Companion books: Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen & E. J. Clery’s The Banker’s Sister

St Mary’s Church at Kintbury

The Old Vicarage

Dear readers and friends,

I’ve just finished Gill Hornby’s fictional post-text, Miss Austen, a fictional biographical portrait of Cassandra Austen, seen from different stand points in time, mostly three “flashbacks”:

the later 1790s when Cassy was engaged to Thomas Fowle, and came to visit Kintbury, his vicar father’ home on the assumption soon they would be married;

Manydowne where assembly dances were often held

the early 1800s the time Cassy and Jane had come to Manydown and Jane received a marriage proposal from Manydowne’s owner the wealthy neighboring squire, Harris Bigg-Wither, brother to the Austen sisters’ close friends, and Jane first accepted and then rejected him; and

1840-41 when the father of Isabella and Eliza Fowle has just died, and they have to vacate Kintbury (as Cassandra and Jane had had to vacate Steventon), where they had been living and thus Jane’s letters to them had been kept, and Cassandra visits Kintbury in order to retrieve (and possibly destroy) family letters (among them, Jane’s).

Hornby has carefully studied all the documents that can be found, other people’s biographies of Jane, Cassandra and other family members, and their friends and neighbors. Hornby then creates convincing real people in this novel during these differing moments and some other connective ones (other get-togethers other times, viz, when the young adults staged plays and the eldest male, James Austen, supplied prologues and epilogues – for we learn about them from the letters and pictures (not tied down to any single linear chronology) the writers wrote about while Cassandra is reading them years later. The novel is thus retrospective at the same time as it is set in living present times; we have imagined maps of the landscapes outside, and floor plans of the rooms within houses; Hornby creates an appropriate idiolect for each letter-writer. I was moved to find Jane’s believable, especially considering some of the distressed content. We watch & feel tine pass, and listen to chance’s events happening to them all. The book reminds me of Colm Toibin’s The Master, a fictionalized biography of Bennet. It delivers the kind of content reality often fails to supply us with; in this case the chief character, Cassandra censored and wanted to burn.

See the favorable review by Stephanie Merritt in The Observer

Now I see Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen can function as a kind of companion to E. J. Clery’s The Banker’s Sister, which I read and reviewed here a couple of years ago. Clery’s may be read as supplying the hard and often unpleasant or challenging money-groundwork for a good deal that happens in the last quarter of Miss Austen.

Alton, 57 High Street — one of Henry’s banks

I won’t rehearse the detailed redaction I provided here, but I would like to add more emphatically how this is not so much a biography of Henry for or about himself, but about those aspects of his life which impinged upon and shaped Jane Austen’s: we do see how important his connections and activity on her behalf led to the publication of her books (even if his financial advice turned out to be bad). She does show how much commercial knowledge goes into the setting and framing of Pride and Prejudice. I don’t agree with her analysis of Persuasion as for risk relating to her or Henry’s business choices. She is freer of the Austen’s family’s view of both Henry and Eliza than I gave her credit for, and do think Tom may well be a partial portrait of Henry.

In addition, what really fascinates me is how so-called fictions can provide more hard important biographical knowledge (Miss Austen) than apparently dry-as-dust research. Miss Austen strikes me as closer to the truth about the publication of Jane’s novels than sometimes Clery is or Jan Fergus (whose book is supposedly about the facts of publication). I’ve come across readers of Austen who say they find Hornby’s portrait of Jane embarrassing or that “they make me wince.” Clery’s explication of Henry’s sycophantic letters and Hornby’s recreation of the missing letters by Jane make sense of Austen’s seeming calm when her portrait shows a troubled and strained woman — Hornby conveys how perceptive and frank in front of herself Jane was.

Hornby is also sympathetic towards Cassandra. When I finished this book I felt I’d like to have known Jane and Cassandra — and Eliza Hancock de Feulllide Austen too. A small but important insight of Hornby’s is she sees Jane’s love for Martha Lloyd.

Ellen

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

Dear readers and friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who?

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

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

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

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

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

Elinor Tomlinson as Demelza in Poldark

A Cornish church filmed in the 2015 series

Ellen

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

For Jane Austen’s birthday … The two pictures of Austen by Cassandra — all we have for sure

Jane facing Cassandra by Cassandra (circa 1810)

Jane looking out at the landscape

Dear All,

For Jane Austen’s birthday I usually try for something special (see these various blogs), something which relates directly to her birthday or something about her personally, e.g., poems she wrote, poems in her honor, her attitudes towards historical women. Today I am proud and happy to have a guest blogger joining in with me: Nancy Mayer, long-time moderator of Janeites now @groups.io, who maintains a website from her research on things about the Regency.

Her topic for today is the vexed one of Jane Austen’s portraits:

December 16th is the anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. One on-going debate about Austen is, Is there an authentic portrait of Jane other than the ones that Cassandra drew? One of those is a back view, and the other doesn’t satisfy because Jane looks either angry or impatient [both just above]. A sort of modified view is on the 10-pound note. There are, however, three other portraits that people claim are portraits of the author Jane Austen.

People are finding portraits in different places and claiming they have to be of Jane Austen of Steventon, I don’t agree. I think Cassandra’s drawings of her sister are the only authentic ones.

One is of a young girl about 15. The question that first comes to mind is why would the family have an expensive portrait made of a young girl when the family didn’t have that money to spare? At least the portrait should have been of the sisters. No one knew she would become famous two hundred years later. The style isn’t the style that would have been in fashion in 1790. Fashion experts have argued both sides of this, I am with those who say it is unlikely that a young miss of 15 having a portrait made in 1790 would have worn this style dress.

Known as the Rice portrait

Then there is a very fashionable sketch the Regent’s librarian made in the margin of a book. This lady is dressed in a very stylish dress. Jane Austen met him in 1814. None of the clothes that we know she wore have the slightest resemblance to the sketch. The reasons that people want to say it is Austen is that it is a beautiful sketch and she met the man.

Said to be a portrait of Austen made by James Stanier Clarke, with whom she was acquainted [for my part I doubt it is her because she did not dress this way]

The third portrait is of a woman sitting at a table looking out of a window in Westminster. She is older than the previous portraits — much older than the one by Clarke, I think. Why this is thought to be of Austen, I don’t know. Again, why anyone would have paid to have her portrait painted– something she never mentions, btw-I don’t know. My objections are that why would she be painted in Westminster instead of Chawton? She appears to be richly dressed. Though Jane paid attention to clothes and fashion, she dressed within her means. Also, I do not see any resemblance between this portrait and that of her by Cassandra. [This is Paula Byrne’s theory]

See my blogs where I argue against the identification and describe a talk where the presenter asked the audience to decide ….

This question of authentic portraits has been a cause of much dissension I know. For many people [nowadays], the picture of Jane Austen that will be the one they remember will be the one on the 10-pound note in England.

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Nancy omits a sixth image — the one that James Edward Austen-Leigh used for his memoir of his aunt. He hired someone to doctor the sketch of Austen that Cassandra drew so as to make her face rounder, smoother, not troubled (no dark lines under her eyes, no sour look — perhaps from headaches she suffered), basically expressionless and to make her arms hang more loosely from her side. The akimbo arrangement where she is creating a barrier between herself and the world gave as aspect to her character he did not want associated with her.

Jane Austen, by James Andrews [circa 1870]

The above is not ludicrous; it’s the colorized engraving that began to circulate that is embarrassingly bad and false:

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In a recent issues of the New York Review of Books, we can see at work the same impulses that led to the doctoring of Cassandra’s sketch and the attribution of the three unauthenticated images. Kathryn Hughes uses the occasion of the publication of Hilary Davidson’s book on Austen’s wardrobe to herself create an image of Austen she prefers to imagine.

A small image of this pelisse

In brief, I see a few telling contradictory elements in Hughes’s musings; the explicit idea seems to be that Austen just loved to immerse herself in fashion, and keep up to date on the very latest whatever, but alongside that we see how poor she and Cassandra were as they attempted to make the same garment do for years, the same piece of cloth essentially turned and resewn, recolored, with new fasteners put in too. She quotes one of Austen’s occasional asides on how she wishes she could buy dresses off a rack, plus Austen’s discomfort with body-exposing undergarments. Hughes’s to me distasteful conclusion that when Austen made her small amounts of money (not little bits to her I know but nothing near what she might need regularly to live independently in any sense) that the first thing she did was “head for the shops” comes from this explicit “official” — conformist and conventional discourse. Hughes has made Austen someone who would have rushed out to see the Barbie movie. Perhaps, then, a different self wrote the fiction books.

I also demur at the description of Austen at tall and thin. I’ve read descriptions of her by the relatives who lived at Godmersham Park which suggest she was just “above the middle size” (so 5 feet 5 say) and Cassandra’s portrait show a chubby woman, someone who did not go in for regular exercise beyond walking.

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Finally, Keeley Hawes as Cassandra Austen in a coming adaptation of a fictionalized biography by Jill Hornby (Miss Austen)

The book begins many years after Jane’s death: so Hawes looks like a Victorianized 18th century woman

Given her world-wide reputation, it’s to be expected Austen (and Cassandra too) have become a marquee characters (in one film Anna Maxwell Martin plays Cassandra) in books, and beyond the many biographies is the subjection of fictionalized ones too. I’ve written about the bio/pic, Becoming Jane (where Anna Hathaway played Jane Austen) — I cannot tonight find my blog or essays on my website (if that’s where it is). I’ve ordered Hornby’s novel (if that is what it is) and will read it as a sequel (or post-text). From what I’ve read about it thus far (and felt looking at some other images of Hawes now circulating) I fear (the right word since I care) that the book is from the conventional (philistine is the older word) POV anti-Jane — the world thinks to be social and conform is important and I see from others if anyone criticizes Cassandra as she emerges from Jane’s letters (very conventional) they are “up in arms.” I am aware the makers of a film can reverse or alter or sufficiently qualify a book, and the acting crew is made up of some fine actors, and women are centrally involved in writing, directing and so on. I am willing to hope for a portrait which stays true to and is sympathetic Austen’s unconventional unsocial character.

But women can be bought too, pressured to produce stories and characters that are mass-audience pleasers. Witness the recent or 2022 Persuasion — the undertext for Dakota Johnson, the actress playing Anne Elliot is a semi-porn figure.

Ellen

Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

On being a Janeite

Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood writing to her mother (1995 S&S)

The idea that an Austen character influenced and carried on influencing us is, to my mind & out of my experience, the mark of the “Janeite.” Anyway I dream/think this. It’s a belief I like and almost believe in that when I was in my later teens Elinor Dashwood was a figure for me I could try to emulate, imitate analogously and in so doing save/rescue myself. Her self-control, her prudence, her thinking about things and for herself however she might behave in accordance with apparent or pretended-to social norms (=social cant). As fanciful perhaps I see her in somewhat of that light still now I’m in my 70s. It’s called a role model except I don’t believe people read this way or for role models …

Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood towards the end of the story, looking out at the sea, enduring (2008 S&S)

Ellen

Persuasions, the JASNA journal 43 (summer 2022): Charles Austen & Slavery & Martha Lloyd; Blackface in High Life Below Stairs; Miss Bates’ soft power carries her through

Cassandra’s drawing of Jane Austen (I’m sure this is accurate)

When once we are buried you think we are gone
But behold me immortal! …
— from Written at Winchester on Tuesday, the 15th July 1817

Friends and readers,

Mid-summer and the anniversary of Jane Austen’s death. The least I can do is return to Austen blogging: for this somber occasion, Vic Sanborn has written a new blog, and I can refer the reader back to one where I link Austen’s very last poem, offering a different take on Austen’s experience of life as shown us over her books, a tone different from Vic’s, but just as earnest in my sorrow that Austen died so young. I’ve just watched the new Netflix Persuasion, featuring, as I’m sure you are tired of hearing, Dakota Johnson as a re-made Anne Elliot (more on that and the current state of Jane Austen movies in the next blog).

Dakota Johnson (Anne Elliot) and Cosmo Jarvis (Wentworth, apparently a rock star) are the latest couple

And I’ve been perusing Persuasions, the JASNA journal No 43 (Summer 2022), and while most of the papers show the usual careful conventionality of approach to Austen (ever balanced, conservative in outlook, almost apolitical), and an underlying hagiography which undermines or shapes what is on offer, there is also the usual feast of information and insight if you care to study the whole issue. So for this blog I’ve singled out four essays I thought of immediate interest to us today: countering the dishonesty and complacency of the Austen world has been guilty of (me too).

The first part is a gathering of essays on the subject of Jane Austen and the arts, only the perspective isn’t that of the anthology I reviewed on this topic a while back:

Charles Austen, thought to have been painted around 1810, in the uniform of a captain

Credit where credit is due: the perspective is much more non-traditional: the authors go to places you might not expect and treat as serious art or politics what you might not think of as art or a document to be read politically (philosophically) in the first place. For example, draftsmanship training the Austen brothers had in the Naval Academy: what is left is treated as serious art. This perspective turns up stuff that is overlooked.

So first up I call attention to Devoney Looser’s essay, whose content is repeated more briefly in a recent Times Literary Supplement for July 8, 2022, “Heroics at Sea,” p 5.. Charles Austen has been presented as acting to “crush” slavery during his career as a captain aboard a British ship bound to capture any ship with enslaved people on it, free them, and punish the perpetrators. The “honest” truth (Looser is calling for honesty) is not quite what has been implied.

In 1826 the Aurora captured and boarded the Nuevo Campeador, and a brief paragraph was printed (and reprinted, went viral insofar as one could in 1826) to suggest that Charles Austen as captain was actively “crushing” the slave trade. The devil (as they say) is in the details. A group of lines indicate 250 people in chains, closely kept in filth and starvation. Someone threw a yam and it’s remarked how the enslaved people behaved over this like angry maddened dogs. Well who would throw a yam? It reminds me of how Trump throw a roll of toilet paper at an audience of Puerto Rican people after that first horrific hurricane during his regime. Then what happened to these people? papers of emancipation were handed out but what else. Looser’s research (based on that of others) finds that most of the time such enslaved people ended re-enslaved or in conditions nearly as bad as the one they were headed for — the mortality rate very high. Nothing whatever done for them. Tellingly the most interesting detail is how the captain was allowed to escape. He had some excuse of his dangerously ill wife — of course he must be allowed off the ship. Surprise, surprise. He never returned. Nor was there any attempt to capture and punish him legally for his crime. Captain Austen probably got his prize money when the ship was finally brought to port; Looser doesn’t mention this so I wouldn’t be so sure. The key to so many written documents about slavery or state-sponsored piracy at sea is how evasive the content usually is.

It is significant that Looser was able to be much clearer and more emphatic in the TLS than Persuasions.

The first essay in the volume, Julienne Gehrer’s “Martha Lloyd and the Culinary Arts at Chawton cottage, a long piece on Martha Lloyd’s cookery book teaches us a lot about the intense closeness of Martha Lloyd to Jane (and Cassandra Austen). Written with more “honesty” (I’ll call it) we read here much evidence of Jane and Martha’s close (lesbian dare I say) attachment, which I have written about elsewhere on this blog.

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A contemporary illustration of a stage production of High Life Below Stairs: a coachman, cook, and household servant all drunk refuse to open the doors of their quarters to their employers

Moving right along to the Miscellany: there are two items of note. One developing further Looser’s call for honesty on a farcical drama often misrepresented in effect; and the other breaking with a conventional conclusion about Miss Bates, but as in the manner of most of the Persuasion articles, doing it without disquieting us, and in a sense re-asserting a conventional value: how useful is social networking.

Lesley Peterson’s “Race and Redirection: Facing Up to Blackface” is absurdly prefaced by a black letter warning: This essay contains language and images that may be disturbing or harmful to some readers. It’s such thinking that leads to banning books and essays like this from schools. The usual over-interpretation frames the honest content. Peterson believes that Austen’s thin, short play, The Visit, owes a great deal to a popular farce by James Townley, High Life Below Stairs. There is a single simple allusion to the Townley play and the Austen family (this is what is interesting) acted High Life Below Stairs as amateurs at Steventon. Peterson’s whole outlook comes out of studies like Penny Gay’s and Paula Byrne’s which have Austen as knowing just about every play ever acted on the 18th century theater, with a phenomenal memory, and inspired to write her novels by details in many of them. The person wanting to write a book called Jane Austen and the Theater is certainly in good luck.

What is new here and so dreadfully distressing is Peterson actually read Townley’s play, and, unlike those who have written about it before (e.g., Byrne), brings out how two of the servants below stairs are black. Probably enslaved people because the white servants resent them for not having salaries. What’s more insult them. I hope I need not repeat the ugly stigmatizing of these black servants’ looks and clothes, and a humiliating ritual (presented as comic) they go through on stage. The story of the farce is about how two “masters” (employers) decide to infiltrate (like moles) below stairs in order to see if their servants are as lazy and over-fed as they surmise. Surprise, surprise, they are. As lazy and overfed. The sneers here are just shameless — the play’s content reminds me of people in my neighborhood who are home-owners talking of tenants as if tenants were an ontologically untrustworthy inferior species.

Full disclosure: I read the text in Garrick’s abridged version in a 5 volume 1805 collection of plays I once (every so luckily) picked up in a Chichester book shop (The British Drama, comprehending the best plays in the English language published by William Miller, Bond Street, printed by James Ballantyne, Edinburgh, 1804 — 2 volumes of comedies, 2 of tragedies, 1 of operettas and farces, with 3 prefaces telling the history of the genres). I confess I never read High Life Below Stairs until last night. I was content to read other people’s descriptions of it. So I am grateful to Peterson.

Peterson of course absolves Austen of all snobbery: she claims The Visit shows Austen would have been very alienated by the masters’ plot: alas, The Visit has a very different story (a very slender one). Basically we can’t say what Austen thought of the story matter of High Life, nor do we know if the Austens played the servants’ parts in blackface. For myself I venture to suppose they did not as it would have been great trouble to blacken two people’s faces and then clean the material off. An illustration from the era printed by Peterson suggests an actual black person (negroid) playing KIngsston, the male black servant. The female, Chloe, is given hardly any lines. OTOH, I remember Jane Austen in her letters referring to musical performers as hirelings. In fact because of the apparently necessary hagiography towards Austen, her essay only somewhat faces up to its content.

Of the at least six actresses playing Miss Bates, for me Sophie Thompkins was the most moving even if in he candied 1996 Miramax Emma: here she is at the moment of realizing Emma’s humiliating mockery of her (1996 Emma, scripted McGrath)

The last essay I have room to report on here (I am trying to keep these blogs shorter), is Diane Reynolds’s “‘I am not helpless:’ Miss Bates as the Hidden Queen of Highbury.” It makes it into the printed edition (there is a hierarchy here, and those essays online are paradoxically often by “lesser” people. Reynolds treats Miss Bates being treated with full respect, hardly any qualifications. That’s unusual. Amanda Vickery is one of the voices who does. Reynolds argues that Miss Bates’s “logorrhea” (Tony Tanner’s word and I cannot resist it for its force and felt accuracy) are in part a conscious put-up job, and cover-up.

I’ve written postings and blogs to argue Miss Bates knows about Frank and Jane’s engagement (how could she not?) and if you read this logorrhea in place (at the ball, at the alphabet game, when the piano comes, and especially towards the end when Jane has been physically sick from Frank’s punishing treatment and Mrs Elton’s unbearable needling and pressure), Miss Bate’s words & stance protect Jane – one stance comes to mind of so many – when Jane is seen to not be able to find her wrap. Frank comes over and so it’s a moment very like the one where Miss Bates declares she is not helpless. Arguably, says Diane, Jane Fairfax is “the novel’s true heroine.”

I loved her characterization of Emma “uphold[ing] a hierarchy,” “pour[ing] out her uncensored venom.” Yes she has a “horror” of “being in danger of falling in with the second rate and third rate of Highbury who were calling on them forever” (we are to see that we see only a sliver of those who come and leave their cards or whatever).

By contrast to Emma, who is isolated except for those she choses to come under her domination (Harriet in the novel), Miss Bates is “continually in company” and we are told today and many believe that networking is power – to know a lot about neighbors and others is a kind of power.” Emma emerges as pathetic by your account. But I would qualify here that from what we see of Emma’s thoughts, just about everyone Emma meets she despises, she is bored by or can’t stand. It’s interesting whom Emma befriends, since she so little understands them. That suggests they are objects to her and she cares little about them (Harriet she drops with no problem, Frank too). Reynolds uses Rilke to justify her use of sub-textual matter (invisible) kept hidden, in the background and her reading against the grain.

The unconventionality here is the non-complacent depiction of Emma. The way some at JASNA talk of Emma has sickened me. Yet we must acknowledge Emma is super-rewarded at the lengthy end of the book – by contrast and similarity Jane Fairfax shows an inability to take too much company; she too loathes it but it of course susceptible to outrageous intrusive comments the way Emma is not. Myself I find a good deal of Jane Austen in both heroines. I also like the looking askance at the supposed deep understanding friendship of Austen and her niece Fanny Knight. In one of her letters to Fanny I feel Austen gives away she looks at Fanny as an amusing object for scrutinizing ironic study.

There is or could be a problem in claiming so much power for Miss Bates, except that Reynolds calls Emma a “magical” world and in that paragraph remind me of Trilling’s now old once well-known introduction to Emma where he declares it an idyllic or pastoral world where reality is sufficiently put aside so that we can laugh at or love these “imbecile” characters because in such an environment they don’t come to harm. What I mean to say is Miss Bates’s is what is nowadays called “soft power,” and soft power doesn’t go very far when you are ejected from your dwelling and have nowhere to live. Emma may mock, but Miss Bates, pace Mr Knightley’s justified worried sympathy (or maybe he is right), does not end up homeless because the marriage comes off. Highbury is not an Indian village and its financial customs and laws work very differently.

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Honesty is the new aegis in some of this collection. But honesty about Jane Austen, given the constituents of her fan-clubs, and the need for academics to sustain a position at their US universities (not exactly over-funded or bastions of anything near economic liberalism in the mid-20th century sense), and sceptical, well-informed (on Martha Lloyd’s movements), candid and against the grain looks at the plays and novels involved can go only so far.

Ellen

The Birthday

This statue by Adam Roud of Jane Austen walking steadily, looking to the side, book tucked under her elbow has been my favorite of the modern rendition — found in Chawton churchyard — we know she loved to walk …

Friend and readers,

I’ve written such a number of blogs commemorating Jane Austen’s birthday in some way by this time, the most obvious where I reprint her poem to a beloved friend, Anne Lefroy, who died on the day in 1808; I wrote about what she wrote that seemed to me neglected (yes) and so interesting: her remarks on Tudor queens, including Katherine Parr; and a whole series, some containing notable poems to her, a new opera, some about a much enjoyed social activity (dancing) and so on.

But I never thought to comb her letters looking for how she felt on the day  (or maybe I did and couldn’t find anything). Diana Birchalls has done a splendid nuanced job asking: did she enjoy it?, and, apparently, true to character, it’s not clear. That is, what is found is considerable ambivalence.

I put the following lines in quotations as a comment on Diana’s and since then added to  it: “She tried hard, she worked at being cheerful and sometimes she was. But she was so intelligent that marking time (as birthdays force us to) is an ambivalent event. Perhaps she might have been happier had she been able to write more,” and it seems been less censured (there is evidence she worried about her family’s response and had to answer to them, including her mother still on Persuasion), had her publishing started earlier. “She was also a spinster with not much money and among her milieu not a high rank and it’s impossible to ignore the average POV and she might have felt that her life was lacking because of the way others treated spinsters.” There was that time in Bath.” OTOH, she knew she was lucky within limits, was solvent enough by living with her family in the prescribed way (she saw how so many others had much to endure, had, as far as we can tell, a supportive family, some loving friends, so she had much to be glad about.” What is most surprising about the quotations and asides and indirect references (beyond the one poem) Diana turns up is the plangent tone of so many of them.

For myself, I imagine Austen happiest when absorbed in her imaginary in the throes of writing, as I imagine a number of her near women contemporaries, for example, Fanny Burney and Anne Radcliffe (given the amounts they wrote), and others she mentions as predecessors, and rivals and simply someone she is reading, e.g. Mary Brunton, Charlotte Smith, Anne MicVicar Grant,  Madame de Genlis. She loved memoirists in French as well as English; we catch her reading travel writers, educational treatises, poets. Perhaps it’s best to commemorate her with striking passages by her — they are hard to pluck out, for they gain their depth by context and resonance across a book.

This morning I came upon another statue of Jane, which has joined the first at Chawton (the gardens), Robert Prescott’s Jane absorbed in writing —

So here are some brief ones I keep in a commonplace file, as favorites, as general ironic truths, as what I have turned to — Matthew Arnold style, the touchstones: I’ve organized them by novels in order of publication, or what is the probable chronology of writing, and then from the letters. The first, the epigraph to this blog: “It is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible” … Henry Tilney, NA

Sense and Sensibility

‘We are all offending every moment of our lives.’…. Marianne Dashwood

‘It is not every one,’ said Elinor, ‘who has your passion for dead leaves.’

Elinor could only smile.

Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.

Pride and Prejudice:

‘There is a fine old saying, which every body here is of course familiar with — Keep your breath to cool your porridge, — and I shall keep mine to swell my song.’ … Elizabeth Bennet

‘We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing’ … Elizabeth once again …

Mansfield Park

Sir Thomas saw repeated, and for ever repeated reason to … acknowledge the advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure …

Emma

She regained the street — happy in this, that though much had been forced on her against her will, though she had in fact heard the whole substance of Jane Fairfax’s letter, she had been able to escape the letter itself. … Emma thinking

‘Well, I cannot understand it.’ ‘That is the case with us all, papa. One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other’ … Emma and her father

“We all know at times what it is to be wearied in spirits. Mine, I confess, are exhausted.’ … Jane Fairfax to Emma, fleeing, after Box Hill

Northanger Abbey

‘Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in…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

‘But why he should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable! How were people, at that rate, to be understood?’ — Catherine about General Tilney

‘After long thought and much perplexity, to be very brief was all that she could determine on with any confidence of safety.’ … Catherine thinking about writing to Eleanor Tilney after having been so insultingly ejected from the abbey

Persuasion

‘One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering….’ Anne Elliot to Captain Wentworth

Here was that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself, which was from Nature herself. It was the choicest gift of Heaven … Austen as narrator & Anne Elliot

Lady Susan

My dear Alicia, of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a man of his age!–just old enough to be formal, ungovernable and to have the gout–too old to be agreeable, and too young to die… May the next gouty Attack be more favourable … Lady Susan herself

Unfinished fragments of novels and Juvenilia:

I wish there were no such things as Teeth in the World; they are nothing but plagues to one, and I dare say that People might easily invent something to eat with instead of them. … Catherine, from Catherine, or the Bower

‘ … she has been suffering much from headache and six leeches a day … [which] relieved her so little we thought it right to change our measures,” “to attack the disorder” in her gum, so they “had three teeth drawn, and [she] is decidedly better, but her nerves are a good deal deranged. She can only speak in a whisper … fainted away twice this morning …  Sanditon, Diana Parker about her sister ….

When there is so much Love on one side there is no occasion for it on the other … The Three Sisters

From Austen’s censored, cut up, bowdlerized letters:

Do pray meet with somebody belonging to yourself, — I am quite weary of your knowing nobody.

I do not want People to be very agreable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

Pray remember me to Everybody who does not enquire after me.

My day’s journey has been pleasanter in every respect than I expected. I have been very little crowded and by no means unhappy.

I write only for Fame, and without any view to pecuniary Emolument …

People shall pay for their knowledge if I can make them …

I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter …

And I cannot resist this longer quotation one, as one possibly never noticed overlooked by my reader:

In defense of spinsterhood:

from Frederick and Elfrida (Juvenilia): one could call it a parodic short story: We have as heroine, “Charlotte, whose nature we have before intimated was an earnest desire to oblige every one … ” when “an aged gentleman with a sallow face & old pink Coat, partly by intention & partly thro’ weakness was at the feet of the lovely Charlotte, declaring his attachment to her”

Not being able to resolve to make any one miserable, she consented to become his wife; where upon the Gentleman left the room & all was quiet.

Their quiet however continued but a short time, for on a second opening of the door a young & Handsome Gentleman with a new blue coat entered & intreated from the lovely Charlotte, permission to pay to her his addresses. There was a something in the appearance of the second Stranger, that influenced Charlotte in his favour, to the full as much as the appearance of the first: she could not account for it, but so it was. Having therefore, agreable to that & the natural turn of her mind to make every one happy, promised to become his Wife the next morning …

It was not till the next morning that Charlotte recollected the double engagement she had entered into; but when she did, the reflection of her past folly operated so strongly on her mind, that she resolved to be guilty of a greater, & to that end threw herself into a deep stream …

We cannot know if this was written before or after Austen refused Mr Bigg-Wither. May we hope it is meant generally?

Ellen

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

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

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

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

18th century lined trunk

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

I’ve put it on academia.edu

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

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

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

And a bibliography.

Ellen