The journey from Norland to Barton Cottage, found in all S&S films, both heritage and appropriations (this from Davies’s 2009 JA’s S&S)
Gentle readers,
As an appendix to my review of Persuasion 2022, plus 4, I’m answering a query I got in three places: what are my choices for Austen films very much worth the watching. I came up with 3 sets for heritage films, and a small group of appropriations. I don’t say others do not have good qualities and interest, but these to me are outstanding.
My criteria: I think a film should convey the book in spirit: the following films are very well done throughout, add to and enrich our understanding of the books, and are works of art in their own right fully achieved
1st set:
1995 Persuasion, BBC, Michell and Dear (Amanda Root & Ciarhan Hinds)
1996 Sense and Sensibility, Miramax, Thompson & Ang (Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet)
1995 Pride and Prejudice, BBC A&E, Andrew Davies & Langton (Colin Firth, Jennifer Ehle)
1983 Mansfield Park, BBC, Giles and Taylor (Sylvestre Le Tousel & Nicholas Farrell)
2007 Northanger Abbey, ITV, Andrew Davies & Jones (Felicity Jones & JJFeilds)
1972 Emma, BBC, John Glenister & Constanduros (Doran Goodwin & John Carson)
Sylvestre Le Tousel as Fanny Price writing from her nest of comforts to her brother William (note his drawing of his ship), one of my favorite chapters in the book (1983 MP)
2nd set
1979 Pride and Prejudice, BBC, Fay Weldon (Elizabeth Garvie & David Rintoul)
2008 ITV (BBC and Warner, among others) Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Andrew Davies & John Alexander (Hattie Morahan, Charity Wakefield)
2009-10 BBC Emma, Jim O’Hanlon, & Sandy Welch (Romola Garai & Johnny Lee Miller)
1999 Miramax Mansfield Park (MP and Juvenilia and JA’s letters), Patricia Rozema (Francis O’Connor & Johnny Lee Miller)
Doran Goodwin as Emma deliberately breaking her shoestring so as to maneuver Harriet and Mr Elton to be alone (1972 Emma)
3rd set
1996 BBC Emma, Davies and Lawrence (Kate Beckinsale & Samantha Morton)
2007 ITV (Clerkenwell in association with WBGH) Persuasion, Snodin & Shergold (Sally Hawkins, Rupert Penry-Jones)
Aubrey Rouget (Carolyne Farina), the Fanny Price character at St Patrick’s Cathedral with her mother, Christmas Eve (Metropolitan is also a Christmas in NYC movie)
Appropriations
2000 Sri Surya Kandukondain Kandukondain or I have found it (S&S), Menon (Tabu, Aishwarya Rai)
1990 Indie Metropolitan (mostly MP, w/Emma), Whit Stillman (Christopher Eigeman, Taylor Nichols, and Carolyn Farina, Allison Rutledge-Parisi, Isabel Gilles)
1993 Republic Ruby in Paradise (NA), Victor Nunez (Ashley Judd, Todd Field)
2008 Granada/ITV/Mammoth/ScreenYorkshire Lost In Austen (P&P), Andrews and Zeff (Jemima Rooper & Elliot Cowan)
2013 BBC Death Comes to Pemberley (P&P), Daniel Percival & Juliette Towhidi (Anna Maxwell Martin, Mathew Rhys)
2007 Mockingbird/John Calley The Jane Austen Book Club (all 6), Robin Swicord (Mario Bello, Kathy Baker, Emily Blunt)
2006 Warner Bros. Lake House (Persuasion), Agresti & Auburn (Sandra Bullock, Keenu Reeves, Christopher Plummer)
Olivia Williams as Jane Austen in reverie, during a walk, facing the river (Miss Austen Regrets)
Biopic
008 BBC/WBGH Miss Austen Regrets (from David Nokes’ biography & JA’s letters) Lovering & Hughes (Olivia Willias, Greta Scacchi, Hugh Bonneville)
My Austen Miscellany contains links to many of the blog-reviews I’ve written.
Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood wandering: as Elinor is my favorite of all the heroines, so Hattie Morahan is nowadays my favorite embodiment (Davies’s S&S, Part 3)
Dear friends, readers — lovers of Austen and of books,
Over on my Ellen and Jim have a Blog, Two, I provided the four photos it takes to capture most of my books on and by Anthony Trollope, and explained why. You may also find a remarkably informative article on book ownership in England from medieval times on and what makes up a library. I thought I’d match that blog with a photo of my collection of books by and on Jane Austen, and in her case, books about her family, close friends, specific aspects of her era having to do with her. Seven shelves of books.
I have a second photo of 3 wide shelves filled with my DVD collection (I have 33 of the movies and/or serial TV films), my notebooks of screenplays and studies of these films, as well as books on Austen films of all sorts. These three shelves also contain my books of translations of Austen into French and/or Italian, as well as a numerous sequels, many of which I’ve not had the patience or taste to read but have been given me.
My book collection for Austen is smaller than my own for Trollope because even though I have many more books on her, she wrote only seven novels, left three fragments, some three notebooks of juvenilia, and a remnant of her letters is all that survives. For each of her novels or books I have several editions, but that’s still only seven plus. By contrast, Trollope wrote 47 novels and I won’t go on to detail all his other writing. OTOH, there are fewer books on him, and the movie adaptations of his books are in comparison very few.
There’s no equivalent movie for The Jane Austen Book Club where members vow to read all Jane Austen all the time
So although I won’t go to the absurdity of photographing my many volumes of the periodical Persuasions, and what I have of the Jane Austen Society of Britain bulletin like publications, I can show the little row of books I’m reading just now about her and towards a paper for the Victorian Web.
The project includes reading some Victorian novels written with similar themes, and Henry James’s Spoils of Poynton; for me it is true that Austen is at the center of a group of women (and men too) writers and themes that mean a lot to me, so I have real libraries of other women writers I have read a great deal of and on and have anywhere from two to three shelves of books for and by, sometimes in the forms of folders:
these are Anne Radcliffe (one long and half of a very long bookshelf), Charlotte Smith (two long bookshelfs), Fanny Burney (three, mostly because of different sets of her journals), George Eliot (one long and half of another long bookshelf), Gaskell (two shorter bookshelves), Oliphant (scattered about but probably at least one very long bookshelf). Virginia Woolf is another woman writer for whom I have a considerable library, and of course Anne Finch (where the folders and notebooks take up far more room than any published books).
As with Trollope starting in around the year 2004 I stopped xeroxing articles, and now have countless in digital form in my computer; I also have a few books on Austen digitally. The reason I have so many folders for Smith, Oliphant, Anne Finch (and other women writers before the 18th century) is at one time their books were not available except if I xeroxed a book I was lucky enough to find in a good university or research library. You found your books where you could, went searching in second hand book stores with them in mind too.
One of my favorite poems on re-reading Jane Austen — whom I began reading at age 12, and have never stopped:
“Re-reading Jane”
To women in contemporary voice and dislocation
she is closely invisible, almost an annoyance.
Why do we turn to her sampler squares for solace?
Nothing she saw was free of snobbery or class.
Yet the needlework of those needle eyes . . .
We are pricked to tears by the justice of her violence:
Emma on Box Hill, rude to poor Miss Bates,
by Mr Knightley’s were she your equal in situation —
but consider how far this is from being the case
shamed into compassion, and in shame, a grace.
Or wicked Wickham and selfish pretty Willoughby,
their vice, pure avarice which, displacing love,
defiled the honour marriages should be made of.
She punished them with very silly wives.
Novels of manners! Hymeneal theology!
Six little circles of hell, with attendant humours. For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbours
And laugh at them in our turn? The philosophy
paused at the door of Mr Bennet’s century;
The Garden of Eden’s still there in the grounds of Pemberley.
The amazing epitaph’s ‘benevolence of heart’
precedes ‘the extraordinary endowments of her mind’
and would have pleased her, who was not unkind.
Dear votary of order, sense, clear art
and irresistible fun, please pitch our lives
outside self-pity we have wrapped them in,
and show us how absurd we’d look to you.
You knew the mischief poetry could do.
Yet when Anne Elliot spoke of its misfortune
to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who
enjoyed it completely, she spoke for you.
—– Anne Stevenson
The Jane Austen Book Club meets in a hospital when a member has a bad accident
Gentle readers, I can hardly wait to see the second season of the new Sanditon on PBS; my daughter, Laura (Anibundel) much involved with WETA (PBS) nowadays, writing reviews and such, who has read the fragment and books about Austen tells me it is another good one.
Chapman’s classic set (appears as Christmas present in Stillman’s Metropolitan): for our first anniversary Jim bought me a copy of Sense and Sensibility in the Chapman set (1924, without the later pastoral cover)
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.
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.
An article with new significant information about the Austen family and slavery has been published by the Times Literary Supplement for May 21, 2021: Devoney Looser’s “Breaking the Silence.” Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall, and, as a TLS paper and digital subscriber, the only way I can access the online article is through an app on my ipad (which I have never succeeded in downloading). A complicated app arrangement effectively prevents me from reading, much less sharing the text (History Today plays the same game). I have read the paper version and so share the article by summarizing the content — and offering a few comments on the article and topic. I add material as well.
Castle Ashby, Northamptonshire; one of a number of country houses who are currently candidates as inspiration for Mansfield Park
It’s been long known that Jane Austen’s father, George had economic and social ties to a West Indian plantation through his familial relations and friendships. Looser sets out to correct misinformation, exaggeration, and confused muddles. Briefly, George Austen met James Langford Nibbs at Oxford where he may have been a tutor or proctor. Nibbs’s second son was sent home to be educated by George Austen among his other male pupils at Steventon. George married Nibbs to Barbara Langford (an heiress) in a London church; Nibbs chose the George Austen to educate his second son in the school set up in the parsonage; and George was co-trustee in a marriage settlement that involved disbursing legacies or funds for chosen relatives. The other co-trustee was Morris Robinson, brother to Elizabeth Montagu, a pivotal person among women intellectuals in Bath, London, and elsewhere. Looser suggests maybe we could find more connection between this famous bluestocking and Jane, at the same time as she dissociates George from direct economic activity and any personal gain from slavery. It was the tenant or owner who directly directed what happened on and to the property and it was probably Morris Robinson who managed the trust.
On Jane’s naval brothers: Looser goes on to Francis and Charles who it has been known for some time had abolitionist sympathies. She requotes the quotations usually cited. She does not mention that Francis was known as a severe flogger — pressing is a form of kidnapping and in effect enslaving white men for a period of time; flogging them to force them to do the work they were kidnapped to do is horrible. She also omits Francis’s awards from the imperialistic investments and insurers (part of what any captain who was successful in ventures would get); these Brian Southam tries to list and finds to have been modest (Jane Austen and the Navy, p 120-21).
As to Henry, it seems that late in life Henry Austen attended an 1840 anti-slavery convention in London and heard Thomas Clarkson, whose writings Jane in a letter said she admired so much, speak. He was not among those painted by Benjamin Robert Hayden in a well-known picture of the people who attended this convention, but he was one of two delegates for Colchester where he was a clergyman. We cannot know what if anything he actively did besides show up. I wrote a short life of Henry Austen for this blog (from research I did and articles I read before Clery’s book on Henry as a banker came out) and discovered that in his career as a military man he attended a court martial of men (again originally pressed) who had mutinied. So equally he publicly supported harsh cruel punishment of men kidnapped and in effect enslaved. Henry’s motives for attending public political spectacles seem to me problematic.
Charlotte Haywood (Rose Williams) and Georgiana Lambe (Crystal Clarke) becoming friends in the ITV Sanditon
Of course the real interest in finding all this out is what were Jane Austen’s attitudes, and it seems from Looser’s account (on my own reading of the letters here on this blog over 3 years) on the whole Austen was quietly anti-slavery. The evidence consists of her admiration for Thomas Clarkson’s writings (not specified, it must be admitted, what she admires Clarkson for). In Mansfield Park there is Fanny Price’s famous question to her exhausted uncle home from Antigua where “the slave trade” was central to extracting wealth; his answer is not told but rather our attention is directed to how silent his children become, and we are to see them as arrogant, ignorant or indifferent about slavery or their father’s hard work, or uncomfortable that such a subject is brought up — or perhaps feeling Fanny is showing off in front of her uncle (a suspicion her girl cousins feel about her when younger). Looser also mentions Austen’s “mixed race West Indian heiress named Miss Lambe” in the unfinished Sanditon: this character gets a lot of attention nowadays since the TV serial adaptation.
Jane Fairfax (Laurie Pypher) telling Emma she has been “exhausted for a very long time” and needs to go back to her aunt’s small apartment (2009 BBC Emma, scripted Sandy Welch)
Alas, Looser is another critic who (to me) mysteriously overlooks Emma, where the amount of concrete specific reference to slavery is, if anything, far longer and interestingly complicated with women’s subjection than the single dramatic dialogue (a passage) in Mansfield Park. Jane Fairfax likens governessing to slavery, and employment offices to marketplaces dealing in selling human flesh (she does not allude to anything sexual in the masters of such houses, but rather the body and strength of the repressed hard-worked young woman who puts herself in service to caste-ridden households). Mrs Elton (an heiress herself) takes up Jane’s allusion to deny that her brother-in-law’s wealth (and Maple Grove, the mansion and estate she has so boasted about) owe anything to “the slave trade;” maybe not, but Bristol was one of the ports where enslaved people were brought, held, sold, and she and her family hail from there.
Looser concludes by addressing and also talking about those whom she suggests resist such discussions and says their silence is wrong, a form of erasure of the full context of Austen’s world and books. Silence today is collusion and complicity with enslavement — in the way the Bertrams’ cousins’ silence feels like in Mansfield Park.
IAlice (Keeley Hawes) and her daughter, Charlotte (Isabella Pappas) (Finding Alice, Episode 1).
1940a photograph of Japanese Americans being forced into internment camps; the basis of the film,Come See the Paradise
“Something had been done in the way of raising money by selling the property of convicted secessionists; and while I was there eight men were condemned to be shot for destroying railway bridges. ‘But will they be shot?” I asked of one of the officers. ‘Oh, yes. It will be done quietly and no one will know anything about it. We shall get used to that kind of thing presently’… It is surprising how quickly a people can reconcile themselves to altered circumstances, when the change comes upon them without the necessity of an expressed opinion of their own. Personal freedom has been considered as necessary to the American of the States as the air he breathes.” — Trollope on the civil War in North America
Portrait shot of one of several variants 1949-1957 TV versions of I Remember Mama
Elinor Dashwood (Hattie Morahan) looking up at Marianne and hearing her extravaganzas with patience (2009 BBC S&S, Andrew Davies)
Dear friends,
Tonight, I thought I’d bring together three movies which center on women or can be related to women and seem to me good and significant movies to watch relevant to us today. As an experiment, for fun, I’ve been watching the Austen movies (a subgenre, some 37 at this point) and end on a pattern others may not have noticed. As I’ve been doing, the blog will not be overlong.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been watching a 6 part ITV (British) serial story, Finding Alice. I was drawn to it because its central role, Alice, a woman at least in her later 30s, whose husband dies suddenly from a fall over a steep staircase, which he deliberately built without a bannister is played by Keeley Hawes, one of my favorite actresses. She used to garner central roles in costume dramas based on masterpiece books (Cynthia in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, as scripted by Andrew Davies); or moving series on remarkable books (Louisa Durrell in The Durrells). Now she is more often found in mystery thrillers which are just that little bit better (more intelligent) than the usual. So this series sounded like a return back to her more thoughtful rich programs. Perhaps the problem with the series is it is too rich, takes too much on, and does not resolve enough of what is presented. This Guardian review by Lucy Mangan is unfair (and shows itself to be a little stupid) by singling out Nigel Havers and Joanna Lumley as superior actors to all the others (I wondered if that had anything to do with their race and age); they are no better or worse at acting their roles, their roles no less or more jarring or uneven than the other characters: but she does outline the story, and I can vouch for many shining moments beyond the ones Mangan allows for.
The film plays variations on how difficult it is to accept the death of a beloved person; it projects different modes of grieving and bereavement. Rashan Stone as the man who is in charge of a hospital morgue and runs bereavement groups is superb in his role; he comforts Alice as well as himself exemplifying how someone else can deal with devastation (his daughter killed herself) and a wife whom he does not get along with (one of the variations on a daughter not able to adjust to a mother who is hostile to her). The hardest hit is Charlotte, Harry and Alice’s teenage daughter, upon whom much of Alice’s earliest antics fall — she insists on burying Harry in their garden turns out not to be such a bad idea after all. But she also wants to impregnate herself with the sperm Harry froze so that she could have another child by him — since she was (rightly) refusing at the time.
Alice in Episode 6, learning to stand alone
After the 6th episode was over and nothing much had been resolved, of several emerging conflicts, except importantly Alice had taken responsibility for all those things her partner Harry had supposedly been doing just fine, only he wasn’t. The story is the sudden death by falling down a steep staircase of the heroine’s partner. We learn pretty quickly both Alice & Harry have taken no thought for the possibility he might die — he has (it emerges by the last episode where we hear him speak his last words) regarded and treated her as a child. Been false in the way he appeared to love her. His bank account does not have her name on it, she has almost nothing in hers; he left this house he and she were supposed to be so proud to live in to his parents. His business dealings he does with women, one of whom turns out to be a semi-mistress — who may have bought (?) his sperm to impregnate her female partner with. The business is near bankruptcy. An illegitimate son appears who thinks he will inherit — but that is not accurate. If she never married Harry and so can’t automatically inherit whatever is left, how does an unrecognized bastard son inherit anything? Harry’s parents are hostile to her, want to sell the house out from under her to pay their inheritance taxes; her parents (Havers & Lumley) consist of a mean-mouthed bullying mother and a weak father who finally seems to leave his wife who openly cuckolds him in the last episode). Many episodes contain such a multitude of complex emotions one cannot begin to cover the ground so richly sown.
This review by Reece Goodall falls into the very trap I suggest the movie wants to preclude: the idea that people don’t let go a lot when they grieve; that they know to be tactful and to live in and within themselves. Anything else is not adult. Sure, in public, but not in private which is where these scenes delve. I grant at the third episode I began to feel this was an attempt to present ever-so-modern patterns of living and taste in a voyeuristically morbid vein, but then in the fourth an upswing begins where we see the point is to show us Alice slowly discovering she is an individual, what kind of person she is, what are her real tastes. I don’t think the only way you can assert your independence is to give other people who are trying to cheat you a hard time, but it is one of those things a woman living alone will have to deal with alone.
At its end you get a message telling you where you can contact counselors to help you through bereavement — quite seriously — the creators just did not know how to cope with what they are presenting to a wider popular audience so they become “constructive.” I see another season is planned (or was). I hope it comes back and becomes less unsteady, giving more time to each set of characters and incidents.
Coherent and beautiful is the indie, Come See the Paradise, written and directed by Alan Parker. It opens with a mother in her early 30s walking with a young adolescent girl child. They are traveling by train to re-meet the father and husband whom they have not seen for years. The mother tells the girl the history she does not understand for her father was take away when she was around 4. This flashback movie then tells from the point of view of the Japanese woman who is attached equally to her family and American husband and is herself self-sufficient, upright.
Hers is the story of them as a young couple, American young man who was involved as a non-professional (non-degreed) lawyer in a union in the 1930s who falls in love with Japanese girl whose parents are about to marry her off to a much older man. In 1942, over 100,000 Americans were interned in prison camps in the USA. Well this extraordinary complete violation of human rights (it was against the law in many states for a white American to marry a Japanese person and they were not permitted to become citizens unless they were born here) hits hard on these lives that are slowly presented. We see the young couple try to persuade her parents; they cannot so they elope. Several years go by and Jack (Dennis Quaid) has involved himself again in striking; Lily (Tamlyn Naomi Tomita) disapproves, is frightened, and when he is taken away to be arrested, flees home to her family (whom she was very attached to). When he finally gets out of jail, he comes to find her and is slowly accepted into the family by all but the father. Then the war breaks out, the internment begins. Everything is very harsh; they have to give up all their property and live in a camp in crowded impoverished conditions. Eventually the young men are coerced into fighting for the USA or accept being sent back to Japan. Jack finds he cannot stay with them and spends most of the war as a soldier. He is finally recognized as a labor agitator and re-sent to jail. So the film is pro labor too — like his Japanese brother-in-law, Jack has a no-choice: go to jail or endure military service. The two stories intertwine and reinforce one another. There is a fine use of music; some of the scenes are very moving; the use of colors is careful and effective. I do not think think it at all exaggerated or exploitative or smug or over-angry. The Karamura family slowly changes; they learn to appreciate Jack; they hang together and they also make individual choices that bring out their characters and need for usefulness, joy, respect.
One of several parting scenes
Recently there has been an increase in violence towards Asian people. Incited by the truly evil man, Trump, to blame Asian people for the coronavirus, older atavistic prejudices have come forward. This time it was a massacre of eight people, six Asian women, in Georgia by a young white very sullen-looking man. In his recent speech before this incident Biden mentioned the way Asian-Americans have been treated since the pandemic started and said this has got to STOP! Tonight he and the Congress are working on helping Asian-Americans and doing what they can to discourage this virulent racism. So this film’s story is not at all obsolete. There is a sneer (!) in wikipedia: the movie is called “oscar bait” and I dare say it won no prizes because of its strong Asian theme. It is a bit long because it wants to get us to the qualified happy ending — retreat for this intermarried family.
Mr Karamura accepting Jack who tells him that this family is his family, he loves them and they love him ….
I don’t know how or why Roosevelt could have allowed this — it is a blotch on his record, very bad. I know how he (in effect) threw Black people under the bus (what an inadequate metaphor) to keep the southern democrats with him. Also how social security did not include cleaning women and other lower end self-employed people — often Black people.
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The political story of I remember Mama is told here It immediately belongs to the history of suppression of any socialistic feelings which came to a head in the early 1950s with the McCarthy hearings of the HUAC; long range it belongs to women’s studies: Gertrude Berg invented, wrote, starred in this development from an earlier genteel white stage play and made a resounding hit of it — despite studio feeling that Americans don’t want Jewish stories either. Berg had a very hard time getting the shows any sponsorship originally.
Then after the success, the show was forced off the air — in effect. The executives cared more about stamping out socialism than monetary success when it came to a Jewish ethnic show. I love Lucy wasn’t touched because it was seen as all-American (but for the unfortunate Cuban husband). The man playing the father, Philip Loeb, a professional stage actor was active in the labor movement; that was enough to get him was black-listed; the show never recovered from his departure and other changes insisted upon. It’s all lies that Americans would not tolerate a divorced person, a Jew or a person from NY on their TV shows. This shows how the channels and big media colluded absolutely with the wave and institution across the US in the fifties of anti-social democratic movements everywhere in every way. They wanted it to be that US people not tolerate Jewish people. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong does tell us that in life Gertrude Berg did not wear housedresses, but swathed herself in silk, furs and jewels.
I did not know this story. I do remember some of the earliest sit-coms, replaying on morning TV — there was one about a daughter and father with a matinee idol as the father (My Little Margie?); another about a secretary (Suzy?); of course I Love Lucy. A Jim Bakkus. Amos ‘n Andy was still playing at night in 1955/56 when we got our TV.
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Elizabeth Garvie as Elizabeth (1979 BBC P&P, Fay Weldon)
So to conclude, once again watching all the Austen movies (I’ve watched more than these, see my blog with more recent Austen movies, viz., P&P and Zombies, Whit Stillman’s Love and Freindship, Sanditon, &c I own or can rent: in general, just about all Austen movies made for paying cinema are versions of Screwball comedies or high erotic romance, from the 1940s P&P, to McGrath’s 1996 candied Emma, Wright’s 2005 Lawrentian P&P, to Bride and Prejudice and the recent travesty 2019 Emma, not to omit the 1995 Clueless and P&P and Zombies. Just about all the serial TV Austen movies are centrally melodramatic, presenting Austen’s material as familial drama exceptions are the occasional gothic (Maggie Wadey’s 1987 NA) and but once only a genuine ironic but gentle satire, the 1972 Constanduros Emma (it falls down today on the visuals, the way the characters are dressed just won’t do). This is true of the three short 2007 films (MP, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey; Wadey, with a spectacular performance by Sally Hawkins, and Andrew Davies) and the 2009 Emma (Sandy Welch) and Sense and Sensibility (again Davies) Many have been made by women, and even in the cinema versions, one finds that women’s aesthetics predominate: the use of letters, a voice-over female narrator, a pretend diary. The Jane Austen Book Club belongs here.
Romola Garai as Emma practicing after the assembly (2009 BBC Emma, Sandy Welch)
For my part in general I vastly prefer the TV choice of genre, though neither captures Austen’s inimitable mix. Perhaps the closest that ever came to her were a few in the “golden years” of the pre-Thatcher BBC — the 1971 Sense and Sensibility (again Constanduros), the 1979 Pride and Prejudice (Fay Weldon) with its emphatic bringing out of Elizabeth’s inner sensibility and quiet wit and also the 1995 A&E Pride & Prejudice (Andrew Davies) taken as a whole. I am a real fan of Andrew Davies (there are a large number of blogs dedicated to films by him, and one of my published papers is on his two films from Trollope (HKHWR and TWWLN)
Wonderful passing time moment: Jane (Susannah Harker) and Elizabeth (Jennifer Ehle) walking and talking
Since 2000 I have gone almost every year to the East Central (regional ASECS) meeting, and I have gone to a number of the JASNA meetings. In view of the covid pandemic (now having killed 223,000 people in the US, with the number rising frighteningly daily), this year EC/ASECS decided to postpone their plan to meet in the Winterthur museum to next year and instead do an abbreviated version of what they do yearly.
By contrast, the JASNA Cleveland group did everything they could to replicate everything that usually goes on at at JASNA, only virtually, through zooms, videos, websites. It was an ambitious effort, marred (unfortunately) because (why I don’t know) much didn’t go quite right (to get to somewhere you had to take other options). It was “rolled out” something like the usual JASNA, a part at a time, so you could not plan ahead or compare easily or beforehand; but now is onsite, all at once, everything (at long last) working perfectly. I visited (or attended or whatever you want to call these experiences) two nights ago and last night, and can testify that since I usually myself go to listen to the papers at the sessions or lectures, I probably enjoyed the JASNA more than I usually do at the usual conference. If you didn’t care for what you were seeing or hearing for whatever reason, it was very easy to click away; you could see what was available all at once, watch far more than one intended to be given at the same time. You can skim along using your cursor …
IN this blog I offer a brief review of both conferences.
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A detail from one of Canaletto’s paintings from around the Bacino Di San Marco, Venice: a lady and gentleman
In our “Brief Intermission,” for EC/ASECS, on Friday, in the evening we had our aural/oral experience, a couple of hours together where we read 18th century poetry and occasionally act out an abbreviated version of a play; during the later afternoon we had one panel of papers, this one about researching unusual subjects itself. Saturday morning, there was one panel of papers by graduate students competing for the Molin prize (given out for excellence to a paper by a graduate student each year); than at 1 pm there was the business meeting (sans lunch unless you were eating from wherever you were while you attended the zoom), and the Presidential Address: this year a splendid one, appropriate to the time, John Heins describing the creation, history and grounds of Dessau-Worlitz Park (Garden Realm) in Eastern Germany, a World Heritage site, with the theme of trying to experience a place fully although you are not literally there by its images, conjuring up in one’s mind, the place we might like to be but are not in. I didn’t count but my impression was we had anywhere from 25 (the aural/oral fun) to 37/40 people for the four sessions. I enjoyed all of it, as much (as other people said) to be back with friends, see familiar faces, talk as friends (chat before and after papers).
I will single out only a couple of papers from Friday’s panel. First, Jeremy Chow’s paper, “Snaking the Gothic” was in part about the way animals are portrayed in 18th century culture, focusing on snakes. It seems the identification as poisonous (fearful) led to their being frequently used erotically. I found this interesting because of an incident in one of the episodes of the fifth Season of Outlander where a bit from a poisonous snake threatens to make an amputation of Jamie’s lower leg necessary but a combination of 20th century knowhow, and 18th century customs, like cutting the snake’s head off, extracting the venom and using it as an antidote becomes part of the way his leg is saved. In other words, it is used medically. Ronald McColl, a special collections librarian, spoke on William Darlington, American physician, botanist and politician whose life was very interesting (but about whom it is difficult to find information).
People read from or recited a variety of texts in the evening; I read aloud one of my favorite poems by Anne Finch, The Goute and the Spider (which I’ve put on this blog in another posting). I love her closing lines of comforting conversation to her suffering husband.
For You, my Dear, whom late that pain did seize
Not rich enough to sooth the bad disease
By large expenses to engage his stay
Nor yett so poor to fright the Gout away:
May you but some unfrequent Visits find
To prove you patient, your Ardelia kind,
Who by a tender and officious care
Will ease that Grief or her proportion bear,
Since Heaven does in the Nuptial state admitt
Such cares but new endeaments ot begett,
And to allay the hard fatigues of life
Gave the first Maid a Husband, Him a Wife.
People read from novels too. This session everyone was relatively relaxed, and there was lots of chat and even self-reflexive talk about the zoom experience.
The high point and joy of the time to me was John Heins’ paper on Worlitz park: he had so many beautiful images take of this quintessentially Enlightenment picturesque park (where he and his wife had been it seems several times), as he told its history, the people involved in landscaping it, how it was intended to function inside the small state, and the houses and places the different regions and buildings in the park are based on. He ended on his own house built in 1947, called Colonial style, in an area of Washington, DC, from which he was regaling us. He brought home to me how much of my deep enjoyment of costume drama and BBC documentaries is how both genres immerse the viewer in landscapes, imagined as from the past, or really extant around the world (Mary Beard’s for example). He seemed to talk for a long time, but it could not have been too long for me.
Amalia’s Grotto in the gardens of Wörlitz
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Andrew Davies’s 2019 Sanditon: our heroine, Charlotte (Rose Williams) and hero, Sidney Parker (Theo James) walking on the beach …
I found three papers from the Breakout sessions, one talk from “Inside Jane Austen’s World,”, and one interview from the Special Events of special interest to me. (Gentle reader if you want to reach these pages, you must have registered and paid some $89 or so by about a week before the AGM was put online; now go to the general page, type in a user name and password [that takes setting up an account on the JASNA home page]). The first paper or talk I found common sensical and accurate (as well as insightful) was by Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, on Andrew Davies’s Sanditon. They repeated Janet Todd’s thesis in a paper I heard a few months ago: that Austen’s Sanditon shows strong influence by Northanger Abbey, which Austen had been revising just the year before. Young girl leaves loving family, goes to spa, has adventures &c. They offered a thorough description of how Davies “filled in the gaps” left by what Austen both wrote and implied about how she intended to work her draft up into a comic novel. They presented the material as an effective realization and updating of Austen’s 12 chapter draft, ironically appropriately interrupted and fragmentary. I will provide full notes from their paper in my comments on my second blog-essay on this adaptation.
The second was Douglas Murray’s “The Female Rambler Novel & Austen’s Juvenilia, concluding with a comment on Pride & Prejudice. He did not persuade me Austen’s burlesque Love and Freindship was like the genuinely rambling (picaresque) novels he discussed, but the characteristics of these as he outlined them, and his descriptions of several of them (e.g., The History of Charlotte Summer, The History of Sophia Shakespeare – he had 35 titles), & James Dickie’s study of cruelty and laughter in 18th century fiction (Doug discussed this book too, with reference to Austen), were full of interesting details made sense of. Of course Austen’s heroine, Elizabeth, as we all remember, goes rambling with her aunt and uncle in Derbyshire and lands at Pemberley just as Darcy is returning to it.
Elaine Bander’s paper, “Reason and Romanticism, or Revolution: Jane Austen rewrites Charlotte Smith in Catherine, or The Bower” interested me because of my studies and work (papers, an edition of Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake, many blogs) on Charlotte Smith. She did not persuade me that Austen seriously had in mind Smith for the parts of her story (was “re-composing” Smith’s novels). But hers is the first thorough accounting for this first and unfinished realistic courtship novel by Austen I’ve come across, and on this fragment’s relationship to an 18th century didactic work by Hannah More, to other of Austen’s novels (especially the idea of a bower as a sanctuary, a “nest of comforts”, character types, Edward Stanley a Wickham-Frank Churchill). I draw the line on the way Elaine found the aunt simply a well-meaning dominating presence: Mrs Perceval is one in a long line of cruel-tongued repressive bullying harridans found across Austen’s work. Austen is often made wholesome by commentators — I find her disquieting. Elaine suggested that Juliet McMaster (who gave a plenary lecture, and told an autobiographical story for the opening framing of the conference) in a previous Persuasions suggested a persuasive ending for the uncompleted book. Her talk was also insightful and accurate in her description of Smith’s novels, their mood, their revolutionary outlook and love of the wild natural world: “packed with romance and revolution, bitterly attacking the ancien regime, injustice, describing famous and momentous world events, including wars — quite different from Austen (I’d say) even if in this book Austen does homage to all Smith’s novels.
As to “Special Events,” I listened briefly to an interview of Joanna Trollope and her daughter, Louise Ansdell (someone high on a board at Chawton House – why am I not surprised?): Trollope, I thought, told the truth when she said young adult readers today, let’s say having reached young adulthood by 2000 find Jane Austen’s prose very hard to read. What I liked about these comments was they suggest why it is so easy to make movies today that are utter travesties of Austen’s novels (the recent Emma) where say 30 years ago movie-makers were obliged to convey something of the real mood, themes, and major turning points of Austen’s novels.
“Inside Jane Austen’s world included talks about cooking, what to put in your reticule (and so on). Sandy Lerner re-read a version of her paper on carriages in Austen’s time that I heard years ago (and have summarized elsewhere on this blog). Of interest to me was Mary Gaither Marshall’s discussion of her own collection of rare Austen books, including a first edition of Mansfield Park (she is a fine scholar): she told of how books were printed (laborious process), how the person who could afford them was expected to re-cover them fancily, the workings of the circulating library &c. She said her first acquisitions were two paperbacks which she bought when she was 10 year old.
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This last makes me remember how I first read Austen, which I’ve told too many times here already, but it is a fitting ending to this blog.
On Face-book I saw a question about just this, from the angle of what led someone to read Austen’s books in a “new” (or different way), without saying what was meant by these words — as in what was my “old” or previous way of reading her. I can’t answer such a question because my ways of reading Austen or eras do not divide up that way. But I like to talk of how I came to study Austen and keep a faith in the moral value of her books despite all that surrounds them today, which go a long way into producing many insistent untrue and corrupted (fundamental here is the commercialization, money- and career-making) framings.
So I wrote this and share it here: Years ago I loved Elizabeth Jenkins’s biography of Jane Austen, and that led me to read Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. I must have been in my late teens, and my guess is I found the Jenkins book in the Strand bookstore. I had already read (at age 12 or so) Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility; and at age 15, Mansfield Park. Nothing inspired me to read the first two (part of this person’s question), but that the first two were there in my father’s library among the good English classics. The third I found in a neighborhood drugstore and I was led to read it because I loved S&S and P&P. MP was not among my father’s classic libraries The first good critical book I remember is Mary Lascelles on the art of the books, then Tave’s Some Words of Jane Austen. So as to “new way of reading her” (intelligently), when Jim and I were in our thirties at a sale in a Northern Virginia library Jim bought a printing of the whole run of Scrutiny and I came across the seminal articles by DWHarding (a revelation) and QRLeavis. I do not remember when I found and read Murdock’s Irony as Defense and Discovery, but it was the first book to alert me to the problem of hagiography and downright lying (though Woolf very early on gently at that (“mendaciou”) about the Hill book on Austen’s houses and friends).
When I came online (1990s and I was in my forties) of course I was able to find many books, but the one that stands out attached to Austen-l, is Ivor Morris’s Considering Mr Collins, brilliant sceptical reading. There are still many authors worth reading: John Wiltshire comes to mind, on Austen-l we read together a row of good critical scholarly books on Austen. Today of course you can say anything you want about Austen and it may get published.
I saw the movies only years after I had begun reading, and the first I saw was the 1979 Fay Weldon P&P, liked it well enough but it didn’t make much of an impression on me. The 1996 Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee/Emma Thompson) was the first of several movies to change my outlook somewhat on Jane Austen’s novels, in this case her S&S.
Since Jane Austen has been with me much of my life, of course I welcomed a chance to experience some of the best of what a typical JASNA has to offer, since nowadays I & my daughter are regularly excluded from these conferences. After all those who have special “ins” of all sorts, I am put on the bottom of the list for what room is left. I regret to say she has quit the society because she loves to read Austen, is a fan-fiction writer of Austen sequels, enjoyed the more popular activities, especially the dance workshop and the Saturday evening ball. She is autistic and rarely gets to have social experiences. She had bought herself an 18th century dress and I got her a lovely hat. They are put away now.
When was I first aware there was an 18th century? when I watched the 1940s movie, Kitty, with Paulette Goddard — you might not believe me, but even then, at the age of 14-15 I went to the library to find the script-play and I did, and brought it home and read it. I fell in love with the century as a set of texts to study when I first read Dryden, Pope, and the descriptive poetry of the era — just the sort of writing that describes places like Worlitz Park.
Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood as she resolves to accept a future with her mother, where she on herself can live (she thinks Edward has married Lucy) (2009 BBC S&S, scripted Andrew Davies)
“‘It is not every one,’ said Elinor, ‘who has your passion for dead leaves …
“Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition …
“‘We are all offending every moment of our lives’ … (Marianne Dashwood)
“‘We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing’ … (Elizabeth Bennet)
“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 Woodhouse)
“‘We all know at times what it is to be wearied in spirits. Mine, I confess, are exhausted’ … (Jane Fairfax)
“‘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 Morland)
“‘One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering….’ (Anne Elliot)
Dear friends and readers,
Every once in a while it is good for me to remember why I’ve had two blogs dedicated to Jane Austen and art I connect to her and her books, and films made from these. Last night I was in a zoom group yesterday (a nowadays not unusual experience) where we were asked this question as a sort of topic for us to discuss and share; “Who’s inspired or guided you?”, and I was surprised to discover that most people either didn’t have or didn’t want to talk about a person or book or specific event(s) they could cite. All day long today that realization was reinforced when I threw the question out on face-book and my three listservs. Only now I feel it’s not that people don’t want to tell of such an experience, most people apparently don’t have one major intense experience or person who made such an impression. I know I am more intense than many about many things.
For myself upon my eyes reading the question, my answer came out in my mind almost before the words for it: my father and Jane Austen’s six novels.
This image of the RLS book is not the one my father read to me, but I cannot replicate a book cover from the old-fashioned sets of English classics he had on his shelf, often published by do-good organizations like the Left Book Club …
I know I have mentioned about my father here before, but not said much for real. Despite spending 44 years in close friendship-love-marriage with my late husband, Jim (whom you are tired of hearing about), the true core influence on what I am, how I came to have the stances I do, political, areligious, social, were the result of my relationship with my father: from my earliest memories, he was the person who understood, companioned me, yes mothered me. Like Edmund with Fanny, he read with me, and reasoned with me about what we read together, read aloud to me — some of my happiest memories of my girlhood come from when he read aloud to me Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Sire de Maltroit’s Door” and “A Lodging for the Night:” since then I’ve been a reader/lover of Stevenson’s style, stance, pizzazz. My father took me to the library, told me of his boyhood during the 1930s depression, explained the politics of the 1950s and early 60s we were experiencing. I left home in 1963. But there was a year after Izzy was born where he phoned me every week on Sunday and we’d have a long satisfying talk.
Emma Thompson as Elinor writing to their mother to tell of what has happened in London to ask if they can come home (1995 Miramax S&S, scripted Emma Thompson, directed Ang Lee)
Then Jane Austen’s 6 famous novels. A couple of people in the zoom registered puzzlement. How could a book (maybe they meant also one so old) influence, guide or shape someone. To some extent this shows how for some people books mean nothing vital to their lives. I read today in one of the papers how public figure was influenced by a book or event — what was cited were famous people, widely know fairly recent books, fashionable, movies. So I tried to tell of how I had first read these books at age 12-13 (S&S & P&P), then 15 (MP), that as a teenager of 17 or so when I was in need of a way of responding to social life and the hard abrasions of people, I’d think of Elinor Dashwood and her stance in life, and how this character (an aspect of Austen herself I still believe) gave me a presence to emulate, to aspire to come up to to protect myself (self-control, prudence are strong themes in Austen embodied in Elinor). How often while I don’t say to myself, How would Elinor or Anne Elliot or Jane Fairfax, or even Fanny Price have acted in this situation, nevertheless parallel situations in the books come to mind when something is happening to me that have some meaning. They need not involve these central figures, but they often do – as well as some of the heroes. Lines from Austen’s books come into my mind unbidden — I remember (or half remember) what seems to crystallize or capture an aspect of the situation. What a given character said.
This is probably why I have so little patience with preposterous interpretations and some of the uses made of her text to forward careers or fill a fashionable niche, or turn her into a whipping post for someone’s feminist thwarted career, or even the hagiography which turns her into an unreal omnipotent presence, which leads to extravagant claims. And as to the solemn moralizing one comes across in some JASNA groups, how can they be so moronic to have missed the core continual anarchic ironies of the text.
To explain this to others I had to fall back on using words like role models — though that’s too crude; I know I don’t imitate these characters in literal close ways. It’s not quite the way I conceive of myself understanding how literature functions, but as a rough and ready analogy that others can understand from their own experience comes close enough. The deepest thing is view of Austen herself that I feel throughout the novels.
By the way: My father did very much like Jane Austen. But there was no need for him to introduce the texts to me. The first time I read Pride and Prejudice I identified my relationship with him with Elizabeth’s with her father. My sympathies have ever been with the father; and it’s clear to me Austen understands what pain and counterproductive humiliation Mrs Bennet puts both her older daughters through. He also was one of those who introduced Trollope to me, with words about The Vicar of Bullhampton to this effect: Trollope has much wisdom.
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But during the talk of the group, I was led to remember how in my first year of full time college I had a teacher for an introductory course in literature where we read Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and I was shocked to hear someone (a group of people) assert how boring the book had been, and I protested and defended my favorite book. (Something similar happened to my daughter, Izzy, in a summer night-time class she took (post graduate) where she gave a paper on Elizabeth Bowen’s Last September and astonished the class by talking about it as deeply sexual. Clinton F. Oliver, an elegant black man, Henry James scholar, born in one of the Carribean islands (he once said). When I came to his office one day he suddenly said to me, major in English literature and be a college teacher. I was so touched, the first teacher to pay attention to me — tellingly a black person.
One memory: we had one class in a big auditorium (the other two were break-out sessions where I was lucky enough to be in his). One day a student came with so many lollipops and gave them out to everyone but me. I was somewhat older than the others — not as much as they thought, dressed in a skirt, probably all in black, anorexic then, but harmless. Anyway he came from behind his lectern and secured two and gave me one and smiled and we both sucked on lollipops with everyone else. It was in his class I first read Henry James: The Princess Casamassima. Also Conrad’s “Secret Sharer.” He was the only black teacher I ever had in all my years in school — until now at OLLI at AU I’ve had a class in August Wilson’s plays taught by someone who is retired military and now a librarian at Howard University
This is an image of the copy I read in that class, edited by him, which I cherish the way I do my first copy of Dr Thorne (edited by Elizabeth Bowen)
One person in this zoom group told me I was lucky to have had an experience with a teacher like that. One experience I never had was of a mentor: by this is meant not only someone who is older, wiser, and counsels you on careers, but helps you create one. Izzy had that: a Mrs Kelly who hired her for her 1st gov’t job, and helped her transfer into the library where she is now (though working remotely from home). Mrs Kelly had real feeling for Izzy and Izzy still goes to Mrs K’s yearly Halloween parties.
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And then reversing perspective: eleven days ago, I came across a posting in that excellent blog, Kaggsby’s Bookish Ramblings, on Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story. Pray read what Kaggsby writes so eloquently, from which I quote her opening paragraph:
It tells the story of a pivotal event in young Annie’s life when, at the age of 18, she spent a summer as an instructor at a camp for younger children. A naive only child, Annie is instantly taken advantage of by H., the head instructor; though remaining technically a virgin, she is used sexually by him, and as the summer goes on, by plenty of others in the camp. Overwhelmed by these experiences, she is unable to recognize how she has been abused or see herself as a victim; she thinks instead she’s now experiencing freedom from the repressive control of her parents, and cannot understand why she should be labelled whore. Her humiliation at the mockery and contempt of the rest of the instructors is almost as strong as her pain at being used and abandoned by H.
As I wrote here, when I reviewed Anne Boyd Rioux’s book on Alcott’s Little Women, the problem with the books I was given, including Little Women, was this aspect of female adolescence and teenagehod, the experience of predatory punitive patriarchal sexuality that not only are boys encouraged to inflict on girls, but girls collude with, are complicit to, is omitted. It is at least hinted at in Sense and Sensibility, and in movies like Lee/Thompson and Davies brought out fully. I wish I had had as well Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia, Naomi Wollf’s Promiscuities. Kaggsby does not see that Ernaux is Aspergers but her description of Ernaux’s horrible time in camp and as a girl growing up is an Aspergers experience. Kaggsby has her limits, but she often goes beyond what she consciously says or sees by the thoroughness of her analyses. In France too although the medical community knows about autism and Aspergers, the general population is unfamiliar with the term. I’ve had a few close French friends and only one knew the term; the other two were uncomfortable with the idea of a disability. It may be Ernaux knows and doesn’t say aloud — but I doubt it. I likened the book to Reviving Ophelia because Mary Pipher at no point that I can recall talks of autism: her book is an expose of the predatory punitive patriarchy that not only many men inflict on us, but many women are complicit in.
This disability puts girls at a frightening disadvantage before boys in our predatory sexual culture. I feel so for her. I have read two others of her books, both life-writing, which I associated with gothic; another I don’t have is Englished as I remain in Darkness; now I think that’s because perhaps she has not been willing to move out into rational diagnosis – the next step would be a book like Annie LeBrun’s
.
I had not thought of Aspergers but now this Kaggsby’s blog provides a comprehensive perspective for all Ernaux’s work. Of course it’s possible she was just naive and inexperienced with no social skills and a very protected upbringing, but I doubt it. At any rate she was a ripe target for experienced and cruel others.
This past summer a woman in my Bloomsbury class at OLLI at AU startled me by in front of the whole group online (another zoom experience) revealing she is lesbian by saying how she wished she had known such Forster’s Maurice when she was girl, and how much it would have helped to know others who are LBGTQ. I responded in kind: that in the 1990s when I first read Reviving Ophelia, I just cried to realize there was a large world of women experiencing what I did. This woman is in her 60s and probably has far more friends and is far more effective in life (may have made real money) than I’ve ever been. Every single person who comes out helps the rest of us.
Not that I think Austen understood herself to be coming out with the depths of her own experiences to help others but rather she began with sharp satire, and revised and revised, until the tone of mind of her book was to some extent also the opposite of where she had begun so deep empathy becomes the mode towards the vulnerable heroine.
Ania Marson as Jane Fairfax, barely but firmly self-contained (BBC Emma 1972, scripted by Denis Constantduros)
Laurie Pypher as Jane Fairfax explaining to Emma that she needs to get away from this wonderful gathering at Donwell Abbey & losing self-control (BBC Emma 2009, scripted by Sandy Welch)
What was wonderful about Andrew Davies’s development of Sanditon was he brought out this paradigm in three of the heroines (see my exegesis of Episodes 1-4, By the Sea …; and Episodes 5-8, Zigzagging). It is central to why Jane Austen has meant so much to me. This is not all she offers, but this is the core.
Ellen
My day’s journey has been pleasanter in every respect than I expected. I have been very little crowded and by no means unhappy. — Jane Austen, Letters (24 Oct 1798)
Emma (Autumn de Wilde, 2020, Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma)
Wendy Moore, Endell Street, The Suffragette Surgeons of World War One
Dear friends and readers,
Last week I was able to attend a series of mostly enjoyable and instructive lectures, talks, discussions from Chawton House for three long nights. I did not have to get on a crowded plane (for oodles of money), travel to Chawton, obtain lodging nearby (ditto), nor did I need to have a paper accepted, which to my mind for years has been a sina qua non for deciding whether to go to a conference, as I want not to wander about belonging to no one. Now I could skip that too.
It’s not that I would not have preferred to experience the place, some of the events and talk that would have gone on all around, but I have once been to Chawton, for three days, for a Charlotte Smith conference (about as perfect an experience as I’ve ever had), with Izzy, and feel I know it from years of reading, not to omit following a Future Learn on Jane Austen done at Chawton House a couple of years ago now.
Further, for me the core of what I go to these conferences for are the papers, the sessions. You see above, two of the delightful books I heard described, and the one Austen film that, together with the history of illustrations for Emma and earlier film visualizations that was included in the three day program. For today I will cover the best of the first day in England (which I experienced at night) and part of the second (ditto). At the end I’ve a video of a thoughtful revealing talk by Joanna Trollope about what actuates her when she writes her novels. I did not listen to all the talks on any of the days: there was too much to take in. You can find videos for many of those I describe below on YouTube. Don’t just skip these, if you love Austen or women’s writing and are fired into enthusiasm or (sometimes) despair at studying women’s lives.
On the first day there were 6 YouTubes, some twitter Q&As, and one or more zoom groups either for a presentation or an afterwards.
Telling hard truth: they are desperate: they lost 80% of their regular funding a couple of years ago now when Sandy Lerner in a huff (angry over something and not justifiably for real) left and took her money with her; now closed, the first speaker tells you their income is down 60%. So this is by way of showing their stuff — their place — there is a place to donate. They showed the strengths of what is available at Chawton House Museum, house, and libraries.
First, very early in the day, the Executive Director of Chawton, Katie Childs, telling briefly all about Chawton House, what she does, and their financial straits. There were two of these creative writing workshops where people are supposedly teaching those who paid for this (limited space) how to write poetry (Clair Thurlow, and Sinead Keegan). She came back later to tell of how hard the job is, about caring for this historical house (once owned by Edward Austen Knight, Austen’s luck brother, adopted by rich relatives, the Knights), the estate, the museum, the library, the events … All that was left out was the grounds.
Then Emma Yandel — All About Emma. Ms Yandel began by telling the viewer that the recent Emma is interesting for its use of costuming, for the visual presentation which breaks with traditions yet yet brings new meanings &c&c. About 16 minutes were filled with information and insight about the history of illustration: the earliest, 1833, Bentley’s edition, very sentimental, normalizing, especially revealing is the choice of scene: Mr Knightley proposing to Emma. Emma is not primarily or even at all a conventional emotional heterosexual romance; with Hugh Thomson’s comic illustrations are the first to break away into real scenes of women (which the novel is filled with), with some irony, then the 20th century took the reader somewhat further. She talked of a 1946 a stage play in London, which was all sentiment and unreality and then was moving on to the most conventional Emma (1996, McGrath, with Gweneth Paltrow) and one of the break-aways, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, when, aargh!, the YouTube broke off and some other YouTube managed to block the rest of this talk …. I have seen the new Emma, and analyzed and described it as a hollow parody in the first half, and emotionally drenched heterosexual romance in the second.
Then a superb talk by Kim Simpson, she takes care of the two libraries and teaches at Southampton University. She told of the early women’s books the Chawton House owns, showed the two rooms of 1000s of books, and then gave a talk on the development of women’s rights as a concept and reality through focusing on seven women writers whose books she curated an exhibit in 2019 about — and including their associates, books they were responding to, and other books along the way. Each of these women that she chose was carefully selected and her work presented intelligently: Jane Austen, Persuasion was quoted (the pen has been in men’s hands), Bathsua Makin (a midwife), An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), Sarah Fyge Egerton, The Female Advocate, written when she was just 14; Mary Astell, Reflections on Marriage (1700, though she wrote a lot about setting up a college for women, on behalf of educating women, Mary Chudleigh (1655-1700), A Defense of Women; Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800) for her letters and for founding a sort of society of bluestockings, Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall, A Journey through every stage of life (1754), Madame de Genlis (1746-1830), the books that Jane Austen read or mentioned; Catherine Macaulay (1731-91, Her Letters on Education (1790).
The intellectual treat of the day was Wendy Moore whose books I have read and admired: especially Wedlock about the abusive marriage Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore endured. Moore writes eloquently, insightfully, passionately. Her talk was on the first women’s hospital at Endell Street, which was created by two courageous women doctors during the first world War in London. At first rejected, then after much struggle and using what connections they had from their education and background, they were allowed to set up a hospital that became one of the best hospitals in London — staffed entirely by women. They were there for the Spanish flu. Then in 1818 ruthlessly disbanded, the women driven away back to their homes. A tragic waste after their heroic admirable successful endeavour. She has been interested in all her work in the history of medicine and exposing violence inflicted on, and exclusions of women from any money, power, ability to choose a life. The suffragettes were done justice to — ironically no longer done in many accountings of suffragettes. They were violent! how could they? only suffragists are nowadays spoken of as acceptable. A rare spirit pushing back is Lucy Worseley. Moore provides the solid research. I quote from Anne Kennedy Smith’s review of the book in The Guardian:
In 1920, as part of an exhibition on women’s war work, the Imperial War Museum planned to display a sketch of a busy operating theatre at Endell Street Military Hospital in London. The hospital’s commanding officers, Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson, were furious, convinced that the depiction of a discarded splint and other clutter would damage the future professional reputation of women in medicine. “We would rather have no record of our work than a false record,” they raged.
One hundred years on, this compelling book at last gives Endell Street its due. It’s the story of the remarkable wartime contribution of two medical women who, as active suffragettes, had previously been enemies of the state. Life partners Murray and Anderson were qualified doctors who met while waging a women’s war against the British government. Anderson refused to pay tax and spent four weeks at Holloway prison after smashing a window in a smart part of London in 1912. Murray risked her medical career by speaking out against the force-feeding of suffragette prisoners.
The outbreak of war in August 1914 gave them the opportunity to take a different sort of radical action. Together they organised the Women’s Hospital Corps and set up a hospital in a luxury Paris hotel. There, amid the chandeliers and marble, they operated on wounds caused by shell fire, used primitive x-rays to locate bullets and shrapnel, and treated gas gangrene and trench foot. The taboo on female doctors treating men vanished overnight. Reports of the women’s success reached the War Office, and in early 1915 Murray and Anderson were invited to establish a large new military hospital in central London.
There was a comedienne, Alison Larkin, who made me laugh; then a writer of Austen post-texts, Natalie Jenner. It was too late at night to listen to her; I’ve since read about her book and discuss Jenner in the comments to my second blog.
Last Joanna Trollope — I’d never seen her before. How personable she is, how she knows how to make herself appealing, I thought. She tells of her motives and what more deeply actuates her in writing the kind of realistic domestic romances of family life in contemporary life that she has for some 30 years. Her first commercial success was apparently The Rector’s Wife (which I am now reading, as a result of listening to this talk). She did real justice to the genre she writes in. I so appreciated this. She then told of her most recent novel, Mum and Dad.
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On the second night I meant to watch or listen just to two talks, and I ended up listening to almost all of them – though not in the order they were put online. In my judgement there were several highlights as talks and for the content in this earlier part of the second set of talks, especially Rebecca James and Julia Wheelwright. At the end of the day/night Devoney Looser (like Gillian Dow), as something of a Janeite star, I’ll save for the second blog. For entertainment and charm on the second day, I’ll focus pick Bee Rowlatt “following in the footsteps of Mary Wollstonecraft.” So here I’ll stop at Wheelwright, moving for the second blog to the later sessions of the second day featuring both Rowlatt and Looser; and for the third day Gillian Dow and Emma Clery. This time I got the time down they spoke.
Theresa Kiergan, a Northern Irish poet, and Lisa Andrews, a journalist who has worked in TV. 11:0 am British summer time. They met while both were working on 26’s 100 Armistice Project. This was about poetry inspired by women refugees, and Kiergan’s has researched and written about the exodus of Belgian into Northern Ireland in the 1940s. 16,000 people, and they were welcomed (a far cry from today). KIergan singled out one woman who did embroidery; one piece of this material she did has survived. Many of the women would have been lace makers
Clio O’Sullivan, communications and publications manager at Chawton, noon British summer time. She told of an exhibit she curated, which she was heart-broken over when it was about to be made public and all was locked down (March): “Man Up! Women who Stepped into a Man’s World.” The title and the way it was described would have put me off but she was such a good interviewer that I was curious to begin her talk. It turns out it is an excellent exhibit and they have done all they can to make it available online. She researched and produced materials (books and other artefacts) about “Miss Betsy Warwick, the Female Rambler,” the “Narrative of the Life of Charlotte Charke” (daughter of Collie Cibber who disowned her – O’Sullivan did not bring in her family), Hannah Snell who joined the army and navy by dressing as a man. Elizabeth Knight (see below – a property owner), George Sand (O’Sullivan has an interesting image of Sand I’d never seen before – very austere, man-like but yet a woman), Mary Ann Talbot, who joined the navy (another cross dresser), the Brontes, Mary Wollstonecraft and a reverse case where a man, Chevalier d’Eon dressed as a woman, Mademoiselle de Beaumont. Hers were stories of soldiering, piracy (!), duelling, acting, ballooning, — and writing. Without the writing we would not know of them. She showed pink as a background to defuse or change the stigmata surrounding the colors.
Rebecca James, at 20 after 12 British summer time. Hers and the next talk were the two best of the whole of the second day. I am so glad that I did listen to O’Sullivan or I might not have gone on to these two. They are not frivolous or silly or popular unrealities. James’s topic was titled: “Women Warriors of the Waves.” The actual subject was the literature of piracy in the 18th century, which she has been studying (half a century ago Richetti wrote about the popular literature on this topic, with no women mentioned). Her two central women are Mary Read and Ann Bonny. There are printed books about these women and documents which repay study: She first discussed The Tryals of Jack Rackam and Other Pirates (printed in Jamaica 1721). In this book the woman are described as disguised like men, but clearly women in disguise, the pictures show their bodies, their breasts. They are presented as fierce, ruthless, violent, unafraid. Then, A General History of Pirates, 1724, with the central characters being “the remarkable Actions and Adventures of Mary Read and Anne Bonny. It’s said to be by Charles Johnstone, perhaps a pseudonym. She talked of the subsections in which we find the stories of these two women. In these the women are really trying to pass as men and behave as men and today one can read these stories about as about women who wanted to have sex with other women. Mary’s story (as told) begins with her entering the male world, but Anne Bonny’s with her in childhood; both story matters emphasize that the girls were when young dressed as boys, and to an extent it is implied they cross-dressed at first due to the circumstances of their families. They were arrested and accused of enough crimes so they could be executed, but both successfully pled their “bellies” (they were pregnant?) and escaped the gallows. She cited one article, Sally O’Driscoll, “The Pirate Breast,” The Eighteenth Century, 53:3 (?):357-79.
Claire in The Search (Season 1, Episode 12, Outlander), one of my favorite sequences where she dresses like a man and sings and dances and rides through the Highlands in her search for Jamie with Murtagh (his best friend, a father-figure) by her side
One of the most striking things about James’s illustrations is how the women were depicted reminds me of the way women in action-adventure costume dramas are depicted today. She showed pictures from a series called Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag on Starz. This is the first time I’ve seen any show that resembles Outlander in any way also on Starz. On a channel called Ubisot, the women are deadly and fierce. Since I’m an addict of Outlander it fascinated me to see that for the first two seasons and part of the second when Claire (Caitriona) dresses as a man it is always clear she is a woman and the way she is costumed recalls some of the images James showed; she is disguising herself for protection; she can be violent and fierce in self protection but by the end of the second season she is working as a nurse caring for all people. By contrast, although in the last episode of the 5th season of Poldark, where Debbie Horsfield has no source whatsoever she attempts to turn Graham’s far more “womanly” heroine Demelza into violent male-dressed woman (it doesn’t work) until then Demelza never looks like any of this material although the circumstances of the costume drama include scenes at sea, and violent scenes of class warfare.
Julia Wheelwright at 2:00 pm British summer time. Her topic was “Masquerade: women of the 18th century dressed up for profit, adventure, liberty.” This too was not the actual theme. Her book is titled Sisters in Arms, and it covers women’s history from classical times past the 18th century. I can’t begin to include all she said or suggested. She too made central use of the lives and stories told about Mary Read and Anne Bonny. I was very interested in her accounting for the myth of the Amazons: she suggested it was a result of Greeks whose writings were transmitted to Western culture, coming upon tribes of peoples (Scythians) where the women did have male fighting roles, and so astonished were they made the stories into something supernatural, glamorous. She told of how Mary Read was Irish originally; not only did she dress as a boy, but she eventually married, had children, went to Jamaica. Mary Read we know died many years later, but Anny Bonny just disappears from history. Hannah Snell was a real woman, she was on the stage for some time, she had brother-in-law names James Grey, she seems to have dressed as a male to escape the roles she was given as well as her family; she would desert after a while. Her biographer, Martha Steevens (?) says the Duke of Cumberland pensioned Hannah; she was married 3 times, had children, but ended in mental illness, in Bedlam, died a pauper in its hospital. Mary Anne Talbot, another told stories about: her details are not born out by documents Best documented from the 18th century is one Mary Lacy, a female shipwright,and chandler.
I donated $50, bought a used copy of Endell Street, and found (with a friend’s help) the 1990s BBC series on YouTube, The Rector’s Wife, with one of my favorite actresses when she was young, Lindsay Duncan in the role of heroine, Anna Bouverie.
Mr Elton about to reveal Emma’s masterpiece of a drawing of Harriet overwhelmed by its frame (Emma 2020)
Our three heroines, Marianne, Heloise, Sophie making supper, tasting the wine, sewing garments (Portrait of a Lady On Fire, 2019)
What is curious about Wilde’s hollowing out of Austen’s Emma to surface scenes until near the end is that the language the actors/actresses speak is strikingly a good deal of the time taken directly from the book. I have not seen this kind of thing since the 1970s and 80s in the BBC series of Austen’s film and Andrew Davies’s 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice. I found real pleasure in hearing Austen’s own lines, which gave the film what gravitas, intelligence and inner grace it had; otherwise it was a perverse travesty reversing the values that Austen’s Emma inhabits.
By contrast, The Portrait of a lady on Fire is often a silent film, sparse dialogue, with meaning projected through sparse dialogue, with meaning projected through strong silent acting in emblematic scenes
Paradoxically, in this Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the relationships among three women are centrat while in Austen’s Emma (in the original book) the women’s relationships with one another are central. This new film parodies these, does not take them seriously or skips a lot of the development of them (is utterly indifferent to women’s relationships as silly) while using some of the original book’s language the way the 1970s and 80s Austen films did. So there is a real contrast between the films. Siamma’s movie traces the development of true relationships; in Austen’s Emma, the heroine does not see anyone truly but herself and in the book all her relationships except that with “Miss Taylor” that now doesn’t count: she drops Harriet, Jane must leave, she & Mrs Elton are sparring enemies. The women in this Portrait of a Lady forced by the world to play the roles imposed upon them and end sad and lonely. Only the artist has some fulfillment.
Friends and readers,
While these two prominent women-centered films made and written by women (Eleanor Catton, a Booker Prize winner wrote the screenplay for this Emma) would seem to have utterly disparate characteristic scenes, as seen in the above high caricature exaggeration of the scene from Austen’s book where Mr Elton displays Emma’s drawing of Harriet brought back from London, framed and the quiet group scene of three characters existing together cooperatively in a daily task, they are at core surprisingly alike. This has not been noticed because with the exception of Anibundel on Sanditon and Emma (whom I know, not from her review, but from personal knowledge, has read both books), every single review I’ve read shows not just no knowledge of the book, but seem to misremember details and distort the book’s overall feel. Mr Martin is not a widowed farmer, Austen’s book is not filled with frenzied activity (Sheila O’Malley); Austen’s book is not generally hilarious, Clueless not in mood at all like Austen’s book (Mark Kermode).
Kermode does begin with a passing comment, that Austen’s Emma is capable of “endlessly reinterpretable gender politics,” and it’s there that the two films criss-cross terrains. Quite the opposite to this new Emma‘s obsessive gaze at all its males’ breeches for signs of phallic strength, Emma is about women’s relationships with one another. The first third of the book has Emma (here Anya Taylor-Joy) obsessed with Harriet (Mia Goth), because she is bereft without Miss Taylor (Gemma Whelan) now removed down the street to the house and presumably arms of Mr Weston (Rupert Graves, sadly aged, into the harmless if ever so there male). It’s arguable the book is as lesbian as the screenplay and realization of Sciamma’s two heroines. Consider how in the book Emma has no desire to marry she says until near its end, and then it’s Mr Knightley’s companionship she would feel deprived of. But Miss Taylor is dismissed in the movie, and Emma and Harriet are treated as two women on the hunt for two males, Mr Knightley (Johnny Flynn) and Robert Martin (Conor Swindells); only at two moments of intense feeling (from the second half of the film) do we see Emma and Harriet dwelling on one another — when finally Emma understands Harriet is now enamoured of Mr Knightley and Harriet grasps this is not acceptable by the woman who deprived her of Mr Martin. The second traces a slow growth of real relationship:
Both movies and stories have one young woman drawing the other and a great fuss made about the painting, but Emma takes this seriously only at the close of the movie where suddenly Emma appears to value the drawing because it is by her and of Harriet, and thus a commemoration of their friendship.
This is of Emma (Kate Beckinsale) painting Harriet (Samantha Morton) from Andrew Davies’s 1996 Emma; but a real dwelling on this substory is found in all the heritage Emmas
By contrast, all the stills in Emma which capture two characters actually in a relationship with one another capture heterosexual passion, Emma with Mr Knightley or Frank Churchill:
Emma and Frank at Box Hill
Emma and Mr Knightley dancing
The reviews of both movies have been uniformly filled with praise, but when I looked at the Rotten Tomatoes comments and percentages, it seems to me those who went to see Emma were not as ecstatic over the costumes (in both films the characters are just beautifully dressed) as the reviewers, were vaguely disappointed at this Emma, and treated it as ho hum yet another Austen film come down the studio pipes (72% rated it favorably), while the audience who registered their views of Portrait were deeply satisfied, gratified, awakened to something new (92% loved it), unexpectedly, deeply pleasurable.
I suggest that the new Emma fails to capture the book repeatedly; in the first half to two-thirds of the film, everything is acted out through artificial gestures, symmetrical behavior, caricature, exaggerated quirky behavior designed to draw laughter. We are not allowed to take the characters at all seriously until the last third, when at the point of the appearance in the story of Mrs Elton (Tanya Reynolds as effective as caricature here as she was as real living woman in Outlander as Lady Isobel Dunsany — it’s curious how actors/actresses in seemingly minor roles in Outlander are being found in key roles in quality films) there is a turn into gushing romance, when (most unlike the book) Mr Knightley acts out a besotted male and Emma melts into throbbing passion.
A structural sign something is wrong is that Jane Fairfax (Amber Anderson) while introduced early on by her adoring aunt, Miss Bates (Miranda Hart), is not seen again until well past the mid-point of the film; most of the scenes in the book and previous films between Frank and Jane are cut; they are utterly forgotten its close. Emma’s rivalry with Jane comes out in the scene where Emma plays the piano in such a banal and awkward way, and Jane is the policed classical performer, but nowhere else. The actress’s power is glimpsed now and again but essentially thrown away:
However briefly (and this kind of clarity about him is sort of new) Frank Churchill is presented as a hard cad; but there is no time given for any camaraderie between Jane and Emma to be built as there is in most of the other Emma films.
Autumn de Wilde, fresh from her career as a fashion photographer, music video producer, and generally pop culture pleaser, just did not take Austen’s book seriously at any level, seems not to have thought about it and granted Austen only the desire to tell stories of conventional heterosexual people moving towards marriage. Thus the movie is amusing but ultimately a bore; she missed what was unusual and interesting and moving in the book. She perhaps overdevelops one of the most famous scenes in the book, but Emma insulting Miss Bates is not part of any insight into the vulnerability of all women. The scene between Mr Elton and Emma coming back from the Christmas party where Austen gives license for a #Metoo encounter (taken up by most of the movies) is here turned into a duel of who is the greater snob, Mr Elton when he sneers at Harriet (everyone has their level) or Emma when she puts on a condescending hauteur that prompts Mr Elton to become physically angry, bang hard on the carriage roof and jump out precipitiously. You’d think he was the person sexually assailed instead of vice versa.
What is curious about this hollowing out of Austen’s book to surface scenes until near the end is that the language the actors/actresses speak is strikingly a good deal of the time taken directly from the book. I have not seen this kind of thing since the 1970s and 80s in the BBC series of Austen’s film and Andrew Davies’s 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice. This viewer found real pleasure in hearing Austen’s own lines, and that they were chosen regularly over any modernization gave the film what gravitas, intelligence and inner grace it had.
Turning to Portrait of a Lady On Fire, the incidents told include Heloise’s sister’s suicide rather than be forced to marry and at the film’s end Heloise seen crying silently across a theater by Marianne; Marianne and Heloise helping Sophie to find an abortionist, comparisons with Eurydice (who might have been glad to escape Orpheus as Carol Duffy’s poem, “The Big O,” suggests), discussions of allowing oneself to be painted as draining the life out of the subject. When left alone, the three women move into egalitarian patterns. A truly perceptive review of the film by Muriel Zagha (for Times Literary Supplement, March 6, 2020, p 25, behind a paywall) brings out its allusions to 18th century women artists, its use of female gazes, its cool egalitarian spectatorship.
Marianne listening to Sophie
Marianne and Heloise confiding
Gazing out to the sea together, wrapped up
One of the most remarkable sequences shows the all-female household going to the beach at night at mid-summer to find the beach filled with women dancing, drinking, eating together, exchanging gossip and folk remedies.
Both films rely heavily on a musical score – use explosions of music to convey complex or comical or emotional commentary on what we are seeing. Emma moves from recognizable operatic music, to Christian hymns, to modern rock, with a probably deliberately sought jarring effect; Portrait of a Lady on Fire jumped to the next century with recognizable symphonies, piano music, arresting chanting (the women on the beach) and modern electronic music.
Mr Knightley and Emma fiercely yet comically quarreling when Emma bullyingly persuades Harriet to refuse Mr Martin
The landscape is made up of 18th century material objects
My quarrel with Wilde’s Emma is not to dismiss its laughter, which we are in need of just now. I have compared the unexamined nature of the material in this woman’s movie (as all the Austen movies ultimately are, no matter how a particular director tries to wrestle into male action sequences) with Sciamma’s sincerely-done contemporary re-imagining of the past to point to Wilde’s dismissal of a sisterhood movie whose 18th century setting could have been used as a reinforcement of themes (from or in the book) embodying women seeking liberty.
Here Heloise as daughter cannot free herself of her mother’s (Valeria Golino) command she marry a man she has never met
I can’t help but remember how this year’s Sanditon attempted a resolutely contemporary re-imagining of Austen’s fragment and failed to carry it off fully. Perhaps what is needed is a new sweeping away of (recent) hagiographical Janeite readings of Austen — as was done by D. W Harding and Marvin Mudrick in the 1940s and 60s respectively.
This is my favorite of all the fictionalized iconic images of Austen — it’s found in the gardens of Chawton House I’m told, 20th century, the sculpture Adam Roud who says it “represents” Austen as “daughter and sister as she walked through town” (see commentary and video)
A windy wet day? her head held high
Jane Austen was very much aware of her birthday, probably each year it came round. On at least two of such days, she wrote a poem upon the occasion, remembering. The finest is the one remembering the death of Anne Lefroy, a nearby companion-friend (however older and however this friend was instrumental in preventing her developing a true love relationship with Tom Lefroy, causing Austen at the time and for several years after much grief). At the age of 55 Anne Lefroy died from a fall from a horse on December 16th, in 1804. Four years later, in the fiction of the poem, to the day, Jane Austen wrote this elegy:
To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy who died Dec:r 16 — my Birthday
The day returns again, my natal day;
What mix’d emotions with the Thought arise!
Beloved friend, four years have pass’d away
Since thou wert snatch’d forever from our eyes.–
The day, commemorative of my birth
Bestowing Life and Light and Hope on me,
Brings back the hour which was thy last on Earth.
Oh! bitter pang of torturing Memory!–
Angelic Woman! past my power to praise
In Language meet, thy Talents, Temper, mind.
Thy solid Worth, thy captivating Grace!–
Thou friend and ornament of Humankind!–
At Johnson’s death by Hamilton t’was said,
‘Seek we a substitute–Ah! vain the plan,
No second best remains to Johnson dead–
None can remind us even of the Man.’
So we of thee–unequall’d in thy race
Unequall’d thou, as he the first of Men.
Vainly we search around the vacant place,
We ne’er may look upon thy like again.
Come then fond Fancy, thou indulgent Power,–
–Hope is desponding, chill, severe to thee!–
Bless thou, this little portion of an hour,
Let me behold her as she used to be.
I see her here, with all her smiles benign,
Her looks of eager Love, her accents sweet.
That voice and Countenance almost divine!–
Expression, Harmony, alike complete.–
I listen–’tis not sound alone–’tis sense,
‘Tis Genius, Taste and Tenderness of Soul.
‘Tis genuine warmth of heart without pretence
And purity of Mind that crowns the whole.
She speaks; ’tis Eloquence–that grace of Tongue
So rare, so lovely!–Never misapplied
By her to palliate Vice, or deck a Wrong,
She speaks and reasons but on Virtue’s side.
Her’s is the Energy of Soul sincere.
Her Christian Spirit ignorant to feign,
Seeks but to comfort, heal, enlighten, chear,
Confer a pleasure, or prevent a pain.–
Can ought enhance such Goodness?–Yes, to me,
Her partial favour from my earliest years
Consummates all.–Ah! Give me yet to see
Her smile of Love.–the Vision disappears.
‘Tis past and gone–We meet no more below.
Short is the Cheat of Fancy o’er the Tomb.
Oh! might I hope to equal Bliss to go!
To meet thee Angel! in thy future home!–
Fain would I feel an union in thy fate,
Fain would I seek to draw an Omen fair
From this connection in our Earthly date.
Indulge the harmless weakness–Reason, spare.
In the poem Jane says she has “mix’d emotions” on her “natal day” in 1808. On that day 4 years ago she knew she would never lay her eyes on Anne Lefroy again; her friend had been “snatch’d away.” An unexpected accident is a great blow. So now a day which gave her “Life & Light & Hope” is an occasion for feeling penetratingly a “bitter pang of torturing Memory.”
She then remembers her friend’s powers, what she valued her friend for: “Talents, Temper, mind . . . solid Worth . . . captivating Grace.” A friend to all, an ornament to the human race. This is going very high, but Austen likens Anne Lefroy to Samuel Johnson, and says that like him, when Anne Lefroy died, there was no substitute, “No second best . . . “None can remind us even of the Man.” (I read this phrase in Boswell’s Life of Johnson and that may be where Jane read it too.)
Vainly she searches. Not there, nowhere around her, only a “vacant space.” And so she says, she will conjure up a vision of her. “Fancy” is much kinder to us, an “indulgent power” — Austen’s idea of hope here is unlike Pope’s ironic witty utterance: “Hope springs eternal in the human breast/Man never is, but always to be blest.” Cool distance has become melancholy shivering: “Hope is desponding, chill, severe to thee!” Thee here can be Austen herself, probably is. So she turns to Fancy.
What does she remember. Not literal looks. Rather the woman’s psychological nature, their friendship, an asserted love for Jane herself, a voice harmonious I’m tempted to remember Emma Woodhouse who valued modulated voices unlike Mr Martin’s, but Austen knows better than to stay here: it’s what Anne would say, “sense . . . Genius, Taste & Tenderness of Soul . . . genuine warmth of heart without pretence,” and we cannot ignore the turn away from sensuality, sexuality, in that “purity of Mind.”
We are given a panegyric like Austen’s brother gave her: neither of them ever “misapplied” their Tongues, spoke and reasoned “on Virtue’s Side. In spoken words, Anne Lefroy sought “to comfort, heal, enlighten, chear,/Confer a pleasure, or prevent a pain — ” This is Popian poetic art: antitheses used for emotional instead of ironic reinforcement.
Can anything go beyond this? Yes. That she liked Jane, was “partial to her” from her “earliest years.” No small thing. Jane asks Fancy to allow her to see Anne Lefroy smiling with love at her. But no, “the Vision disappears:” “Tis past & gone — We meet no more more.” This “Cheat of Fancy” over a Tomb is short.
The poem ends with Austen hoping to be united to her friend once more after death, the dream many have had of death. There is a medieval picture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (in a glass case) where we see pairs of friends clutching each other against a flowery flat green background; rows of these from top to bottom. Perhaps she says this terrible pain of having had her friend die, which creates a union of memory in her mind augurs a “connection” to be. She asks Fancy to “indulge this harmless weakness,” for that’s how she regards this idea.
“Reason, spare.” Reason, a deeply felt of reality from knowledge of experience tells her otherwise. Jane was not a religious woman.
This is almost a repeat of what I wrote on December 16th, 2011, when I was as yet unwidowed, and had not felt the true bereftness of grief. At the time I had not as yet visited Chawton House Library (as it used to be called), and only seen Chawton cottage once. Now I’ve been to Chawton cottage twice (once very thoroughly) and particated in a four day conference on Charlotte Smith at Chawton House Library.
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Romola Garai as Emma playing the piano after returning from a very ambiguous experience in an assembly ball (2009 BBC Emma, scripted by Sandy Welch), the most recent of the heritage-faithful type of adaptation (see list)
I have not yet found a way to blog regularly on Austen; my scheme to blog once a week on a book like Paula Byrne’s in the event turns out to be unworkable; I feel as if I’m using the book too invasively; one or two blog reviews a book is for most of them the ethical way to go about it. I had thought of collecting news items and did so this week:
2) the latest “Jane Austen find” by Devoney Looser, as in fan fiction, really a letter possibly by Mary Russell Mitford. It’s behind a paywall at the newly semi-pop (trying for this) dumbing down TLS as “fan fiction or fan fact”, followed by some secrets hitherto unknown about Oliver Sacks. Mary Russell Mitford was a writer and neighbor, & is discussed perceptively in the most recent issue of Persuasion, ‘Jane Austen and Mary Mitford: A New Appraisal” by Azar Hussain (the essay not one of those online, alas). See also Oliphant on Mitford, Austen and their first biographers.
3) Janine Barchas at the Blarb for a Los Angeles publication, where she presents as a new find an essay on Arthur’s Miller’s (dreadful) radio adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. It is not quite a new find; several years now I heard a full paper by Sylvia Marks on this adaptation; here’s a summary from an earlier blog here:
Sylvia Kasey Marks’s paper was on the 20th century great playwright, Arthur Miller and the 18th century forger, Henry Ireland. She discussed them as both appropriating the work or understood persona and style of someone else. In the early phase of his career Miller wrote radio plays, and some of these are dramatizations of someone else’s novel. She demonstrated that in Miller’s case we see him consistently change his original to fit his own vision. Unlike Ireland, Miller was not trying to find a new space in which he could create something unlike what others were writing at the time. He was building his career and operating within a considerable group of constraints (which include pleasing the audience). Sylvia told the whole sad story of Ireland, including a conflict with his father, and how we may see popular attitudes towards Shakespeare in some of Ireland’s writing.
It seems to me there’s nothing for it but to take the time out periodically and read a good book on Austen or by one of her near contemporaries (or on such a contemporary) and write a good review. It comes down to picking a book. I will be returning to view and write about Jane Austen’s Sanditon, Anna Lefroy’s continuation, once again Chris Brindle’s filmed play and at length,
4) soon to air on PBS, Andrew Davies’ interesting (if finally a failure) attempt at modernizing extending and yet keeping within the Austen canon, Sanditon
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Adelaide Labille-Guiard’s portrait of Marie-Gabrille Capet (1798) — L-G specialized in portraits, at which she was very good, and which paid — early on she married unhappily and quickly left her husband so had to support herself
Last I have been developing blogs on actresses once again and first up will be Susannah Maria Arne Cibber (1714-66) and then fast forward to Barbara Flynn. I’m reading an excellent concise artistic biographical study of Adelaide Labille-Guiard (1749-1803) for my first woman painter. Foremother poets are a intimidating cornucopia, but if I include prose-poets, maybe Virginia Woolf as seen in Night and Day (a very enjoyable insightful and underrated novel) will be my first — not that Woolf needs me to blog about her.
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 