Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood writing to her mother (1995 S&S)
The idea that an Austen character influenced and carried on influencing us is, to my mind & out of my experience, the mark of the “Janeite.” Anyway I dream/think this. It’s a belief I like and almost believe in that when I was in my later teens Elinor Dashwood was a figure for me I could try to emulate, imitate analogously and in so doing save/rescue myself. Her self-control, her prudence, her thinking about things and for herself however she might behave in accordance with apparent or pretended-to social norms (=social cant). As fanciful perhaps I see her in somewhat of that light still now I’m in my 70s. It’s called a role model except I don’t believe people read this way or for role models …
Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood towards the end of the story, looking out at the sea, enduring (2008 S&S)
Amanda Vickery expatiating on a group of 18th century letters and what they reveal
Dear Friends and Readers,
Last May I announced that I would be going (once again) to the East Central region meeting of the American 18th century Society and that a proposal for a paper I was going to write over the summer had been accepted. Well I did write said paper this past August, but as bad luck would have it — and my own inabilities in the area of driving and traveling — I was prevented from going. This is not the first time this has happened since Jim died. See my Jane Austen and the Arts blog, the paper Ekphrastic Patterns in Austen
I know that central to the fun of delivering a paper is conveying to living people one’s work, seeing their responses on their faces and the conversation afterwards. I’ve had a sort of substitute. A good friend, Rory O’Farrell, read the paper and this is part of the conversation we had via email letters:
Your Anne Finch paper was interesting. I quite agree with the necessity of reverting to the original documents wherever possible. In the case of the Calendar of medieval documents I was recently using, I examined some of the online images of specific documents in the calendar, and noted minor occasional omissions on the part of the preparer of the calendar (done pre 1950), often on partially legible or earlier erased entries. It occurs to me that, with modern lighting (ultra-violet and or infra red) and modern high resolution cameras, that document should be re-assessed, as some of the 1950 indecipherable comments/entries might easily resolve using such modern equipment and add a little to the story therein set out.
Thank you on the Anne Finch paper. I don’t know what people might have discussed; but one is the distance between the electronic facsimile and the actual manuscript. I’m willing to say little is lost because it’s so hard to reach real manuscripts, but modern publications or editions of these ms’s (like the one published by Cambridge of AF, or these new Cambridge volumes of Austen ms’s) won’t do — for the reasons I outline. Thank you for this.
Then the other day in one of my classes on Anthony Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset and Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife and The Choir (Barsetshire Then and Now), I brought into class my very ancient-looking and battered 1867 pirated American copy of The Last Chronicle, which contains almost all George Housman Thomas’s original illustrations. They asked me had I ever seen a manuscript of Trollope’s and what did it look like? did he make many corrections? I said I had never seen any of Trollope’s manuscripts, only read descriptions of them, and it would seem that we mostly have fair copies his wife created from his working papers; those more immediate copies we have show he did change his plans as to who would be central or a secondary character, and the manuscript of the 4 volume version of The Duke’s Children (now at Yale) showed many revisions as he cut it down. But in general from what we can see, it would seem that Trollope trained himself to write quickly a copy that would not be all that changed the next day and then add on to that at the rate of 250 new words a day.
But over my life I had seen many manuscripts from early modern women (Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara), and worked specifically with Anne Murray, Lady Halkett (17th century Scots royalist spy), editions of the journals and letters of Fanny Burney (I wrote reviews) and seen the manuscripts or manuscript facsimiles of all the work of Anne Finch and much of Jane Austen. I told them about some of what is in this paper, and much to my surprise they asked questions about manuscripts authors left. I told them the story of Walter Scott’s manuscripts and how around the time of the Regency period, attitudes towards manuscripts changed: before then, writers tended to destroy them. They were in effect devoured in the printing process. After, they were documents whereby you could trace the original intentions of the author, get near to the author in the most close way possible.
Thinking about this, the people’s interest in manuscripts should not have surprised me. It’s part of this change of attitude begun in the 19th century and going stronger than ever so that we have exhibits in museums of artists’ first and continuing sketches, stages in the process, leading towards the final great item seen as the finished work.
A later 20th century edition of the Wellesley manuscript
It is sad not to have gone as these were people whom I’ve regarded as genuine friends, but I know my ability to drive continues to diminish: I cannot drive in the night was part of the reason I decided not to go. The aggressive and dictatorial social and political world of the US grows more restrictive and punitive: I don’t know that I could get through the computer machines in airports where there are so few hired employees to help people and customs is overtly hostile: I have actually been pulled over 3 times by TSA people who act as silent tyrants. So I will have to go less and less. With inflation, the cost begins to bite into my income and savings more.
It is an ill wind that does nobody any good: I am looking forward to more sheerly pleasurable reading, projects where I would not produce a paper (Italian studies, Anglo-Indian studies) and eventually a book-length study (at long last) of the Poldark and Outlander romance fiction and films.
Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) walking back from vase gazing in Inverness, Halloween time (Outlander S1, E1)
Our first look at Ross Poldark (Robin Ellis) as by coach he rides towards Nampara, Cornwall (Poldark 1:1)
Cassandra’s drawing of Jane Austen (I’m sure this is accurate)
When once we are buried you think we are gone
But behold me immortal! …
— from Written at Winchester on Tuesday, the 15th July 1817
Friends and readers,
Mid-summer and the anniversary of Jane Austen’s death. The least I can do is return to Austen blogging: for this somber occasion, Vic Sanborn has written a new blog, and I can refer the reader back to one where I link Austen’s very last poem, offering a different take on Austen’s experience of life as shown us over her books, a tone different from Vic’s, but just as earnest in my sorrow that Austen died so young. I’ve just watched the new Netflix Persuasion, featuring, as I’m sure you are tired of hearing, Dakota Johnson as a re-made Anne Elliot (more on that and the current state of Jane Austen movies in the next blog).
Dakota Johnson (Anne Elliot) and Cosmo Jarvis (Wentworth, apparently a rock star) are the latest couple
And I’ve been perusing Persuasions, the JASNA journal No 43 (Summer 2022), and while most of the papers show the usual careful conventionality of approach to Austen (ever balanced, conservative in outlook, almost apolitical), and an underlying hagiography which undermines or shapes what is on offer, there is also the usual feast of information and insight if you care to study the whole issue. So for this blog I’ve singled out four essays I thought of immediate interest to us today: countering the dishonesty and complacency of the Austen world has been guilty of (me too).
The first part is a gathering of essays on the subject of Jane Austen and the arts, only the perspective isn’t that of the anthology I reviewed on this topic a while back:
Charles Austen, thought to have been painted around 1810, in the uniform of a captain
Credit where credit is due: the perspective is much more non-traditional: the authors go to places you might not expect and treat as serious art or politics what you might not think of as art or a document to be read politically (philosophically) in the first place. For example, draftsmanship training the Austen brothers had in the Naval Academy: what is left is treated as serious art. This perspective turns up stuff that is overlooked.
So first up I call attention to Devoney Looser’s essay, whose content is repeated more briefly in a recent Times Literary Supplement for July 8, 2022, “Heroics at Sea,” p 5.. Charles Austen has been presented as acting to “crush” slavery during his career as a captain aboard a British ship bound to capture any ship with enslaved people on it, free them, and punish the perpetrators. The “honest” truth (Looser is calling for honesty) is not quite what has been implied.
In 1826 the Aurora captured and boarded the Nuevo Campeador, and a brief paragraph was printed (and reprinted, went viral insofar as one could in 1826) to suggest that Charles Austen as captain was actively “crushing” the slave trade. The devil (as they say) is in the details. A group of lines indicate 250 people in chains, closely kept in filth and starvation. Someone threw a yam and it’s remarked how the enslaved people behaved over this like angry maddened dogs. Well who would throw a yam? It reminds me of how Trump throw a roll of toilet paper at an audience of Puerto Rican people after that first horrific hurricane during his regime. Then what happened to these people? papers of emancipation were handed out but what else. Looser’s research (based on that of others) finds that most of the time such enslaved people ended re-enslaved or in conditions nearly as bad as the one they were headed for — the mortality rate very high. Nothing whatever done for them. Tellingly the most interesting detail is how the captain was allowed to escape. He had some excuse of his dangerously ill wife — of course he must be allowed off the ship. Surprise, surprise. He never returned. Nor was there any attempt to capture and punish him legally for his crime. Captain Austen probably got his prize money when the ship was finally brought to port; Looser doesn’t mention this so I wouldn’t be so sure. The key to so many written documents about slavery or state-sponsored piracy at sea is how evasive the content usually is.
It is significant that Looser was able to be much clearer and more emphatic in the TLS than Persuasions.
The first essay in the volume, Julienne Gehrer’s “Martha Lloyd and the Culinary Arts at Chawton cottage, a long piece on Martha Lloyd’s cookery book teaches us a lot about the intense closeness of Martha Lloyd to Jane (and Cassandra Austen). Written with more “honesty” (I’ll call it) we read here much evidence of Jane and Martha’s close (lesbian dare I say) attachment, which I have written about elsewhere on this blog.
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A contemporary illustration of a stage production of High Life Below Stairs: a coachman, cook, and household servant all drunk refuse to open the doors of their quarters to their employers
Moving right along to the Miscellany: there are two items of note. One developing further Looser’s call for honesty on a farcical drama often misrepresented in effect; and the other breaking with a conventional conclusion about Miss Bates, but as in the manner of most of the Persuasion articles, doing it without disquieting us, and in a sense re-asserting a conventional value: how useful is social networking.
Lesley Peterson’s “Race and Redirection: Facing Up to Blackface” is absurdly prefaced by a black letter warning: This essay contains language and images that may be disturbing or harmful to some readers. It’s such thinking that leads to banning books and essays like this from schools. The usual over-interpretation frames the honest content. Peterson believes that Austen’s thin, short play, The Visit, owes a great deal to a popular farce by James Townley, High Life Below Stairs. There is a single simple allusion to the Townley play and the Austen family (this is what is interesting) acted High Life Below Stairs as amateurs at Steventon. Peterson’s whole outlook comes out of studies like Penny Gay’s and Paula Byrne’s which have Austen as knowing just about every play ever acted on the 18th century theater, with a phenomenal memory, and inspired to write her novels by details in many of them. The person wanting to write a book called Jane Austen and the Theater is certainly in good luck.
What is new here and so dreadfully distressing is Peterson actually read Townley’s play, and, unlike those who have written about it before (e.g., Byrne), brings out how two of the servants below stairs are black. Probably enslaved people because the white servants resent them for not having salaries. What’s more insult them. I hope I need not repeat the ugly stigmatizing of these black servants’ looks and clothes, and a humiliating ritual (presented as comic) they go through on stage. The story of the farce is about how two “masters” (employers) decide to infiltrate (like moles) below stairs in order to see if their servants are as lazy and over-fed as they surmise. Surprise, surprise, they are. As lazy and overfed. The sneers here are just shameless — the play’s content reminds me of people in my neighborhood who are home-owners talking of tenants as if tenants were an ontologically untrustworthy inferior species.
Full disclosure: I read the text in Garrick’s abridged version in a 5 volume 1805 collection of plays I once (every so luckily) picked up in a Chichester book shop (The British Drama, comprehending the best plays in the English language published by William Miller, Bond Street, printed by James Ballantyne, Edinburgh, 1804 — 2 volumes of comedies, 2 of tragedies, 1 of operettas and farces, with 3 prefaces telling the history of the genres). I confess I never read High Life Below Stairs until last night. I was content to read other people’s descriptions of it. So I am grateful to Peterson.
Peterson of course absolves Austen of all snobbery: she claims The Visit shows Austen would have been very alienated by the masters’ plot: alas, The Visit has a very different story (a very slender one). Basically we can’t say what Austen thought of the story matter of High Life, nor do we know if the Austens played the servants’ parts in blackface. For myself I venture to suppose they did not as it would have been great trouble to blacken two people’s faces and then clean the material off. An illustration from the era printed by Peterson suggests an actual black person (negroid) playing KIngsston, the male black servant. The female, Chloe, is given hardly any lines. OTOH, I remember Jane Austen in her letters referring to musical performers as hirelings. In fact because of the apparently necessary hagiography towards Austen, her essay only somewhat faces up to its content.
Of the at least six actresses playing Miss Bates, for me Sophie Thompkins was the most moving even if in he candied 1996 Miramax Emma: here she is at the moment of realizing Emma’s humiliating mockery of her (1996 Emma, scripted McGrath)
The last essay I have room to report on here (I am trying to keep these blogs shorter), is Diane Reynolds’s “‘I am not helpless:’ Miss Bates as the Hidden Queen of Highbury.” It makes it into the printed edition (there is a hierarchy here, and those essays online are paradoxically often by “lesser” people. Reynolds treats Miss Bates being treated with full respect, hardly any qualifications. That’s unusual. Amanda Vickery is one of the voices who does. Reynolds argues that Miss Bates’s “logorrhea” (Tony Tanner’s word and I cannot resist it for its force and felt accuracy) are in part a conscious put-up job, and cover-up.
I’ve written postings and blogs to argue Miss Bates knows about Frank and Jane’s engagement (how could she not?) and if you read this logorrhea in place (at the ball, at the alphabet game, when the piano comes, and especially towards the end when Jane has been physically sick from Frank’s punishing treatment and Mrs Elton’s unbearable needling and pressure), Miss Bate’s words & stance protect Jane – one stance comes to mind of so many – when Jane is seen to not be able to find her wrap. Frank comes over and so it’s a moment very like the one where Miss Bates declares she is not helpless. Arguably, says Diane, Jane Fairfax is “the novel’s true heroine.”
I loved her characterization of Emma “uphold[ing] a hierarchy,” “pour[ing] out her uncensored venom.” Yes she has a “horror” of “being in danger of falling in with the second rate and third rate of Highbury who were calling on them forever” (we are to see that we see only a sliver of those who come and leave their cards or whatever).
By contrast to Emma, who is isolated except for those she choses to come under her domination (Harriet in the novel), Miss Bates is “continually in company” and we are told today and many believe that networking is power – to know a lot about neighbors and others is a kind of power.” Emma emerges as pathetic by your account. But I would qualify here that from what we see of Emma’s thoughts, just about everyone Emma meets she despises, she is bored by or can’t stand. It’s interesting whom Emma befriends, since she so little understands them. That suggests they are objects to her and she cares little about them (Harriet she drops with no problem, Frank too). Reynolds uses Rilke to justify her use of sub-textual matter (invisible) kept hidden, in the background and her reading against the grain.
The unconventionality here is the non-complacent depiction of Emma. The way some at JASNA talk of Emma has sickened me. Yet we must acknowledge Emma is super-rewarded at the lengthy end of the book – by contrast and similarity Jane Fairfax shows an inability to take too much company; she too loathes it but it of course susceptible to outrageous intrusive comments the way Emma is not. Myself I find a good deal of Jane Austen in both heroines. I also like the looking askance at the supposed deep understanding friendship of Austen and her niece Fanny Knight. In one of her letters to Fanny I feel Austen gives away she looks at Fanny as an amusing object for scrutinizing ironic study.
There is or could be a problem in claiming so much power for Miss Bates, except that Reynolds calls Emma a “magical” world and in that paragraph remind me of Trilling’s now old once well-known introduction to Emma where he declares it an idyllic or pastoral world where reality is sufficiently put aside so that we can laugh at or love these “imbecile” characters because in such an environment they don’t come to harm. What I mean to say is Miss Bates’s is what is nowadays called “soft power,” and soft power doesn’t go very far when you are ejected from your dwelling and have nowhere to live. Emma may mock, but Miss Bates, pace Mr Knightley’s justified worried sympathy (or maybe he is right), does not end up homeless because the marriage comes off. Highbury is not an Indian village and its financial customs and laws work very differently.
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Honesty is the new aegis in some of this collection. But honesty about Jane Austen, given the constituents of her fan-clubs, and the need for academics to sustain a position at their US universities (not exactly over-funded or bastions of anything near economic liberalism in the mid-20th century sense), and sceptical, well-informed (on Martha Lloyd’s movements), candid and against the grain looks at the plays and novels involved can go only so far.
I’ve not given up or put away my review of the new Cambridge Finch volume altogether. I’ve been reading (for example) Gillian Wright’s Producing Women’s Poery, 1600-1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print: a study of women’s poetry as the texts appear in the manuscripts across this era. I’m going to contribute the following talk/paper (maybe 15-20 minutes worth) at the coming EC/ASECS conference (in person! at Winterthur museum, Wilmington, Delaware) for a panel called Material Matters, meant to concentrate on the material phenomena surrounding or part of texts (including the lodging the poet writes in):
“From Beginning to End of the Long 18th Century: Anne Finch’s poetry in manuscripts and Austen’s unfinished and finished fiction in manuscripts (for a panel called Material Matters)
At the opening (so to speak) of the era, that is, the later 17th century, and the close, the early 19th, we can now study most of two writers’ manuscripts in recent edited editions from Cambridge. I will argue there is much to be learned from reading these two women’s manuscripts in both the printed forms, if one can get hold of the ms in some form other form (facsimile, digitalized), or (as it were) raw (the ms itself in a rare book room). The attitude of mind of the authors to the work, her perceived status, the attitudes towards her of those living directly around her come out. Dating, visible processes seen on the pages, emerge from behind the curtain of formal publication. I will also show that over this long haul little changed in women’s status (here both in effect high elite) and how that shapes the works I discuss too.
Amanda Vickery expatiating to the viewers over a manuscript book of letters (At Home with the Georgians)
That is, if I can get there and find ways to and from the inn to the conference sessions at the museum it’s to be held in. For some this would be nothing. For me, it’s a lot to get past. I get lost, it’s a long way, and I can no longer drive in the dark.
Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw) Ethiopian girl living in Beirut (Capernaum)
Madeline (Martine Chevalier) and Anne, her daughter (Lea Ducker) — (Deux of Two of US is not just about the love of two aging lesbians, but the daughter of one of them)
Heloise (Adèle Haenel), Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (it’s a three-way relationship at its height: wealthy young girl to be sold to a husband, painter, and pregnant maid)
I’ve just spent four weeks teaching a course where we read two marvelous books by women, Iris Origo’s War in the Val D’Orcia, an Italian war diary, 1943-44, and Christa Wolf’s Cassandra and Four Essays, and want to observe, commemorate, act out Wolf’s argument (proved) in her book that there is a real body of literature by women, separate from men, superior, filled with alternative values, following different genre paradigms, only permitted to thrive in Europe and her cultures since the 18th century and that in marginalized ways, but there and wonderful — deeply anti-war, anti-violence, filled with values of women, a caring, cooperative, preserving, loving ethic. What better day than V- or Valentine’s, better yet against Violence Day, especially when aimed at women. A day yesterday when much of the US in the evening sat down to watched a violent-intense game, interrupted by celebrity posturing, false pretenses at humane attitudes, and glittery commercials (the Superbowl).
Last night I watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire (which I’ve written about already here), and the 6th episode (Home Truths) of the second season of All Creatures Great and Small (ditto), and the fifth episode of the fourth season (Savages) of Outlander, Her-stories (adapted from Diana Gabaldon’s Drums of Autumn)
Anne Madeley as Mrs Hall (housekeeper, and vet)
Helen (Rachel Shelton) and James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph)
Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Adawehi
I delighted in my evening:
Home truths: shamelessly sentimental and ratcheting up lots of angst, yet nothing but good happens. Why? I’ve decided it’s a show with women in charge — for real. Mrs Herriot gives up James to Helen, Mrs Hall and the woman with the perpetually nearly mortal cows. Mrs Pumphrey is the local central goddess, and Tricky woo, her animal. A new woman came in, an aging gypsy who lives with stray dogs. Parallel to Mrs Pumphrey. I love it.
The men are the Savages: the crazed German settler who thinks the Native Americans are stealing “his water” so when his daughter-in-law and grandchild die of measles, he murders the beautiful healer of the tribe — they retaliate by murdering him and his wife and burning down his house. Claire had been there to help bring the baby into the world. The coming problem that most counts is measles. Jamie and Ian discover they can’t get settlers while the Governor and his tax collectors are taking all the profits from settlers and using it to live in luxury, and Murtagh is re-discovered. Very moving reunion with Jamie and Claire — keeping the estates, feeding animals. She functions as Mrs Hall.
The three women eat, walk, sleep, talk together; the two upper class ones go with their maid to help her abort an unwanted pregnancy among a group of local women meeting regularly to dance, talk, be together where they sit around a fire — here they are preparing food, drink, sewing ….
A brief preface or prologue to two fine women’s films: Capernaum and Two of Us, with some mention of Salaam Bombay and Caramel, ending on Isabelle Huppert as interviewer and Elif Batuman as essayist on women’s film art:
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Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) and Rahil’s baby, Yonas (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole)
One of the courses I’m taking this winter at the same OLLI at Mason where I teach is one recent fine movies, and the first we saw Capernaum directed by Nadine Labarki. She has another remarkably memorable film I saw years ago, Caramel, the stories of five women whose lives intersect in a beauty parlor). She and two other women wrote the screenplay. It’s an indie, in Arabic, set in the slums of Beirut: the title refers to a place on the northern shore of the sea of Galilee and forms part of the Jesus Christ stories. The word also means chaos. It makes Mira Nair’s Saleem Bombay looks into the semi-lark it is: both center on a boy living on the streets of desperately poor area who is cut off from any kind of help from parents. Nair’s film ends in stasis: with the boy on the streets still, having stabbed to death a cruel pimp who preyed on a prostitute who is one of the boy’s friends, and took her small daughter from her.
People write of Capernaum as heart-breaking but most of their comments center on the boy (Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian). It’s done through flashbacks. The gimmick complained about is the boy is suing his parents for bringing him into the world. Basically the boy, Zain, exposes the cruel treatment his parents have meted out to him — real emotional, social and physical abuse too. In fact, Hilary Clinton proposed many protections for children, a couple of which aroused the ire of conservatives because she proposed to give children rights which in effect included complaining about parental abuse. I remember how she was attacked fiercely for her proposals on behalf of children. As eventually passed it was about adoption procedures and administration, whether she succeeded in making the child’s welfare count for real I don’t know
What is seriously relevant is the continual filming of dire poverty and the imprisoning of helpless (stateless) immigrants, refugees with no papers and how the need for papers is used by criminals and some lower base businessman to punish and demand huge sums from these people willing to buy forged documents. Astro, the film’s villain, is trying to take Rahil’s baby from her so he can sell the baby, and we discover at the film’s end he had no good parents and home for the baby, only a transitory prison. Labarki takes the viewer through the jails such people end up in and the conditions there — although this is Beirut, you could easily transfer this to the borders of the US. I find the supposed secondary character, a young single mother end up separated from her child as important as the boy, Zain — the fantasy of the movie is this boy takes real responsibility for the child. We also see how Zain’s sister, Sarah was sold to a man when she was 11 and dies of a pregnancy, how his mother is endlessly pregnant with no way to make any money to feed her family or send anyone to school. We se how desperate circumstances have led the boys’ parents to behave brutally to him and to one another, to in effect sell Zain’s sister, their daughter, Sarah, age 11, who dies in childbirth (too young for pregnancy).
It’s an important movie for our time — Biden is continuing many of Trump’s heartless and cruel policies at the borders — not the separation of families. There is no excuse for this. This movie does have a sudden upbeat happy ending (sort of). See it.
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Then very much a Valentine’s Day film: Two of us, also on this film course’s list.
Nina (Barbara Sukowa) — much in love with Madeline, she has no family around her
Isabelle Huppert more recently (see her in the interviews just below)
Very touching. It’s about two lesbians who have grown old and one is nervous (Madeline), frightened of her two grown children (Anne and Frederick), never ever admitted how she loathed her bullying husband (who made a lot of money if her apartment is any measure). Nina lives across the hall and yes people outside them think they are just friends. But they are deep lovers and as the movie opens, Nina is pressuring Madeline to sell her apartment so they can move to Rome permanently, Rome where they have been so happy.
What happens: Mado has a stroke, and is parallel to a movie so long ago, The Single Man, for which Colin Firth was nominated for an Oscar where two homosexual men have deep true life and one dies (Matthew Goode) and the other (Firth) is closed out by the family. Goode leaves everything to Firth, an English teacher. Goode’s family know about the gay life style and enjoy spitefully excluding Firth and beating back the will. Firth comes near suicide, pulls back, just in time.
Here the women hid, and Nina has to break through a caregiver who loathes her as competition. There is much inexplicable imagery. As the film opens, Nina has a dream of herself as a child saving Madeline as a child. Black birds or crows come and go. Nina becomes violent and axes the daughter’s care to get the caregiver in trouble and fired. Gradually the daughter realizes there is something special here. When she first sees a photo of the two women together in Rome, she is revulsed, and puts her mother in a home where the mother is drugged into compliance. The caregiver and her son come and threaten Nina, and when she is out, destroy her things in her apartment insofar as they can and steal what money she has. My mother had a caregiver just like this desperate hard angry woman. Anne witnesses her mother try to come out of her stasis to reach Nina, and Nina try to run away with her. Anne thinks again, and chases her mother and her mother’s lover back to her mother’s apartment, where they are quietly dancing together. The movie ends with Anne banging frantically on the door, saying she didn’t understand.
There is hope. Anne has brought a kitten for her mother while the mother was with the caregiver. We see it in the hall and may hope Madeline’s money will be enough and they will be left alone again. Such movies do show up the ratcheted up cheer of All Creatures and Small – how much truer to life this. Real anxiety Real trouble. It’s about aging and loneliness. There are as fine reviews of this as The Lost Daughter.
And two thoughtful interviews conducted by Isabelle Huppert (a fine French actress. One with the director, this his first film. The other between Huppert and Sukowa: listen to two actresses talk shop It’s very unusual to talk candidly about the problem of enacting, emulating having sex in front of a camera.
Don’t throw your evening out to become an object sold by one company to another to sell awful products at enormous prices.
I conclude with an excellent essay-review by Elif Batuman of the film-oeuvre of Celine Sciamma. Batuman shows how Sciamma is seeking out and inventing a new grammar of cinema to express a feminist and feminine quest for an authentic existence as a woman experiencing a full life: Now You See Me. I quote from it on The Portrait of a Lady on Fire:
The “female gaze,” a term often invoked by and about Sciamma, is an analogue of the “male gaze,” popularized in the nineteen-seventies to describe the implied perspective of Hollywood movies—the way they encouraged a viewer to see women as desirable objects, often fragmented into legs, bosoms, and other nonautonomous morsels. For Sciamma, the female gaze operates on a cinematographic level, for example in the central sex scene in “Portrait.” Héloïse and Marianne are both in the frame, they seem unconcerned by their own nudity, the camera is stationary—not roving around their bodies—and there isn’t any editing. The goal is to share their intimacy—not to lurk around ogling it, or to collect varied perspectives on it.
Mira Nair (filming A Suitable Boy) and Celinne Sciamma
Dear friends, readers — lovers of Austen and of books,
Over on my Ellen and Jim have a Blog, Two, I provided the four photos it takes to capture most of my books on and by Anthony Trollope, and explained why. You may also find a remarkably informative article on book ownership in England from medieval times on and what makes up a library. I thought I’d match that blog with a photo of my collection of books by and on Jane Austen, and in her case, books about her family, close friends, specific aspects of her era having to do with her. Seven shelves of books.
I have a second photo of 3 wide shelves filled with my DVD collection (I have 33 of the movies and/or serial TV films), my notebooks of screenplays and studies of these films, as well as books on Austen films of all sorts. These three shelves also contain my books of translations of Austen into French and/or Italian, as well as a numerous sequels, many of which I’ve not had the patience or taste to read but have been given me.
My book collection for Austen is smaller than my own for Trollope because even though I have many more books on her, she wrote only seven novels, left three fragments, some three notebooks of juvenilia, and a remnant of her letters is all that survives. For each of her novels or books I have several editions, but that’s still only seven plus. By contrast, Trollope wrote 47 novels and I won’t go on to detail all his other writing. OTOH, there are fewer books on him, and the movie adaptations of his books are in comparison very few.
There’s no equivalent movie for The Jane Austen Book Club where members vow to read all Jane Austen all the time
So although I won’t go to the absurdity of photographing my many volumes of the periodical Persuasions, and what I have of the Jane Austen Society of Britain bulletin like publications, I can show the little row of books I’m reading just now about her and towards a paper for the Victorian Web.
The project includes reading some Victorian novels written with similar themes, and Henry James’s Spoils of Poynton; for me it is true that Austen is at the center of a group of women (and men too) writers and themes that mean a lot to me, so I have real libraries of other women writers I have read a great deal of and on and have anywhere from two to three shelves of books for and by, sometimes in the forms of folders:
these are Anne Radcliffe (one long and half of a very long bookshelf), Charlotte Smith (two long bookshelfs), Fanny Burney (three, mostly because of different sets of her journals), George Eliot (one long and half of another long bookshelf), Gaskell (two shorter bookshelves), Oliphant (scattered about but probably at least one very long bookshelf). Virginia Woolf is another woman writer for whom I have a considerable library, and of course Anne Finch (where the folders and notebooks take up far more room than any published books).
As with Trollope starting in around the year 2004 I stopped xeroxing articles, and now have countless in digital form in my computer; I also have a few books on Austen digitally. The reason I have so many folders for Smith, Oliphant, Anne Finch (and other women writers before the 18th century) is at one time their books were not available except if I xeroxed a book I was lucky enough to find in a good university or research library. You found your books where you could, went searching in second hand book stores with them in mind too.
One of my favorite poems on re-reading Jane Austen — whom I began reading at age 12, and have never stopped:
“Re-reading Jane”
To women in contemporary voice and dislocation
she is closely invisible, almost an annoyance.
Why do we turn to her sampler squares for solace?
Nothing she saw was free of snobbery or class.
Yet the needlework of those needle eyes . . .
We are pricked to tears by the justice of her violence:
Emma on Box Hill, rude to poor Miss Bates,
by Mr Knightley’s were she your equal in situation —
but consider how far this is from being the case
shamed into compassion, and in shame, a grace.
Or wicked Wickham and selfish pretty Willoughby,
their vice, pure avarice which, displacing love,
defiled the honour marriages should be made of.
She punished them with very silly wives.
Novels of manners! Hymeneal theology!
Six little circles of hell, with attendant humours. For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbours
And laugh at them in our turn? The philosophy
paused at the door of Mr Bennet’s century;
The Garden of Eden’s still there in the grounds of Pemberley.
The amazing epitaph’s ‘benevolence of heart’
precedes ‘the extraordinary endowments of her mind’
and would have pleased her, who was not unkind.
Dear votary of order, sense, clear art
and irresistible fun, please pitch our lives
outside self-pity we have wrapped them in,
and show us how absurd we’d look to you.
You knew the mischief poetry could do.
Yet when Anne Elliot spoke of its misfortune
to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who
enjoyed it completely, she spoke for you.
—– Anne Stevenson
The Jane Austen Book Club meets in a hospital when a member has a bad accident
Gentle readers, I can hardly wait to see the second season of the new Sanditon on PBS; my daughter, Laura (Anibundel) much involved with WETA (PBS) nowadays, writing reviews and such, who has read the fragment and books about Austen tells me it is another good one.
Chapman’s classic set (appears as Christmas present in Stillman’s Metropolitan): for our first anniversary Jim bought me a copy of Sense and Sensibility in the Chapman set (1924, without the later pastoral cover)
Since 2000 I have gone almost every year to the East Central (regional ASECS) meeting, and I have gone to a number of the JASNA meetings. In view of the covid pandemic (now having killed 223,000 people in the US, with the number rising frighteningly daily), this year EC/ASECS decided to postpone their plan to meet in the Winterthur museum to next year and instead do an abbreviated version of what they do yearly.
By contrast, the JASNA Cleveland group did everything they could to replicate everything that usually goes on at at JASNA, only virtually, through zooms, videos, websites. It was an ambitious effort, marred (unfortunately) because (why I don’t know) much didn’t go quite right (to get to somewhere you had to take other options). It was “rolled out” something like the usual JASNA, a part at a time, so you could not plan ahead or compare easily or beforehand; but now is onsite, all at once, everything (at long last) working perfectly. I visited (or attended or whatever you want to call these experiences) two nights ago and last night, and can testify that since I usually myself go to listen to the papers at the sessions or lectures, I probably enjoyed the JASNA more than I usually do at the usual conference. If you didn’t care for what you were seeing or hearing for whatever reason, it was very easy to click away; you could see what was available all at once, watch far more than one intended to be given at the same time. You can skim along using your cursor …
IN this blog I offer a brief review of both conferences.
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A detail from one of Canaletto’s paintings from around the Bacino Di San Marco, Venice: a lady and gentleman
In our “Brief Intermission,” for EC/ASECS, on Friday, in the evening we had our aural/oral experience, a couple of hours together where we read 18th century poetry and occasionally act out an abbreviated version of a play; during the later afternoon we had one panel of papers, this one about researching unusual subjects itself. Saturday morning, there was one panel of papers by graduate students competing for the Molin prize (given out for excellence to a paper by a graduate student each year); than at 1 pm there was the business meeting (sans lunch unless you were eating from wherever you were while you attended the zoom), and the Presidential Address: this year a splendid one, appropriate to the time, John Heins describing the creation, history and grounds of Dessau-Worlitz Park (Garden Realm) in Eastern Germany, a World Heritage site, with the theme of trying to experience a place fully although you are not literally there by its images, conjuring up in one’s mind, the place we might like to be but are not in. I didn’t count but my impression was we had anywhere from 25 (the aural/oral fun) to 37/40 people for the four sessions. I enjoyed all of it, as much (as other people said) to be back with friends, see familiar faces, talk as friends (chat before and after papers).
I will single out only a couple of papers from Friday’s panel. First, Jeremy Chow’s paper, “Snaking the Gothic” was in part about the way animals are portrayed in 18th century culture, focusing on snakes. It seems the identification as poisonous (fearful) led to their being frequently used erotically. I found this interesting because of an incident in one of the episodes of the fifth Season of Outlander where a bit from a poisonous snake threatens to make an amputation of Jamie’s lower leg necessary but a combination of 20th century knowhow, and 18th century customs, like cutting the snake’s head off, extracting the venom and using it as an antidote becomes part of the way his leg is saved. In other words, it is used medically. Ronald McColl, a special collections librarian, spoke on William Darlington, American physician, botanist and politician whose life was very interesting (but about whom it is difficult to find information).
People read from or recited a variety of texts in the evening; I read aloud one of my favorite poems by Anne Finch, The Goute and the Spider (which I’ve put on this blog in another posting). I love her closing lines of comforting conversation to her suffering husband.
For You, my Dear, whom late that pain did seize
Not rich enough to sooth the bad disease
By large expenses to engage his stay
Nor yett so poor to fright the Gout away:
May you but some unfrequent Visits find
To prove you patient, your Ardelia kind,
Who by a tender and officious care
Will ease that Grief or her proportion bear,
Since Heaven does in the Nuptial state admitt
Such cares but new endeaments ot begett,
And to allay the hard fatigues of life
Gave the first Maid a Husband, Him a Wife.
People read from novels too. This session everyone was relatively relaxed, and there was lots of chat and even self-reflexive talk about the zoom experience.
The high point and joy of the time to me was John Heins’ paper on Worlitz park: he had so many beautiful images take of this quintessentially Enlightenment picturesque park (where he and his wife had been it seems several times), as he told its history, the people involved in landscaping it, how it was intended to function inside the small state, and the houses and places the different regions and buildings in the park are based on. He ended on his own house built in 1947, called Colonial style, in an area of Washington, DC, from which he was regaling us. He brought home to me how much of my deep enjoyment of costume drama and BBC documentaries is how both genres immerse the viewer in landscapes, imagined as from the past, or really extant around the world (Mary Beard’s for example). He seemed to talk for a long time, but it could not have been too long for me.
Amalia’s Grotto in the gardens of Wörlitz
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Andrew Davies’s 2019 Sanditon: our heroine, Charlotte (Rose Williams) and hero, Sidney Parker (Theo James) walking on the beach …
I found three papers from the Breakout sessions, one talk from “Inside Jane Austen’s World,”, and one interview from the Special Events of special interest to me. (Gentle reader if you want to reach these pages, you must have registered and paid some $89 or so by about a week before the AGM was put online; now go to the general page, type in a user name and password [that takes setting up an account on the JASNA home page]). The first paper or talk I found common sensical and accurate (as well as insightful) was by Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, on Andrew Davies’s Sanditon. They repeated Janet Todd’s thesis in a paper I heard a few months ago: that Austen’s Sanditon shows strong influence by Northanger Abbey, which Austen had been revising just the year before. Young girl leaves loving family, goes to spa, has adventures &c. They offered a thorough description of how Davies “filled in the gaps” left by what Austen both wrote and implied about how she intended to work her draft up into a comic novel. They presented the material as an effective realization and updating of Austen’s 12 chapter draft, ironically appropriately interrupted and fragmentary. I will provide full notes from their paper in my comments on my second blog-essay on this adaptation.
The second was Douglas Murray’s “The Female Rambler Novel & Austen’s Juvenilia, concluding with a comment on Pride & Prejudice. He did not persuade me Austen’s burlesque Love and Freindship was like the genuinely rambling (picaresque) novels he discussed, but the characteristics of these as he outlined them, and his descriptions of several of them (e.g., The History of Charlotte Summer, The History of Sophia Shakespeare – he had 35 titles), & James Dickie’s study of cruelty and laughter in 18th century fiction (Doug discussed this book too, with reference to Austen), were full of interesting details made sense of. Of course Austen’s heroine, Elizabeth, as we all remember, goes rambling with her aunt and uncle in Derbyshire and lands at Pemberley just as Darcy is returning to it.
Elaine Bander’s paper, “Reason and Romanticism, or Revolution: Jane Austen rewrites Charlotte Smith in Catherine, or The Bower” interested me because of my studies and work (papers, an edition of Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake, many blogs) on Charlotte Smith. She did not persuade me that Austen seriously had in mind Smith for the parts of her story (was “re-composing” Smith’s novels). But hers is the first thorough accounting for this first and unfinished realistic courtship novel by Austen I’ve come across, and on this fragment’s relationship to an 18th century didactic work by Hannah More, to other of Austen’s novels (especially the idea of a bower as a sanctuary, a “nest of comforts”, character types, Edward Stanley a Wickham-Frank Churchill). I draw the line on the way Elaine found the aunt simply a well-meaning dominating presence: Mrs Perceval is one in a long line of cruel-tongued repressive bullying harridans found across Austen’s work. Austen is often made wholesome by commentators — I find her disquieting. Elaine suggested that Juliet McMaster (who gave a plenary lecture, and told an autobiographical story for the opening framing of the conference) in a previous Persuasions suggested a persuasive ending for the uncompleted book. Her talk was also insightful and accurate in her description of Smith’s novels, their mood, their revolutionary outlook and love of the wild natural world: “packed with romance and revolution, bitterly attacking the ancien regime, injustice, describing famous and momentous world events, including wars — quite different from Austen (I’d say) even if in this book Austen does homage to all Smith’s novels.
As to “Special Events,” I listened briefly to an interview of Joanna Trollope and her daughter, Louise Ansdell (someone high on a board at Chawton House – why am I not surprised?): Trollope, I thought, told the truth when she said young adult readers today, let’s say having reached young adulthood by 2000 find Jane Austen’s prose very hard to read. What I liked about these comments was they suggest why it is so easy to make movies today that are utter travesties of Austen’s novels (the recent Emma) where say 30 years ago movie-makers were obliged to convey something of the real mood, themes, and major turning points of Austen’s novels.
“Inside Jane Austen’s world included talks about cooking, what to put in your reticule (and so on). Sandy Lerner re-read a version of her paper on carriages in Austen’s time that I heard years ago (and have summarized elsewhere on this blog). Of interest to me was Mary Gaither Marshall’s discussion of her own collection of rare Austen books, including a first edition of Mansfield Park (she is a fine scholar): she told of how books were printed (laborious process), how the person who could afford them was expected to re-cover them fancily, the workings of the circulating library &c. She said her first acquisitions were two paperbacks which she bought when she was 10 year old.
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This last makes me remember how I first read Austen, which I’ve told too many times here already, but it is a fitting ending to this blog.
On Face-book I saw a question about just this, from the angle of what led someone to read Austen’s books in a “new” (or different way), without saying what was meant by these words — as in what was my “old” or previous way of reading her. I can’t answer such a question because my ways of reading Austen or eras do not divide up that way. But I like to talk of how I came to study Austen and keep a faith in the moral value of her books despite all that surrounds them today, which go a long way into producing many insistent untrue and corrupted (fundamental here is the commercialization, money- and career-making) framings.
So I wrote this and share it here: Years ago I loved Elizabeth Jenkins’s biography of Jane Austen, and that led me to read Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. I must have been in my late teens, and my guess is I found the Jenkins book in the Strand bookstore. I had already read (at age 12 or so) Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility; and at age 15, Mansfield Park. Nothing inspired me to read the first two (part of this person’s question), but that the first two were there in my father’s library among the good English classics. The third I found in a neighborhood drugstore and I was led to read it because I loved S&S and P&P. MP was not among my father’s classic libraries The first good critical book I remember is Mary Lascelles on the art of the books, then Tave’s Some Words of Jane Austen. So as to “new way of reading her” (intelligently), when Jim and I were in our thirties at a sale in a Northern Virginia library Jim bought a printing of the whole run of Scrutiny and I came across the seminal articles by DWHarding (a revelation) and QRLeavis. I do not remember when I found and read Murdock’s Irony as Defense and Discovery, but it was the first book to alert me to the problem of hagiography and downright lying (though Woolf very early on gently at that (“mendaciou”) about the Hill book on Austen’s houses and friends).
When I came online (1990s and I was in my forties) of course I was able to find many books, but the one that stands out attached to Austen-l, is Ivor Morris’s Considering Mr Collins, brilliant sceptical reading. There are still many authors worth reading: John Wiltshire comes to mind, on Austen-l we read together a row of good critical scholarly books on Austen. Today of course you can say anything you want about Austen and it may get published.
I saw the movies only years after I had begun reading, and the first I saw was the 1979 Fay Weldon P&P, liked it well enough but it didn’t make much of an impression on me. The 1996 Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee/Emma Thompson) was the first of several movies to change my outlook somewhat on Jane Austen’s novels, in this case her S&S.
Since Jane Austen has been with me much of my life, of course I welcomed a chance to experience some of the best of what a typical JASNA has to offer, since nowadays I & my daughter are regularly excluded from these conferences. After all those who have special “ins” of all sorts, I am put on the bottom of the list for what room is left. I regret to say she has quit the society because she loves to read Austen, is a fan-fiction writer of Austen sequels, enjoyed the more popular activities, especially the dance workshop and the Saturday evening ball. She is autistic and rarely gets to have social experiences. She had bought herself an 18th century dress and I got her a lovely hat. They are put away now.
When was I first aware there was an 18th century? when I watched the 1940s movie, Kitty, with Paulette Goddard — you might not believe me, but even then, at the age of 14-15 I went to the library to find the script-play and I did, and brought it home and read it. I fell in love with the century as a set of texts to study when I first read Dryden, Pope, and the descriptive poetry of the era — just the sort of writing that describes places like Worlitz Park.
Catherine (Felicity Jones) and Isabella Thorpe (Carey Mulligan) in the circulating library at Bath (2008 NA, scripted Andrew Davies
Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) arriving near the sunny beach in Sanditon (2019 Sanditon, scripted by Andrew Davies, among others)
I would bring together Janet Todd’s talk and Georgina Newton’s to suggest that it is a sort of betrayal on Austen’s part to erase all details of books she read, and plays she went to, and not make any of her heroines serious readers or writers. I wish there were a heroine somewhere in her oeuvre who ends up happily without marriage. We will not have such heroines until the mid-20th century.
Friends and readers.
There is a sliver of a silver lining to this frightening pandemic and its necessary quarantining, many lectures and talks many could never reach, virtual conferences, plays operas concerts are turning up on-line. I’ve told how enjoyable I found the Chawton House Lockdown Literary Festival (Part One, Part Two). Chawton House has gone on to set up further talks over the summer, and this past week Jane Todd gave a quietly suggestive talk on Sanditon and Northanger Abbey: A Shared Pen, aka “On her first and last novel.” I spent a wonderful week in Bath in 2002, but never had time or occasion to go to one of the regular talks on Austen that occur there; this weekend the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute sponsored a second talk (I missed the first) on Jane Austen’s feminism and how it relates to girls today on-line. As the presenter said, hitherto they would get a small number of people who lived in and around Bath or made it their business to come from not too far off UK; now they had people a zoom session from literally around the world.
I took notes on both and am glad to record what was said for my memory’s sake and share what I remember for others who are interested. Remember my hands can no longer taken down stenography in the precise way and with the quickness I once did, so these summaries and comments are meant to be only suggestive, the gist of what was said. Both were thoughtful, stimulating talks
Janet Todd: Her first and her last, Northanger Abbey and Sanditon.
Austen, she felt, puts all her novels into dialogues with one another: S&S with P&P, the title shows a clear pair; MP with Emma), and the sister-Bath books, NA and Persuasion. Then we have heroines teasing each other across the volumes, themes and types contrasting and paralleling, with heroines within the novels further patterned. Northanger Abbey is far fuller than Sanditon, but Austen was not satisfied with it in 1816 when she put Miss Catherine “on the shelf” and felt she might not take it off again. I add Austen in her letters has a way of identifying a novel with its chief heroine as she sometimes refers to the novel by the heroine’s name.
First of NA draft began in 1794; she returned to it and wrote full length book after or during her second Bath visit of 1797-98. Coming to live in Bath, she starts writing in 1802, and sends it to Crosby to publish as Susan in 1803. It may have taken her a while to realize the book was not coming out from this man’s press. So in 1809 they are moving to Chawton, and she wants to procure ms of Susan to work on it; sneered at by his son, she does not pay the £10 asked back. In a preface written in 1813 she worried parts of this book had become obsolete. She had much admired Burney’s Camilla, mentioned in extant NA, and the heroine finds a copy in a bookshop lending books in ,Sanditon 1817.
Todd also felt Austen revised her manuscripts continually (I agree), and that they all had far more literary allusion and specifics than they had when published. These were pruned away in all but NA and Sanditon. They all also seemed to have had names which connected them to her family, to Austen’s life: The Watsons was The Younger. Well Sanditon was The Brothers. We may imagine (from the dates on the calenders and extant manuscripts) that Sanditon was written not long after Emma, which had been followed by a revision of NA as a similarly satiric text (heroine a romancer). I suspect (Todd did not say this) that Persuasion existed in some draft form earlier on, as that would be the only way to account for its extraordinary depth and suggestive detail (squeezed in between NA and Sanditon). Henry Austen said all her novels were gradual performances.
Henry Tilney (J.J. Feilds) dancing with Catherine at their first ball together
Sidney Parker (Theo James) meeting Charlotte at their first ball together
Some strong over-lappings: Both NA and Sanditon are rich in material items. We have a common sense heroine with parents who say put and are sensible prudent people (contrast the Bennets who are not). The Haywoods and Morlands economize; they have dowries for their daughters, the Morlands a sizable sum to set James up with. They are both off places associated with holiday and fanciful time: an Abbey, a spa town. If it was Henry who gave NA its name; it is a tale of a place, and ditto for James Edward Austen-Leigh’s naming of Sanditon (if he did name it) There is in both a comical sense of adventure; there is no abduction in Austen (though there is one in Marie Dobbs, and also now in Andrew Davies’s TV series, of Miss Georgina Lambe). Davies makes Sidney into useless guardian for Miss Lamb, but from what we are told of Sidney in Austen, it seems that he may have the same kind of slightly jaundiced witty, a teacher. Inadequate chaperons for both heroines in both books.
Some differences, with other novels brought in: Charlotte & Catherine have good hearts and thinking minds, but after that they differ. Catherine is the butt of the NA narrator, at times the naif and does not satirize others; by contrast, Charlotte is capable of he ironic put down, but gives people want they want, supports nutty people with a quietly thinking satiric voice. Austen wants us to take Charlotte’s presence seriously throughout; for Catherine, she is mocked in the first chapter of NA, a heroine device and we are back to that in the penultimate chapter. In Sanditon it’s Charlotte who keeps seeing Clara Brereton as a sentimental victim-heroine type, while Catherine has to be prodded by Isabella into seeing Isabella or the Tilneys into romance figures. Emma, on the other hand, has dangerous ideas about Jane Fairfax (dangerous for Jane) Todd felt that Emma protested too much how comfortable she was seeing so little from her window, while Charlotte is a realist. She does not need to read books to calm her mind the way (say) Anne Elliot does
In all Austen’s novels she works up anxiety for heroine; nasty domineering older woman throughout the fiction is still seen in Sanditon. (I suggest that Mrs Elton is an upstart younger version of this kind of bully.)
I felt that Prof Todd was most interested in showing that Austen is aware that fiction is an interpretive tool; the misreadings of reality by many of her characters bring out a core of rottenness at the heart of this society. I thought she was interested in the alienated eye in the books (sometimes the heroine’s, sometimes from other characters, e.g., Mr Bennet, sometimes Mr Knightley, Mr Darcy, more ironically Henry Tilney (who allows his sister to be left lonely and bullied). There is no one to over-ride the heroines in some of the books; Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor Dashwood, Jane Fairfax (however weak her position), Anne Eliot. The narrative voice is important here. Intrusive in NA. She pointed out how at the end of NA, Mrs Tilney is a felt ghost (I feel that is true of Lady Eliot). So there some things do turn into the tragic.
Todd saw hardly any darkness in Austen’s vision in these books (or across the whole of Austen’s vision). I cannot agree and think there are enough intelligent characters dissatisfied with their lot, and these reflect Austen herself. Remember the Juvenilia. Remember the anguish several of her heroines experience, how much chance is made to be on their side. I am of the D.W. Harding school, and he has had many critics and readers like myself. Austen had limited material to work with, the conventions of the realistic novel. Only by these could she justify what she was doing to her family. Remember how worried she was about their approval, and how dependent she was on that for publication and the family for an allowance. Lady Susan remained unpublished; The Watsons was left in a strangely high polished state for the 1st volume; how two of the published novels are not truly finished (NA and Persuasion). That Austen lost her fight with time and illness.
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Darcy (Colin Firth) meeting Elizabeth Jennifer Ehle) and Mr and Mrs Gardner at Pemberley, he greets them as equals (1995 P&P, scripted Andrew Davies)
Edmund Bertam (Nicholas Farrell) consulting Fanny (Sylvestre Le Tousel), an equal relationship from the beginning (1983 MP, scripted Ken Taylor)
While Janet Todd is a well-established scholar and professor, with many books and articles, an editor of important volumes, retired head of Cavendish College, Cambridge; Georgina Newton is a younger scholar, finished her Ph.D not long ago, with her specialty more sociological, and works as a university lecturer and primary school teacher. She is interested in the education of girls from poorer backgrounds. What she has seen in life makes her passionate to help them. Her Ph.D. consisted of studying working class girls and girlhood, looking at how they imagine their future. She discovered they have a feminist tone and attitudes but don’t know how to articulate their desire, how to vocalize their criticism of their place and given futures in society. What she did was divide Austen’s novels as a group into broad themes and look to see how these girls related to what is found in Austen.
First Ms Newton discussed Austen’s novels seen as a comment on society. Austen was once seen as wholly conservative; since the 1970s some see that she challenges partriarchal structures. Some of her heroines attempt to take charge of their own world. That is seen as feminist by girls today. Life today for girls is a battle with obstacles including class, rank, money, their roles as mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. What choices are they given. In books there was a limitation on what a woman could write. Ms Newton did her research from a socialist feminist perspective, and sees Austen as having a limited subject matter and personal experience. She shows us the restrictions of women’s lives; we see how confined they are, hemmed in, put into the interior of a home. The male goes out far more freely into the world of public work. The girls she studied (asked questions of) fully expected to make sacrifices to be able to do work commensurate with their education. They do not like that they cannot or it is hard to fulfill their personal goals; they don’t like the situation and yet accept it.
Emma (Kate Beckinsale) painting Harriet (Samantha Morton) (1996, scripted Andrew Davies) — Emma a book susceptible of lesbian reading, is relentlessly made heteronormative
Then heteronormative marriage is a key theme for Austen’s books, knitting everything together. Marriage gave the man almost total power over his wife, he could abuse her, take away her children, isolate, imprison her. The choice a woman was given was who to marry, the pressure hidden but ever there. In P&P it’s not that the man needs a wife, but a woman needs a husband. MP Lady Bertram got a far better prize than her dowry merited (ironic openings). Girls 12-13 will deny they are interested in boys; they say they want an education, to get a job before marriage. Marriage has still the fantasy element Beauvoir discussed; the man will take care of you. They could be scathing towards individual boys, bu they assume he will support them when they have children. Yet they seek independence.
The seeking of equal relationships in Austen and her heroines. Elizabeth is looking for a equal partner. This idea is found in Wollstonecraft. Not just equal in their relationship as people, but commanding respect, responsibility. Girls did not want to be “stay-at-home” “mums,” but do something for and by themselves. The girls she was with often talked about their parents’ relationship. Some girls said the father and mother juggled care for the children together; others became cross about how a father or brother left the women in the family to do the work needed at home.
The virgin/whore dichotomy still operative in Austen’s world. This binary still forms typology; the girls were quite critical of one another or themselves for behaving in an open sexually inviting manner; they dress to escape blame. Ms. Newton did not say this but look at how Lydia Bennet, the two Eliza Williamses, when Jane Fairfax is clandestinely engaged, when Maria Bertram runs away, at the scorn for Isabella Thorpe when betrayed by Captain Tilney — how these characters are treated.
Where Elinor Dashwood (Emma Thompson) tells Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant) that men can work for a living, women are not allowed (1995 S&S, scripted Emma Thompson)
Economic Power in Austen. Men can get jobs, rise in the world through their work; women are impotent. Emma Thompson’s script for S&S brings this out. Only by marrying can a woman move up in the world. Women today make 24% less at similar jobs (she said). The girls were very aware of this economic inequality, and saw the lower salary and positions as defining the limits of what they can do – on top of the sacrifice for those at home.
Colonel Brandon (here David Morrisey) given much authority, respect in S&S (2008, scripted by Andrew Davies)
Wentworth (Ciarhan Hinds) talking to his sister, Sophia Crofts (Fiona Shaw) who challenged on his authority (1995 Persuasion, scripted Nick Dear)
Figures of authority in Austen. Very few authority figures given real respect are women. Women left out of history (NA), literally confined, small spaces and given no or miseducation. Anne Eliot talked of how at home they are preyed upon by their inward selves. Space is provided by a man, and women must accommodate themselves to what he can make or decides. Here they talked of how femininity is a public performance, to be “lady-like” or respectably feminine is the default setting. The girls said it mattered how society saw them; they were angry at the injustice of having to play these roles. Patriarchal structure continues in Austen and men as figures of authority. The girls had felt the experience of being subject to men or seeing women subject to men. Catherine de Bourgh is powerful but within the domestic home and over what patronage she inherited from her husband.
In general, the teenage girls she studied spent a lot of time talking about what makes a strong woman and the finale in books & movies where she is nonetheless married off to a man at the end. They saw that women with the least rank and money had the least economic power unless they marry a powerful man then and now. Marriage nonetheless assumed, heterosexuality assumed in Austen and their spoken lives. Newton suggested that in the 1970s an important theme, an attempt was made to enable women to support other women. Austen offers us a shrewd take on women’s worlds, a world not that far from ours in some essentials. Sisterhood a powerful theme through Austen – what women owe other women. She ended on the thought she had never expected the girls she studied to be as feminist as they were, and to read Austen with them in these ways brings out wonderful insights.
Some thoughts: I did feel there was condescension in some of what Ms Newton said, that she was too aware the girls were “working class” and she “upper middle” as constituting this big difference between her and them. “Their” statements/attitudes show how they are under terrific pressure to marry and to have children. Perhaps Ms Newton is too. We know what huge obstacles these acts will make if they want to have a thorough education and succeed in a job outside their homes. She might have emphasized that more. That Austen does not see marriage and family in that light because Austen sees no opportunity to “get out there” in the first place. That there are other ways of gaining fulfillment — individual self-cultivation (as we see glimpsingly in Lady Russell).
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I would bring together Janet Todd’s talk and Georgina Newton’s to suggest that it is a sort of betrayal on Austen’s part to erase all details of books she read, and plays she went to, and not make any of her heroines serious readers or writers. It is painful how she makes her one reading girl, Mary Bennet, a fool and plain to boot (as if that were why a girl might read a good deal of the time). I wish there were a heroine somewhere in Austen’s oeuvre who ends up happily without marriage. We will not have such heroines until the mid-20th century.
A rare sympathetic portrayal of Mary Bennet (Tessa Peake Jones) is found in Fay Weldon’s 1979 BBC P&P
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Both sessions had a question and answer period. In the case of Janet Todd, it was a zoom meeting and there was real conversation. People knew or recognized one another. Alas, I had to leave early. I had so appreciated the quiet tone, the measured delivery of the talk but there is no way to convey that so I say it here. At the Bath Institute, the mode was to read aloud the Q&A in chat, with occasionally people voicing their comments or questions. Everyone seemed lively and interested; they were many more observations than there was time for. I can’t remember any to be as feminist as the working class girls Georgina Newton interviewed.
But there will be other sessions this summer from both institutions. I’ll add to that if you donated to Chawton House during the Lockdown festival, you were given a chance to re-see and re-listen to Todd as often as you like until it’s pulled down. The Bath Institute had trouble with its zoom and everyone who paid for a ticket can now re-see it on the site for a while.
Drawing Room at John Murray, 50 Albemarle Street, London
Bee Rowlatt, Dear Mary, In Search of Mary Wollstonecraft
Dear friends and readers,
I continue my account of the talks and interviews variously recorded at the Chawton House Lockdown Literary Festival last weekend. We’ve covered Friday and half of Saturday, May 15th and 16th; today we’ll have the second part of Saturday and Sunday, the 16th through 17th.
I have a new observation to apply to all the proceedings: as I watched and listened I began to notice that almost all the women (all the speakers but two were women) had remarkably similar backdrops. At first, the tasteful cream-white room with its bookcase on one side, perhaps a window on the other seemed real, but a while, it could not be that all the people would be in a room with a bookcase to the side, all the rooms of a light creamy-white.
What fools you at first is they are not exactly alike. Some women seemed to be sitting and looking down at notes from time to time; others seemed to be standing up. Some people didn’t have it — Caroline Jane Knight didn’t — she came across appealingly in the way upper class Brits know how – she can tell seemingly charming/frank stories of this house as she grew up in it, and perhaps it was thought more piquant to give her as background a room in Chawton House; Devoney Looser didn’t conform either. But most did.
I now also add the titles of fiction and a brief description of one of the talks about fiction that were part of this festival in the comments to this blog — as I can see people are reading these blogs.
I began with Alison Daniells, whose YouTube went on line at 3 pm British summer time. She talked of Elizabeth Knight, who, very unusually for a woman, owned Chawton House and the surrounding properties in the earlier 18th century. She was not the elderly Knight woman who was kind to Jane Austen, but an ancestress (1674-1737) who, unlike most women at the time, inherited a vast property and its income. Despite the law of coverture (explained by Daniells) and primogeniture, sometimes a woman could end up owning a family’s property – basically when there were no direct sons or sons-in-law and when there was no entail put on the property (as became popular in the later 18th century).
We were told of Knight’s two marriages and then her pro-active behavior on behalf of controlling her property, doing with it as she wanted, and also exercising a right to vote. Apparently a woman could vote in some circumstances in the later part of the 17th and early 18th century.
Louisa Albani. 5:00 pm British summer time, is an artist who created a short video where she expressed through visual pictures Mary Wollstonecraft’s experience of Paris and during a visit to Versailles in 1792. She was directly followed by Bee Rowlatt, interviewed by Clio O’Sullivan.
Rowlatt has written imitation of Richard Holmes (who literally followed in the footsteps of his biographical subjects in a book called Footsteps): In Search of Mary Wollstonecraft Rowlatt tells of her trip following Wollstonecraft as Wollstonecraft reports in her brilliant travel book, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Rowlatt did some research (though she said that was not her emphasis) and her book includes why Mary was there –- not clearly told in the superb, melancholy, and picturesque book; Mary was working for her ex-lover, Gilbert Imlay. American, then smuggling silver and goods stolen perhaps from aristocrats. She had had a baby by him, which baby she took with her, and also a maid (whose name is never mentioned). She had tried to kill herself when Imlay left her and her baby, took up with another mistress and resumed his amoral peripatetic existence. She was partly trying to maintain contact with him, but also trying to build a new life for herself, to rescue a relationship, and to explore Scandinavia, which Rowlatt did too and describes. Mary never found the silver (which had, ironically justly) been in turn stolen; the captain won a legal battle in court. Imlay was also smuggling arms out of Paris – working all ends this unscrupulous man.
Rowlatt read aloud some of the beautiful pieces of peaceful description in the book. Mary did recover her health. Rowlatt talked of Godwin’s biography, how it functioned to hurt Mary’s reputation for a couple of hundred years – myself I think she would have been erased altogether if not vilified so that Godwin’s book is not what was to blame. Rowlatt remarked that the suffragette Millicent Fawcett was the first person publicly to defend Wollstonecraft after a century of sustained vituperative misogynistic attack. Men & the upper classes in general (she was a socialist for her time, very like Paine in her outlook) must’ve seen in her book real danger.
A Valancourt book
Devoney Looser, a Professor of English at Arizona State, at 6:00 pm, “All the Janes.” She is writing a dual biography of Jane West (1758-1852) and Jane Porter (1774-50). Looser pointed out that in Austen’s era thousands of books were published and hundreds of them by women, who often wrote novels, but not that much fewer than men (men 300 to women 295). Women more prolific than men. She did not say if all these were in English.
Everyone knows about West’s A Gossip’s Story, where one of the dual heroines is called Marianne. What was interesting to me was that Jane West may also have written a another novel influencing Austen’s beyond Sense and Sensibility. (Looser never mentioned Caroline de Lichtfield, but I didn’t expect it – she may have mentioned de Stael). West though also wrote a novel called Ringrove (1827), which seems to be an imitation of Emma, the motherless rich heroine. Devoney has published an essay with someone else “Admiration and Disapproval before Jane Austen: Jane West’s Ringrove, Essays in Romanticism, 26 (2019): 41-54.
Jane Porter was much better known than Austen during Austen’s lifetime and since, especially for her children’s books and for adults The Scottish Chiefs (1810). Where she lived is now crumbling down or flattened altogether. Her sister, Anna Maria Porter (1778-1832) wrote historical fiction too. Jane Austen wrote her brother Edward about this sister’s book, The Lake of Killarney. Stainer Clarke, the librarian (the one so easy to despise for presuming to encourage Jane Austen) encouraged Jane Porter to write the same romance for the royal family and she did, Duke Christian of Luneberg.
Looser suggested had Austen lived maybe she would have changed her mind, because she liked money (the pewter comment was trotted out). To me to say this is to misunderstand the source and nature of Austen’s art. She couldn’t write such a romance as her whole stance towards life, towards what kinds of writing she could do that was valuable and she enjoyed doing, her determination to ground herself in moral comic truth by writing of what she knew, precluded such book.
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On the third night I started earlier in the evening (US EST time). Perhaps it is well to recall here that research in this library and museum from a scholarly standpoint is far more about 18th century women writers or the 18th century matters affecting women in general. For fans it’s a shrine for Austen but in the library room she is rightly and naturally among dozens of women.
A promotional photo
Caroline Jane Knight, 11 am 4th great granddaughter of Edward, 5th great niece of JA, began the day. She is probably the present heir to the house, and seems (since Sandy Lerner pulled out) to be shaping what the house will become — much more popular in orientation. She told us of how she grew up in the house, its rituals; she stressed that her family didn’t feel rich, and many branches of the Knights lived in the house at one time, each with its own living quarters, rather like a rabbit warren. Since the opening of this house to the public after the Jane Austen Society became involved and Sandy Lerner endowed it so richly for many years (herself paying for the hugely expensive restoration), the house is becoming a local community and British public community space as well as place for AGMs, Austenian and other 18th century women. There was little about Austen’s books — I wondered if she had read them much until lately.
In her talk she made it clear she knows she lived a privileged life. Nonetheless, the house as described by her sounded like some castle where there’s a court and everyone in lives in little crowded corners. It is true that these mansions were at times turned into the equivalent of hotels or apartment houses. She looked very strongly made, and I wondered if she rides? (is a horsewoman). She was very upbeat. See my blog on Devoney Looser’s review of her book, Jane and Me.
Caroline Knight was followed by Martin Chaddick, at noon, telling us of the supposed secrets of Chawton House –- he had photographs of the house before it was restored. First built in 1583-1590; the Knight family failed to provide an heir after Sir Richard Knight; it was passed to other branches of the family where the owner would change his named to Knight as did Jane Austen’s brother, Edward Austen, after he was adopted. He said he was researching house and its actual occupants, and started with how many had this first name and that; his work was that of a genealogist. You can read the literal history of the place at wikipedia.
In a third connected talk (about the neighborhood), at 1:20 Katie Childs and Lizzy Dunford discussed the village around the house in a similar practical local history fashion.
To turn to Austen’s contemporaries and other women writers, Kimberley James, began at 1 pm; she is the Collector and Manager at Gilbert White house. She spoke about the friendship of Hester Chapone and Gilbert White as seen through their letters. We learned of how they met through Hester’s brother, John Mulso, who was at Oxford when Gilbert White arrived. All three very intelligent people; White trained as a barrister. The two men became very close and from ages 20-70 Mulso wrote letters to White and there we find the history of this pair of people as friends. In 1745 Mulso brought White to meet the Mulso family, and Hecky and White hit it off. Gilbert tried to pursue a career at Oriel, Oxford and gardened. Hester married in 1760 but her husband (Chapone) died soon after, and she had the liberty and desire to live in London middling society where she met Elizabeth Carter who introduced her to Elizabeth Montagu; she became part of several circles of learned ladies, among them one surrounding Samuel Richardson, author of Clarissa and Grandison. Mulso died in 1790 and until then his letters describe these groups of people as Hester and Gilbert interacted with them. Then there is silence.
We come now to the two best talks of the last day: first, with no pictures: EJ Clery, 2 pm. Professor at Uppsala and author of a biography of Henry Austen. Clery said she had come to discuss literary societies. “All great writers need a gang” she began. Literary societies are about nostalgia, purpose conservation, they have archives, a shared love of books. The Jane Austen Society (of Britain), however, began 80 years ago, with the aim of restoring the small house Jane Austen lived in with her mother, sister, and friend, Martha Lloyd, and the throwing out of a grate from a fireplace. In 1949, we find an inscription on Chawton, which commemorates when the society and hopes for restoration began. Basically we owe the existence of the house still to Dorothy Darnell (1877-1953), who founded the society in 1940; it was at first a small gathering. Dorothy Darnell was also an artist (1904-1922), studied with Nicolson and exhibited in Royal Academy of Paris; she painted portraits; Emily, a sister, married (1856-1949), went to the Royal College of Music. We are in the period of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Dorothy’s sister, Alice Beatrix Darnell (1873-1995) was made chairman. A Rev Darnell was involved too. Carpenter who paid for an estimation; the Duke of Wellington at the time agreed to have his name used in the restoration of the small building.
Clery gave portraits of other early members of the JA British Society. Dorothy knew the writer Elizabeth Jenkins (1905-2010), Cambridge educated, wrote novels, 6 biographies, a very retiring, who destroyed her first novels. Elizabeth the Great is her best known book; she worked for Victor Gollancz during the war years, and chronicles her society in her writing and editing. She had no money, but was connected to upper class people and in Oxford, Mary Lascelles (1900-1995), one of the first scholars to produce a solid close reading of Austen, involved herself, RW Chapman (1881-1960) worked with Jenkins; they wrote Catherine Mecalf, that they need trustees, wanted to give prize, to produce annual reports In 1950 came the first one: 8 pages. 1938 appeared the first published articles about Jane Austen that became the traditional article in the journals (edited by Jenkins). At some point, Edward Knight agreed to sell his house for 3000£. The rooms became shrines, but meticulous research went into the making of them.
As to the Jane Austen Society journal reports, it is regularly published, each on average 100 pages, 10 articles, reports of talk (with much solid antiquarian research), reports from groups. David Selwyn edited them at first, and slowly a house of research was built: it’s from these reports Clery’s first information about Henry Austen> TABCorley and Clive Kaplan: Corley was an economic historian, had 4 children, a widower; Caplan involved with founding of JASNA. (My biography of Henry Austen as a blog is based on these men’s essays). Then Brian Southam and LeFaye built and expanded the society more to become what it is today. She told us where we may access the volumes nowadays: http://www.janeaustensocietyfreeuk.com/index.html and memsec@jasoc.org.uk
Now a YouTube of Gillian Dow, where she speaks for herself, but I’ll add a description too in case you want some notes:
Gillian Dow, who used to be the manager of Chawton House, has returned to Southampton University, and is writing a book on John Murray II (1778-1843) and his female authors, supporters, his networks. The Office at 50 Albemarle Street is above (the top of this blog). Bryon’s memoirs were burnt in that fireplace. She went there where literary gatherings once held (and Byron’s Memoirs deliberately burnt, Germaine de Stael once there, Scott too); also did research at the National Library of Scotland. She calls these women his 4 o’clock friends. JM2 was the son of John Murray I, who started the business in 1763. Gillian Dow read the letters of the women whose books he published or who tried to be published. David McClay published a good book just on Murray in 2018.
The story: 1793 JM2 inherited the business; he established The Quarterly Review in 1809, published landmark works, among them Byron and Austen. Egerton had published Austen’s first 3 novels; 1815 she resolved to go to Murray (much more prestigious, a publisher of literary books), and was offered 450£ for Emma with copyrights for S&S and MP; she and Henry refused (calling Murray a “rogue” in one letter), and published on commission, paying for production and distribution costs. Murray also published (1804) Genlis’s Duchess de la Valliere; radical women’s books, novels, listened to Caroline Lamb; went on with travel books, Heman’s poetry, an early woman scientist’s books; Susan Fevrier, Frankenstein; he was a supportive man. So it turns out Murray was no rogue (and Henry not such a good businessman); they made much less than 450£; 530 were remaindered at 2 shillings. The women he was involved with include Maria Graham (1785-1842), Sarah Austin (1793-1867), who followed her husband to Germany, kept in touch, provided Murray with a sort of readers’ reports, for example on someone she is asked to translate (1830). A third woman, Louis Swanton Belloc (1796-18881), who wrote a 2 volume biography of Byron; she was a translator, turned Cranford into French, Maria Edgeworth. She supported her husband and 3 children, was aggressive asking Murray to support this or that woman.
In the zoom period answers to questions included: unlike Austen most of these women did not work with brothers or come with male relatives on their behalf; yes, women are more likely to be translators. Very fashionable French readers liked to read English. Yes the women knew one another.
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Joshua Reynolds, The Ladies Waldegrave (sewing), 1780
Janine Barchas, 5 pm. The lost books of JA. Prof Barchas went over cheap reprints, embarrassing covers, lousy translations (mostly French, Italian and Spanish), and unreliable texts of Jane Austen’s novels. She presented herself as caring for these books and this readership but her tone was one of laughter. She showed mawkish covers and titles, saying we should regard these books as beacons in the darkness to readers left out, readers who need a chance to rebel. She was implying ideas about the readership of such books about which we know very little. The covers amused her, as did small grotesque female dolls called bobble heads (almost memorably ugly they are so distasteful) which she interspersed with the covers. I thought about her book on Northanger Abbey from where she claims to unearth as places she argues central to NA for which there is no evidence in the book, none; they are described as seriously chilling gothic places though are in fact highly problematic sensationalized tourist attractions.
Jennie Bachelor 6:00 pm, who was the first Chawton House fellow, and is now a professor of English at Kent University. Together with Alison Larkin, she has published a part craft, part critical and historical reading book on Jane Austen and Embroidery. Wollstonecraft regarded the perpetual sewing activity by women as oppressive, but many women (she said) did and do not. Austen appears to have taken pride in her sewing, and showed an avid interest in clothes.
Bachelor went over the kinds of materials you find in (considered as a type) Ladies Magazines: novels reviews, foreign news, advertisements, fashions, plates, poetry, but also frequently patterns for embroidery, but endlessly cut out for use (with no instructions — you were expected to know what to do). Her dissertation and an article she published includes some of the kinds of fiction found in these books: in one from 1790s, tale of shipwreck, we read of a Mrs Brandon attached to a Mr Willoughby; in 1802 a Case of Conscience has a Mr Knightley who marries an obscure orphan boarding at a school. Charlotte Bronte one of the later subscribers. These issues would be bound up (rather like single plays) – they were never meant to be kept.
Bachelor said she was very frustrated because she could find so few patterns, hunted for them, and then one day came across an issue with six. She started a Great British Stitch-in –- devised craft projects for all levels of ability, skill, some patterns for historically minded, others mixed media. She showed us a reticule made from embroidery. Among those who contacted her was Alison Larkin, from Yorkshire, they met and dreamed of a book. Sections organized with histories, biography, novels – an embroidery muff makes her think of Tom Jones. Well the book happened and she was here to show it to us.
The festival for me concluded with Hilary Davidson, at 7:00 pm, telling us of her Dress in the Age of Jane Austen. She traced the changes from exaggerated fashions of mid- to later 18th to a new apparent simplicity of dress for a while, until again a new set of exaggerations emerged (1830s). Sewing was very important; these were social acts. She studied women’s account books. They bought and wore differently textured clothing. How did women keep warm: they wore flannel underwear, a riding habit, woolen dress and habit, shawls, mantles, a pelisse, a spenser. Cossack trousers came in 1810 as armies crossed Russia and vice versa. From India lace-making, net machines, silk slips. She looked at Edgeworth’s Belinda’s depiction of assembly carefully. She showed us and analysed one of the covers on Margaret Drabble’s many women’s novels of our own era.
How did people use clothes in the Regency period and just after was the kind of question she asked herself and tried to answer. What exactly was stylish and why? What is meant by vulgar? Were you self-creating or ludicrous? Clothes represent complex identities are represented: she wanted to know how women experience these identities and the clothes that projected them?
Emma (Autumn de Wilde, 2020, Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma)
Wendy Moore, Endell Street, The Suffragette Surgeons of World War One
Dear friends and readers,
Last week I was able to attend a series of mostly enjoyable and instructive lectures, talks, discussions from Chawton House for three long nights. I did not have to get on a crowded plane (for oodles of money), travel to Chawton, obtain lodging nearby (ditto), nor did I need to have a paper accepted, which to my mind for years has been a sina qua non for deciding whether to go to a conference, as I want not to wander about belonging to no one. Now I could skip that too.
It’s not that I would not have preferred to experience the place, some of the events and talk that would have gone on all around, but I have once been to Chawton, for three days, for a Charlotte Smith conference (about as perfect an experience as I’ve ever had), with Izzy, and feel I know it from years of reading, not to omit following a Future Learn on Jane Austen done at Chawton House a couple of years ago now.
Further, for me the core of what I go to these conferences for are the papers, the sessions. You see above, two of the delightful books I heard described, and the one Austen film that, together with the history of illustrations for Emma and earlier film visualizations that was included in the three day program. For today I will cover the best of the first day in England (which I experienced at night) and part of the second (ditto). At the end I’ve a video of a thoughtful revealing talk by Joanna Trollope about what actuates her when she writes her novels. I did not listen to all the talks on any of the days: there was too much to take in. You can find videos for many of those I describe below on YouTube. Don’t just skip these, if you love Austen or women’s writing and are fired into enthusiasm or (sometimes) despair at studying women’s lives.
On the first day there were 6 YouTubes, some twitter Q&As, and one or more zoom groups either for a presentation or an afterwards.
Telling hard truth: they are desperate: they lost 80% of their regular funding a couple of years ago now when Sandy Lerner in a huff (angry over something and not justifiably for real) left and took her money with her; now closed, the first speaker tells you their income is down 60%. So this is by way of showing their stuff — their place — there is a place to donate. They showed the strengths of what is available at Chawton House Museum, house, and libraries.
First, very early in the day, the Executive Director of Chawton, Katie Childs, telling briefly all about Chawton House, what she does, and their financial straits. There were two of these creative writing workshops where people are supposedly teaching those who paid for this (limited space) how to write poetry (Clair Thurlow, and Sinead Keegan). She came back later to tell of how hard the job is, about caring for this historical house (once owned by Edward Austen Knight, Austen’s luck brother, adopted by rich relatives, the Knights), the estate, the museum, the library, the events … All that was left out was the grounds.
Then Emma Yandel — All About Emma. Ms Yandel began by telling the viewer that the recent Emma is interesting for its use of costuming, for the visual presentation which breaks with traditions yet yet brings new meanings &c&c. About 16 minutes were filled with information and insight about the history of illustration: the earliest, 1833, Bentley’s edition, very sentimental, normalizing, especially revealing is the choice of scene: Mr Knightley proposing to Emma. Emma is not primarily or even at all a conventional emotional heterosexual romance; with Hugh Thomson’s comic illustrations are the first to break away into real scenes of women (which the novel is filled with), with some irony, then the 20th century took the reader somewhat further. She talked of a 1946 a stage play in London, which was all sentiment and unreality and then was moving on to the most conventional Emma (1996, McGrath, with Gweneth Paltrow) and one of the break-aways, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, when, aargh!, the YouTube broke off and some other YouTube managed to block the rest of this talk …. I have seen the new Emma, and analyzed and described it as a hollow parody in the first half, and emotionally drenched heterosexual romance in the second.
Then a superb talk by Kim Simpson, she takes care of the two libraries and teaches at Southampton University. She told of the early women’s books the Chawton House owns, showed the two rooms of 1000s of books, and then gave a talk on the development of women’s rights as a concept and reality through focusing on seven women writers whose books she curated an exhibit in 2019 about — and including their associates, books they were responding to, and other books along the way. Each of these women that she chose was carefully selected and her work presented intelligently: Jane Austen, Persuasion was quoted (the pen has been in men’s hands), Bathsua Makin (a midwife), An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), Sarah Fyge Egerton, The Female Advocate, written when she was just 14; Mary Astell, Reflections on Marriage (1700, though she wrote a lot about setting up a college for women, on behalf of educating women, Mary Chudleigh (1655-1700), A Defense of Women; Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800) for her letters and for founding a sort of society of bluestockings, Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall, A Journey through every stage of life (1754), Madame de Genlis (1746-1830), the books that Jane Austen read or mentioned; Catherine Macaulay (1731-91, Her Letters on Education (1790).
The intellectual treat of the day was Wendy Moore whose books I have read and admired: especially Wedlock about the abusive marriage Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore endured. Moore writes eloquently, insightfully, passionately. Her talk was on the first women’s hospital at Endell Street, which was created by two courageous women doctors during the first world War in London. At first rejected, then after much struggle and using what connections they had from their education and background, they were allowed to set up a hospital that became one of the best hospitals in London — staffed entirely by women. They were there for the Spanish flu. Then in 1818 ruthlessly disbanded, the women driven away back to their homes. A tragic waste after their heroic admirable successful endeavour. She has been interested in all her work in the history of medicine and exposing violence inflicted on, and exclusions of women from any money, power, ability to choose a life. The suffragettes were done justice to — ironically no longer done in many accountings of suffragettes. They were violent! how could they? only suffragists are nowadays spoken of as acceptable. A rare spirit pushing back is Lucy Worseley. Moore provides the solid research. I quote from Anne Kennedy Smith’s review of the book in The Guardian:
In 1920, as part of an exhibition on women’s war work, the Imperial War Museum planned to display a sketch of a busy operating theatre at Endell Street Military Hospital in London. The hospital’s commanding officers, Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson, were furious, convinced that the depiction of a discarded splint and other clutter would damage the future professional reputation of women in medicine. “We would rather have no record of our work than a false record,” they raged.
One hundred years on, this compelling book at last gives Endell Street its due. It’s the story of the remarkable wartime contribution of two medical women who, as active suffragettes, had previously been enemies of the state. Life partners Murray and Anderson were qualified doctors who met while waging a women’s war against the British government. Anderson refused to pay tax and spent four weeks at Holloway prison after smashing a window in a smart part of London in 1912. Murray risked her medical career by speaking out against the force-feeding of suffragette prisoners.
The outbreak of war in August 1914 gave them the opportunity to take a different sort of radical action. Together they organised the Women’s Hospital Corps and set up a hospital in a luxury Paris hotel. There, amid the chandeliers and marble, they operated on wounds caused by shell fire, used primitive x-rays to locate bullets and shrapnel, and treated gas gangrene and trench foot. The taboo on female doctors treating men vanished overnight. Reports of the women’s success reached the War Office, and in early 1915 Murray and Anderson were invited to establish a large new military hospital in central London.
There was a comedienne, Alison Larkin, who made me laugh; then a writer of Austen post-texts, Natalie Jenner. It was too late at night to listen to her; I’ve since read about her book and discuss Jenner in the comments to my second blog.
Last Joanna Trollope — I’d never seen her before. How personable she is, how she knows how to make herself appealing, I thought. She tells of her motives and what more deeply actuates her in writing the kind of realistic domestic romances of family life in contemporary life that she has for some 30 years. Her first commercial success was apparently The Rector’s Wife (which I am now reading, as a result of listening to this talk). She did real justice to the genre she writes in. I so appreciated this. She then told of her most recent novel, Mum and Dad.
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On the second night I meant to watch or listen just to two talks, and I ended up listening to almost all of them – though not in the order they were put online. In my judgement there were several highlights as talks and for the content in this earlier part of the second set of talks, especially Rebecca James and Julia Wheelwright. At the end of the day/night Devoney Looser (like Gillian Dow), as something of a Janeite star, I’ll save for the second blog. For entertainment and charm on the second day, I’ll focus pick Bee Rowlatt “following in the footsteps of Mary Wollstonecraft.” So here I’ll stop at Wheelwright, moving for the second blog to the later sessions of the second day featuring both Rowlatt and Looser; and for the third day Gillian Dow and Emma Clery. This time I got the time down they spoke.
Theresa Kiergan, a Northern Irish poet, and Lisa Andrews, a journalist who has worked in TV. 11:0 am British summer time. They met while both were working on 26’s 100 Armistice Project. This was about poetry inspired by women refugees, and Kiergan’s has researched and written about the exodus of Belgian into Northern Ireland in the 1940s. 16,000 people, and they were welcomed (a far cry from today). KIergan singled out one woman who did embroidery; one piece of this material she did has survived. Many of the women would have been lace makers
Clio O’Sullivan, communications and publications manager at Chawton, noon British summer time. She told of an exhibit she curated, which she was heart-broken over when it was about to be made public and all was locked down (March): “Man Up! Women who Stepped into a Man’s World.” The title and the way it was described would have put me off but she was such a good interviewer that I was curious to begin her talk. It turns out it is an excellent exhibit and they have done all they can to make it available online. She researched and produced materials (books and other artefacts) about “Miss Betsy Warwick, the Female Rambler,” the “Narrative of the Life of Charlotte Charke” (daughter of Collie Cibber who disowned her – O’Sullivan did not bring in her family), Hannah Snell who joined the army and navy by dressing as a man. Elizabeth Knight (see below – a property owner), George Sand (O’Sullivan has an interesting image of Sand I’d never seen before – very austere, man-like but yet a woman), Mary Ann Talbot, who joined the navy (another cross dresser), the Brontes, Mary Wollstonecraft and a reverse case where a man, Chevalier d’Eon dressed as a woman, Mademoiselle de Beaumont. Hers were stories of soldiering, piracy (!), duelling, acting, ballooning, — and writing. Without the writing we would not know of them. She showed pink as a background to defuse or change the stigmata surrounding the colors.
Rebecca James, at 20 after 12 British summer time. Hers and the next talk were the two best of the whole of the second day. I am so glad that I did listen to O’Sullivan or I might not have gone on to these two. They are not frivolous or silly or popular unrealities. James’s topic was titled: “Women Warriors of the Waves.” The actual subject was the literature of piracy in the 18th century, which she has been studying (half a century ago Richetti wrote about the popular literature on this topic, with no women mentioned). Her two central women are Mary Read and Ann Bonny. There are printed books about these women and documents which repay study: She first discussed The Tryals of Jack Rackam and Other Pirates (printed in Jamaica 1721). In this book the woman are described as disguised like men, but clearly women in disguise, the pictures show their bodies, their breasts. They are presented as fierce, ruthless, violent, unafraid. Then, A General History of Pirates, 1724, with the central characters being “the remarkable Actions and Adventures of Mary Read and Anne Bonny. It’s said to be by Charles Johnstone, perhaps a pseudonym. She talked of the subsections in which we find the stories of these two women. In these the women are really trying to pass as men and behave as men and today one can read these stories about as about women who wanted to have sex with other women. Mary’s story (as told) begins with her entering the male world, but Anne Bonny’s with her in childhood; both story matters emphasize that the girls were when young dressed as boys, and to an extent it is implied they cross-dressed at first due to the circumstances of their families. They were arrested and accused of enough crimes so they could be executed, but both successfully pled their “bellies” (they were pregnant?) and escaped the gallows. She cited one article, Sally O’Driscoll, “The Pirate Breast,” The Eighteenth Century, 53:3 (?):357-79.
Claire in The Search (Season 1, Episode 12, Outlander), one of my favorite sequences where she dresses like a man and sings and dances and rides through the Highlands in her search for Jamie with Murtagh (his best friend, a father-figure) by her side
One of the most striking things about James’s illustrations is how the women were depicted reminds me of the way women in action-adventure costume dramas are depicted today. She showed pictures from a series called Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag on Starz. This is the first time I’ve seen any show that resembles Outlander in any way also on Starz. On a channel called Ubisot, the women are deadly and fierce. Since I’m an addict of Outlander it fascinated me to see that for the first two seasons and part of the second when Claire (Caitriona) dresses as a man it is always clear she is a woman and the way she is costumed recalls some of the images James showed; she is disguising herself for protection; she can be violent and fierce in self protection but by the end of the second season she is working as a nurse caring for all people. By contrast, although in the last episode of the 5th season of Poldark, where Debbie Horsfield has no source whatsoever she attempts to turn Graham’s far more “womanly” heroine Demelza into violent male-dressed woman (it doesn’t work) until then Demelza never looks like any of this material although the circumstances of the costume drama include scenes at sea, and violent scenes of class warfare.
Julia Wheelwright at 2:00 pm British summer time. Her topic was “Masquerade: women of the 18th century dressed up for profit, adventure, liberty.” This too was not the actual theme. Her book is titled Sisters in Arms, and it covers women’s history from classical times past the 18th century. I can’t begin to include all she said or suggested. She too made central use of the lives and stories told about Mary Read and Anne Bonny. I was very interested in her accounting for the myth of the Amazons: she suggested it was a result of Greeks whose writings were transmitted to Western culture, coming upon tribes of peoples (Scythians) where the women did have male fighting roles, and so astonished were they made the stories into something supernatural, glamorous. She told of how Mary Read was Irish originally; not only did she dress as a boy, but she eventually married, had children, went to Jamaica. Mary Read we know died many years later, but Anny Bonny just disappears from history. Hannah Snell was a real woman, she was on the stage for some time, she had brother-in-law names James Grey, she seems to have dressed as a male to escape the roles she was given as well as her family; she would desert after a while. Her biographer, Martha Steevens (?) says the Duke of Cumberland pensioned Hannah; she was married 3 times, had children, but ended in mental illness, in Bedlam, died a pauper in its hospital. Mary Anne Talbot, another told stories about: her details are not born out by documents Best documented from the 18th century is one Mary Lacy, a female shipwright,and chandler.
I donated $50, bought a used copy of Endell Street, and found (with a friend’s help) the 1990s BBC series on YouTube, The Rector’s Wife, with one of my favorite actresses when she was young, Lindsay Duncan in the role of heroine, Anna Bouverie.
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 