still seen in Sanditon. (I suggest that Mrs Elton is an upstart younger version of this kind of bully.)

I felt that Prof Todd was most interested in showing that Austen is aware that fiction is an interpretive tool; the misreadings of reality by many of her characters bring out a core of rottenness at the heart of this society. I thought she was interested in the alienated eye in the books (sometimes the heroine’s, sometimes from other characters, e.g., Mr Bennet, sometimes Mr Knightley, Mr Darcy, more ironically Henry Tilney (who allows his sister to be left lonely and bullied). There is no one to over-ride the heroines in some of the books; Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor Dashwood, Jane Fairfax (however weak her position), Anne Eliot. The narrative voice is important here. Intrusive in NA. She pointed out how at the end of NA, Mrs Tilney is a felt ghost (I feel that is true of Lady Eliot). So there some things do turn into the tragic.

Todd saw hardly any darkness in Austen’s vision in these books (or across the whole of Austen’s vision). I cannot agree and think there are enough intelligent characters dissatisfied with their lot, and these reflect Austen herself. Remember the Juvenilia. Remember the anguish several of her heroines experience, how much chance is made to be on their side.  I am of the D.W. Harding school, and he has had many critics and readers like myself. Austen had limited material to work with, the conventions of the realistic novel. Only by these could she justify what she was doing to her family. Remember how worried she was about their approval, and how dependent she was on that for publication and the family for an allowance.  Lady Susan remained unpublished; The Watsons was left in a strangely high polished state for the 1st volume; how two of the published novels are not truly finished (NA and Persuasion). That Austen lost her fight with time and illness.

*************************************

Darcy (Colin Firth) meeting Elizabeth Jennifer Ehle) and Mr and Mrs Gardner at Pemberley, he greets them as equals (1995 P&P, scripted Andrew Davies)

Edmund Bertam (Nicholas Farrell) consulting Fanny (Sylvestre Le Tousel), an equal relationship from the beginning (1983 MP, scripted Ken Taylor)

While Janet Todd is a well-established scholar and professor, with many books and articles, an editor of important volumes, retired head of Cavendish College, Cambridge; Georgina Newton is a younger scholar, finished her Ph.D not long ago, with her specialty more sociological, and works as a university lecturer and primary school teacher. She is interested in the education of girls from poorer backgrounds. What she has seen in life makes her passionate to help them. Her Ph.D. consisted of studying working class girls and girlhood, looking at how they imagine their future. She discovered they have a feminist tone and attitudes but don’t know how to articulate their desire, how to vocalize their criticism of their place and given futures in society. What she did was divide Austen’s novels as a group into broad themes and look to see how these girls related to what is found in Austen.

First Ms Newton discussed Austen’s novels seen as a comment on society. Austen was once seen as wholly conservative; since the 1970s some see that she challenges partriarchal structures. Some of her heroines attempt to take charge of their own world. That is seen as feminist by girls today. Life today for girls is a battle with obstacles including class, rank, money, their roles as mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. What choices are they given. In books there was a limitation on what a woman could write. Ms Newton did her research from a socialist feminist perspective, and sees Austen as having a limited subject matter and personal experience. She shows us the restrictions of women’s lives; we see how confined they are, hemmed in, put into the interior of a home. The male goes out far more freely into the world of public work. The girls she studied (asked questions of) fully expected to make sacrifices to be able to do work commensurate with their education. They do not like that they cannot or it is hard to fulfill their personal goals; they don’t like the situation and yet accept it.

Emma (Kate Beckinsale) painting Harriet (Samantha Morton) (1996, scripted Andrew Davies) — Emma a book susceptible of lesbian reading, is relentlessly made heteronormative

Then heteronormative marriage is a key theme for Austen’s books, knitting everything together. Marriage gave the man almost total power over his wife, he could abuse her, take away her children, isolate, imprison her. The choice a woman was given was who to marry, the pressure hidden but ever there. In P&P it’s not that the man needs a wife, but a woman needs a husband. MP Lady Bertram got a far better prize than her dowry merited (ironic openings). Girls 12-13 will deny they are interested in boys; they say they want an education, to get a job before marriage. Marriage has still the fantasy element Beauvoir discussed; the man will take care of you. They could be scathing towards individual boys, bu they assume he will support them when they have children. Yet they seek independence.

The seeking of equal relationships in Austen and her heroines. Elizabeth is looking for a equal partner. This idea is found in Wollstonecraft. Not just equal in their relationship as people, but commanding respect, responsibility. Girls did not want to be “stay-at-home” “mums,” but do something for and by themselves. The girls she was with often talked about their parents’ relationship. Some girls said the father and mother juggled care for the children together; others became cross about how a father or brother left the women in the family to do the work needed at home.

The virgin/whore dichotomy still operative in Austen’s world.  This binary still forms typology; the girls were quite critical of one another or themselves for behaving in an open sexually inviting manner; they dress to escape blame. Ms. Newton did not say this but look at how Lydia Bennet, the two Eliza Williamses, when Jane Fairfax is clandestinely engaged, when Maria Bertram runs away, at the scorn for Isabella Thorpe when betrayed by Captain Tilney — how these characters are treated.

Where Elinor Dashwood (Emma Thompson) tells Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant) that men can work for a living, women are not allowed (1995 S&S, scripted Emma Thompson)

Economic Power in Austen. Men can get jobs, rise in the world through their work; women are impotent. Emma Thompson’s script for S&S brings this out. Only by marrying can a woman move up in the world. Women today make 24% less at similar jobs (she said). The girls were very aware of this economic inequality, and saw the lower salary and positions as defining the limits of what they can do – on top of the sacrifice for those at home.

Colonel Brandon (here David Morrisey) given much authority, respect in S&S (2008, scripted by Andrew Davies)

Wentworth (Ciarhan Hinds) talking to his sister, Sophia Crofts (Fiona Shaw) who challenged on his authority (1995 Persuasion, scripted Nick Dear)

Figures of authority in Austen. Very few authority figures given real respect are women. Women left out of history (NA), literally confined, small spaces and given no or miseducation. Anne Eliot talked of how at home they are preyed upon by their inward selves. Space is provided by a man, and women must accommodate themselves to what he can make or decides. Here they talked of how femininity is a public performance, to be “lady-like” or respectably feminine is the default setting. The girls said it mattered how society saw them; they were angry at the injustice of having to play these roles. Patriarchal structure continues in Austen and men as figures of authority. The girls had felt the experience of being subject to men or seeing women subject to men. Catherine de Bourgh is powerful but within the domestic home and over what patronage she inherited from her husband.

In general, the teenage girls she studied spent a lot of time talking about what makes a strong woman and the finale in books & movies where she is nonetheless married off to a man at the end. They saw that women with the least rank and money had the least economic power unless they marry a powerful man then and now. Marriage nonetheless assumed, heterosexuality assumed in Austen and their spoken lives. Newton suggested that in the 1970s an important theme, an attempt was made to enable women to support other women. Austen offers us a shrewd take on women’s worlds, a world not that far from ours in some essentials. Sisterhood a powerful theme through Austen – what women owe other women. She ended on the thought she had never expected the girls she studied to be as feminist as they were, and to read Austen with them in these ways brings out wonderful insights.

Some thoughts: I did feel there was condescension in some of what Ms Newton said, that she was too aware the girls were “working class” and she “upper middle” as constituting this big difference between her and them. “Their” statements/attitudes show how they are under terrific pressure to marry and to have children. Perhaps Ms Newton is too. We know what huge obstacles these acts will make if they want to have a thorough education and succeed in a job outside their homes. She might have emphasized that more. That Austen does not see marriage and family in that light because Austen sees no opportunity to “get out there” in the first place. That there are other ways of gaining fulfillment — individual self-cultivation (as we see glimpsingly in Lady Russell).

***************************

I would bring together Janet Todd’s talk and Georgina Newton’s to suggest that it is a sort of betrayal on Austen’s part to erase all details of books she read, and plays she went to, and not make any of her heroines serious readers or writers. It is painful how she makes her one reading girl, Mary Bennet, a fool and plain to boot (as if that were why a girl might read a good deal of the time).  I wish there were a heroine somewhere in Austen’s oeuvre who ends up happily without marriage. We will not have such heroines until the mid-20th century.

A rare sympathetic portrayal of Mary Bennet (Tessa Peake Jones) is found in Fay Weldon’s 1979 BBC P&P

***************************
Both sessions had a question and answer period. In the case of Janet Todd, it was a zoom meeting and there was real conversation. People knew or recognized one another. Alas, I had to leave early. I had so appreciated the quiet tone, the measured delivery of the talk but there is no way to convey that so I say it here. At the Bath Institute, the mode was to read aloud the Q&A in chat, with occasionally people voicing their comments or questions. Everyone seemed lively and interested; they were many more observations than there was time for. I can’t remember any to be as feminist as the working class girls Georgina Newton interviewed.

But there will be other sessions this summer from both institutions. I’ll add to that if you donated to Chawton House during the Lockdown festival, you were given a chance to re-see and re-listen to Todd as often as you like until it’s pulled down.  The Bath Institute had trouble with its zoom and everyone who paid for a ticket can now re-see it on the site for a while.

Ellen

Andrew Davies & Co’s Sanditon, Episodes 5-8: Zigzagging into a Conclusion in which Nothing is Concluded

Esther Denham (Charlotte Spencer) and Lord Babbington (Mark Stanley) enthusiastically tie the knot (Sanditon Episode 8)

Mary Parker (Kate Ashcroft) and Charlotte’s adieu (Episode 8) — they had a real friendship

Mary: Despite everything, I do hope you don’t regret coming to Sanditon.
Charlotte: How could I? It’s been the greatest adventure of my life

Pleased and exasperated readers,

I follow on from my first blog review of this series.

Since Esther and Lord Babbington do marry and we see them making love in bed, it’s not quite true that Episode 5 through 8 take us through a series of ratcheted up climaxes as the character zig first this way to no purpose.  There is a slender skein of satire and sensible human feeling spun through the second half, with again an attempt at showing us, the viewers, a joyous time in the natural and romantic worlds:

Episode 5 gives us yet another repeat of Georgiana Lambe (Crystal Clarke) defying Sidney (Theo James) and her governess, Mrs Griffiths (Elizabeth Berrington), with the help of Charlotte (Rose Williams) and a decoy novel, Mary Brunto’s Self Control, more crises over money, ending in all down to the beach for a rousing game of cricket, with Charlotte taking Tom Parker’s [Kris Marshall] place as he characteristically lets everyone down and then tries to cover up and lie, demanding the referee take back a decision

Tom Parker as sore loser demanding a re-decision (Episode 5)

(5)

With good-natured Charlotte taking over and ever compromising decent James Stringer (Leo Suter) accepting the injust recall (Episode 5)

Episode 6 is zag again as Georgiana flees to London, with Sidney and Charlotte hastening after (in hot pursuit? arguing all the way, he Sherlock, she Girl Friday); they rescue Georgiana in a wild high speed chase of coaches from a brothel where she was improbably captured by a unscrupulous man to whom Georgiana’s gambling suitor, Otis, (Jyuddah Jaymes) was in debt and to whom Otis seems to have sold Georgiana! After which all who count return to Sanditon (Otis is out), where again we have a repeat of near bankruptcy (the now utterly disillusioned embittered Mr Stringer still trying to get Tom to pay him and his men), staved off this time by Charlotte’s idea “let’s have a regatta!” to make money, with time out along the way for Babbington and Esther to take a walk by a waterfall. The episode ends with a ball so we can watch Sidney and Charlotte enacting falling in love through elegant dancing:

During the coach chase, Sidney swings his body from one coach to another (Episode 6)

Dancing falling in love — another extravaganza of a ball, the 2nd of the series (Episode 6)

Then Zag in the divagating circles of Episode 7 as we begin move into various water antics, while the subplot of the fierce competition between Edward Denham (Jack Fox) and Clara Brereton (Lily Sacofsky) over who will inherit Lady Denham’s (Anne Reid) wealth as she seems truly to be on the edge of death, becomes absurdly melodramatic: the two fuck on the floor, they frantically seek the will and bargain and burn it. All to no avail, as Lady Denham suddenly gets better, after which she is seen in her usual nagging way commanding Esther to please (and this time marry) Lord Babbington. I have been omitting various walks and drives on the beach for Esther and Babbington (among others), and Sidney and Charlotte’s growing friendship, suddenly cut off by the appearance of Mrs Eliza Campion, now widow, once engaged to Sidney and come to fetch him back …

One appealing scene has Arthur (Turlough Convery) once again being kind to (talking sensibly as no one else does) to Georgiana (Episode 7)

From the water race (Episode 7)

I will not attempt to follow the zigzagging of the great crises of Episode 8, which include yet another extravagant ball, interrupted by a vast fire destroying all Tom Parker’s buildings, the death of old Stringer (caught in said fire), Sidney rushing once again to London for money, only to return to say he got some in the one way left – he has engaged himself again to Eliza. Vic Sanborn’s blog covers this episode step-by-hurried step.

Sidney now adding to all his hero’s deeds, frantic fire-fighting (Episode 8)

Stringer looking up at the fire and realizing his father has died beyond one of the upper windows(8)

Charlotte facing going home, trying to accept that Sidney now cannot marry her

As to the content of the stories, the only thing I regret is the sense Tom has he’ll be all right. He does not deserve to be all right. As written, it seems Charlotte may after all marry Mr Stringer, and he will be her reward as Esther’s is the Babbington as good husband material (she is rescued from the pit of incest and seething envy of Clara) and maybe Sidney will marry Eliza — all pragmatic. Diana Parker is for a moment desolate as all Arthur’s kindness to Georgiana begins in her mind to add up to love, until Arthur reassures her he has no desires for women (is homosexual) so will not marry Miss Lambe. Arthur with his money will go home with his faithful side-kick sister, Diana, so the comic spinster too will now not be alone — as she feared.

Diana and Arthur: she to him: “Home’s best. You’re so right, Arthur!” —

I dislike happy endings unless I am made to believe in them. Most of the time Austen qualifies her happy ending by ironies and other astringent comments or a downright melancholy possibility in the future (as in Persuasion‘s final paragraph). Sentimentality such as in the scene between Tom and his wife, and then Sidney and Charlotte on the cliff grates on me by its untruthfulness. You might say I so long for joy that meretricious substitutes depress me. In life this ending seems to me just what might happen. I can hope that after all Charlotte marries Mr Stringer and, like Esther, learns to love her worthy kind consistent tender hard-working husband (Stringer can still take up the offer of an apprenticeship to an architect in London once he recovers from his grief over his father’s death).

I wouldn’t mind if there was another season, but would be very unhappy if Charlotte did not marry Stringer as I find Sidney has shown himself to be a volatile, difficult and often tyrannizing violent man. As I feel that at no point did the writers make me truly believe in Georgiana or Otis (they were not created as portraits of African people as they really might have been snatched from their environment, given little security, disdained for their race), I don’t know what I want for her. I’m glad Edward is ejected (poetic justice there). I would hope Clara comes back and is reconciled with her aunt (though who would want to live with such a harsh bully?), but if we are to be treated again to these seething melodramatic absurdities I’d just as soon skip Clara doing more hand-jobs and Sidney exposing himself (low points in the series).

*****************************

This remains the best edition for the money — the editor is Margaret Drabble

This edition has a long full introduction (history, interpretation, text)

Again, the important questions to ask are, is this a good movie series? how does it relate to Austen’s Sanditon, its source (with or without continuations). To take the questions in reverse order: as opposed to the first four episodes (and perhaps some of what was planned) just about nothing from these 4 episodes comes from any Sanditon. All that could be taken was taken and now they are trying for further character development, changes and story matter. Much that is developed is melodramatic, cliched, and when written with some attempt at human truth, not given enough time for development. Continuity and smoothness of transition were ignored. The scenes between Sidney and Charlotte as they begin to try to get to know one another and seem to be much attracted needed much more time and words. Charlotte Spencer’s acting of Esther a difficult role was effective, and, given the number of swiftly juxtaposed scenes she was in, there was enough for the actress to convey a miserably abused young woman. Rose Williams’s Charlotte made sense and if more quiet time had been granted to Theo James as Sidney, not so much rapid switching back and forth, he might have conveyed a man whose masculinity and self-respect was threatened as he watches his family go broke. Tom suggests Sidney was in some before time jilted by Eliza; Sidney hints at remorse over his life in Antigua. But so little time was given for any development or nuanced dialogue.

Two of four shots of Charlotte walking along grieving … (Episode 8)

One sign of haste is the Deus ex machina of Lady Susan. She is suddenly there, is never explained.  Why should a high society woman, or (if she) a prince’s mistress take an interest in the obscure Charlotte and help her?

A shot from Chris Brindle’s Sanditon material

A dull fairy tale shot from this series

Perhaps the film-makers (writers, directors) didn’t trust their viewing audience for a moment not to be bored. Its dramaturgy reminded me of the new Poldark. I find the Outlander series vastly superior: why? they will sometimes spend (really) 10 minutes on a interlude; they give time to dialogues to develop and we get real thought from the characters. Not enough time or money was spent on the Sanditon sets: the buildings were uninteresting, shot from afar, with the same stills used over and over again. It was clear a minimum of what was suggestively needed inside was created; the best “sets” were the beaches and water.

It’s a shame since it did seem to me that the conception of the series suggested experimentation. Could they build another kind of Austen adaptation, one which took in contemporary attitudes towards family life, sex, money, and new film-making techniques and audience acceptance of lives not lived according to some narrow set of norms? They did not manage it because the series is not the careful work of art it needed to be – and I have seen many a Jane Austen adaptation have. There is a companion volume. It does not say much about the movie series. Why break a butterfly upon a wheel?

Ellen

Two videos: a review-essay on 4 heritage/faithful adaptations of P&P; Brindle’s musical Sanditon, 1st impressions of Davies’s free TV adaptation, Sanditon

The view from the cliffs of Walton-On-The-Naze, Essex from 27.10, Brindle, Sanditon Film-Of-The-Play (thanks to Chris Brindle for supplying it [Olympus Digital Camera]

Joanna Harker and Jennifer Ehle as Jane and Elizabeth, the central pair of the novel brought out beautifully by so many scenes between the sisters in Davies’s 1995 P&P

Sidney Parker (Theo James) and Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) bypassing one another in Davies’s Sanditon (Part 2)

Dear friends and readers,

A blog on Austen herself is long overdue, so by way of getting back to her texts, I offer tonight two videos on or of film adaptations.

Miss Bingley claims a dance from Darcy at an assembly ball (1940 MGM P&P)

Elizabeth Garvie as Elizabeth (1979 P&P, Fay Weldon)

Over on Janeites@groups.io, Nancy Mayer sent the URL to this interesting (not overlong at all) video: “Book vs. Movie: Pride and Prejudice in Film & TV (1940, 1980, 1995, 2005)” or “Pride and Prejudice by the Book:”

I find it an an excellent video review. It’s not original in approach but each of the four perspectives, and the points made are accurate and as a composition, the whole makes sense. Comparing these four makes sense too because they are (as the narrators says) of the faithful (heritage it’s called sometimes) approach. What makes the video especially good, gives it some distinction is the choice of shots, the scenes and dialogues chosen, and how they are put together. The video-makers had to have watched all movies four over and over again, made very careful slices, and then spent a long time putting together juxtapositions and montages. The one drawback is many of the dialogues from the movies in the clips, are too shortened, not enough of the conversation cited. For example, in Joe Wright’s 2005 P&P, when Claudie Blakeley as Charlotte accusingly says to Elizabeth, before telling Elizabeth of her decision to marry Mr Collins, “don’t you judge” (a few words to this effect), the eloquent speech just afterwards would have brought out not just the quality of the modernization of the language of this one, but the in-depth interpretation offered by the script-writer Deborah Moggach, with some help from Emma Thompson

The incandescent Lawrentian erotic close of Joe Wright’s 2005 P&P, Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFayden as Elizabeth and Darcy (tacked onto the American version)

********************************

Sanditon is now airing on ITV, will in January 2020 be shown on PBS, and the creator, script-writer, Andrew Davies, has a new and freer adaptation of Austen than he’s done before. After watching several of his adaptations over the 2 decades from 1990, we can see how far he has come (going with the era he’s developing a film for) from his first adaptation – he has now “done” P&P, Emma, S&S and Northanger Abbey — all of these very good in their Davies way, a re-vision partly from a male point of view. I note he has said no more and think to myself he is no fan of Mansfield Park and is avoiding the dark melancholy and unfinished state of Persuasion (captured very well in 2007, directed by Adrian Shergold, written by Simon Burke)

Two stills from Andrew Davies’ Sanditon, the first episode, the first glimpses of the place and beach; the second POV Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) and Tom Parker (Kris Marshall)

For some first impressions of the Part 1 Sanditon, and now Part 2

The second video, I offer by contrast: the cabaret style YouTube of the musical Sanditon as it played cabaret style in London this past late July.

I’ve written too many blog-reviews and commentaries on Chris Brindle’s filmed play of Sanditon (heritage style the faithful type), and a couple of the songs, so accompany this one just by a photograph of the English shoreline down south, here unspoilt (uncommercialized)

Here is a still I’ve not put up yet of Charlotte Heywood in comic anguish:

Act I of Brindle’s Sanditon — Amy Burrows as Charlotte Heywood

Part 2 of Davies’s Sanditon — Rose Williams as Charlotte emerging from bathing in English channel

A closing thought: it seems to me that a remarkable variety of types of films (genre, or heritage/appropriation), points of view, film techniques have been used across Austen’s corpus, testifying to how capable the books are of suggesting lines of approach for each era they have been read in.

Ellen