EC/ASECS virtually: Material Culture: Book history, Theater things, Natural History, & “My Journal of the Plague Year” (3)

Faye Castelow as Hellena, Joseph Millson as Willmore and Alexandra Gilbreath as Angellica Bianca in Aphra Behn’s The Rover RSC, 2016

Friends and readers,

My third and last blog on the EC/ASECs conference held last month, virtually. The first centered on the Thursday evening and first panel, Friday morning, where I gave my talk on “A Woman and Her Boxes: Space and Personal Identity.” the second blog included a long talk by the present Senior Curator of Education, Deborah Harper, on a history of collectors’ pianofortes, at the Winterthur Museum. For the the third I cover what papers I heard from Saturday morning until later afternoon. (Unfortunately I had to miss some; the titles of these are found on the website and not included here.) The conference ended with a spell-binding coda speech by Joanne Myers, of Gettysbury College near by, likening each phase of her time enduring the social isolation and closed schools of the pandemic to the phases of Daniel Defoe’s experience of a deadly epidemic in London in his famous partly fictionalized book.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We began with a book history panel. I heard two of the three papers or talks. Joseph Rudman explained and described the Editing Aphra Behn Website. He had a good deal of praise for E-ABIDA that website, E-APBIDA. He described what was in the site and how it was a useful tool as well as handy modern and extensively informed device. The general aim of this website is to explain the fine new Cambridge edition. Cambridge is publishing an 8 volume edition of Behn’s works at the same time. He offered strong praise for what the website is providing (there are 15 different editors), will apparently carry on doing for a while (as support for the edition) and suggested that it might stir others to do likewise.

One of the Burney diaries covering these court years

Elizabeth Powers’ presented her paper, “Books Do More Than Furnish a Room: Goethe and Burney in Their Father’s Library.” She chose these two authors because she felt they overlapped in time and despite showed how their different parentage and culture and their writing at the end of literary traditions produced a kind of public discourse which all who participate in this discourse can share in. Burney was secretive about her reading while Goethe was open. Burney was educated mostly at home; Goethe sent away to schools. But both kept journals and dramatized themselves differently in these. Burney shows herself embedded in her society; while Goethe is apart, he is interested in developing a style he will use later to legitimize what he writes down autobiographically. (My view is Burney is partly fictionalizing herself and doing it very effectively through the use of novelistic techniques.)

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Jonathan Groff as George III in Hamilton: nowhere as hilarious on video as when he is in person in front of an audience

Whole outfit

For “Theatre things” I again heard two of the three, these both thought-provoking papers. Jason Shaffer in his ““The Coat and The Cockade: Costuming Elements in Early Republican Drama” centered his talk on costume, and its importance, how an audience is led to suspend its disbelief while looking at outrageously amusing or dramatic clothes; they are delighted to believe in what they see. Then on stage familiar objects interact with a fantasy world built around these. He chose to discuss scenes where characters discuss their clothes. A costume endows an actor with the power of the character and theatrical realized dream vision. We also identify the actor as him or herself for real; that’s part of the thrill, and the familiarity. Mrs Siddons playing Lady Macbeth is both herself and Lady Macbeth. He mentioned how brilliant were the costumes in Hamilton; how they functioned as emblems of complex ideas made visceral. Watching theater on a computer at home loses the sense of audacity in the actor; bodies matter. Clothes too. Watching movies without others in the audience diminishes the thrill. He gave various examples of characters from the plays of the era on the English and American stages. Then how advertising pictures serve to reproduce our memories of, or create longing to join in, the live shared experience.

A contemporary cartoon of the Brunswick theater collapsing

Matt Kinservik in his “The Suppression of the Royalty Theatre Reconsidered” taught a somber moral. Basically the original patentees (ownership and control of these goes back to the early Restoration years, and their heirs (or those who had bought the patents and were present owners) allowed the group to build their theater and then insisted it be shut down. Matt named which people were involved, the hard and difficult work (negotiations) required, who went at first to support friends and/or associates and the various phases of hard work (including getting the materials) and then the advertising. And then the dismay when it was clear the law would be enforced, and how much money was lost when the audience so wanted more legitimate theater. The moral was the worst choice was opted for by those with the power to shut the others down: They let them build the house and then cracked down.

A famous travel book, described as a delightful classic, filled with description of flora and fauna

Unfortunately I missed two of the three papers on panel on natural history, in travel and other writing. I came in upon people discussing local birds.

The third talk, by Rodney Mader, was quite different, riveting even. His topic was Bartam’s Travels and Its baggage, a book written by a man who was a quaker scientist influenced by the romantics poets and Wordsworth’s Prelude. Mr Mader talked about a post-humanist perspective he found himself developing during the experience of trying to write about such a book and writer during this pandemic. He felt all the injustice (violence, lies) he was seeing going on around him — politically, economically, socially — estranged him from dealing with the material as it was presented by the people at the time. These were books compiled by people who dispossessed others, their methods were dependent on their power over others so the natural science was imposed. The man studying plants without regard to all that was going on around him was the son of an international merchant, a farmer who worked enslaved people. Wm Bartram himself found he could not drive or control the 6 enslaved people he was given; there is no evidence of what became of them (there were six including one pregnant woman).

Apparently, if you look at history on the Internet that includes Bartram, you can find the people involved in organizations he would have belonged to practiced, were for eugenics, and today present sign identifying themselves as for environmental conservation. An Alabama Heritage site from 2011 celebrates Bartram and other explorers and writers in botany; there is a photo of a Black ornithologist on their website.

The pièce de résistance of the whole conference turned out to be Joanne Myers’s concluding Presidential Address: “My Year of the Plague. She began by telling us she had long admired Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year and had taught it several times. She reread it this past year, and it helped calm her to read the incidents as her and her two daughter’s lives unfolded around them. She worked and taught from home, and taught her daughters too. She delivered a talk whose emotional trajectory followed that of Henry Foe (the chief character of Defoe’s Journal). Her tone was quiet, controlled, intense; she said she seemed to devour space and time in matter of fact prose. She saw the mistrust, the isolation, and sometimes people trying to help one another. At one point she said she was trying to provide service against the terrors’ dislocations. She teaches at Gettysburg herself so was surrounded by pro-Trump types and (I imagine) made the atmosphere everywhere outside her home more fraught. Defoe himself (in my view too) is a de-mystifier; it was noteworthy to her that Defoe remained a private man amid all he recorded.

Next year EC/ASECS hopes to meet for real or physically at the Winterthur museum in Delaware.

Ellen

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EC/ASECS virtually: Material Culture: Austen then & now; women in the world; keyboards at the Winterthur Museum & Library (2)

An eighteenth-century mask

Friends and readers,

Another report on the papers and panels at another virtual conference, this one the fall EC/ASECS, to have been held at the Winterthur Museum, with the umbrella subject matter: “Material Culture.” Happily for each time slot there was only one panel, so I missed very little. On Thursday evening, we began our festivities online with Peter Staffel’s regularly held aural/oral experience. Excerpts from two comedies were dramatically read, and various poems. I read two sonnets by Charlotte Smith, and probably read with more feeling the first, No 51, because I thought of Jim and how I have dreamed of going to the Hebrides and got as far as Inverness and a drive around the northern edge of Scotland where across the way I saw the isle of Skye (or so I tell myself it was):

Supposed to have been written in the Hebrides:

ON this lone island, whose unfruitful breast
Feeds but the summer shepherd’s little flock,
With scanty herbage from the half cloth’d rock
Where osprays, cormorants and seamews rest;
E’en in a scene so desolate and rude
I could with thee for months and years be blest;
And, of thy tenderness and love possest,
Find all my world in this wild solitude!
When Summer suns these northern seas illume,
With thee admire the light’s reflected charms,
And when drear Winter spreads his cheerless gloom,
Still find Elysium in thy shelt’ring arms:
For thou to me canst sov’reign bliss impart,
Thy mind my empire—and my throne thy heart.

The next morning at 9 am we had our first panel, Jane Austen Then and Now, chaired by Linda Troost, and I read my paper “A Woman and Her Boxes: Space and Personal Identity in Jane Austen”.

Next up was Elizabeth Nollen’s “Reading Radcliffe: the importance of the book in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. After the publisher had held onto the manuscript for six years, she wrote an angry letter, but he refused to return the manuscript unless she paid back what he had paid her brothers (£10); her family wouldn’t fork out the money. Nollen retold Udolpho in a way that emphasized its comforting and inspirational components. Her argument was Austen was re-writing Udolpho to make Radcliffe’s book into a bildingsroman. In Northanger Abbey we go with a heroine on a journey into womanhood. Henry and Eleanor Tilney, kind and unselfish friends, invite Catherine to back with them to their ancestral home. Ms Nollen (to my surprise) at the close of her paper inveighed against Catherine marrying Henry, finding in him much offensive man-splaining, seeing him as a man who will domineer over her. Catherine is exchanging one boss for another was her take, and that Catherine’s new future life is that of a dependent. (I feel that at the novel’s end, we are expected to feel how lucky Catherine is to have married such an intelligent, cordial, for the most part understanding man — and at the young age of 18, but of course it could be the narrator’s closing words are wholly ironic.)

Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland escaping her friends and social duties by reading (paratexts from the ITV Northanger Abbey)

B. G. Betz’s “Pride and Prejudice and Its Sequels and Variations: a Gift to the Humanities.” She began by asserting that for Elizabeth Bennet is the favorite heroine of most readers, that Elizabeth and her novel provoke a passionate response in people. Why else the endless retellings of the E&D story? I’d say this is certainly so in the film adaptation Lost in Austen. (Here’s the plot of Pride and Prejudice to refresh your mind.) She then told us she travels around to libraries doing Library Hours (reading books to younger children) with the aim of getting more people reading, reading Jane Austen and also all the modernizations and adaptations, and appropriations of Austen books into written sequels, other (related?) romances, and many many movie adaptations. BG emphasis was “As long as I get them reading!” She probably is alive to Austen’s distinctive language and intelligent text, but what she aims out is to re-engage common readers with books, using Austen and romance. She went over several lists of sequel-writers (naming them, citing titles), told of which characters did chose this or that as central to the story line of a particular novel or series of novels, and the dates of publication. (I sometimes wonder if I miss out because I so rarely read sequels, and admit that the most recent Austen adaptations [heritage as well as appropriation] do not attract me because the film-makers seem no longer to assume the viewership includes a sizable population who have read Austen’s novels).

The morning’s second panel, Women in the World: Shaping Identity through Objects and Space included four papers. I can offer only the gist of three of them.
The chair, Andrea Fabrizio’s paper, ““Small Town Travel and Gossip: Earthly Obstacles and Spiritual Agency in The Narrative of the Persecutions of Agnes Beaumont, was about a slender book, that because of my lack of knowledge of the topic and perspective, was difficult for me to follow. It’s short (only 50 pages) and vindicates a woman’s right to a spiritual choice. The general issue is one of control. A young woman’s father will not allow her to belong to a Bunyan-like church group, during their perpetual struggle, he dies and she is accused of murder (!) and then acquitted.

Ruth G. Garcia’s “‘Affect nothing above your rank’: Social Identity and the Material World in Conduct Books for Servants” focused on Edgeworth’s Belinda as a novel. Ms Garcia sees the novel as one which manifests and explores anxiety over servants sharing space with their employer (Belinda is Lady Delacour’s companion; another servant is insolent). The novel might seem to uphold conduct books which insist on controlling servants (in among other areas dress), but we are shown how servants have little right to live. Lady Delacour’s is a troubled marriage and accedes finally to Belinda’s influence. By contrast, Lady Anne Perceval is an exemplary character who is her husband’s partner. She cited Carolyn Steedman’s Labours Lost, an important book about women servants. (I have read essays which interpret this novel quite differently, seeing it as a lesbian text, as about a mother-daughter relationship.)

Xinyuan Qiu’s “Affection or Affectation: An Alternative Way of Reading Pamela Provided by Hogarth’s London Milkmaids” is described by its title: she used Hogarth’s satiric depictions of milkmaids (which do resemble the ways Richardson dresses Pamela) to argue that the text is salacious but not to satirize or critique it in the manner of Fielding but rather to argue that the milkmaid figure used erotically challenges traditional hierarchies.

A drawing by Hogarth featuring a milkmaid — this is a more chaste image than several of those examined

I could take in more of Elizabeth Porter’s ““Moving Against the Marriage Plot: London in Burney’s Cecilia because I have studied Burney’s Cecilia, as well as her journal writing (and of course read Evelina). This seemed to me a study of Cecilia as an instance of urban gothic used as a critique of the way this young woman is treated. As defined by Ms Porter, urban gothic, associated with the Victorian gothic, presents a state of disorientation in urban spaces; male authors tend to write this kind of gothic (I thought of Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White and No Name.) It is a development out of Radcliffe (whom I remember Burney commenting upon in her journals). Cecilia ends in a psychic breakdown running around the London streets, near the novel’s close she experiences horror, imprisonment, living in darkness. In marriage laws and customs where women lose personhood in marriage, which provides a happy ending which seems more like succumbing. We are left with feelings of stress, strain, haunted regret, resignation.

I was able to attend to only one of the papers on the third afternoon panel, a miscellany of papers, “Susan Howard’s “‘Born within the Vortex of a Court’: Structural Methodologies and the Symbology of Possessions in Charlotte Papendiek’s Memoirs. This was a reading of Papendiek’s 1760s Memoir. Her father had been a servant in Queen Charlotte’s court, and Charlotte constructs a dual narrative telling about her private life as a child and grown woman at this court. Ms Howard read material realities as manifesting aspects of social realities. Things, and especially gifts, are emissaries between people. She discussed Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of the queen and of this Assistant Keeper of the Queen’s wardrobe (as well as Queen’s reader). After her talk (during the discussion) Ms Howard talked about the problem of gauging how far what Papendiek wrote was literal truth, but suggested if it wasn’t, the journals are as valuable for telling us of the values, norms and general events at the court. (I feel the same holds true for Burney’s journals and diaries, which have recently been shown by, among others, Lorna Clark, to be often highly fictionalized.)

I came in at the end of Jessica Banner’s “Women behind the Work: Re-Thinking the Representation of Female Garment Workers in Eighteenth-Century London,” which was a study of the realities of the lives of female garment workers in 18th century London (methods of production, pay, who and where were they located?, their re-organization between the 1790s and 1815). There is a Liverpool directory, an alphabetical list of names.

The second day ended with an hour-long very enjoyable talk by Deborah Harper, Senior Curator of Education, Winterthur Museum and Library, working there for over 30 years. She took us on a tour of the keyboard instruments in the Dupont collection at the museum, focusing on 18th century elements and what seems to be one of the most cherished treasures of the collection, a 1907 Steinway owned and played upon by Mrs Ruth du Pont (nee Wales, 1889-1967); her husband, Henry Francis Dupont was the Dupont who developed the museum into the premier collection of American decorative art it is today. Although not mentioned by Ms Harper, his father, Henry Algernon du Pont, was a US senator for Delaware, a wealthy Republican businessman and politician who promptly lost his seat when senators were no longer appointed but elected. I wouldn’t presume to try to convey the rich detail and explanations in this talk (accompanied by interesting images). Ms Harper covered what are harpsichords, pianofortes, owners, collectors, specific histories of the different keyboards, how they fit into the culture of their specific place and era, stories of estates, individual players, where the keyboard has been and is today in the buildings. One group of people mentioned, the Lloyd family who owned Wye house and Wye plantation, owned large groups of enslaved people, among them Frederick Douglas.

The longest section revolved around the Steinway at present in a beautiful front room, and how it was loved and used by Ruth du Pont, who, Ms Harper said, loved musicals and Cole Porter songs. Ruth du Pont is described on the Winterthur website as “the Lady of the house,” “a social figure, talented musician, and hostess of four houses” and “devoted wife” and mother. “Photographs and documents from Winterthur’s vast archive document Mrs. du Pont’s life of hospitality, music, and travel.” I found elsewhere a full and franker life of high privilege than you might expect (with many photographs). She had to endure various tensions throughout her younger years (in each life some rain must fall), and later in life would go into angry tirades at FDR as “a traitor to his class.” So she would have resented my having social security to live upon? It also seems that her husband didn’t like the color of her piano; he wanted to paint it gray-green to match the 18th century colors of some of his collected furniture. When he decided against this (wisely, or was persuaded not to), he kept the piano from view for a long time (placing it for example in a concert hall for a time).

Used for Christmas concerts today

One of two blogs,
Ellen

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

A Review of Art and Artifact, ed Anna Battigelli

Tonight I am also (with this review)

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

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

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

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

Jane Austen:

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

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

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

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

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

Ragazza che legge: A Girl Reading by Jean Raoux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rachel Ruysch

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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What’s a “nice girl” like Jane Austen have to do with that radical-aesthete-anarchist, Félix Fénéon?

Paul Signac (1890), Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon (1861-1944)

1946 reprint

[After the crushing of the Paris Commune, 1871] Between 25 thousand and 35 thousand men, women, and children were summarily executed, their bodies burned in piles or tossed into mass graves. There were more executions that week than in the three-year Reign of Terror during the French revolution, (JUHalperin, Félix Fénéon, p 26)

The judge: ‘You were seen talking to anarchists behind a lamppost.’
Fénéon: Can you tell me, your honor, where behind a lamppost?’ — (SFigura, ICahn, PPeltier, “The Anarchist & the Avante Garde,” MOMA, Fénéon, 21

“Drawing near the abbey”, Catherine’s “impatience” “returned in full force:” “and every bend in the road was expected with solemn awe to afford a glimpse of its massy walls of grey stone, rising amidst a grove of ancient oaks, with the last beams of the sun playing in beautiful splendour on its high Gothic windows” … [but the next morning] [Catherine] was struck, however, beyond her expectation, by the grandeur of the abbey, as she saw it for the first time from the lawn. The whole building enclosed a large court; and two sides of the quadrangle, rich in Gothic ornaments, stood forward for admiration. The remainder was shut off by knolls of old trees, or luxuriant plantations, and the steep woody hills rising behind, to give it shelter, were beautiful even in the leafless month of March. Catherine had seen nothing to compare with it …” (NA, II:5 [20], 152; II:7 [22], 168)

Catherine (Felicity Jones) and Henry (J. J. Feilds) coming up to the abbey (2009 NA, scripted Andrew Davies)

Friends and readers,

It’s not often I come across an article in the New Yorker where I feel I know something the writer of the article does not seem to know — and I may have in Peter Schjeldahl’s “Out of the Dark,” a review of two presently languishing exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art, one on the “premier photographyer of the human drama of the Great Depression,” that is to say, Dorothy Lange, and the other on a “shadowy French aesthete and political anarchist (bomb thrower, in his later years a communist), “sometime art critic, dealer, collector, journalist, editor,” Félix Fénéon. More likely he just thought it supremely unimportant that Fénéon in my view (and that of others) wrote the best translation of a novel by Jane Austen into French to date.

It was in 1894 while awaiting trial for having participated in the murder bombing of groups of civilians, that Fénéon is said to have been bored, and searching the prison library found some old school books, a “few volumes of George Sand and Northanger Abbey. “Women writers, like women visitors, ” were of course considered “innocuous” (JUHalperin). A friend brought Fénéon a dictionary, and “he began patiently to translate the English novel. He was soon happily involved in rendering the author’s pithy style and keen insights into human nature” (JUHalperin, 284).

But maybe not. Maybe Schjeldahl didn’t know. I turned over all 204 pages of the book MOMA has produced to accompany its exhibition, Félix Fénéon, the Anarchist and the Avante Garde, and nowhere do I find this considerable incident: it’s not nothing to translate a novel by Austen and then get it published. Schjeldahl refers to himself as simply “Googling” these (including Lange) “brilliant subjects,” but of course I assume he read the MOMA book because he singles out for emphasis the same topics: Fénéon’s wit, that he was (ironically) chief clerk of the Ministry of War at the time he was involved with what Schjeldahl and others call terrorists (they saw themselves as revolutionaries; more recently the French have seen themselves as a resistance, and now yellow jackets), his importance as an editor & reviewer of central periodicals in Paris, the immense collection of art objects he amassed — and his ability to be effortlessly wittily startling and cruel in words.

I could write a letter to the New Yorker, but lack ambition and suspect it would not be published.

So instead I shall re-print my short essay written some years ago for Ekleksographia Wave Two, a poetry magazine, for October 2009, a special issue on translation. The periodical was online, and I had my essay linked into my website, but alas, the link has gone bad (what happens is somehow some “rogue” page supersedes mine — and I’ve no idea how to fix this). I did know about this, and at the time put the essay (before I lost it) on academia.edu as “Jane Austen in French.” But it has gotten very little attention there (61 views, 9 readers).

For a reasonable while (and I’ve not given over yet) I was studying French translations of Austen, and I read part of one Italian one L’Abbazia di Northanger by Liana Borghi.  I am very fond of NA, and have written a number of papers and blogs on the book, the gothic, and its two film adaptations, on women’s friendships in the book, one even published in Persuasions. During this time I made it my business to study a couple of French studies of Austen (see Pierre Goubert, 1, 2,) and I once sent off a proposal to discuss at a Chawton House conference the contemporary French translation of Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho by Austen and Radcliffe’s contemporary, Madame de Chastenay.

Be all this as it may, my argument for the superiority of Fénéon’s text is contextualized by my reading of French translations of Sense and Sensibility, which I think highly of, or are of interest because of the author-translator (Isabelle de Montolieu).

In a nutshell what interested me (why I felt compelled to write a short essay) is that this witty anarchist saw in Austen a fellow spirit, a fellow subversive. Fénéon’s translation itself picks up on it as a bookish book, does justice to the deeply picturesque elements of Austen’s texts as well as imitating interior voices he is hearing that persuade us believable characters are before us.

Catherine and Isabella Tilney (Carey Mulligan) in the circulating library talking of books … (same movie, only I’ve lightened the still)

Jane Austen in French

like the original poet, the translator is a Narcissus who . . . chooses to contemplate his own likeness not in the spring of nature but in the pool of art — Renato Poggioli

Why would one want to produce a cauliflower in wool? . . . The desire to reproduce one medium in terms of another . . . is a curious,
wide-spread and deep-rooted human need. It may or may not be at the mysterious root of art — Margaret Drabble (1)

I enjoy reading translations of books I love into one of the two languages I can read besides English: French and Italian, and I had the real delight this summer of reading Félix Fénéon’s Catherine Morland, a fin-de-siecle translation of Austen’s Northanger Abbey (first published 1818). It is one of a very few translations of Austen to be remembered as by another author and the only one I have seen described as excellent, as just about up to Austen’s own.

As I began to read, I felt I should put Austen’s English text aside, forget it insofar as I could, and read Fénéon for limpid, lapidary verve he was offering. Alas, I couldn’t quite. I know and love Austen’s novel too well, and would find myself aware that this phrase or that paragraph was omitted, and wanted to check Fénéon against Austen. Then as I came to the later gothic parts of Austen’s book, the sparkling wand of delicate irony was lost for a while. So although by that time I had a copy of Austen’s text under Fénéon’s on my lap as I read, I picked up a third text, Pierre Arnaud’s L’Abbaye de Northanger (Pleiade, 2000), and read that. Well, for the whole of Arnaud’s I found a text consistently close to the original, one whose vocabulary and syntax imitated Austen’s; if a little stilted or pedantic, Arnaud wrote with much more expansive or generous (longer) sentences than Fénéon’s. These allowed Arnaud to keep the anguished and troubled tones in Austen’s English female gothic too. Ought I to have read it apart from Austen’s? Perhaps, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the urge and my pleasure was in seeing the English transposed to another system of sounds and meaning as I went along, rather like the pleasures offered by closely faithful film adaptation (for example, Peter Bogdanovich’s 1974 film Daisy Miller).

Fénéon’s method is close to what Dryden termed paraphrase (“translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense”) with very occasional and subtle forays into imitation (“assum[ing] a liberty not only to vary from words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion”).(2) What Feneon was doing was reliving the experience Austen had lived, and finding analogous words in French to convey this as he went along. He did not translate by conjuring up a new text word for word, but found the words that came naturally to him in his idiolect as he re-enacted, re-saw precisely Austen’s imagined experience, all the while keeping his eye on the text’s movement before him. So we have an older male outside looking in, touched and amused, but not himself feeling within the gut the intense importance of small things and sense of vulnerability the female Austen experiences. There is a kind of throbbing delight and anxiety in passages given Catherine by Austen; an acid and even quiet hatred for the outrages of common life, and resentment of certain kinds of stupidities in women and bullying in men, which Austen feels are overlooked as unimportant or, worse yet, rewarded. Fénéon is slightly but persistently more distant. He wrote Catherine Morland while he was in prison charged with anarchy and possibly murder (the question was, Did he engineer the bombing of a restaurant in Paris where people were hurt and killed?). He was allowed this text in his cell together with a dictionary because at the time Austen was seen as utterly apolitical, harmless, and it’s her detachment and the sheer aesthetic playfulness of the picturesque he recreates (3)

Pierre Arnaud’s method veers between Dryden’s metaphrase (“turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one language into another”) and paraphrase, and he achieves a remarkable balance between gothicism and witty yet serious enough social and psychological realism. His sentences can be involuted, the feel pedantic, but he rarely loses a subtle implication – which Fénéon growing impatient, may well skip rather than lose his hold on a vital stream of intensely captured feeling. I tried Arnaud’s translation against a third, Josette Salesse-Lavergne’s Northanger Abbey (Christian Bourgeois, 1980), and found Salesse-Lavergne’s is the weakest because she doesn’t do the concentrated work metaphrase demands (her paraphrase is so weak that I found errors) and shows no evidence of even careful thought about the zeitgeist of the text (as Arnaud shows in his “Notice”).

One swallow does not a summer make, so I tried three analogous Sense and Sensibility texts. First, Isabelle de Montolieu’s Raison et Sensibilite; ou les deux manieres d’aimer (1815, just 4 years after the appearance of Austen’s). Montolieu was more popular, better known than Austen; I had edited her first novel (which influenced Austen), and this translation had recently been republished (Archipoche, 1996)(4). I had read castigations of Montolieu’s text, and discovered that she translated so freely she often leaves the original story altogether, making up her own incidents, changing what’s happening even radically, especially towards the end, reminding me of most film adaptations. Dry irony becomes trembling sensibility; truth to experience turns back into romance cliches. So, with my experience of Arnaud in mind and the Pléiade book to hand, I turned to Pierre Joubert’s Le Coeur et La Raison for contrast, and found his adherence to a balance between metaphrase and paraphrase, a matter of a man carefully turning sentences from one medium (English) into another (French). Joubert is a persuasive essayist, and makes a good argument for changing Austen’s title as the English heavily-connotative complex words have no equivalent terrains in French, and his book is sometimes very witty, but thoughtful linguistic expertise turned to rendering a book academically respected does not make for a living text. Again I switched, to Jean Privat’s Raison et Sentiments (Christian Bourgeois, 1979), and was relieved and then absorbed by the directness, force, and clarity of a text genuinely rooted in contemporary spoken French which nonetheless kept to Austen’s syntax and an Anglo-influenced vocabulary.

There is an argument (followed in a recent Russian translation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice) that a translator (like a modern screenplay writer) should attempt some combination of the language of the author’s day with our own. Well, this older contemporary tone, connotation and syntax (even across languages), Montolieu offers. When she translates closely (and she performs metaphrase for long stretches), her tone becomes uncannily like Austen’s, and yet like Fénéon, her text is imbued by a spirit of her own where she is either re-enacting, or reacting instinctively against, her source. I’ve read an (anonymous) 1808 translation into English of Germaine de Stael’s 1807 Corinne, ou l’Italie, and this 1808 text has Montolieu’s power to bring a modern English reader closer to the older French text than any modern translation, even Sylvia Raphael’s Corinne, or Italy (Oxford 1998), a moving work of art out of Stael’s: like Arnaud accurate, like Privat direct, and beyond that, like Feneon (except, revealingly, for the female gothic) manifesting an unembarrassed understanding of, identification with, Stael from beginning to end.

I have translated the poetry of two women poets, Vittoria Colonna (1492-1547) and Veronica Gambara (1485-1550), and written an essay on translation in general and my own methods.(5) I believe great translations emerge when the new artist imaginatively re-enacts what she finds in the previous text in her modern idiolect: you must be true to your own inner spirit and be seeking to express it through choosing a deeply empathetic text which you try to experience as if you had written it; at the same time, you forget yourself, so absorbed are you in contemplation and re-enactment. Poggioli and Drabble would put it that a translator tries to “transpose” another “aesthetic personality” into “the key of their own” and “escapes from the self” through an attentive work in a medium they also love.6 What I enjoy in strong translation is its re-creative and revelatory power.

Catherine savoring the gothic room (again 2007 NA, still lightened)

Notes

1 Renato Poggioli, “The Added Artificer,” On Translation, ed. Reuben Brower (NY: Galaxy, 1959):139; Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet, A Personal History with Jigsaws (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009): 290.
2 John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, ed. George Watson (NY: Everyman, 1964):1:268.
3 Joan Ungersma Halperin, Félix Fénéon, Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), 169-70, 284, 307. It was begun 1894, published 1898. Fénéon reworked his text with the help of an English poet, John Gray.
4 See Isabelle de Montolieu and Caroline de Lichtfield 
5 “On Translating Vittora Colonna and Veronica Gambara”
6 Poggioli, 139; Drabble, 253.

See also Lucy Cousturier (1870/8-1925): artist, memoirist, a life outside conventional society

Ellen

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“Hardly any women at all:” Jane Austen’s inclusions of women in her History of England

Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth wife (for the origin and my first adumbration of this perspective: What she said about Tudor queens)

I read history a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all … Catherine Morland, Northanger Abbey, I:14)

Friends and readers,

After all, for my first 2020 blog I have an innovative perspective on Jane Austen’s Juvenilia to share. For the coming JASNA to be held in St Louis, Missouri, in which the topic is to be Jane Austen’s Juvenilia, I sent in a proposal where I said I would demonstrate that in her The History of England, Jane Austen meant to burlesque the norms shaping the way “history, real solemn history” was written in her era, and to include and to defend not just infamous women, but forgotten and underappreciated ones. Her text goes beyond vindicating Mary Queen of Scots, and the Stuart kings and the English house of York, well beyond parodying Oliver Goldsmith’s popular history. She is a partisan defender of women, and places them in her text at every opportunity given, and ostentatiously refuses to make numinous figures out of powerful men.

This is a development from that proposal.

Mary Queen of Scots, contemporary portrait by Federico Zuccai or Alsonso Sanchez Coello

From 2018 Mary Queen of Scots (directed by Rosie Rourke); we see Ismael Cruz Cordova, Maria Dragus, Izuka Hoyle, and Saoirse Ronan as Mary and her ladies and David Rizzo: the most recent image

The effect of Austen’s attitude, tone, details, parody and insistent bringing in of women is to go beyond Tudor and Stuart history as it is usually found in books published in the 18th century: say Robertson’s and Hume’s histories of the Tudor and Stuart period, and what is found in Catherine Macaulay’s Whiggish history. I was going to quote from these works to show the way they are male-dominated, with a perspective that is top down and (ultimately) Big Man history even if the culture and social and economic life of the country is not ignored. This is a little book which should be included in the history of history writing by women.

The startling thing is how Austen surprises even the alert reader by how much she knows about obscurer women and men, and must herself have read in an alienated way, against the grain of her courses to get beyond common bogus distortions. The only cited date is a letter between Anne Boleyn and King Henry: that’s easy, it comes from Goldsmith. But one concise sentence referring to Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth wife, is packed with suggestion: “The King’s last wife contrived to survive him, but with difficulty effected it” (Austen, Juvenilia, Cambridge ed P. Sabor, 181-82). Parr did not just passively luckily outlive the king; she had to actively thwart his attempt to arrest her when her intelligent writing and political and religious views threatened (as Anne Boleyn had done) to go beyond what he meant to do by taking over the Church of England. Yet where can she have learned that Parr actively rescued herself — she is not included in Shakespeare or the better known plays about Perkin Warbeck (by John Ford).

Portrait of Anne Boleyn (1507-London, 1536), Queen of England. Painting by unknown artist, oil on panel, ca 1533-1536

From 2003 The Other Boleyn Girl scripted by Philippa Lowthorpe: Jared Harris and Jodha May as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn

There is an excellent book on Katherine Parr’s life, reading, writing, intelligence by Linda Porter: Katherine the Queen, which I would have used. Also other good biographies of Renaissance women, of which there are many. Yes it’s true that Austen could not have time-traveled and read this book; rather she has to have read with alertness all the comments, assertions and counter-assertions on Tudor women in the romances and various histories of the era. In her letters in her later years she writes of reading history aloud with Fanny and Cassandra; she would have read the kinds of sources that went into Sophia Lee’s The Recess and later Walter Scott’s The Abbot and Monastery. Austen makes fun of the historical informative impulse in Scott after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, but in this earlier work we see she went for the same kind of material we find referred to offhand by Charlotte Smith and Anne Radcliffe (in her 1794 A Journey Made in the Summer [Germany into Italy was planned). Radcliffe has read astonishingly in the annals of the places she visits. Scott did not write out of a vacuum. It interests me how avid a reader Austen was of Scott, obtaining each volume as it came out (including, she was in time for, The Antiquarian)

Early depiction of Elizabeth Tudor (I) attributed to William Scrots

Glenda Jackson as the young Elizabeth, just come to the throne (1971 BBC serial drama)

A second context for her depiction of women in this young woman’s parodic didactic text will be her letters where she explains why she takes the adamant tone she does when defending a woman. In a letter to Martha Lloyd she remains fiercely on the side of “Poor Woman,” Queen Caroline of Brunswick “because she is a woman & because I hate her husband. She admits Caroline’s flaws but resolves nevertheless “to think that she would have been respectable if the Prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first … “

— I suppose all the World is sitting in Judgement upon the Princess of Wales’s Letter,” Poor Woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband — but I can hardly forgive her for calling herself “attached & affectionate” to a Man whom she must detest — & the intimacy said to subsist between her & Lady Oxford is bad. — I do not know what to do about it; — but if I must give up the Princess, I am resolved at least always to think that she would have been respectable, if the Prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first. —-(Austen’s Letters, ed LeFaye, 4th edition, 16 February 1813, 216-17).

I will argue the attitude of mind here, is one which pays attention to the original perpetrator of abuse, notices how harassment which claims love as its motive is a form of torment that inflicts misery on even unsympathetic women (Elizabeth I, 185-86). I counted no less than 18 women (Catherine, French wife of Henry V; Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI; Joan of Arc; Edward IV’s bethrothed, Bona of Savoy [referred to, not named) and wife, Elizabeth Woodville, his mistress Jane Shore; Richard III’s wife, Anne (whom she denies was murdered by her husband); Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth of York, his daughter Margaret who married the Scottish James V; five of Henry VIII’s six wives, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Katherine Parr [not named referred to as “the king’s last wife”], Lady Jane Grey, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scot, Anne of Denmark). Some are not named and our narrator frets then that she does not know the woman’s name.

Hers is a history with plenty of women in it. I intended to go over and use the marginalia to Austen’s copy of Goldsmith’s History of England, and the copious notes found in the Cambridge Juvenilia volume edited by Peter Sabor. Austen’s History of England is an exuberant but also richly intertextual work.

From excellent forgotten 1970 Shadow of the Tower (first episode by Rosemary Anne Sisson): James Maxwell as Henry VII and Norma West as Elizabeth of York (also a poet)

I would have used Thomas Penn’s The Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England; here is a YouTube, 15 minutes of an hour long lecture by Penn on the “most notorious invader of England” (he whole available on Amazon Prime) because he had so little right to the throne: Henry Owen Tudor

Finally I proposed to have some fun showing how Austen’s extraordinarily alert iconoclastic stances (as when she treats historical characters in the same way she does fictional ones by showing how she anticipates some of the more interesting film history and adaptations of our own era. I was going to bring in my laptop and show clips from older and recent film history and adaptations of novels set in the Renaissance era.

But my proposal was rejected and so now I’ll not do any of this. What a shame! It is speculation, not evidence. Meant to stir the mind to see Austen in another light as well as her era. Also to be feminist. I could have read part of Elizabeth of York’s (1465-1503) “sestina,” one of the earliest poems in English by a woman (see one of my earliest foremother poet essays):

I pray to Venus

My heart is set upon a lusty pin;
I pray to Venus of good continuance,
For I rejoice the case that I am in,
Deliver’d from sorrow, annex’d to pleasance,
Of all comfort having abundance;
This joy and I, I trust, shall never twin –
My heart is set upon a lusty pin

I pray to Venus of good continuance,
Since she has set me in the way of ease;
My hearty service with my attendance
So to continue it ever I may please;
Thus voiding from all penseful diease,
Now stand I whole far from all grievance –
I pray to Venus of good continuance,

For I rejoice the case that I am in,
My gladness is such that giveth me no pain,
And so to sorrow never shall I blynne,
My heart and I so set ’tis certain
We shall never slake, but ever new begin
For I rejoice the case that I am in,

Deliver’d from sorrow, annex’d to pleasance,
That all my joy I set as aught of right,
To please as after my simple suffisance
To me the goodliest, most beauteous in sight;
A very lantern to all other light,
Most to my comfort on her remembrance–
Deliver’d from sorrow, annex’d to pleasance,

Of all comfort having abundance;
As when I think that goodlihead
Of that most feminine and meek countenance
Very mirror and star of womanhead;
Whose right good fame so large abroad doth spread,
Full glad for me to have recognisance –
Of all comfort having abundance.

This joy and I, I trust, shall never twin –
so that I am so far forth in the trace,
My joys be double where others are but thin,
For I am stably set in such a place
Where beauty ‘creaseth and ever willeth grace,
Which is full famous and born of noble kin–
This joy and I, I trust, shall never twin.

Note the puns.

The JASNA members would have loved this paper. I got the usual hypocrisy over how there were so many applicants and how they had to turn away so many excellent proposals for papers of merit. Papers are also chosen by who is giving the paper and what kinds of people the organizers want, who they are connected to, how they relate to Austen. My hunch is they hardly looked at it. If you tell me it is too learned, I will laugh at you. Much of it a stretch. And meant to be fun. But yes grounded in the era and Austen’s texts and those she liked to read.

Why do I not write it up and send it to Persuasions? the two organizers asked. Ah yes.  Right.  As they well know, because Persuasions prefers papers given at the conference. As my daughter, Izzy, said to me last year when we did not make some final cut to join 800+ at the JASNA in Williamsburg (even though we were quite early in registering online), what do we pay this yearly fee for? She belongs to two organizations, one professional, American Library and another which professes to be a combination of personal interest (fans) and scholars; in both cases your money guarantees you a space at the AGM. I suggested it was the periodical and newsletter.

Ellen

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10 books that have influenced me most in my life? Julie de Lespinasse & Marie Anne du Deffand

Watteau, The Serenade

Day 8/10 of books that influenced me, had a discernible impact. (For Day 7/10, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale). When I was around 17 or 18 years old, I was in a used bookstore in Manhattan called the Argosy. It was on 59th Street, near the corner of Lexington Avenue. How I got there I don’t know but someone must’ve told me about it — it seemed to be about 5 floors high with very old elevators (the kind that had gates that seemed near to falling on you), and each floor was filled with bookcases of dusty books, many very old and decidedly uninviting, some falling apart.

It was there I first came across Fanny Burney, in a one volume and in a three volume edition of her letters (brown, falling apart) and I have told that story in the Burney newsletter: “On First Encountering Fanny Burney D’Arblay.”  But it was what was nearby that riveted me truly: a single volume edition in French of the letters of Julie de Lespinasse, nearby a 3 volume edition in French of the letters of Madame Du Deffand. I opened them up and started to read and found them irresistible. I no longer have those books but I do have the Elibron facsimile of a 2 volume edition of Lespinasse and a 2 volume edition of the letters of DuDeffand edited by Chantal Thomas.

In the volume by Lespinasse I read she was frantically and abjectly in love with a M. Guilbert and wrote him desperate letters where she poured out her thoughts and feelings in the most eloquent language I had ever come across. In the course of telling the tortures of her soul, she talked freely about all sorts of things, writing dramatic scenes, commenting on books, on plays she’s gone, people she knows, but always she comes back to the main point, she loves him, she cannot do without him, why does he not write her, why does he not visit her, not even respond to her. It was a form of madness.

An engraving said to represent Madame du Deffand

Madame du Deffand was very different: acid melancholy, caustic wit, the most bitter and truthful comments about life, funny, she wrote mostly to a man I had never heard of before: Horace Walpole whom she was very fond of, but also Voltaire (I had heard of him) and people with strange (to me) titles, particularly one man, Heinault to whom she confided the secrets of her life. I’m sure I understood less than half of what I read but what I did read struck deep chords. At early point I understood she was blind. Well many years later I have read much about Lespinasse, niece to Deffand, and Benedetta Craveri’s Madame du Deffand and her world, and Chantal Thomas. I read these before I read the unabridged Clarissa.

Engraving representation of Julie

I took all these volumes home (including the Burney) in a big brown shopping bag, and since then have read even many later 18th century women’s letters and memoirs and novels, English and French. I typed and put two novels by two other women of this era (Sophie Cottin, Isabelle de Montolieu) on my website, and edited Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde for Valancourt Press. Jane Austen read some of these women (Stael, Genlis, for a start).

On the vast first floor

The Argosy still exists but is no longer many floors with ancient elevators; it’s one big floor with a basement and you buy many of its books through catalogues. Below is the Argosy from the outside ….

This coming fall I propose to read with a class at OLLI a paperback edition in English of Madame Roland’s autobiography and letters. I am very fond of a biography of her by Francoise Kermina, which is more insightful than the ones in English and also a Elibron facsimilar of a 19th century study of her by Charles Dauban which includes selection of letters by her to her friend and separate sketches of her relationships with different equally interesting people..

Alfonso Simonetti, Ancor Non Torna, illustration for 19th century Italian translation of Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest

I put Ann Radcliffe here too, anong these women: my love for her novels, and the one travel book comes out of how the tone of her mind is coterminous with the tone of these other women’s minds of the later 18th century. I know I love the gothic which increases what her books mean to me, but basically her Mysteries of Udolpho is such another as Stael’s Corinne, ou l’Italie, and Madame de Chastenay translated Radcliffe’s great book into French and left a 3 volume memoir of her own.

Watteau, Iris (detail inside much wider vaster mural)

Ellen

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10 Books that influenced me most in my life: Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Bronte’s Jane Eyre & DuMaurier, Austen’s Mansfield Park

Hattie McDaniel, Olivia de Havilland and Vivien Leigh 1939 in Gone with the Wind

Diary

Friends,

Day 5/10 of books that influenced me (growing up lasts a long time), that had a discernible impact.

Again for me this is problematic. Between the ages of 13 and 15 I read and reread four books to the point I knew many scenes by heart and can today still conjure them up vividly in my mind. Undeniably (surely we are to to be truthful, or What are we doing in such an exercise?), the first up in time (I was 12) was Gone with The Wind. It came into our house as a book-of-the-month club special for my mother, and I sat down and began to read. I was so entranced (with a four column page) read it so much and so often that the copy fell into pieces. The cover illustration was a collage of scenes from the GWTW books (hence not like the one I find) but my copy was a reprint of the first edition, the ample book behind this older cover:

Note the confederate flag on the side of the paper cover

The problem is that even then I knew it was a racist book and I am today deeply ashamed of myself that I ignored this. (Note the confederate flag on the side of the paper cover.) It was wrong and racist behavior on my part as the book has functioned perniciously in US culture. Still I am not embarrassed in front of GWTW. I have seen this reaction when I used to assign to students to read a book from childhood and the young adult was embarrassed to realize what the book he or she so loved was. I regretted when that happened. My father tried to read The Secret Garden to me when I was 10 and had to give it up so mortified was he to see the agenda of Burnett’s book. These books answered to what we were then

I was Scarlett in my earliest readings. GWTW led to my reading a helluva of lot of Walter Scott in my earlier teens.  In later years I have decided the heroine of GWTW is Melanie. I shall never forget her standing at the top of the ruined stairs of Tara with a rifle, having killed the marauding soldier, and now determined to lug the corpse to the field to bury it. When Ashley comes home, Scarlett’s wild desire to run to him, and Will saying, “he’s her husband.” I’ve expanded the heroes to include Rhett Butler, Ashley Wilkes and Will Benteen.  I remember so many scenes from GWTW; they formed a backdrop of women’s key emotional moments in my mind. Scarlett in her mother’s green velvet curtains trying to charm money out of the imprisoned Rhett.

It’s women’s historical romance first and foremost.

I’ve never given up this type of book and some are leftist and liberal. My most recent wallowing has been in the distressingly pro-violence Outlander (the first three books) and the brilliant voyeuristic film adaptation: I find irresistible the central love relationship of Jamie and Claire, and I bond with Claire in book and film. I find irresistible still her fierce adherence to Jamie, I bond with her in book and film.

Claire and Jamie starting out together …

People disappear all the time.
Young girls run away from home.
Children stray from their parents and are never seen again.
Housewives take the grocery money, and a taxi to the train station.
Most are found eventually.
Disappearances, after all, have explanations.
Usually.
Strange, the things you remember.
Single images and feelings that stay with you down through the years

I know the Poldark novels by Winston Graham belong to this genre so my study of the Poldark novels began here when I started to read Ross Poldark after watching a few of the episodes of the 1970s serial drama. It’s deeply humane in its politics.

My first copy of Ross Poldark, the 1970s reprint of the 1951 cut version, published in anticipation of the 1975 serial drama starring Robin Ellis

There were three other authors I read & reread around the same time, getting to know by heart key scenes: the second chronologically was Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I recently reread it once again and am convinced it is a poetic masterpiece of l’ecriture-femme, one of the great novels for women and one of the world’s great novels in all languages. Who can forget countless passages like this: “I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure, born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld; or offered only at a price I cannot afford to pay.” Contra mundi.

This is the copy of Jane Eyre I now own

At the time I was not alive to the crucial differences in language between Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca — Rebecca was another “extra” from my mother’s subscription to the US Book-of-the-Month Club. Like Bronte, like GWTW, DuMaurier’s books satisfied a need in me that recent Booker Prize women’s romance (Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac, A. S. Byatt, Possession) also satisfy. Bronte and DuMaurier explicitly make visible a woman’s vision using techniques found in l’ecriture-femme, but there were only 5 Bronte novels that I could read (JE, Villette, Agnes Grey, Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights) so DuMaurier functioned as yet more of the same: My Cousin Rachel, Jamaica Inn, Branwell Bronte and above all King’s General. Last summer I reveled with a group of people in a class I taught at OLLI at Mason in reading together King’s General (17th century civil war, crippled heroine) and Susan Sontag’s Volcano Lover. However vastly more perceptive about the nature of reality, Volcano Lover is still of this genre. All versions of the same kind of underlying deep gratification of soul.

I had found my copy of Jane Eyre in a local drugstore for 40¢; I went back a few weeks later, and found imprinted in the same cheap way Austen’s Mansfield Park. Another 40¢ and home I went to read and reread MP. My fourth and nowadays favorite book of all these. When I got to the end and heard the moral of struggle and endure, I turned back to the first page and read the novel over again. I’ve never stopped reading it. It has never been far out of my mind, always at the edge of consciousness to be called up. I’ve never forgotten the cover of this MP: white, with 18th century type stage characters, and the blurb telling me this is a “rollicking comedy.” In my naivete I couldn’t understand why this blurb so false was there. But no matter I was Fanny, and this was a somber strong book.

The colors dark and distorted this is nonetheless the second copy of MP I owned

Since then I’ve seen all the film adaptations of Jane Eyre and Mansfield Park available.

Fanny and Edmund growing up at MP (1983 Ken Taylor BBC)

With GWTW, Jane Eyre, and Mansfield Park I began my love affair with women’s great books, historical romance, and historical fiction. I’ve never stopped reading these and nowadays want only to write about them. And for me they include the great classics (in 19th & early 20th century beyond DuMaurier, English Anne Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann, Margaret Drabble).

Ruth Wilson as Jane Eyre (Sandy Welch’s JA, 2006)

Ellen

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EC/ASECS, at Fredericksburg: Adaptation, Textual Studies, Women writers; actresses, pets in pictures, slavery & religion

Paul Sandby (1731-1809) The Magic Lantern

Dear readers and friends,

My second report on the papers and talks I heard at the recent EC/ASECS conference (see Money, Feeling and the Gothic, Johnson and The Woman of Colour). I’ve three panels, a keynote speech and individual papers to tell of. Of especial interest: a paper on hunger towers (the use of hunger as a political statement has reversed itself); on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (favorable!) and Mary Shelley’s Valperga, out in a good new edition; it’s about (among other things) a struggle between tyrannical autocracy and liberal democracy … just our thing …

1861 Illustration of Dante’s Inferno: Ugolino grieving over his starving dying sons

For the last session on Friday (Oct 28th), I went to the “Adaptation” panel chaired by Peter F. Perreten. Erlis Wickersham’s “Goethe’s Use of Traditional Hunger Tower Motifs in Gotz von Berlichingen. The historical background of the motive brings out the astonishing reverse use made of death through hunger today. Hunger towers were a visible symbol and reality that told people looking at them that the powerful family (or group) or political person has imprisoned someone so that he (or she) shall die a horribly painful death from slow starvation. Erlis said they were common in medieval landscapes. A very cruel form of murder. Perhaps one of the most famous examples is in Dante’s Inferno: Ugolino who was imprisoned with two sons and two grandsons. Schiller’s play is less complex than what happened historically, which was an instance of torture, of unspeakable inhumanity during the last days of the feudal system. Schiller alters this so that it becomes a chosen hunger strike. Schiller is showing us a new state of mind, a way of conveying a deep disapproval, a rejection of life as then lived. Kafka’s early 20th century story, “The Hunger Artist” presents a scene of people watching a man die for entertainment, a sort of paradigm mirroring aspects of humanity. The most recent example is found in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games: she depicts a grimly impoverished society, a dystopian culture. Those who win a primitive unfairly manipulated contest receive more food and comforts. Its heroine, Katniss Everdeen represents the strength of idealism. Hunger becomes a weapon against oppression, a defiance of the existing social order. Escape though seems to be impossible in this hunger-haunted world. Of course what should happen is ample food be supplied to all.

I had not realized the expressions on the faces of the actors in promotional shots for Hunger Games might suggest they are hungry ….

Sylvia Kasey Marks,”What did Playwright Arthur Miller do to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice?” Helen Jerome was the screenplay writer for the first of the film adaptations of Jane Austen in 1941, a fairly successful P&P. The typescript is in Texas. At the time Miller was between jobs, his greatest plays had yet to be written, and one way he made money was to write radio plays He does not seem to have known much about the 18th century or its texts, and he used this Jerome adaptation in 1945 to write an hour-long radio show. Sylvia felt Miller had not read Austen’s novel: he is unaware of Elizabeth and her father’s warm relationship, of the witty use of letters. Miller made many more changes, some silly (Lydia gets drunk on raspberry punch), and a few subtle cruelties here and there. Miller also panders. But the play has as its theme a willingness to reject the past; the characters say that they never told the truth in this house for 10 minutes. We need to have a ruthlessness against the past that holds us.

Sally Hawkins as Anne Elliot grieving over her letters (2007 Persuasion, scripted Simon Burke, it’s just possible to see Persuasion as a breaking away from the past that holds us in its grip)

Linda Troost gave an insightful account of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I enjoyed her paper because when I wrote my blog I could not find one review or blog which took the movie at all seriously or praised it; most people could not get beyond its mockery of aspects of heterosexual romance, and seemed to regard the piece as inane trivia. I reviewed it as a flawed work (see my The Violent Turn), which attempts a mirroring of our modern preoccupations with violence as a solution to all our problems; there is some serious gothic: a deep disturbance over the human body, it whips up disgust with nature, and (as Frankenstein, the ultimate origin) has an obsession with death. Linda took it on its own terms, which she appeared to enjoy: Lady Catherine de Bourgh as a great warrior, Wickham’s desire for power, how Elizabeth saves Darcy. I was aware of how many scenes in the film still keep the pivot or hinge-points of the book,and how the costumes quoted other films, Linda brought out many jokes through intertextual borrowing from other films

The kind of breakfast scene so typical of Austen films

The familiar Darcy proposal to Elizabeth becomes a violent duel, complete with swords and axes

The day was over; there was a reception for Linda Merians, who had been the secretary of the society for so many years, speeches, drinks, and then I went to dinner at a nearby Asian fusion restaurant with a friend.

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Wm Hogarth (1697-1764), The Distrest Poet (1736)

The early morning session, Bibliography, Book History, and Textual Studies chaired by Eleanor Shevlin was marvelous but I doubt I can convey why because the fun was in the minute changes people make to their texts, the interest complicated questions of profits from copyright, and one woman’s thwarted attempt to sell her book of letters for money.

Jim May discussed Goldsmith’s multitudinous revisions, big and small, in his poems “The Traveller and the Deserted Village.” Jim began with how in the Clarendon edition of Pope, the editors chose to use the earliest possible text, a pre-publication copy, on the grounds that incidentals don’t matter. He then moved to Arthur Friedman’s edition of Goldsmith which shows a feeling for a very complicated text. For Goldsmith writing was rewriting. He rewrote other people’s adaptations, translations, introductory material. He would revise and revise and revise his own texts. He would respond to critics by revising for the next edition. The problem for readers is they don’t understand Friedman’s system of annotation (Lonsdale’s is easier to follow). You can trace Goldsmith’s thought by paying attention to these small changes.

Nancy Mace asked if Robert Falkener was aanother music private or a principled revolutionary, bringing otherwise unaffordable music (sheets) to “the masses?” It’s a story of 18th century conflicts between open access and protection of private property (musician and composer’s profits). In 1760s we find Falkener’s name on harpsichords as a builder; then then begins to produce music sheets. Printers had preferred to use engraved pewter plates; Falkener recognized printing from movable type was much cheaper. Music had been selling for shillings and so many pence; Falkener sold his sheets for a penny a piece. Music trade brought suit three times and courts sided with plaintives. It was in 1777 music regarded as texts was covered by copyright. Falkener used arguments like Handel’s work had been in the public domaine, he raised the troubling question (by then) of monopolies. She looked at the case of Love in a Village which led to a series of lawsuits, claims and counterclaims (Bickerstaffe, or Walsh or Pyle)and finally the; court more or less sided with original or first owner. Meanwhile Falkener had lost but he carried on printing: 8 of the most popular sheets, from a popular operetta). The problem with claiming his purpose was to reach more people falls down when you realize these people could not afford even the cheaper sheet music.

Michael Parker discussed “the unknown career of Harriet Woodward Murray, a Maryland Woman of letters. Prof Parker edited the poetry of Edmund Waller and is now working on a biography, and in a letter by Alice Mary Randall he read of her friend, Harriet Woodward (1762-1840) who produced a book called Extracts. He then came across a 2 volume set of Extracts attributed to someone else, which he recognized from the earlier description. The book reflects the preoccupations and tastes of genteel American who is a great reader; she moves from gaiety to piety, to trying to help impoverished and African-American people. She includes Shenstone and poetry of sensibility, Shenstone himself had gathered poems by his friendsHe told of her parents, who she married, the planation where she grew up, where she lived later upon her marriage, her good friend, Catherine Nicolson Few (1764-1854). Harriet’s husband had lost a great deal of money, so Harriet wrote this book and Catherine attempted to get up a subscription list of 380 individuals for 456 copies, 156 of which were women. Frederick Green of the Gazette printed it. The friendship between the two women seems to have lapsed, and Harriet tried to sell the books herself. In fact few took their copies, mostly family members and the profit was $30. In this century most of the copies were destroyed by a descendant by mistake. The family was related to the family behind Daisy in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby.

The room was full and there was a lively discussion afterwards — about American culture, the realities of selling books by subscription, did writers stay with the same printers? Nancy reminded us that music was a luxury business: middle class people learned to play instruments, and most money was made selling instruments. The audience did not care about the quality of the printed sheets. The composer had to sell his music through a fee; there were no royalties then.

Adolph Menzel (1815-1905), Staircase by Night (1848) — I felt an appropriate image for Wright’s poems (see just below)

Catherine Ingrassia’s keynote address, “Familiarity breeds Contentment: (Re)locating the Strange in 18th century women writers” was basically about how to go about changing the canon so we can bring in 18th century women writers hitherto not studied. The new technology and editions make it possible to study minor women writers for the first time: we can have the texts from ECCO and Pandora online. She had two lists of words: those signifying familiarity are pleasant; those signifying strangeness, hostile. The period saw the first editions by women of their poetry, first biographies; they were attacked too. But obstacles to a woman writing are many, from family obligations, to impoverished widowhood. To use the old anthologies is to repeat the same mistakes as often editors rely on a previous edition. Now we have tools to use like the Cambridge Companions to Women’s Writing: books which offer ideas on how to approach the texts we have. There were anthologies of women’s poetry, miscellanies by individuals, often writing in solitude without much opportunity to make money. Catherine read aloud to us poems by women of the 18th century, one a widow with 2 daughters, another by a spinster. She chose a poem about a battle, about Culloden (great defeat and slaughter), about a riot in Bristol; women wrote poems about widowhood, homelessness, hungry children, wives thrown into prison with their husbands (not male topics). Among the better known women mentioned were Mehetabel Wright (about the death of a new born child). I’ve written a foremother poet essay on her life and superbly strong verse. Catherine ended on Eliza Haywood as a good candidate for major treatment in a course, highly topical, daring in her treatment of same-sex relationships. There is a six volume set of her works; an Approaches to Teaching volume.

The discussion afterward did not turn on the question of the quality of Haywood’s work, but rather the problem that since in many colleges, there will be a course given in eighteenth century literature and/or history at best once every two years, which of the traditional authors should you eliminate so as to make room for Haywood? It’s not as if the canon which is so recognizable and familiar to us is at all familiar to the undergraduate, who you might like to attract to a study of 18th century literature, culture, art. It was then time for the business lunch.

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It was at this point I found myself unable to take substantial enough notes to report on the afternoon consistently. So I’m going to conclude on noting for those like myself interested in three papers on women writers or artists, with brief summaries of three papers in the last session. Alistaire Tallent’s paper was on “Stranger than Fiction: How a Slanderous Novella Made Mademoiselle Clairon a Star of the Parisian Stage (I know how important these memoirs are for actresses’s careers and reputations — see my The Rise of the English Actress); Joanna M. Gohmann’s “Paws in Two Worlds: The Peculiar Position of Aristocratic Pets in 18th century Visual Culture” (especially as a cat lover I regretted not hearing this one) and Caroline Breashears, “Novel Memoirs: The Collaboration of Tobias Smollett and Lady Vane” (Constantia Phillips, Lady Vane’s life appears as an interlude or insert in Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle, utterly non-conformist, an instance of scandal life-writing).

Marguerite Gerard (1761-1837), Le chat angora — those familiar with later 18th century painting will be familiar with paintings of women aristocrats with their pets (not always accurately rendered, often placed in the position of a child or among children)

Another Gerard: The Cat’s Lunch

Mary Beale (1633-99), Portrait of a Girl with a Cat — the salacious ones are remembered but the appearance and accuracy of most (like this) testify rather to how animals were increasingly treated as companions to owners and their children

“Giving Voice to the Persecuted” (3:30-4:45 pm) was the last session, and chaired by Sayre Greenfield. Ted Braun gave a full description of Olympe de Gouges’s L’Escavage des negres, and its first production (deliberately played badly). He also placed it in the context of Gouges’s passionately-held revolutionary beliefs: it might fail as theater (it’s an excessively sentimental heroic romance), but not as an anti-slavery tract. Gouges asked direct resonating questions (how can we behave so miserably, deplorably to these people?!). She spoke on behalf of the oppressed, revealing the worst cruelties, asked for equality for women. For her efforts, she was reviled and guillotined.

Jennifer Airey’s paper, “A temper admirably suited to Enthusiasm: Sexual Violence, Female Religious Expression, and the Trial of Mary-Catherine Cadiere (1731)” was about a young nun who was probably taken gross advantage of by her confessor; she sued him for rape, he was acquitted and then accused her of witchcraft. She was using a relgious vision to give her cultural authority. It was a cause celebre, pornographic pamphlets, and anti-catholic propaganda appeared. Both people were in danger of fierce physical punishment. The real story ended in his death and her disappearance from the world’s stage; but Mary Shelley re-worked the story fictionally in her Valperga in the characters of Beatrice, an orphan who becomes a prophet, and Castruccio, a tyrant prince (see Mary Seymour, Mary Shelley, pp 251-53). After a prolonged sexual assault Beatrice goes into violent convulsions, and has visions which Shelley sees as empowering her. Shelley also flirts with heresy by suggesting an actively malevolent God.

An excellent new edition by Stuart Curran is reviewed in Romantic Circles — “the novel dramatizes a struggle between autocracy and liberal democracy that spoke to its era and now our own

Christine Clark-Evans’s “Colbert’s Negro/Negres Slave Mothers and Montesquieu’s Climatic Mothers: Motherhood in the Code Noir and Of the Spirit of the Laws,” was the last paper of the day. She spoke of the harsh treatment of enslaved mothers (no right to anything, least of all their children) who were abused concubines, forced back to work immediately after giving birth. Theories of mothers and motherhood (Roxanne Wheeler has a book on this) ignored. Montesquieu was against slavery and in his work said that only through vicious slavery could you clear the land and produce sugar at a profit; he described the horrible treatment of enslaved black women.

We stayed to talk though we had run out of time. Ted said one problem with her play is decorum deprives her slave characters of authentic voices. Jennifer suggested Shelley asks if nature is inherently evil, with God an incompetent adminstrator. Shelley’s Last Man we find God treated as love.

And so a fine conference ended.

One of the worst things that happens to Greer Garson as Elizabeth is she gets mud on her shoes and dress (this in 1941) — this is after all a Jane Austen blog

Ellen

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Outlander: the first season, a handy list; a few thoughts on the novel

Outlander 2014 Caitriona Balfe as Claire Randall and Tobias Menzies as Frank Randall before Castle Leogh, 1945

Castle Leogh, 1743

I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days — my hair standing on end the whole time …

Impelled by an irresistible presentiment, you will eagerly advance to it, unlock its folding doors, and search into every drawer –but for some time without discovering anything of importance — perhaps nothing but a considerable hoard of diamonds. At last, however, by touching a secret spring, an inner compartment will open–a roll of paper appears–you seize it–it contains many sheets of manuscript — you hasten with the precious treasure into your own chamber, but scarcely have you been able to decipher ‘Oh! Thou–whomsoever thou mayst be, into whose hands these memoirs of the wretched Matilda may fall’ — when your lamp suddenly expires in the socket, and leaves you in total darkness … Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland, NA, Chapters 14 and 20)

Dear friends and readers,

Having finished listening to Davina Porter read aloud (remarkably well) the whole of Diana Gabaldon’s historical romance, Outlander, I’m ready to go forward with watching the second season, adapted from Dragonfly in Amber. I’m studying both the series of romances and the film adaptations as examples of what has happened to popular historical romance in an era where the prestige of historical fiction has gone way up. Historical fiction and post-colonial historical romance have again for some (as the forms did in the Victorian era) become an instrument of political import (mostly post-colonialist). At the same time there has been a fierce backlash against feminism and liberal attitudes towards homosexuality (lesbianism, tranvestism), and fascist ideas gaining ground, i.e, violence as a means of solving problems, individual liberty and thought are out, women are there as mothers, wives, sisters, not individuals in their own right. That’s why Gabaldon needed a 20th century woman in her book so she should have agency.

How does this relate to Austen: this sort of book, the romance, especially gothic and implicitly political, ambivalently feminist were the kinds of books she read and praised as works genius — Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Francis Burney, Maria Edgeworth — in a novel she rewrote endlessly in an attempt to combine satire of the form while embodying its truths persuasively, i.e., Northanger Abbey.

As a prelude, I’ve gathered up all the blogs I’ve written thus far on Outlander so I can refer back to them, and so my readers can see what has been our findings about this genre and film adaptation thus far:

Outlander: a cross between Frank Yerby’s Border Lord, DuMaurier’s romances, Sophie Lee’s Recess, Dorothy in Wizard of Oz, and epistolary subjective novels

Outlander and Poldark: Horsfield’s scripts; problematic parallels towards violence towards women & rape

Outlander 1: Sassenach and Craig Na Dun; People Disappear all the time … Radcliffe Redivida

1 Outlander 2 and 3: Castle Leogh & The Way Out: DuMaurier Redivida

1 Outlander 4 & 5: The Gathering and Rent; as a Descendant of Waverley

Outlander: 6 and 7: Garrison commander; Wedding Nights (2): tapestry

1 Outlander 8: Both Sides Now; The Long  night of the Wedding: magic

1 Outlander: 8 & 9: Reckoning; Both Sides Now, the historical sublime, Romancing History; 2:1 Through a Glass Darkly

1 Outlander: 10 & 11: Pricking of My Thumb; Devil’s Mark; babies & witchcraft; again the question of genre

1 Outlander: 12 & 13: Lallybroch and the Watch: you can’t go home again; gender roles transitioning

1 Outlander: 14-16: The Search, Wentworth Prison, To Ransom a Man’s Soul, Finale; The issue of torture

I have read fans were dismayed by the choice of Caitriona Balfe — I find her very appealing. At no point does she have the lightly mocking jocular tone Gabaldon uses for her heroine.

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Inverness where the novel opens

A few thoughts on Gabaldon’s novel:

Problems: in the present time sequences Gabaldon is American and has no idea how to write British dialogue or thoughts. She uses the phony language of 1950s romance as I remember it: Frank Randall calls Clare a wench; characters beam at one another; they are roguish. She has been influenced strongly by the 1940s British movies and this is reflected in the films in the way the opening new honeymoon scenes are done and the opening scenes of the second season when she has returned pregnant in 1948 after Culloden has happened but she somehow does not know what happened exactly, not even who won. In the opening sequence in the UK there is supercilious tone of half-mockery at reading people; a shallow amused jocularity and descriptions of what no British woman really did in the 1950s when they shopped. Gabaldon seems to think that genealogy studies are serious historical research — or she assumes her readers do. It may be this tone is intended to function like that of Lockwood in the opening of Wuthering Heights (supercilious and faintly ironic), but he never aims his irony at sensitivity, history itself and so on.

Oh and no one reads anything at all – except as part of a profession. The film did counter this gap in the book with literary allusion (all added in, poetry from Donne, Robert Louis Stevenson) and downplayed the heroine’s irony towards her husband’s literary research profession — though presented her as slightly bored by him, and the renewed marriage not quite working (so said the heroine in her voice-over). Gabaldon herself is clearly (I concede) drenched in the history of this period and all sorts of book leaning, biography, chronicles (disguised or referred to in her companion most cavalierly, sprezzatura and all that – she never sleeps, does no housework &c&c)

Escape — Claire perhaps wanted to disappear — through the stones

At each deviation and choice the film-makers are better. They keep the significant and resonating lines unerringly. Her story is what makes the book in a way, and her characters are somewhat re-conceived. Litereally the mini-series is close. Her heroine has never had a political thought in her head. Gabaldon is also a master of romance style; she sustains eloquence about love; her dialogue is naturalistic once Claire moves back in time and to Scotland. The Scottish dialect does not feel like pastiche. They add “Madam” to Black Jack’s speech and sudddenly Randall’s is an 18th century male voice. Gabaldon’s strengths come out more too: she’s good at describing love-making, at erotica. These passages are important for today’s historical romance for women, as the love-making is told from a woman’s point of view (foreplay emphasized ….)

There is self-reflexivity. Clare comments how in romances the “bad male” of romance is never rooted in any local reality; Gabaldon feels she does this by her post-colonialist story of the vicious English against the Highland Scots, the corrupt Jacobite courts. She also (I think consciously) wants to give us a heroine who struggles against forces of nature: so we have Clare fighting a wolf and subduing and killing it! It’s very much a woman’s book — if you can get into this sort thing. Today I’m going to try Daphne DuMaurier’s King’s General for a while to see if I can in her case for the summer term as I have to send in a proposal for this coming summer by Feb 10th! DuMaurier is a political innocent in comparison. The 21st century Catherine Morland would read both. — in preference to “real history,” which Martha Bowden in her Descendants of Waverley does not have that much use for either. Phillippa Gregory gobbles it all up to spit it out as historical romance: she has done that for Margaret Tudor too. The book as Emily Nussbaum wrote of the mini-series it’s mirroring our time. Anne Stevenson, one of my favorite 20th century women poets, has also written about the book favorably.

Claire being taught how to kill with a knife

There are some troubling patterns of violence and humiliation across the first season which is much more emphatic in the book: the subaltern hero is intensely punished. The last two episodes of the mini-series are horrifyingly abusive of Jamie Fraser: he is tortured into submitting to anal sex, his spirit to resist broken by breaking his hand, the merciless flogging. I had realized his back shows horrific treatment too, well, this a pattern in the book too: the ritual humiliation of the heroine (occurs much more weakly and not as centrally) is nothing to this. I asked izzy about Games of Thrones, and she said yes and they are killed off; in Agents of Shield these central and subaltern central heroes go through enormous emotional turmoil.

I had noticed this pattern in Tudor dramas on film: the men took the place hitherto reserved for the heroine, and took it that the Henry 8 story appeal was the ability to show masculinity of a very different sort than the modern controlled invulnerable (unattacked mostly) hero, but maybe not. In Outlander this fits the (mild or undeveloped very much )post-colonial perspective, an unintended consequence inheritance from Walter Scott. Poor Jamie can’t go home again even: the result an unmitigated disaster. I’ve grown to like Jamie Fraser, have bonded with him and to some extent Claire (the text is strongly offset by the mini-series, its tone and especially Caitronia Balfe’s intelligent performance). I find myself very anxious as the story moves from distraught catastrophe to distraught catastrophe. I know this was the appeal of Poldark: I liked the central hero and heroine (and secondary ones, Elizabeth and Francis, too). In Tolstoy’s War and Peace I bonded with some of the central characters. It’s a sina qua non finally for loving a book — though one can love the imagined author as a substitute.

I found a long scene describing a childbirth very good. IN the depiction of Lallybroch, Jamie’s home, in the film instead of a long series of scenes of life in such a country place there was yet another action-adventure inserted betrayal: the book here is good. Both women’s point of view. At the same time the insistence on violence as an answer to problems becomes yet more overt. It’s not simply the book shows a man violent to a woman and her learning to accept just that once, but there are repeated instances of problems solved by violence. The idea is when there is no other way. I have said I think there are situations where the other side will not respond except through violence. To me the argument slavery was dying by itself ignores human nature plus the actual situation. I think the present administration thinks they can do what they want as the American people, especially democrats are utter cowards, despicably lukewarm (that’s how they see the desire to reason and negotiate). But many many instances should not turn violent; that makes for more violence — which does happen in the book: a man forced to give up his son whom he has been beating mercilessly by violence on hi then turns in our hero, so he may be hanged; our hero’s friends then set fire to his house or him (it’s not clear).

There is an obsession with defending violence as a way of solving problems (really — the belief is you force people to do things and then they retaliate if they are not scared any more), but also sheer pain, and combined with the at times faux at times earnest post-colonialism, it is an exploration of torture from the point of view of the horrors of the experience. You are not meant to be inured (as can happen and discussed by Susan Sontag in her Regarding the Pain of Others). This book sold widely in the US, is enormously popular. I’ve already mentioned the ceaseless attack on homosexuality through the depiction of Black Jack Randall — it’s kept up as mockery of effeminate males.

Again the mini-series is an improvement: there are added and emphasized males who are thoughtful, gentle: like Willie — and favored

Ned Gowan’s role as poet-lawyer is built up enormously — he appears only in the collecting of rents briefly and in the court scene in the novel — so the film-makers recognized this violence as a problem in the novel

In the final sequence of novel Jamie is humiliated personally (made to do submissive begging) and he feels he has to tell this to Clare: we get a depiction of torture which condemns it on all grounds and shows how it is basis of a tyranny (as Eleanor Scarry discussed in The Body In Pain); beyond that in the telling why someone would kill themselves after they escape even years after they escape (as Primo Levi and others who spent time in extermination and German concentration camps). He lives in dread of Randall and has nightmares. In the mini-series the emphasis was on a man raping a man, in other words sexual, and the discussions (such as they were on popular websites run by professionals, very discreet) focused on see how men are raped too (so it almost became a show revealing women lying in another direction — they pretend only they are raped) though to do the film justice it was also deeply anti-torture. I could not get myself to finish one of books Jim was in the middle went when the cancer had affected his brain to the point he couldn’t read, Speaking About Torture, edd Julie Carlson and Elisabeth Weber. Looking it at now I find essays on “What Nazi Crimes tell us”, how torture is represented, the “rituals of hegemonic masculinity” John Yoo, the torture memo and Churchill. I find it used in studies of torture where it is suddenly introduced with insufficient information. At first I thought it referred to the purpose of torture (as defined in such studies) to through pain and terror “drive the victim ‘beyond the borders of death into [a state of speechless] nothingness; well, that is what Black Jack Randall has done to Jamie and it is Claire who must give him an identity again, a sense he’s alive, pride, should live; the idea of ghosts on the mind is part of the meaning and in the second season and Dragonfly In Amber Jamie is haunted by nightmares of Randall getting hold of him again.

Before the book ends there is a (to me) odd decent moral set of lessons: Claire seeks comfort in “confessing” to a priest and we see him calm her conscience over bigamy; try to give reasons for God having sent her back to this era. As with Austen and other popular books I’ve read two chapters before the end you get the characters discussing the moral of the adventures, of this time-traveling. She clearly believes in God, that this is a just universe with rewards and punishments and yet a moralism about life as a journey and self-development through helping others and so on is suddenly put before us credibly. The discussions include can she stop Culloden for then the people who are supposed to be killed won’t be? the responsibility of changing history. At this point the book is silly.

Murtagh listening to the priest, Claire and Jamie in the monaster

The book ends with Claire and Jamie leaving the monastery through walking through a cave which has warm restorative mineral waters — like a spa, only dark colored, a mirror. This coming up from a recess is directly Sophia Lee and Ann Radcliffe material, only enhanced here by the sensual delights of love-making. The center of romance is the love story. They will go to Rome where he has connections and could get a position, be safe, and they work to prevent Culloden. Murtagh who we have learned once loved Jamie’s mother and regards himself as Jamie’s second father goes with them.

Crossing the Highlands together

I realize now I have listened to Porter read aloud the whole of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as translated by Maud — she provides brilliant reading of that too. I recommend her to lovers of books read aloud by tape, CD, MP3 or download.

Ellen

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Jane Austen and the picturesque: Mavis Batey’s JA and the English Landscape

Bath House, for Mrs James Henry Leigh by John Adey (1755-1860, Humphry Repton’s son)

“Those cottages are really a disgrace. The church spire is reckoned remarkably handsome. I am glad the church is not so close to the great house as often happens in old places. The annoyance of the bells must be terrible. There is the parsonage: a tidy–looking house, and I understand the clergyman and his wife are very decent people. Those are almshouses, built by some of the family. To the right is the steward’s house; he is a very respectable man. Now we are coming to the lodge–gates; but we have nearly a mile through the park still. It is not ugly, you see, at this end; there is some fine timber, but the situation of the house is dreadful. We go down hill to it for half a mile, and it is a pity, for it would not be an ill–looking place if it had a better approach — Mansfield Park, Chapter 9

“… the Cobb itself, its old wonders and new improvements, with the very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of the town, are what the stranger’s eye will seek; and a very strange stranger it must be, who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better. The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet, retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme; and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest-trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight: these places must be visited, and visited again to make the worth of Lyme understood — ” Persuasion, Chapter 11

Dear friends and readers,

I thought before going on to notes from my last conference this fall, “EC/ASECS: The Strange and Familiar,” I would devote a working blog to my project and thinking about “Ekphrastic patterns in Jane Austen.” After all this is supposed a blog focusing on Jane Austen.

For the past month, I’ve been slowly making my way through Austen’s famous six novels alongside many studies of the picturesque in landscaping, about landscape architects in her era and their debates, on how literary people, gardeners, historians have approached the mode (especially different when it comes to the use of enclosures to take the land from the propertyless and vulnerable), and how writers about Austen in particular place her and her novels in these debates. One might expect her outlook to change because the worlds of her books have different emphases, and since her stance towards life changed over the years: from (generalizing) a mildly rebellious, personally acid (as a woman) point of view to seriously politically grave and questioning, to acceptance, ever with irony, mockery of the very gothic mode she had loved, to late melancholy over what she wished she had known, and a new valuation of the sheerly aesthetic.

Yet I find broadly across the thirty years of writing life (1787-1816/7) a sameness, a steady holdfast to a point of view. This may be voiced as a strong adherence to judging what is presented as aesthetically pleasing or true by its usefulness. How far is what is created useful for those who live in or near it — use includes how much comfort and pleasure an individual can have from art, which seems to depend how far it works with the natural world (or against it, destroys the natural world), at what cost does this use come, and she counts as cost not only the removal of people and destruction or neglect of their livelihoods (especially in Mansfield Park and Emma), but how far it erases history or the past which she sees as giving meaning to the present through group memory and identity. She excoriates those who seek only status through their purchases and efforts, shaping what emerges from this motive as hypocritical at least as regards joy in all the aspects of the natural world, and disrespectful of animals, plants, whatever has been built. There’s nothing she despises more than someone who professes to love something because it’s fashionable — as say the gussied-up cottage. She has little use for celebrities: partly she is too snobbish and proud to chase after someone whose work so many profess to admire but in fact understand little of. To appreciate any art, no matter what it is, from drawing, to singing and playing an instrument, to curating (as it were) an estate, you must do it diligently and caring how it will turn out for its own sake, not for the reward you might personally get.

John Linnell (1792-1882), Gravel Pits in Kensington (1812)

This is what I found to be true of the implied author’s attitudes and to account for the treatment of pictorialism wherever it be found in her works. I began with the idea that she found very funny viewers, readers who approach art and judge it insofar as it literally imitates what happens in life: walking in the autumn or death of the year, sitting in a garden in the cool fall, working in a kitchen, aboard a boat — these three are the subject of aesthetic conversations, however brief, in, respectively Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion. Now I see she partly wants to take aboard critiques from characters who never forget the practical realities of life, so remain unable to engage with improbable conventions of design, typical scene drawing, and what’s left out and/or assumed. The aesthetically naive or obtuse reaction has something direct to tell us about what is the relationship of what is seen to person seeing. I originally saw in the gap between artistic convention in a medium and what it’s representing in real life as allowing for enjoyment in contemplating how the convention is just a convention and we could presumably choose another. So we are free in art. Now I’m seeing the importance of going outside convention, our own enjoyment of whatever it is, to understand ourselves better. Then we can do justice to others who may not be able to respond imaginatively on a sophisticated level but have other valuable traits.

John Crome (1768-1821), A Heath

This is a very serious or moral way of putting this matter but I think in what seems to be the beginning of an era of indifference to the needs of others, to previous understood relationships, to truth anything less is a further betrayal.
I found myself so strengthened by Austen as I went along (as I have been before) this time because in contrast our world outside is seeing remorseless attacks on the natural world, most people inhabiting the earth, worship of pretension, competition for rank and accumulation of money at whatever cost to others and group loyalty (never mind what to). A different version of these latter probably dominated the world-centers and made the later 18th century world the suffering-drenched place it was, but there were at the time groups of reformists, revolutionaries who were (to use FDR’s formulation) for a much better deal for all, even including animals.

George Morland (1763-1804), The Artist’s Cat Drinking

I’m going to hold back on working this thought pattern out in close reading of appropriate places in Austen’s books for my paper, and here just briefly survey one old-fashioned book published surprisingly recently (1996) for the way Austen is treated as knitted to and writing for her family.  Matey belongs to those who read Austen’s books as non-critical of her era, to some extent unexamined creations (staying away from “politics”), belonging to a closed small world of what I’d call rentier elites. I thoroughly disagree with most of this; I think Austen’s outlook to be so much larger than this, and critical of her world and family too, but Batey understands what is provable by close reading and relevant documents (which recent published critics seem not to). Matey’s book is good because Matey uses the particulars of Austen’s family’s lives and their neighborhood (and its inhabitants), their properties and how they treated them wisely.  She looks at how authors that Austen is known to have read or from her novels probably knew and how their topics and attitudes are treated in Austen’s books. Her documented sources  are books Austen quotes, alludes to, or are unmistakably part of her text). She researched about these common sensically and with discrimination, ever thinking of what is Austen’s tone as Batey decides whether this or that text or garden place or drawing could be meant to be part of Austen’s discourse.

Contemporary illustration: Box Hill

Each of the chapters is attached either to a period of Austen’s life or one or a group of her texts; they all have beautifully appropriate reproductions of picturesque landscapes; they all pick up on some aspect of debates on the picturesque in the era, often closely attached to, coming out of the particular Austen texts (but not always). “The Background” (1) tells of Austen’s family’s life briefly, how they lived in picturesque landscapes, how Edward the third brother was adopted by a rich couple who gifted him with immense wealth in the form of two country mansions and wide lands with all the patronage, rents, and power and education that came with that. The Austen family is presented as highly intelligent, wanting few personal relationships outside themselves (unless it be for promotion) and their gentry world. Austen wrote for her family is Batey’s assumption. We learn how Austen grew up inside “The Familiar Rural Scene” (2), loved Cowper, band egan her first long novel as epistolary narrative .  Batey dwells on Austen’s love of Cowper and how his poetry educated her into the kind of writing she did. Cowper is much quoted, how Marianne is passionate over his verse, Fanny has imbibed it in the deepest recesses of feeling and memory.

Selbourne today —

Batey swerves slightly in “Agonies of Sensibility” (3): as she is herself politically deeply conservative, she makes fun (unexpectedly given how she’s presented Austen thus far) of the writers and the texts she says influenced Austen profoundly: Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther (where, I suggest, the hero kills himself as much because he has to live in a sycophantic court as any love affair he has), Charlotte Smith’s deeply depressed poetry and more desperate novels (highly critical of the social and political arrangements of the day): as with Cowper, Batey quotes at length and Smith’s poetry does justice to itself. Batey shows how the family paper, The Loiterer mocks “Rousseau’s half-baked” (her words) ideas. She goes over the juvenilia she can link directly to the family members: “Henry and Eliza” where she uses names and places of people close by:

Lady Harcourt’s flower garden in Nuneham Courtenay (based on precepts in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise)

The same paradoxical pull-back shapes her “The Gothic Imagination” (4):  Batey talks of “the whine” of this material: the graveyard poets, the grand tour, Ossian, Blake. Batey does not take seriously any of this as deriving from contemporary anguish; her perspective is that of the aesthete (very 1950s American); she discuss the sublime from Burke apolitically, the lucky landowners, and even (or perhaps especially because ever sceptical). Samuel Johnson is hauled for his sceptical assessments (no sign of his Journey to the Western Islands). So Batey’s outlook on Northanger Abbey is it is about this “craze” which Austen saw through. Nonetheless, she quotes tastefully, and you can come away from this chapter with a much richer terrain and Austen text than Batey herself allows for. And she combines, so Smith’s Emmeline now comes in. She quotes from the effective presence of the abbey, the Tilney’s conversations on the picturesque and history, Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest as found in Austen’s text (amply quoted with illustrations appropriate).

Thomas Jones (1742-1803), The Bard

Batey has not heard of feminism but she does know these are women’s texts and includes a reproduction of an landscape by a woman I’d never seen before but alas tells nothing of the artist, not even her first name:

Lady Leighton, a watercolor of the gothic seat at Plas Newyd where the ladies of Langollen (a famous lesbian couple) read Ossian together (it was said).

I must start to condense. “Enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque” (5) and “The Beautiful Grounds at Pemberley” (6) contain a valuable discussion of Gilpin, who he was, how he came to wander all over England and write books on landscape and accompany them with evocative illustrations. She goes over the flaws in these (they are semi-fake, omitting all that is unpleasant, like exhausted hard-working human beings, and “eyesores” like mines), his theoretical works, of course the mockery of him (Batey is big on this). She does tell how Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price exposed the way these landscapes avoided showing how exploitative of the people and landscape products (for use) these enclosures and picturesque-makers were, but does not apply this to Austen: rather she quotes Marianne either engaged with the sublimely or critical of hypocritical cant. For the Sense and Sensibility discussion (where Batey stays on the surface again) she includes many lovely black-and-white and grey illustrations of real landscapes (ruins that real, i.e., crumbling buildings), tourist sites (Netley Abbey to which Austen’s family came). The productions for Pemberley are gorgeously colored: a Turner, a Joseph Wright of Derby, photographs of vast green hills. For Pride and Prejudice Batey simply dwells on the visit to Pemberley saying how unusually detailed it is, without asking why. She does notice Darcy has left much of the original placement of streams in place, and invites gentlemen to fish there; but how is it that every window has a gorgeous view from it, how did this come about, were these specifics originally related to some discussion (in a previous longer P&P) of how Darcy made the landscape never crosses her mind.

Batey thinks Ilam Circuit walk gives us a sense of what was to be seen outside Pemberley windows

No matter how much was “lopp’d and chopp’d” says Batey, we have all in place that we need.

Batey approves of the chapters on Mansfield Park, “A Mere Nothing Before Repton (7)” and Emma, “The Responsible Landlord” (8), because there is so much serious criticism of the picturesque which Batey finds herself able to enter into in the first (land should be useful, should honor history, the church). She has a fine thorough discussion of Stoneleigh Abbey which Mrs Austen’s cousin tried to take over when its owners died so took his aunt and her daughter with him, possession being nine points of the law: the letters are quoted and they feel like a source for Northanger Abbey. Repton’s work for the Austens as well as generally is done far more justice to than Mr Rushworth ever understands.

Stoneleigh Abbey before (Batey includes an “after” too: all the animals, the gardening work are removed as unsightly)

Batey believes Mr Knightley is modeled on Austen’s wealthy brother, Edward, who did work his own land, who valued his cows, who was conscientious — within limits: she does not bring out how later in life Edward was among those who refused to pay for a share of improvements of roads as he himself would not profit from it (we can’t do that, must not share). She does not seem to realize the earlier portrait of John Dashwood is also Edward nor that Edmund (whom she also identifies with Edward) is more than a little dense. But yes Mr Knightley is our ideal steward of land, working hard to make sure all can get something from nature (though, let me add, some do get more than others as the pigs in Animal Farm said was only right), and has not bowed to fashion, kept his trees, his house in a low sheltered place, has not spent enormously for “an approach.”

It comes as no surprise that Batey’s last chapter, “The Romantic Tide” (9), does not concentrate on Persuasion or Sanditon. These do not fit into her idealization of wealthy mansions, landscapes of and from power (I’d call them) . The aesthetic debates of MP and Emma set in a larger social context do not reach her radar. Thus that the Elliots have lost their house as Austen’s sixth longer book begins, the money basis of the economy, of war (Wentworth’s business like William Price’s is when called for killing and grabbing the property of others) and increasingly transient nature of existence for the fringe gentry are not topics here. We begin in Upper Cross but move to dress and harps in Mansfield Park (Regency costume enables Batey to bring in Fanny Knight and Austen’s times together in London). The furor over cottages orne probably represents an association from Mary Musgrove’s house, but the details are now all taken from the satire on Robert Ferrars’s despising of large buildings, worship of cottages and hiring Bonomi (without further context) in Sense and Sensibility. Sanditon‘s seaside gives way to “the insufferable Mrs Elton’s” lack of a real abode, her origins in trade in Bristol, and Lydia Bennet’s vulgarity. Batey’s text turns snobbish itself.

Where originality comes in again is not the sublimity of the sea, but in how the Austens enjoyed themselves in summer after summer of Austen’s last few years on the coast, “undeterred by threats of invasion.” Batey thinks the source place for Sanditon Bognor, which made a great deal of money for its entrepreneur, something what we have of the fragment suggests Mr Parker will not do. Anna Lefroy’s apt continuation has him going broke but for brother Sidney, a hero only heard of in the extant text. Jane Austen, we are told, disapproved of challenges to the traditional way of life, was against exploiting sickness and hypochondriacs like the Parker sisters. Batey seems to forget Austen was herself dying but includes the idea she “had little time for the socialistic propaganda of William Godwin”! In Sanditon Austen is harsh towards Burns and (we know from her letters) was strongly enamored of Crabbe — he has a hard look at nature and the rural landscape. A Fanny Price, name and character type, the story of a couple separated as imprudent with no retrieval are found in Crabbe. However, as Batey acknowledges in her book’s last few paragraphs, in Persuasion Austen revels in Charmouth, Pinny, Lyme.

William Turner, watercolor of Lyme Regis seen from Charmouth — Austen stayed there in 1803 and 180 and Anne Elliot discusses romantic poetry with Captain Benwick there

Batey’s is a useful book if you don’t look in it for any perception of why Austen was compelled to write and the full complicated nature of her texts. If it seems to be, it is not much different from Janine Barchas’s comparable History, Location and Celebrity, recent, respected: Barchas’s book is not filled with matters of fact in Austen, but in other books (of genealogy), in Barchas’s case buildings Austen never mentions (interesting if lurid), in amoral people not connected to her except by chance of first or last names (of which Austen does not have much variety). A “proof” can hinge on a number: Thorpe and Catherine have driven seven miles to one place, well seven miles in another there is this other gothic place, and Barchas has her subject matter. Both give us historical context, and between the two, Barchas remains speculative, a matter of adding one speculation to the next, and then crowding them around a text that never mentions them; Batey has the merit of writing about texts and movements Austen discussed, alludes to, quotes from, places we know for sure she visited, lived in. Both have good bibliographical references and you can use them as little encyclopedias.

Ellen

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