Demelza and Ross Poldark (Eleanor Tomlinson, Aidan Turner, the last still of this year’s first episode, both looking grim or distressed)
Demelza and Ross in front of fire. She: “If you do not challenge the corrupt and unjust, who will?” He: “What would you have me do? I am not that man, Demelza, I have never been that man [someone who seeks power, loves the grand gesture, yet blows to authority].
Ross to Warleggan: “I believe belief is a beautiful thing” — from the final episode of this season
Friends,
It’s time to bring together another year’s worth of episodes in the saga of the new Poldark mini-series. We now have three year’s worth, five and one-half of the novels. To begin with, the the first season’s episodes and blogs on topics (like mining, poaching. I wrote also of the scripts of the first season. The novels adapted were Ross Poldark and Demelza (Poldark novels 1 and 2).
For the second season, the handy list is longer than the following for the third because the series itself had more history and the scripts had been published before the season ended. The novels adapted were Jeremy Poldark and Warleggan (Poldark novels 3 and 4):
This year no scripts have yet been announced; there was intense interweaving of the personal and public where the personal became contrived and at times far too melodramatic. I wish I had had the scripts to compare to see if this impression is the result of the director’s choices. The novels adapted were The Black Moon and most of The Four Swans (Poldark novels 5 and 6).
I’ve been putting this year’s blogs on my site for film adaptations and cultural arts in general, but these are also films from books very much rooted in the 18th century. Next up will be a list of the second season of Outlander, a sort of companion and comparable set of films partly set in the 18th century.
Morwenna Chynoweth Whitworth and Geoffrey Charles Poldark (Elisse Chappell and Harry Marcus)
In general, this year’s season compared in the same way as the previous two did to the 1975-78 Poldark mini-series. Both depart from the books, with the older series keeping much more to values of individual liberty and social justice, revolutionary Enlightenment norms, and the newer returning us to community as safety, compromise and desperate cooperation as modes of survival for its characters. See Poldark Rebooted, Twenty Years On.
For intelligent comments by the actors on the 1970s mini-series you cannot do better than this YouTube of The cult of Poldark:
The older series is subtler and more successful in conveying complex psychologies of characters interacting; the newer one is more overtly and interestingly political, a woven tapestry of juxtaposed epitomizing scenes (at its best symbolic art, with the character no longer presences on a stage, but figures in a picture). This year was much drabber than the previous — as befitting characters growing older, wearier, yielding the world’s demands.
Photo taken during Plath’s college years — this is one of my favorites (not in the exhibit)
One of several self-portraits in the exhibit — she is imitating the popular “abstract” style of the 1950s
Pursuit By Sylvia Plath
Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit.
Racine
There is a panther stalks me down:
One day I’ll have my death of him;
His greed has set the woods aflame,
He prowls more lordly than the sun.
Most soft, most suavely glides that step,
Advancing always at my back;
From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:
The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.
Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,
Haggard through the hot white noon.
Along red network of his veins
What fires run, what craving wakes?
Insatiate, he ransacks the land
Condemned by our ancestral fault,
Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;
Meat must glut his mouth’s raw wound.
Keen the rending teeth and sweet
The singeing fury of his fur;
His kisses parch, each paw’s a briar,
Doom consummates that appetite.
In the wake of this fierce cat,
Kindled like torches for his joy,
Charred and ravened women lie,
Become his starving body’s bait.
Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;
Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;
The black marauder, hauled by love
On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.
Behind snarled thickets of my eyes
Lurks the lithe one; in dreams’ ambush
Bright those claws that mar the flesh
And hungry, hungry, those taut thighs.
His ardor snares me, lights the trees,
And I run flaring in my skin;
What lull, what cool can lap me in
When burns and brands that yellow gaze?
I hurl my heart to halt his pace,
To quench his thirst I squander blood;
He eats, and still his need seeks food,
Compels a total sacrifice.
His voice waylays me, spells a trance,
The gutted forest falls to ash;
Appalled by secret want, I rush
From such assault of radiance.
Entering the tower of my fears,
I shut my doors on that dark guilt,
I bolt the door, each door I bolt.
Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:
The panther’s tread is on the stairs,
Coming up and up the stairs.
— one of the poems typed by Plath in the exhibit, said to have been written almost immediately after she met Hughes
Dear friends and readers,
Another foremother poet blog from a different angle than usual: I usually offer a few images from their best work, and comments, then a central section on the life and finally on the poetry in general. For tonight I want to describe a remarkable exhibit I saw and lecture I heard at the National Portrait Gallery: One Life: Sylvia Plath.
The exhibit was culled and put together by Dorothy Moss, a curator at the National Portrait Gallery, who also has taught at Smith College where Sylvia attended, and Karen Kukil, a curator of rare books and manuscripts at Smith College, and editor of the first unabridged, uncensored (unbowlderized) books of journals, and now letters by Plath. Until Kukil’s work all the autobiographical writing by Plath that readers could reach were put together by Ted Hughes or only with his or his sister, Olwen’s approval; even now Plath’s daughter, Frieda, controls what is put in print, so there are still some letters, poems, pictures withheld, or where they appear framed and controlled by Frieda who is said to be a fierce partisan on behalf of her father, Ted Hughes. Frieda has written lines showing intense hostility and resentment towards those who want to know more about her mother’s life.
‘Wanting to breathe life into their own dead babies
They took her dreams, collected words from one
Who did their suffering for them.
They fingered through her mental underwear
With every piece she wrote. Wanting her naked.
Wanting to know what made her.
Then tried to feather up the bird again
The exhibit is small, only one room, but they pack a lot in. It takes us through her life at first using photographs, her own art work, letters about her by others, journalism, writing by her for obtaining prizes, an essay on the double in literature for a class, a recommendation by Ruth Beuscher, a psychiatrist who became her friend recommending her for a Fulbright after her time at Smith, and gradually focusing on her poems written upon specific personal occasions, and her later letters to friends in distress at Hughes’s treatment of her, trying to start a new life with two young children to care for. There is also a musical piece, an installation it’s called by Olivia Johnson, Glass heart/bells. On a table one sees glass jars and funnels, bells, light flickering, with some of Plath’s words from her poetry heard over and over (“I thought I could not be hurt”; “How frail the human heart”) and a line from Hughes (“a mirrored soul of art”). Moss and Kukil said they had a hard time getting the Smithsonian to agree to any exhibit: objections included the idea that since Plath killed herself, the exhibit would be dark and not appeal; the idea that Plath was not widely known. This is startling to be told when for most women poets she is the major figure of the 20th century. It reminds me of how until the 1960s Virginia Woolf did not receive public acclaim and only recently has her importance and greatness been acknowledged. Prompted by questions, Moss and Kukil agreed that her suicide has made her an ambivalent figure the way Woolf’s suicide has made her.
For the lecture, first Moss spoke for about a half hour, then Kukil for the same amount of time, then they took questions.
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A depiction of Plath by her from the exhibit: here she is weeping over what she is reading about World War One
Moss’s lecture: She began by saying how tears welled in her throat when the exhibit was finally in place. She surveyed the many books, essays, poems published on Plath since her death, and insisted that in fact Plath is part of popular culture, however unacknowledged or acknowledged only quietly. She seemed to determined to alter the picture of Plath as dark and brooding; at least she was not so when she was younger, though she had a break down before she went to college. Moss said many readers say they do not feel so alone in their reactions to our society and one another when they read Plath.
This made me recall one of the poems I first read by her, which I remembered ever after.
The Applicant
First, are you our sort of person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we given you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed
To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt,
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit —
Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of _that_?
Naked as paper to start
But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
(11 October 1962)
I too hate interviews. In my experience they are forms of hazing as well as demanding the applicant portray herself as utterly willing to efface the self to be loyal to the institution, the people who are hiring her, someone of high status, with a great deal of pride and determined ambition. Oh yes and doing what is fashionable. The poem is not in the exhibit.
Moss followed what is fashionable today too. Plath was presented as constructing her image, posing and savvy before the camera, so a picture of her imitating Marilyn Monroe (they said) in a bathing suit was one self, but another of her with brunette hair, looking demur was for application for a scholarship was another. They chose her with a bicycle in front of a school building with a sketch pad to be the leading image outside the door of the exhibit because they thought somehow this showed her presenting an image of herself. The photo was taken by a good friend at the time, Marcia Brown, who stayed loyal to her after Hughes left her, and to whom one of the poignant letters in the exhibit was written. They chose the poem “It was the night before Monday” to show a happy moment with her parents, Winthrop and Aurelia Plath, and her brother, Warren.
On one of the walls of the exhibit
She covered the usual early biographical material, her father’s sternness and early death, her closeness to an aunt Dot (Dorothy, her mother’s sister)), a picture of herself dressed as a nurse (done during her father’s illness). There were cut-outs by her: when young she wanted to be a fashion designer. These show an astute awareness of popular highly sexualized styles of the 1950s. (Yves Saint-Laurent similarly made his own beautiful cut-outs as a young boy; his were more original in style; see my comments on an exhibit of his art at the Fine Arts Museum in Richmond, Virginia.) There was a pony-tail, a long, Plath’s own from when she was 12 and first cut her hair, saved as a relic by her mother. Her mother wrote that she couldn’t sleep the night before Plath cut her long hair for the first time.
In her teens Plath drew herself again and again, imitating different styles. She was liberal in her politics , and some reflect that (there is a mocking collage of Eisenhower in the exhibit). She was horrified at the murder by the state of the Rosenbergs. Her pictures also imitate popular styles at the time (surreal, cubism), we see her as a clown. She originally wanted to major in studio art but soon after entering Smith her professors directed her into literature and writing.
A Fractured Self
Moss said the thesis about the double in literature reflected Plath’s own sense of her fractured selves. After she won a number of awards, she secured a position for a year working in New York City for Mademoiselle (much coveted). She interviewed Elizabeth Bowen; photographs of that interview are in the exhibit. She met Marianne Moore too. Her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, is about the disillusionment she experienced during that tie.
In 1955 she went to England on a Fulbright and there met Hughes whom she married a year later. There are many photographs of her and him together, and several familiar ones are in the exhibit, and a portrait by her of him (quite beautiful). Moss did not say this but it’s apparent (to me) that Plath unfortunately bought into the myth of the deep appeal for sexual women of aggressive, violent macho males and the poem “Pursuit,” and a letter she wrote immediately after that show her exultant upon meeting Hughes as a “savage animal.” She was in fact naive when it came to understanding the realities of living with a promiscuous aggressive domineering man; Moss said she thought she could change him; it’s not clear when she began to realize that he didn’t want to live a domestic life centering on children. She herself had longed to be a mother. Kukil said they included the famous poem, “Balloons” to indicate how much joy she felt with her children.
Here is one less well-known:
New Year on Dartmoor
This is newness: every little tawdry
Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,
Glinting and clinking in a saint’s falsetto. Only you
Don’t know what to make of the sudden slippiness,
The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.
There’s no getting up it by the words you know.
No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.
We have only come to look. You are too new
To want the world in a glass hat.
It is said to be to her daughter, Frieda, as a little girl around Christmas. Plath’s greatest poetry comes from the period of her marriage and the desolation, despair and betrayal she knew in the separation.
Moss ended on Plath’s posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1982. In accordance with her upbeat presentation, she did not tell of the gravestone which apparently has had to be renewed several times as people keep trying to erase Hughes’s name from it. Nor did she mention that Hughes’s second wife, whom he was living with when Plath killed herself (not yet divorced) killed herself. She had a child too.
Another poem not in the exhibit:
Edge
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odours bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
Diane Purkiss wrote an essay on this poem from which I quote: “Plath evokes first Cleopatra, whose serpents in Shakespeare are babies suckling her breasts, then Medea, whose ‘illusion of a Greek necessity,’ is revenge on Jason, her unfaithful husband.Medea’s revenge takes the form of child-murder. The woman in the poem hovers undecidably between the two figures, one whose ‘children’ killed her, one who killed her children, one whose violence turns towards her own flesh through her children, one whose violence turns outward through her children.”
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Large Size Shoes by Sylvia Plath (this comes from an essay I read on another exhibit of Plath’s visual art — her drawings and illustrations, which are often very home-y and plain)
Karen Kukil concentrated on Plath’s writing, telling us briefly of the works she wrote, something of the history of the editions of the poems and letters. I wish she had told more about this. The exhibit includes the Royal manual typewriter she used as a teenager; later she has a semi-electric Smith Corona (so did I); then an Olivetti (in the UK). Kukil began by quoting a line by Plath: “I am in my deep soul happiest on the moors.” She is buried in Hepenstall (a parish church in Yorkshire). She covered The Bell Jar, the first book of poems, Ariel, with “Lady Lazarus,” a poem about suicide attempts. She too wanted to counter images of Plath as always a depressive by (as with Moss) by not giving the full context or de-emphasizing say her alienation from her mother’s form of ambition, such a poem seemed to come out of nowhere. She did talk later of the book, Letters Home, to her mother (Plath wrote altogether 747 letters to her mother); these show a happy complacent girl; they were carefully selected and censored after her death. Her mother had been very angry at the portrait of a mother in The Bell Jar, thinking it was simply her when it was a composite. Kukil said her own edition of Plath’s Journals (1955-62) is the first non-censored edition of Plath’s life-writing.
Plath, Kukil said, was “fearless.” That’s why she could write such frank bold transgressive poetry. She was an artist and would go through 15 drafts (of a poem “Elm,” a wood used for coffins, a poem about loneliness). She saved drafts of her poetry. All this was inherited by Hughes. Her poems also often have political context: so a poem on electrotherapy (which she apparently had inflicted on her) connects to her memories of how the Rosenbergs were electrocuted. Peter K. Steinberg whom Kukil worked with has created a website for studying Plath’s poetry. He is the co-editor with her of the two volume The Letters of Sylvia Plath (2017/18).
They then took questions. There was a good discussion. They told of how they came to study Plath. For Kukil it was being in Smith College. They were convinced that Plath knew she would someday be studied, and wrote at least some of her letters with a later audience in mind. She would write to Hughes saying they would someday be admired as a couple of poetic geniuses. (Their image has not emerged in quite the way she thought when she first married him.) They mentioned that Frieda has had a hard emotional life: her brother, Nicholas, Sylvia’s son, had a Ph.D. and did good work in science, but he too suffered from depression and killed himself. Teachers they had were important: Pamela Hunter gave a course which included work by Plath. Smith now has a rich archive of Plath material — bought from Hughes. They spoke of a course which joined together the work of Plath with Virginia Woolf. I made a comment at that: I said I thought that Plath and Woolf resembled one another in their after reputation: both died too young to control their papers; since they killed themselves, the reaction to their work has been affected by the average person’s discomfort with suicide, and this has kept the respect they both had early on subdued; that suicide arouses hostility in many people connected to someone who killed him or herself and by outsiders to the people most closely connected (say a husband). In Plath’s case there have been duelling angry biographies; in Woolf’s many attacks on her as elitist, “out of touch” with the world, often little understanding of Leonard. Both women commented on that, basically agreeing.
Stevenson has written about how she was hampered and stymied by Olwen Hughes
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A Kitchen — by Plath
I’ll close on discussions I’ve had with people who’ve studied and written professionally on Plath, people who have taught her poetry, and people who have read her deeply. Often they object to autobiographical reading, but this seems to me cannot be avoided; the material is often rooted in the personal, and Plath makes this plain (as did a poet of the 18th century I’ve studied, Charlotte Smith.) Friends who suffer themselves from bad headaches mentioned that Plath suffered from migraines and how these are reflected in her poems; for example, the rhythms and imagery of “Lesbos.” One seeming impersonal theme that has general application emerges circles around Medea — as we know betrayed by Jason. My friend, Fran, wrote “one major aspect in Wolf’s own treatment of the Medea theme is the way people feed on other people’s catastrophes, scandals and often actually fan the flames of defamation themselves. Here you have a voyeuristic, vampiristic crowd gloating over a homier Medea’s personal calamity:
Aftermath
Compelled by calamity’s magnet
They loiter and stare as if the house
Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought
Some scandal might any minute ooze
From a smoke-choked closet into light;
No deaths, no prodigious injuries
Glut these hunters after an old meat,
Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies.
Mother Medea in a green smock
Moves humbly as any housewife through
Her ruined apartments, taking stock
Of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery:
Cheated of the pyre and the rack,
The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.
One last which seems to me to show Plath at her finest is vatic:
The Moon and the Yew Tree
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness-blackness and silence.
For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Eight weeks: Monday, 11:50 am to 1:15 pm, September 20 & 27; October 11 – November 8
Tallwood, 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax Va
Dr Ellen Moody
Description of Course
We will ask what did a woman writer’s career look like, what genres and journalism women published, what obstacles & advantages women experienced, like & unlike today. We’ll read Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentance,” and Oliphant’s Kirsteen. We’ll also dip into on-line excerpts from Martineau’s Autobiography, Norton’s English Laws for Women in the 19th Century, Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst, “Freedom or Death” and journalism; Virginia Woolf’s “Professions for Women”
Required Texts in the order we’ll read them:
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, ed Macdonald Daly. Penguin, 1996 ISBN: 0-140-43464-X There’s a reading of unabridged text by Juliet Stevenson on CDs, Cover to Cover)
George Eliot, “Janet’s Repentance,” from Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. Jennifer Gribble Penguin, 1998. ISBN: 0-14-043638-3. There is also an online edition of Janet’s Repentance at the University of Adelaide’s website:
Margaret Oliphant, Kirsteen, edited by Anne Schriven. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Studies, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-948877-99-5 or Kirsteen; or the Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years ago, ed. Merryn Williams. 1984; rpt. London: Dent Everyman, 2012. ISBNs: 9780460011457; 0460011456. Not listed at Amazon. Available at Bookfinder: http://tinyurl.com/ycn3m6rz Also Booksource: https://mybooksource.com/kirsteen.html. Here are the covers:
Kirsteen, Association of Scottish Studies
Kirsteen, Dent Everyman
Digital editions of Kirsteen (if you are willing to read online): it is available online at the University of Pennsylvania:
There’s a version of Kirsteen on Kindle for $4.99; The Complete Works of George Eliot are on Kindle for $1.99, and these include Scenes of Clerical Life (which would include “Janet’s Repentance”).
Format: Study group meetings will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion (essays mentioned will be sent by attachment or are on-line).
Sept 20: In class: The writing career for women and Gaskell’s. For next time: begin Mary Barton; Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, Part IV, Section 1 and 2, pp 206-17.
Sept 27: In class: Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Martineau’s career and writing. For next time Woolf’s “Professions for Women.”
Oct 4: I must cancel the class as I’ll be out of town. Read ahead and on your own.
Oct 11: In class: Mary Barton. The topic of women’s professions. George Eliot’s career.
Oct 18: “Janet’s Repentance.” For next week Sections 1 and 2 of Caroline Norton’s English Laws
Oct 25: “Janet’s Repentance.” Caroline Norton; marital laws, custody of children, violence towards women. Read as much as you can of Kirsteen.
Nov 1: Oliphant’s career and Kirsteen. Reading Kirsteen and Emmeline Pankhurst’s “Freedom or Death.”
Nov 8: Kirsteen. The Suffragettes.
Margaret Oliphant when young (click on the image to enlarge it)
Supplementary books, films, audio CDs:
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans aka George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell, 1994.
Bulwer-Lytton, Rosina. A Blighted Life: A True Story, introd Marie Mulvey Roberts. Bristol: Thoemmes, 1994.
Mackenzie, Midge. Shoulder to Shoulder: A Documentary. NY: Knopf, 1975.
Mill, John Stuart. On the Subjection of Women (1861). Broadview Press, 2000.
Robins, Elizabeth, The Convert: https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/elizabeth-robinss-the-convert-excellent-suffragette-novel/ Shoulder to Shoulder. Script: Ken Taylor, Alan Plater, Midge Mackenzie. Dir. Waris Hussein, Moira Armstrong. Perf: Sian Philips, Angela Downs, Judy Parfitt, Georgia Brown. Six 75 minute episodes available on YouTube. BBC, 1974.
Sturridge, Lisa. Bleak House: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction. Athens: Ohio UP, 2005.
Uglow, Jenny. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993. The best.
Webb, R. K. Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian. NY: Columbia UP, 1960.
Williams, Merryn. Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography. NY: St. Martin’s, 1987. Excellent.
Wingert, Lee. Battered, Bruised and Abused Women: Domestic Violence in 19th century Fiction. Ph.D. Thesis, Iowa State University. On-line pdf
A drawing by Anne Bronte of herself and (presumably her dog, Flossy)
Dear friends and readers,
I have not been able to write on this blog for so long because I’ve been away twice, one to the Highlands of Scotland and once to a friend in central Pennsylvania, but I have been reading much of interest on women’s art and by women. Two outstanding writers whose art links to one another’s and Jane Austen’s especially: Anne Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65),about whom I’ve written again and again and long ago and as gothic.
Tonight I want briefly to add to a blog on Bronte as a poet and half a blog on David Nokes and Janet Baron’s film adaptation of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (dir. Mike Barber, featuring Tara Fitzgerald, Rupert Graves, and Toby Stephens. I was asked to review Nick Holland’s excellent literary biography of Bronte, In Search of Anne Bronte, for the Victorian Web and just finished the review. I am so chuffed to say it now appears there – and with interesting illustrations: a watercolor painting of the dog, Floss, by Charlotte Charlotte Bronte, a photo of Ellen Nussey I’ve never seen before, a drawing of a waterfall, Haworth Moor.
This blog is the spill-over of what I couldn’t put into the review also. In reading around Holland’s book, that is to say, other books and essays on Bronte as well as her Agnes Grey, poems, and again watching David Nokes and Janet Baron’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I’ve discovered that Anne Bronte is having a true Renaissance, rightly newly discovered (almost for the first time) as an ardent feminist, hard-hitting truth-teller about women’s lives, serious artist, and quietly independent-minded ambitious woman. New biographies abound, new essays on her, new editions of her novels and poetry. Along with Holland’s book, I read Samantha Ellis’s revisionist Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life and Julie Nash and Barbara A. Suess’s New Approaches to the Art of Anne Bronte, where justice is done to her two novels. The first Bronte whom Winifred Gerin wrote about was Anne.
In brief, as I’ve surmised before, Anne Bronte wanted to have a career insofar as she was permitted to by her society — which meant as a governess, teacher, and writer. She studied hard at school, came to her own conclusions about religion (refused to believe in a punitive Calvinism), and fell in love once, but the man she loved predeceased her (Haworth was a deeply unhealthy place to live because the water was so bad). She did not hate her brother, Branwell, but felt for him in his self-destruction, and was close to her sister, Emily (quite a feat). And she succeeded in what she endeavoured — the pupils she had in her second place respected and liked and were influenced by her. Until the fatal illness that killed many in Haworth destroyed her at the young age of 29. Unfortunately she does not emerge as a separate presence in Lutz’s The Bronte Cabinet, where she is (as she has often been) overshadowed by her elder sister, Charlotte, who in recent books emerges as the person most responsible for the early repression and distortion of her work, and later misunderstanding. We have left only five of her interesting letters.
She also drew. The three images we have of her are by her. The above of herself and a beloved dog; the one just below recording her love of the sea:
A third, at the end of this blog, in an antique sort of imaginary dress.
Agnes Grey gives an unsentimental depiction of the life of a governess at the time: the little valuation given to education, the small salary, withering disdain and lack of any life or free time; an austere emotional integrity governs this plainly written uncompromising and quietly gripping book.
I am so cheered when I read this book for its rare accuracy. Agnes will reminds us of Jane Eyre (though written first), but her experience as a governess is very different in that she does not get on well with her pupils and doesn’t meet a kindred spirit. The descriptions of the many little humiliations she meets every day in both the jobs are all too convincing, clearly drawn from life. The relationship between Agnes and Rosalie might have influenced Charlotte Bronte’s portrayal of Lucy Snowe and Ginevra Fanshawe in Villette – in both cases, there is the quiet, put-upon teacher who is overshadowed by a more worldly and beautiful pupil. Also, in both books, the two are love rivals, but with the younger girl regarding the man concerned as a plaything or “conquest”, while the poorer and slightly older woman living in the shadows truly loves him. Even the surnames “Snowe” and “Grey” are similar, both with a lack of colour. Agnes is passionate, just as Lucy and Jane are, but all have to put themselves under constant unnatural restraint. What’s remarkable and unique is how Agnes-Anne feels so alienated and hurt from the cruelty, bullying, lying, cupidity, and stupidity of most around her. Here is a person so jealous she cannot bear for her governess even to have a passing relief. This is so strong. The book is about justified alienation from the social world around the heroine, at the same time as the heroine does not give up her desire for achievement and fulfillment.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall tells an utterly believable and powerful story of a woman who made a bad choice for a husband, how when he becomes an alcoholic who wants to make his son another, leaves him, and creates a career for herself as an artist; she returns to her husband to nurse him in his last illness, and when she does remarry (as in Agnes Grey) she chooses a man for his character, one where he respects her as of equal worth with him, has compatible intelligent tastes, and genuine kindness. Other women’s fates, other marriages, are depicted in these two books.
Wildfell Hall is written as alternating diaries, so subjective in presentation. Like Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Forster’s Howard’s End, E. H. Young’s Jenny Wren, Trollope’s Small House of Allington, Isabelle de Montolieu’s Caroline de Lichtfield, all of them are novels of erotic awakening and then renunciation — you chose the wrong man. George Sand’s early novels belong to this pattern too. Bronte’s is unusual for insisting on how society forms wrong norms for women and making the two marry early and then we watch what would happen in such a marriage.
It is also a story of motherhood — something omitted from the film. Elisabeth Gruner shows that unless you figure in the stories of motherhood, which include dialogues or debates on how to bring up a child (boy in one way and girl in another) you lose a central meaning of from this novel. Helen Graham argues both sexes should be sheltered and is against teaching a boy to drink or be amoral (which is what others urge her to do). We see how the society around these women use the women’s attachment to their children to control their behavior. She shows the hypocrisy of the claim that the society cares about the welfare of the child first; what the society’s rules and customs are set up to do is make the woman stay with the man and obey him. Helen’s second husband, Gilbert Markham is treated in terms of his relationship with his domineering mother. Here Anne Bronte anticipates later Victorian books: Caroline Norton’s Lost and Saved (about having children taken from you) and Ellen Wood’s famous East Lynne.
I find I put two more poems by Anne on my Sylvia blog (scroll down) and will conclude by adding yet two more that I never noticed before but which reading Holland and Ellis have made me appreciate are also part of her character:
Lines composed in a Wood on a Windy Day
My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
And carried aloft on the winds of the breeze;
For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,
Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.
The long withered grass in the sunshine is glancing,
The bare trees are tossing their branches on high;
The dead leaves beneath them are merrily dancing,
The white clouds are scudding across the blue sky.
I wish I could see how the ocean is lashing
The foam of its billows to whirlwinds of spray;
I wish I could see how its proud waves are dashing,
And hear the wild roar of their thunder to-day!
The Consolation
Though bleak these woods and damp the ground
With fallen leaves so thickly strewn,
And cold the wind that wanders round
With wild and melancholy moan,
There is a friendly roof I know
Might shield me from the wintry blast;
There is a fire whose ruddy glow
Will cheer me for my wanderings past.
And so, though still where’er I roam
Cold stranger glances meet my eye,
Though when my spirit sinks in woe
Unheeded swells the unbidden sigh,
Though solitude endured too long
Bids youthful joys too soon decay,
Makes mirth a stranger to my tongue
And overclouds my noon of day,
When kindly thoughts that would have way
Flow back discouraged to my breast
I know there is, though far away
A home where heart and soul may rest.
Warm hands are there that clasped in mine
The warmer heart will not belie,
While mirth and truth and friendship shine
In smiling lip and earnest eye.
The ice that gathers round my heart
May there be thawed; and sweetly then
The joys of youth that now depart
Will come to cheer my soul again.
Though far I roam, this thought shall be
My hope, my comfort everywhere;
While such a home remains to me
My heart shall never know despair.
She has been likened to Jane Austen but I think not: she is more in the vein of Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage, Harriet Martineau in Deerbrook and her autobiography. I understand better why I am so drawn to her too: in the second poem she loves her home in the way I do mine. Do read her, gentle reader, she has much to say to you.
It is gratifying to be told that one of your blogs has prompted another blogger to write further on its subjects: the woman in question was part of my two series thus far of women artists: Ellen Epps Gosse.
Roger Wotton, Professor Emeritus of Biology at University College London, was moved to write about the woman he calls (as did many people she knew) Nellie as Nineteenth-Century Wonder Woman. He grew up in Devon and his book is on Philip Henry Gosse, Ellen’s father-in-law, Edmund’s father: Walking with Gosse, Natural History, Creation and Religious Conflicts, the introduction by Sir Patrick Bateson may serve as a review as well as short biography of Prof Wotton. His blog concentrates far more on Ellen and Edmund’s relationship as well as (understandably) Edmund and his father’s, while mine sets Ellen in the context of the remarkable number of other women artists in her immediate family and nearby kin: Ellen’s daughter, Sylvia Gosse (1881-1968):
The Semptress by Sylvia
Ellen’s sister, Emily Epps; another sister Laura Epps ,later Alma Tadema (1852-1909), and Laura’s daughter, Anna Alma Tadema (1867-1943)
Eton College Chapel by Anna
If you go over to my blog you will find I have supplied at least one picture by each of these Epps-related woman (with the exception of Emily). I was demonstrating the truth of Deborah Cherry’s argument in her Painting Women that in the 19th century women artists emerged in connected groups from connected families. When we are talking of the photographer artist, Julia Margaret Cameron, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, and Angelica Garnett (the last two writers, as was Ellen Epps Gosse occasionally). We don’t see Cameron, Woolf, or Bell, as a somewhat self-enclosed family group, but this more famous Bloomsbury group fits this Victorian pattern too. I mentioned in the blog and here add a few pictures by a third less-well known group come from the Hayllarr family: Little Stackpole, Edith
Edith’s Feeding Swans
Jessica:
Jessica’s Peonies
Kate:
Kate’s Sunflowers and Hollyhocks
and Mary. Although very different in style and presentation, if you look at Vanessa Bell and even Dora Carrington’s paintings, you will find similar subjects, attitudes of tranquil stillness in reverie (scroll down to see Vanessa’s family group).
I’ve not forgotten my series of women artists. for the first series I made a linked in handy list; for the second my reader will have to be content with names you put into the search engine. I’ve been so busy with projects that will lead towards published papers, reviews, or a book to write anything new since then, except for my review of the powerful movie, Maudie, about Maud Lewis (1901-70), who now ends of the second series.
Sofonsiba and Lucia Anguissola (1535/6 – 1625; 1536/8 – 1565)
Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670)
Mary Beale (1633-1699)
Anne Killigrew (1660-1685)
Angela Kaufmann (1741-1807)
Henriette Ronner Kip (1821-1909), Posy Simmonds (b 1945)
Joanna Mary Boys Wells (1831-61)
Florence Ann Caxton (1838-1920)
Ellen Epps Gosse (1850-1929)
Beatrix Potter (1855-1943)
Ethel Reed (1874-1912)
Dora Carrington (1893-1932)
Remedios Varo (1908-1963)
Maud Lewis (1901-1970)
I have tonight at least made up a group of candidates for a third series: Anna Dorothea Therbusch, Adelaide Labille Guiard, and Elisabeth Vigee LeBrun for the 18th century; Mary Ellen Best English and German, naive art, American looking, includes illustrations, 19th century
Elizabeth Nourse and Marie Spartali Stillman for the 19th century; Emily Carr, Vanessa Bell and Paula Regno for the 20th. If I can find material, Giovanna Fratellini for 17th into 18th century Italy; and Helen McNicoll and Elin Danielson for late 19th into 20th century (the same cusp as Helen Allingham and Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes).
Two self-portraits: women often do self-portraits
Giovanni Fratelli, a Self-Portrait (1720)
Elin Danielson (1861-1919), a Self-Portrait (1890)
I would also like this time to write about women illustrators, especially Elizabeth Shippen Green (1871-1954)
“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” — Eugene V. Debs who ran for US president as a socialist
Friends,
Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover: A Romance, was the historical novel I chose to teach this summer alongside Daphne DuMaurier’s King’s General. As DuMaurier’s novel was our example of great old-fashioned (pre-1960s/70s) historical fiction, so Sontag’s was our example of contemporary post-modern (yet progressive), post-colonial, feminist, self-reflexive realism (and she is even pro-animal rights). A familiar embodiment of the old-fashioned type (to anyone reading my blogs) is Winston Graham’s Poldark cycle (the first quartet falling just after WW2: Ross Poldark, Demelza, Jeremy Poldark, Warleggan, 1945, ’46, ’48, ’53). Among the first embodiments of contemporary post-modern historical fiction (a first full flowering), Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, and a typical choice for the Booker Prize, whose choices are always of the post-modern variety, from Scott’s Staying On (1977) and Salmon Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) to Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009).
I confess the first time I tried to read The Volcano Lover, I couldn’t get on with it. That was in 1993 when my husband Jim, gave me this book as a Christmas present. It has an inscription — not written down by him but by me. At that time Sontag’s frequent changes of era and character for her narrator without traditional signalling defeated me. I did know it in the early simple form of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, but I didn’t connect Mrs D with Volcano Lover, and anyway I just wasn’t used to reading a book which attacked the very foundations of realistic fiction, of history writing. I couldn’t have begun to read Woolf’s The Waves. Since then I had conquered much more complicated versions of this: Graham Swift’s Last Orders (now one of my many favorite books, a Booker Prize winner), and with the use of Simon Slater’s brilliant reading aloud (on CDs), Wolf Hall (another favorite). Well this past Christmas (2016) I just fell into it. No trouble at all. Exhilarating because this new wildly free structuring is accompanied by an exposure of the limits of Enlightenment thought as winning out (however slowly) over the centuries humankind’s utter irrationality, vehement appetites, greed, deep-buried (only for some) amorality, atavistic beliefs, violence, and accompanying despair, the impulse towards death.
I’ve outlined the differences between old-fashioned, traditional historical fiction and post-modern, post-colonial too many times (scroll down). I taught a course in Booker Prize books. To be sure, there is no hard and fast difference between the two eras: both kinds romance a great deal, fantasize, use anachronism (all historical fiction and films intersect the past with the present). It’s a matter of emphasis: a romance. The best aim to combine the strange with the familiar. You embody history through novelistic elements so the reader (or viewer when it’s a historical film or adaptation) experiences the past as if we were there.
View of the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, 9 August 1799, after a drawing by Pietro Fabris
Onto this marvelous book: we had great fun in my class the days we discussed it. As is characteristic of the type, Sontag continually takes wholly unexpected angle: instead of telling say Emma Lady Hamilton’s story or Nelson’s as a dual romance (though they are often mocked as a whore, and half-crazy naive admiral), her center was Sir William Hamilton, the collector-husband of Emma (himself remembered as a cuckold). But Sir William was a brilliant man; his is one of the collections that the British Library began with. Here he is one of those people who are central in upholding utterly corrupt regimes because it’s convenient for them to do so, in their interest. Instead of pivoting from London, or Paris, or Rome, or the usual center of empire, we find ourselves in Naples, a highly corrupt marginalized cityscape, where Sir William had ended up ambassador (longing to be somewhere else, the city of his final destination not quite Moscow).
The later 18th century from Sir William’s continual presence allows for several meditations on why people collect, on art, on obsessions (like studying volcanoes); sometimes the narrator was your conventional implied presence erupting from the later 18th century and then again she’d be Sontag of 1992,the scholar-essayist, but slipping, less distinct, and we find ourselves in World War Two (and are reminded no matter how bad our present moment, they came back, we come back from the nadir of 1943) of just after; and then again zeroing in in a specific year 1798-99 because at the core of her book (the center of the onion) was the disastrous rebellion by a small enlightened and artisan group in Naples, put down by the great hero Nelson, abandoned by the other great hero, Napoleon, and then savagely tortured and murdered. And then the perspective turns again and you are in the story matter of Puccini’s Tosca (which occurs just after that rebellion).
The most moving part of the novel is probably Part Three, Sir William’s meditation as he lays dying, but it’s arguable that the novel’s main characters are the seemingly marginalized women who variously comply with the men, rebel against them, stealthily control them (the Naples queen, Maria Carolina, sister to Antoinette, kept the garantuanly fat, asinine, blood-hungry King Ferdinand IV, on his throne), are variously destroyed, or somehow survive, sometimes grow very rich and powerful but then at the change of a male can become destitute in no time. These women are the collector’s first wife, Catherine Barlow, daughter of an MP for Pembroke, a very wealthy heiress whose money it is that Sir William is spending and carries on spending after she dies. The first part of the book ends with her death (after falling in love with William Beckford, who unlike Sir William pays attention to her). There’s Emma herself (Lady Hamilton); Emma’s mother (Mrs Cadogan, whom like the actress Farrell and her mother, Emma never left behind), Efrosina Puma (great name), the sybil who reads everyone’s fates through connecting each to a tarot card, and last but never least a remarkable journalist-poet, radical political activist, deeply humane, idealistic, Eleanor de Fonseco-Pimentel (hung). Along the way, Maria Carolina remembers her sister’s beheading in a nightmare (when she thinks the Parthenopena Republic has a chance, and suddenly we are deeply inside the mind and body of Antoinette as David so cruelly depicted, all steely pride as the cart trundles her to the guillotine. The book just soars in the fourth and last part, the concluding monologues by Emma, by her mother and by Eleanor are as important as any before and we end on Eleanor – a revolutionary, daring journalist, poet imprisoned starved raped tortured and then hung. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time — and was senselessly murdered along with a profoundly important physician of the day (Cirillo among the dead, a friend-doctor to Hamilton), humane thinkers; people understood this was disgraceful and did nothing to stop it. Her words end the novel unforgettably:
I will not allow that I was moved by justice rather than love, for justice is also a form of love. I did know about power, I did see how this world was ruled, but I did not accept it. I wanted to set an example. I wanted not to disappoint myself. But I was afraid as well as angry in ways I felt to powerless to admit. So I did not speak of my fears but rather of my hopes. I was afraid my anger would offend others, and they would destroy me. For all my certitude I feared I would never be strong enough to understand what would allow me to protect myself. Sometimes I had to forget that I was a woman to accomplish the best of which I was capable. Or I would lie to myself about how complicated it is to be a woman. Thus do all women, including the author of this book. But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.
So, the book’s deeply feminist. The book opened with Sontag moving into a flea market, and from there the prestigious antique show, and then she is the alter ego, the absent-present narrator half-inside the minds of Sir William and his nephew (king and knave of cups) at an 18th century auction (where bankrupt people sold their cherished things). For those who love paintings, this book is filled with descriptions of paintings that once or still do exist, of caricatures, objects historically real, and faked, and when the scene is over, you have learned much more about history than most other ways. Part of the fascination is how she brings in through allusion biographies, other historical fictions history; the book is anti-genre (these are false constraints, rhetorical schemes so slow readers can catch on) too.
But the only character I loved absolutely, bonded utterly with, cared about (well along with Catherine Barlow and Eleanor) is the monkey, Jack, whom William Lord Hamilton buys and at first loves him abjectly and shows it. At first the animal is himself and we see (Darwin-like) how just like human beings this animal is — as complex, as feelingful. But Hamilton doesn’t want that, he wants a toy, and teases and is cruel to Jack, who a quick learner, does a turn-about and becomes the performing anxious doll-like creature, the “monkey” Hamilton wanted. I felt the cruelty of Hamilton’s teasing and so bad for the monkey who died, partly of neglect (the servants would not care for it when Hamilton was away) and partly of a broken heart. Sontag has made this effect deliberately because she has Hamilton think to himself how he has been told to buy two creatures so they will not be lonely as they need their own species but he coolly will not do it. He is clearly paralleled in the book to Catherine Barlow who was depicted with Hamilton by David Allen (both impossibly idealized): she was his companion, played beautifully, gave him many ideas as she read with him
William and Catherine Hamilton
Human beings are given names they don’t lose; when they die, it is recorded; it matters, they don’t just disappear the way an animal will from a narrative. And after Catherine dies, the stage is open for Emma to come on, followed by Nelson. There is order, observance. Not for the other non-human animals in this novel. Immediately we are introduced to the disgusting King of Naples, we see him rushing out to the phony hunt, where all is set up easily for his and his courtier’s slaughters (the animals have no chance) and then we (and the king and courtiers) watch the desperately poor of Naples jumps on the non-human animals’ carcasses, tear them to pieces to eat them. Horrible horrible oh most horrible. There are scenes of such visceral depravity scattered through the novel as well as scenes of beautiful music-making, rehearsals of scholarship (on volcanoes), archaeological digs (Pompeii, a palace that is still standing in Palermo today).
I learned much reading it, what I had to look up to explain to students (about Goethe’s Italian Journal, one of Sontag’s sources). There are characters whose name she never uses: Sir William’s name appears, but he is most often called the cavaliere, Emma is occasionally Emma, but mostly the cavaliere’s wife, Nelson is always “the hero,” Goethe “the poet.” The point is to make us keep distance so we see this individual (however convincingly presented because of their idiosyncracies, there are no stereotypes here) as a type living today. The king reminds me of Trump. The (landscape artist), Tishbein (Goethe’s friend), the painter, David. Winckelmann is there, the philosopher, but what we hear about is his sordid death (a homosexual, he invited to his room a street male whore and was murdered for the money in the room).
So much learned detail of all kinds went into the book I couldn’t begin to explicate it. The novel is like DuMaurier’s anti-war and war is again seen from the woman’s point of view. A lot of the present action takes place in the palace in Palermo during the revolt against the Naples king and queen, and the brief republic that was set up – Parthenopean as I said), the ODNB retells that tragic disaster for the republicans and decent people briefly – January 1799 to middle summer 1799. Napoleon had successfully invaded in 1795 and for a while put his relative on the throne, then a deal was hatched and the Naples royality went back, the French gov’t of 1799 invaded again and this time set up a republic; but then Napoleon’s forces deserted and the reprisals taken were ferocious. Those who’ve seen the opera Tosca have been introduced to the monster head of police and torture, Baron Scarpia who did run a network of spies during this era. Angelotti– former consul, the painter, Cavaradossi — Sontag enjoys bringing in semi-fictional characters from other historical fiction works which is what the opera is,
At one point the characters are holed up in the palace of a Palermo aristocrat. Try hard as I did I could not identify who this Duke was, probably an Orsini (not Colonna), member of Patagonia aristocracy, a wealthy clan not gone from this earth even now; Goethe visited and described the villa. You can visit it today – much has been looted and is in museums. Villa La Baghera, east of Palermo. The place still exists –- this worship of objects as numinous is central to touring. Some of us might do some touring this summer – me too. I’m not exempt: we do an odd thing when we tour: we go to see something that is circled as super-special or why spend so much money and trouble to see them. We endow them with ideological magic forgetful of all the suffering and circumstances of other people at the time around these rich people who owned or made or had made these beautiful things, all these other people which made these things possible.
I now see that showing a character after death as talking to us about his or her life from the perspective of what happened later is a brilliant stroke. for myself I’ve felt that death defines life as we know it; we are ever aware how short our lives are, so a book where death is not taken seriously (where characters come back as in science fiction) must at some level be silly. I’ve changed that view. Time-traveling and the bringing back of a dead person, not as a revenant (sheer ghost) but presence of themselves are fantasy conventions that can be instruments for creating sudden illuminations. More pragmatically, I learned about another 18th century woman writer: Fonseca Pimentel is the center of a historical novel I will get to when I return to my Italian: Enzo Striano, Il resto di niente. Storia di Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel e della rivoluzione napoletana del 1799, Napoli, Avagliano 1999; Milano, Rizzoli 2001 (available on Amazon for $4.91).
Settings include specific houses in Naples, London, the English southern counties, back to Naples, Palermo, we even go to Merton Place, the last idyllic house Emma created for her and Nelson to live out their lives together in. I said just about all the pictures including the cruel caricatures are pictures that really existed or exist still. Such things help us recreate the past. Single great lines by the narrator, single moments that strike us (probably why the book reminded the woman in my class of Tom Jones).
****************************
I offered some history and brought into class the magnificent book that was published as an accompaniment to the art exhibit that resulted from this book: 1996: Vases and Volancoes: Sir William Hamilton and His Collection, ed Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan. I passed it around the class so everyone could see some of the objects described in The Volcano Lover, and pictures of the semi-famous people. Sontag’s book shows us the circumstances surrounding these objects, and the privileges and deprivations of the people who owned or made them. The idea is to prevent cleaned up versions of what happened (ironically as in this book or exhibition) that mattered. I’m reading a book on the Highland clearances before I go see the battlefield of Culloden this August in Inverness, Scotland. Before I went to Leeds, England oh so many years ago I was told to read Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier.
Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun painted Emma Lady Hamilton as a Sybil (a Corinne) — Sontag thinks that LeBrun was half-mocking Emma here and either Emma didn’t realize this or didn’t care
Emma was famous for her “attitudes:” enacting goddesses in type roles until she grew very fat. A woman painter, Vigee-LeBrun also painted Emma as Ariadne – she was abandoned on an island by Theseus. Sontag remarks: “never in all the portraits made of her, was she depicted so patently as a courtesan (meaning whore).” I note Mrs Trump is no longer as scared to show skin; at first she was trussed head and hand to toe, not now.
There’s a rare superb biography (not condescending, not salacious) on Amy Lyon with Horatio Nelson as a secondary subject by Colin Simpson. Emma Hamilton’s birth name was Amy Lyon. Her mother was Mary Lyon and she was illegitimate. Impoverished people. She is said to have been very beautiful – 18th century taste. Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh was one of the first young squires in Cheshire to “protect” Emma, Simpson called him “an archetypical wicked philandering squire — he taught her to ride and introduced her to Charles Greville the heartless nephew of Hamilton; Greville was the one who taught her the surface manners of upper class life and then offloaded her onto Hamilton. But it was she who created (fashioned if you will) herself into a courtier; it was she who kept the Queen of Naples contented with Hamilton, she who organized fetes, she would brought Merton Place in her and Nelson’s very few months together in England. She couldn’t spell very well, but she was eloquent. In her desperate last years when she was living in hovels fleeing the creditors’ bailiffs, she wrote Featherstonehaugh (it took a lot of pride swallowing) and wonderful man sent a present of game (how good of him) and promises of more and maybe a visit to his house (that would have helped) “when times were quieter” (meaning he too worried lest he would offend). She was enormously good-natured. So many relatives were in effect vindictive and they were so lest they might have to pay her something that was intended for her. Others who said they were on her side (very like people jumping on the Trump bandwagon) could not be bothered to do anything lest somehow somewhere it hurt their interest. After all she was she: Mary Lyons’s bastard daughter and who had she been? and they couldn’t have gotten away with it but for the debtor’s laws, and I had two sentences in mind as I closed the book.
As a character in the book: very able, finds passages in texts that are wanted, writes to the Queen – she rose because she was bright, pro-active –- late in life a good hostess for Nelson and very motherly to him. The improbable couple. The thin crippled man, the heavy tall full-bodied woman. She is blamed for spending – get this. Like people on medicaid are not supposed to want white teeth like others. How dare they? She’s blamed for keeping Merton when the wise thing to do was sell immediately (her last home, made for Nelson and herself, from a raw downtrodden place into a pretty farm house, with gardens, cost a lot) but her way of how she survived so luxuriously and with upper people through life was to always keep the parade up. In her closing letters she is keeping it up with her clearly half-delusional upbeat lies (some would say looking through rose-colored glasses, others how brave and gallant)
Most depictions of Nelson are reverential (so leave out his missing arm, shoulder, eye, damaged legs, that he was so short) or they are caricatures so we might as well have this idealization: it’s a detail from Nelson imagined deeply in thought before a window and the battle of Trafalgar
Nelson: the key here is he was originally lower class; he rose through the ranks quickly in war and the two identified with one another. He was vulgar and poorly educated except insofar as his technical educationin the navy. He and she shared tastes. Each time he had a defeat he was in danger because he had few familial connections. That he died young prevented any of this from coming out. Simpson is continually showing us how the historians have distorted and got what happened wrong, and without saying so explicitly as with Sontag exposes the viciousness underlying the worship of great heroes. He’s (Simpson) is not having any of this naval genius applied to Nelson: it was the psychology of the man (coming out of his lower class origins, his ambition, his continually asserting himself with these rewards against insecurity), reminding me of a couple of mad-dog (I allude deliberately) confederate generals who were similarly early wounded and killed. Very nervy, very daring. Side issue: he was so short – like Napoleon. Nelson begins in the book on p 188. He vaults into their lives. Thumbnail sketches of people scattered through out the book, so how he looked when Emma first saw him as envisaged by Sontag; then how he looked another time. Sontag does not take sides the way DuMaurier does though we may infer her horror at Nelson’s support of the King and her detestation of the queen whom all recognized for what she was.
But “the hero” was treated very badly apart from when out of this wild risking of his and everyone else’s life to win a battle, this extraordinary daring when (to revert to Tolstoy) he realized inspirited the man to fight wildly, desperately, heroically (if we must use such words): time and time again he is snubbed; he is promised big payments which never come. Property which never materialized. He has no connections which matter. He is small awkward and his accent like Emma’s) never disappears: he likes her because she is of the lower class like him. He did leave her adequate money but the trustees and lawyers refused to pay out on all sorts of invented grounds. This part of Emma’s life reminded me of the plight of Charlotte Smith. Don’t be a woman in this world.
I didn’t omit Sontag herself. She is in her book. She was celebrity among a subset of of “in” people in New York City in the 1970s through 90s. A celebrity is someone who is famous because they are famous – much awe and silly amounts of ink or electrons are now dedicated to this topic; TV celebrities are famous because they are famous: they are just the types those who watch TV during the day want to identify with. Arts-in people who know everyone who writes for the New Yorker. She was better than this intrinsically: a writer of real depth and originality and her series of non-fiction essays have been very influential – not given the credit Foucault is because she’s a woman and not French. Against Interpretation. On Photography, Illness as a Metaphor – expatiate; Regarding the Pain of Others – expatiate. A political activist: active against the war in Vietnam, against colonialism as practiced by (among others) the US. She became infamous for a short while after 9/11 when she said, well what do you expect? You go around repressing social democracy, bombing people, training death squads, backing dictators and especially killing and destroy the chances of middle eastern people (especially young men). Not a good moment to bring this out.
As with DuMaurier, there is a complicated personal life and unusual, she made it by unconventional paths, not through her high degrees, getting tenure, giving papers but by the force of her personality and people she became closely associated with – as editor, fellow writers. She is said to have thought of herself as a novelist but her fictional corpus is very small -but then her non-fiction essays are not long either. Volcano Lover is her longest book. She wrote “an acclaimed” novel” in the 1980s. The Way We live Now, about AIDs Sontag’s parents were Jewish NYC, father died and mother remarried US army chaplain Nathan Sontag. She said her mother was distant and cold; they lived in California; her career begins when she goes to the University of Chicago where she graduates with a BA at age 18. She married Philip Rieth, father of her beloved son David; divorced after 8 years . Basically she got into circles of influential people, original thinkers, studied German. She went on for a Masters in Philosophy. Lived in late 1950s in Paris – – she said most central time of her life. She wrote and directed four films,Lady from the Sea, Alice in Bed. Bisexual and last long-time lover and partner was Annie Leibowitz; hence we have many photos and hence her book on photography. A role model, she died in 2004. she had had cancer twice before, but it came back raging Illness as metaphor came from the first bout when she had breast removal and painful bone operations – about how people treated her when they discovered she was mortally ill.
The life of Sir Wm Hamilton in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is excellent and justifies Sontag’s choice. He took the post in Naples, collected Emma; Nelson too, patient, tolerance, brilliant use of an access to wealth – he was not a fabulously wealthy man like his cousin, Beckford. The nephew, and his heir, Charles Greville, cold, coolly selfish, passed Emma along to William.
Hamilton, as a character very good natured well meaning intelligent man, generous too, kindly. what’s the irony? He supports such vicious regimes. King of cups in the tarot pack Puma says. The continuance of social evils is not due to the fact that we do not know what is right, but that we prefer to continue doing what is wrong. Those who have the power to remove them do not have the will, and those who have the will have not, as yet, the power – R.H.Tawney. I don’t know who said; “Evils that befall the world are not nearly so often caused by bad men as they are by good men who are silent when an opinion must be voiced.” I liked him but should we like him? – look at his behavior to Jack, to his wife Catherine. He seems to have been more taken with Emma than she with him. Entranced with her youth and beauty. His detachment suited her purpose. There is his obsession with volcanoes: by gathering things, and information he gains power and thus prestige. He counts, he matters, he is meaningful. Towards the end of the book when Wm is dying with Nelson and Emma by his side, he confuses Nelson with Tolo, his one-eyed valet (whom he calls Cyclops) who climbed up and down with him but is killed in Ferdinand’s disastrous march on Rome – anything that king did was a disaster – utterly incompetent cruel narcissist. There’s a pathos in Hamilton remembering him with such fondness late in the book
Charles Greville – selfish narrow cold mean – lots of people like this – a monster if to take care of yourself first and foremost and all that takes it is to be a monster. Both Hamilton and Greville left diaries, letters, sales catalogues, wills. Nephew and heir. Probably if I knew more about tarot cards and the pack we’d find another skein of allusion. He is Knave of cups. To jump to late in the book, Emma’s mother summing up Charles: she is ever saying all is for the best (in the best of all possible worlds). Many of Hamilton’s letters are to Charles: instructions, directions. We’re told he went after widows.
Catherine Barlow whom Sontag attributes a number of the central insights in Hamilton too left very little. As many women did and Sontag has her express relief that she will not be laughed at. Queen of cups. Great pathos. It’s that she loves him and seems also to die of no one paying attention except for Beckford. The parallel character is Jack, the monkey – who I said was my favorite character. I liked Harriet Fitzgerald best of all in Tom Jones. One woman in the class said the book reminded her of Tom Jones, only we didn’t have the supposedly rational narrator to fool us.
Hamilton watches Catherine die (pp. 113-16) the narrator moves forward in time about what Hamilton cannot see. I like to be taught new things: I never considered how powerful it is to have a character who is dead brought back and comment on him or herself – which is the ending of the book. New function for ghosts.
Her monologue at the end (375-80) He left her alone too much, she was not a hermit, she didn’t go to the court because she didn’t like falsity at court. When dead she thinks to herself he is remembered as the husband of his second wife, she not at all.
The Queen of Naples peculiarly mean and vicious; we are shown during the rebellion, it matters who is in power to the powerless and vulnerable. She comes into her utterly selfish own. At one point Sontag remarks that the well-meaning are just unspeakable naïve and easy to destroy. The peasants supported the idiot king.
Sontag moves in ways that allow her to zero in on specific moments and live them fully from within and without – like the beheading of Marie Antoinette. Begins with how The Cavaliere keeps the king company and Emma, the queen. They write letters. And suddenly we are in Maria Caroline’s mind and her worst fears, her nightmare (and unadmitted to guilt): she would (rightly) be butchered. Both of them have a need for female friendship (as did Antoinette with her ladies) – she imagines herself carted away, beheaded (p. 132) – of course during this time her sister was and we have David’s cruel picture of Antoinette at her journey’s end – the two of them grieve (p 134) – we move to the volcano, then an allusion to a famous book by Elias Canetti: Auto-da-fe.
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Susan Sontag makes me think of Umberto Eco: a critic and essayist who turns himself into a novelist but remains a critic and essayist. Her book like DuMaurier’s is also l’ecriture-femme: the cyclical structures, the topics or subjects, the point of view, real inwardness (more than DuMaurier in KG). One of the online YouTubes of Sontag has her discussing fiction with John Berger: his and her books are about what we see, and the ethics of seeing, what is it we are seeing in this photo in this depiction of pain, how do we judge central states of our being when we refuse to recognize as natural like illness and death. Illness is not the nightime side of life. Sontag says we tell stories to give value to a life; that we long to see taboos violated; that you can tell in written form what you cannot say orally. Fiction is often moralized fantasy.
From the Savanna Illinger lecture: Sontag’s looks especially at the ethics of representations of other people’s pain. Sontag asks of a text, Does it advance our understanding of the real, denounce that which conceals human misery, substitutes sentimentalism (shallow feeling, not rooted in anything really felt). But can art make us understand the reality of another person’s suffering? If we understand, the text is still not functioning ethically unless feeling is translated into action. (A high standard here; I think it’s enough to make another person think and feel morally, recognize what is ethical, and one can then hope this will influence him or her.) For Sontag the trouble with photos (and nowadays we must add videos) is they acknowledge but do not explain. Art must create and explain the conditions that make for sympathy for those who have been victimized, ridiculed, their lives wrecked. In The Volcano Lover Illinger thinks Sontag was interested in the political consequences of egoism (the characters are all egoists). Did their art or knowledge or science contribute to a just society? For the 18th century significant moments were just before the horror falls; it seems audiences now want to experience the trauma of violence, of indignity. Sontag is not sure this helps, but she writes a book offering this latter.
To return to the course comparison of DuMaurier and Sontag: we had two fine examples of historical fiction, both by women, both anti-war. The book far truer to experience, and thus more serious, is The Volcano Lover, but both very much worth reading and studying, talking about, writing about. I was told by women in the class that most of them had not heard of The King’s General; it is one of her novels that have fallen out of public memory (there has been no film to date), so I was glad that I had assigned it. The closest non-fiction memoir I could compare KG to is Iris Origo’s War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-44 (an extraordinary book).
Daphne DuMaurier around the time Vanishing Cornwall was published
“We are all offending every moment of our lives.” — Marianne Dashwood, Austen’s S&S
“We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing” — Elizabeth Bennet, Austen’s P&P
Sitting with her on Sunday evening—a wet Sunday evening, the very time of all others when, if a friend is at hand, the heart must be opened, and everything told…” Edmund from Austen’s MP
“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 from Austen’s Emma
My dear Alicia, of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a man of his age! — just old enough to be formal, ungovernable and to have the gout — too old to be agreeable, and too young to die … May the next gouty Attack be more favourable — Lady Susan from Austen’s Lady Susan
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 from Austen’s NA
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering….’ Anne Elliot from Austen’s Persuasion
Friends,
July 18th, 1817: Not, one might think, an occasion for happy commemoration. On that day a relatively young woman ended a long painful period of dying (dying is hard work), in bad pain (opium could not cope with it except as dope), cradled in the arms of her loving sister, a close friend, Martha Lloyd, and relatives near by. She had managed to publish but four novels, and no matter how fine, there were so many more she could have written or drawn from her stores of fragments. Two came out the next year, posthumously, one clearly truncated (Persuasion), the other not in a satisfying state according to Austen herself (Northanger Abbey). (Titles given by her brother and said sister.) She had been writing for 21 years at least before her first novel was published — Sense and Sensibility, by herself with money saved up and money and help from said brother, Henry and his wife, her beloved cousin, Eliza Austen. After Emma and a couple of unwise (seen in hindsight) decisions, she was just beginning to make money — or there was a hope of it. She was not altogether silenced as her books were reprinted in sets of novels over the 19th century, while over the next 170 years (1951 was the last date for a new text) fragments and letters by her emerged, albeit framed by contexts set up by her family and then academic critics. A sentimental identity was concocted for her by her loving nephew, Edward Austen-Leigh in 1870, in a memoir of her, an important year and publication because his portrait and picturesque edition was the beginning of a wider readership for her novels.
It will be said the poem she is said to have composed on her last days where she wrote: “Behold me immortal,” has been fulfilled. All her extant writings seem to be in print; some are widely read, the major six filmed over and over, and recently a seventh (Lady Susan) and an eighth (Sanditon) added, with influence on many other familial romanes and witty romantic comedies, and from her work, a growing number of appropriationsto boot. All written and/or discussed in newsprint, on public media, TV, in conferences as of the utmost importance. Her fictions has been translated into the major languages of the world. Who has not heard of Jane Austen? A New Yorker joke of 30 years ago was a good alibi on the stand was you were writing a biography of Jane Austen. The Bank of England commmemorates her today with a £10 note.
Nonetheless, she had so much life left in her, she was so open to trying new trajectories, looking for new ways to develop her novels (as Persuasion and Sanditon seem to suggest), that the commemoration ought to be done with a sense of loss, of what might have been before us (and her) — as well as acknowledgement of what her journey’s end was. That this is not the tone can be accounted for in numerous ways, but a central one is the phenomenon of celebrity — as it is enacted in her case. For all such individuals, a kind of “ideological magic” (Theodor Adorno’s word) is ignited which may be sold through respected cultural industries’ institutions because it is recognized to confer power on people surrounded by this awe — such a person can get elected to be president of the United States however ill-qualified, or simply be worshipped as genius and each decade his or her identity (biography) reshaped to fit the new decade’s ideas of what is most admirable. That this re-shaping is going on before us can be seen in the various articles that were published in the New Times Book Review on Austen yesterday (on which more below).
For my contribution, for yes I’m pulling my little bandwagon along behind or with the others too, I’m prompted by Diane Reynolds’s fine blog on the first lines in Austen’s fiction.
I thought to myself, What more fitting in thinking how she was cut off, than her last lines? Tracing these in order of publication (so at least we know that there is evidentiary basis for our chronology),
Sense and Sensibility (1811):
Between Barton and Delaford there was that constant communication which strong family affection would naturally dictate; — and among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that, though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.
Pride and Prejudice (1813):
With the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.
Mansfield Park (1814):
On that event they removed to Mansfield; and the Parsonage there, which, under each of its two former owners, Fanny had never been able to approach but with some painful sensation of restraint or alarm, soon grew as dear to her heart, and as thoroughly perfect in her eyes, as everything else within the view and patronage of Mansfield Park had long been.
Emma (1815):
The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade; and Mrs. Elton, from the particulars detailed by her husband, thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own. — “Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! — Selina would stare when she heard of it.” — But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.
Northanger Abbey (1817):
To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen is to do pretty well; and professing myself moreover convinced that the general’s unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their knowledge of each other, and adding strength to their attachment, I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.
Persuasion (1817):
His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish that Tenderness less; the dread of a future War all that could dim her Sunshine. — She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance.
Lady Susan (1871)
For myself, I confess that I can pity only Miss Mainwaring; who, coming to town, and putting herself to an expense in clothes which impoverished her for two years, on purpose to secure him, was defrauded of her due by a woman ten years older than herself.
The Watsons (1871):
As for me, I shall be no worse off without you, than I have been used to be; but poor Margaret’s disagreeable ways are new to you, and the would vex you more than you think for, if you stay at home —
Emma was of course un-influenced, except to a greater esteem for Elizabeth, by such representations — and the visitors departed without her.
Love and Friendship (1922)
Philippa has long paid the Debt of Nature, her Husband however still continues to drive the Stage-Coach from Edinburgh to Sterling: — Adieu my Dearest Marianne, Laura
Sanditon (1925)
And as Lady Denham was not there, Charlotte had leisure to look about her and to be told by Mrs. Parker that the whole-length portrait of a stately gentleman which, placed over the mantelpiece, caught the eye immediately, was the picture of Sir Henry Denham; and that one among many miniatures in another part of the room, little conspicuous, represented Mr. Hollis, poor Mr. Hollis! It was impossible not to feel him hardly used: to be obliged to stand back in his own house and see the best place by the fire constantly occupied by Sir Harry Denham.
Catherine, or The Bower (1951)
A company of strolling players in their way from some Neighboring Races having opened a temporary Theater there, Mrs Percival was prevailed on by her Niece to indulge her by attending the performance once during their stay — Mrs Percival insisting on paying Miss Dudley the compliment of inviting her to join the party when a new difficulty arose.
If we pay attention just to these last lines, we do not see the ironist and satirist primarily. Yes there is a barb in the Sense and Sensibility line; and the ending of Emma brings us yet another exposure of the complacent shallowness of Mrs Elton’s moral stupidity (she does though have the last word); however muted, some hard ironies in Lady Susan, plangent ones in Sanditon. In a novelist supposed to pass over death, two have direct allusions to death (fear of widowhood for Anne Elliot, a more pragmatic re-enacting of life now without the partner). If we cheat just a little and go back one sentence we begin to darker emotional ironies: Elizabeth Watson will stay in a seethingly bitter home so Emma can visit a brother not keen to have her. Go back two or three paragraphs, and we learn for Sense and Sensibility the moral of our story has been:
The whole of Lucy’s behaviour in the affair, and the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held forth as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to self-interest, however its progress may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of time and conscience.
More famously in Mansfield Park:
… Sir Thomas saw repeated, and for ever repeated, reason to rejoice in what he had done for them all, and acknowledge the advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure.
Lady Catherine de Bourgh puts in a final appearance before the happy coda of Pride and Prejudice:
But at length, by Elizabeth’s persuasion, he [Darcy] was prevailed on to overlook the offence, and seek a reconciliation; and, after a little farther resistance on the part of his aunt [Lady Catherine], her resentment gave way, either to her affection for him, or her curiosity to see how his wife conducted herself; and she condescended to wait on them at Pemberley, in spite of that pollution which its woods had received, not merely from the presence of such a mistress, but the visits of her uncle and aunt from the city.
Still, I suggest what we have in these last lines, is coda, resolution, a sense of quiet satisfaction at the way things turned out for the characters (like all of us far less than perfect people) at journey’s end. This continuum of stability, of order, of reasoned perspective is central to what many readers seem to value Jane Austen for still.
According to Cassandra, Austen’s last written lines were:
“Henceforward I’ll triumph in shewing my powers
Shift your race as you will it shall never be dry
The curse upon Venta is July in showers–‘.”
As Hermione Lee in a good book on biographical writing has shown (she is not the only biographer to do this), what is often asserted as the dying person’s last words won’t stand courtroom-like scrutiny. Emotionally involved people have their agendas just as surely any more distanced politicized (as who isn’t?) group of people. And it’s hard to remember or get the emphasis accurately: Cassandra says that towards the end of conscious life Austen said “she wanted nothing but death & some of her words were ‘God grant me patience, Pray for me Oh pray for me” (LeFaye’s edition of Austen’s letters, Cassandra to Fanny Knight, Sunday, 20 July 1817).
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Another portrait of Jane Austen by Cassandra — when she was in good health as may be seen from her strong body (see JA and Food). Some readers/critics complain vociferously that we don’t see her face refusing to recognize this was at the time a trope for absorption in landscape reverie
But, as I mentioned, the usefulness of Jane Austen as icon makes for a ceaseless attempt to get past such texts, peer into them to find what is wanted by the viewer, and pry something new out. I recall how Hamlet did not like being played upon by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Matthew Arnold congratulated Shakespeare that he eluded it: “Other abide our question; thou art free …” Since her nephew’s memoir, Jane Austen has not been so fortunate. And this pronounced phenomenon – the re-invention of Jane Austen as well as an exploration of who these millions of readers are (now recorded in book reading groups and blogs across the Internet) is found across the many publications this year. I’ll confine myself to what was printed in the New York Times Book Review and their Sunday Review for some examples.
The most to the point was John Sutherland’s on Helen Kelly’s JA: Secret Radical: at first he lightly and deftly, but definitely skewers Kelley: he picks out precisely the most untenable of her theses and arguments. I did not know that Kelley trashed Tomalin’s biography (I missed that), Sutherland picks up that as as well how she is deliberately insulting, provocative. One online review I read said she combines blog-style snark and literal readings with academic (sort of) approaches; I know that she misreads in a peculiar way: if we do not see Catherine doing something then she didn’t do it — no novelist conventions are allowed the usual play.
Bu then he says something significant: that the aim of Kelley’s book (as with many other readers who want to turn Austen into a political radical) is ultimately against the Marilyn Butler thesis that Austen is a deep conservative. The problem here is as with other critics Kelley is dependent on, she no where mentions Butler. But the opposition is important: Butler’s thesis is persuasive and convincing in her first book especially, Romantics, Rebels and Revolutionaries because there Butler analyses at length true radicals in the era against which both Scott and Austen emerge as reactionary. Butler’s thesis fits William St Clair’s about “the reading nation” that it is no coincidence Scott and Hannah More and Austen a little later were readily available and the likes of Wollstonecraft’s works and Charlotte Smith, Holcroft, &c were not. Butler’s edition of Northanger Abbey remains the best and she wrote the present authoritative ODNB of Austen.
Jane Smiley on Deborah Yaffe, a book about readers and writers of Austen, especially of the common reader kind (“Fandom”), complete with interviews. She is a journalist. Smiley says the second half of Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen contains worthwhile analyses: it is a “book history” book, tracing the literal publications, what they looked like, who bought them. It’s weak on illustrations, but then in the second half she discusses the way Austen has been discussed in the 20th century: by male academics, and then by women readers (Speaking of Jane Austen by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B. Stern is important), and now the new manipulations of her texts. Smiley feels just about all of Paula Byrne’s book on Jane Austen and the theater of the time teaches us in an interesting insightful way: about the theater, when Jane Austen went there, and how the plays of the era relate to her books. From my reading I find Byrne’s claims for sources in specific plays won’t bear scrutiny, but as a book about an aspect of the cultural world of Austen, it’s fascinating. Byrne’s other book (A life in Small Things) explores Jane Austen through small things she left and marginalized texts adds real information and readings of Austen’s life-writing.
Sutherland is followed by an essay by Lizzie Skumick on sequels, the writer and texts in question, Joan Aiken. I have one of them somewhere in my house and remember I found it unreadable. Then a Francesco Moretti like analysis of Jane’s vocabulary using computer cluster technology by Kathleen Flynn (who wrote the JA Project, a time-traveling tale, claiming to unearth further secrets about Austen’s private life and death) and Josh Katz. They find Austen uses many intensives (very, much), lots of abstractions, in fact defies prescriptions for good writing. What then is her magic? they fall back on interpretation (forgetting Sontag who we recall instantly was against interpretation) and argue the tension between appearance and reality, pretense and essence (a good nod to Marvin Mudrick book on irony in Austen: “defense and discovery” were her modes). Moving on, Rahhika Jones reveals no deaths in Austen’s pages while we are reading them — we hear of a stillborn Elliot. But we hear of a number of deaths before the fictions start is the truth. And these deaths are important: Lady Susan’s husband, her support, Mrs Tilney, Eleanor’s, Mr Dashwood — all these set the action and it’s not just a question of property and money. Not content, we get a quiz with “famous” people (small celebrities) who alluded to Austen. Finally on p 16 it gives out.
Not to despair, in the Sunday Review we find Devoney Looser arguing suggestively against the idea that Austen did her major writing on a tiny desk with a handy set of pages to push the little bits of writing under. It does sound improbable as long as you don’t take into consideration she might have done it once in a while when company was expected. Looser is also not keen on the assumption that Austen carried about much of her papers in a writing desk (rather like an ipad). Again it does seem improbable she took them all — but that she took some when she traveled (the way one niece describes) is demonstrated in one of her letters where she talks about a panic when her writing desk with was carried off in another carriage during trip. The desk was rescued.
Some of these revisions of Austen in each era’s image can add much to our knowledge. Such a book is Jan Fergus’s on Austen as an entrepreneurial businesswoman, a professional (a word with many positive vibes) writer. Each must be judged on (my view) on its merits as contributing to sound scholarship (documents explicated using standards of probability and historicism) or ethical insight into Austen’s creative work.
Susan Sontag in several of her essays on the relationship of art (especially photography) and life (especially the representation of pain, of illness) asks of works of art, that they advance our understanding of the real. Do they instead conceal reality under the cover of sentimental versions of what probably didn’t happen or not that way. Austen’s own fervent adherence to doctrines of realism in her era (probability, verisimilitude) suggests she thought the justification for her irresistible urge to write and to reach a readership is to promote an understanding of the reality of another person’s experience of life. I suspect such a standard would produce contemporary serious critiques of Austen’s fiction along the lines of the older irony-surveying Marvin Mudrick. This, as Amy Bloom on Lucy Worseley’s documentary about the houses Jane Austen lived in (also in the New York Times Book Review) concedes is not what’s wanted by a majority of Austen’s readers; Bloom reviews a BBC “documentary” (as much myth as fact) by Lucy Worseley on Jane Austen’s houses. It’s characterized, Bloom says, by “shameless ebullience” is a composite phrase using Worseley’s frank admission.
One counter is Elena Ferrante’s unusual (and obsessive) defense of anonymity as the only true way to elicit for a piece of art its value in its own right (not as belonging to some group, some identity, some agenda). While her choice of anonymity has been defended on the grounds she has a right not to tell her name or about her life, the principles she tirelessly repeats in Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey has not received the endorsement it should. Online when she has put an essay arguing why anonymity is important, against in effect celebrity (fame) and icon worship, commentators don’t believe she really thinks as she does. Her idea, like Sontag’s, Austen’s own, and numerous of Austen’s more sober critics, that it’s the duty of the fiction-writer to “get close to the truth” of reality calls out for more attention. Sontag puts it in her Regarding the Pain of Others, that falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, and allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection (I condense and paraphrase).
Are there any terrifying moments in Austen. Yes. Some of this important material in found across her letters (which are often glossed over or dismissed on the grounds she never meant them to be read by others); some in the Austen papers (the life history of Jane Austen’s great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Weller Austen, how badly she was treated as a widow and her struggle to provide for herself and for her children), in Austen’s fiction, an undergirding of deep emotions held at bay, which I think come outs strongly in her treatment of death as experienced by widows in her fiction. At this level Austen also (in some words Victor Nunez gives his Henry Tilney hero in Ruby in Paradise about reading Jane Austen): “Saved me from evil. Restored my soul. Brought peace to my troubled mind. Joy to my broken heart” (Shooting Script, p 41).
It’s good the books survive, and some of the films, biographers, and literary critics do justice to them.
From the Jane Austen Book Club: Sylvia (Amy Brenneman) reading Emma
