A winter syllabus 2023: The Heroine’s Journey at OLLI at Mason online

Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) and Henry Tilney (J.J. Feilds) entering the realm of the ancient Abbey, crossing the bridge (2007 Granada/WBGH Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies)

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: 4 Thursdays midday, 11:50-1:15 pm online,
F405Z: The Heroine’s Journey
Office located at 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va 22032
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course:

We will explore the archetypal heroine’s journey across genres and centuries in the western Eurocentric tradition, from classical times to our 21st century female detectives. Our foundational books will be Maria Tatar’s The Heroine with 1001 Faces (written as a counterpart to Joseph Campbell’s famous and influential The Hero with a Thousand Faces), and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey (click to reach the whole text online for free). Our four books will be Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales; Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter; and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. We will discuss what are journeys, the central experiences, typical plot-designs, characterizations, and events of the lives of our heroines of classical myth, fairy & folk tales (and connected to this historical romance and time-traveling tales), realistic fiction, and the gothic (and connected to this mystery/thrillers, detective stories). There are two recommended films as part of our terrain to be discussed: Outlander, S1E1 (Caitriona Balfe as Claire Beauchamp transported), and Prime Suspect S1E1 (Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison). I will supply some poetry (Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, Marge Piercy), two scripts (for the serial episode of Outlander and the 2022 film adaptation of The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal), and one parodic modern short story (“Rape Fantasies” by Atwood), all as attachments.

Leda (Olivia Colman) stopping off to look at the sea sometime during her journey there and back (Lost Daughter, 2021)

Required Books (these are the editions I will be using but the class members may choose any edition they want):

Margaret Atwood. The Penelopiad. NY: Grove Press (originally O. W. Toad), 2005, ISBN 978-1-84195-798-2
Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales. NY: Harper and Row, 1981. ISBN 0-06-090836X (reprinted with new codes many times)
Elena Ferrante. The Lost Daughter, trans. Ann Goldstein. NY: Europa, 2008.
Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman. NY: Norton Critical Edition, 2004. ISBN 978-0-393-097850-6. Another excellent (good introduction, good materials at the back of the book) modern edition is the Longman Cultural text, ed. Marilyn Gaull. NY: Longman (Pearson Educational), 2005. ISBN 0-321-20208-2

Strongly suggested films:

Outlander, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Sassenach” Written Roger Moore, directed John Dahl. Featuring: Caitronia Balfe, Sam Heughan, and Tobias Menzies. Available on Netflix (and Starz), also as a DVD. I can supply a script for this one.
Prime Suspect, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Price to Pay 1 & 2.” Written Lynda La Plante, Directed Christoper Menaul. Featuring Helen Mirren, John Benfield, Tom Bell. Available on BritBox, YouTube and also as a DVD

Kauffmann, Angelica: Penelope Taking Down the Bow of Ulysses (18th century fine painting)

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion

Jan 26th: Introduction, Atwood’s Penelopiad, with a few of her Circe poems, and Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Big O” (from The World’s Wife)

Feb 2nd: From Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales read “The Bloody Chamber” (Bluebeard), “The Courtship of Mr Lyon,” (Beauty and the Beast)”Puss-in-Boots,” “The Lady of the House of Love” (Sleeping Beauty plus), “The Company of Wolves” (Little Red Riding Hood). Please have seen Outlander S1, E1. Another movie you could see is the 1984 Company of Wolves, an extravagant fantasy bringing together a number of Carter’s fairy tales and fables; she is one of the scriptwriters. It’s available on Amazon Prime.

Feb 9th: Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, with Marge Piercy’s “Morning Athletes” If you are interested, see the film adaptation, The Lost Daughter, scripted & directed Maggie Gryllenhaal; while much is changed, it is absorbing and explains the book (Netflix film, also available as a DVD to buy); it features Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, and Jack Farthing (as Leda’s husband). I can supply a script for this one too.

Feb 16th: Austen’s Northanger Abbey, with discussion that links the gothic to modern mystery-thriller and detective stories. I will send by attachment Margaret Atwood’s “Rape Fantasies” (a very short story). Please have seen Prime Suspect S1, E1-2. If you are interested, see the film adaptation, Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies, directed by Jon Jones; while much is changed, this one is also absorbing and adds to the book (available as a YouTube and DVD); it features beyond the two principals, Carey Mulligan, Liam Cunningham (General Tilney) and Sylvestre Le Touzel (Mrs Allen)

First still of Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison, late arrival at crime scene, driving herself (Prime Suspect, aired 6 & 9 April 1991, “Price to Pay”)

Select bibliography (beyond Tatar’s Heroine with a Thousand Faces and Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey):

Beard, Mary. Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations. Liveright, 2013. Early refreshingly jargon-free feminist readings of documents left to us.
Bojar, Karen. In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018.
Carter, Angela. Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings [non-fiction, essays, sketches, journalism], ed Jenny Uglow, introd. Joan Smith. NY: Penguin, 1998
Cavender, Gray and Nancy C. Jurik, Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press, 2012.
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2004.
Frankel, Valier Estelle. 3 books: Symbolism & Sources of Outlander: Adoring Outlander: On Fandom, Genre, and Female Audience; Outlander’s Sassenachs: Gender, Race, Orientation, and the Other in the TV series. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015-17 (also on later books, Duane Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732-1776. Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina, 1961.)
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. 1983; rep, rev Harvard UP, 1993.
Gordon, Edmund. The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 2016.
Hirsh, Marianne. The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Indiana: Bloomington UP, 1980
Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. 2nd Edition. Chicago: Univ of Illinois, 1995.
Moody, Ellen, “People that marry can never part: A Reading of Northanger Abbey, Persuasions Online, 3:1 (Winter 2010): https://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol31no1/moody.html ; The Gothic Northanger: A Psyche Paradigm, Paper delivered at a EC/ASECS conference, November 8, 2008 online: http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/gothicna.html ; The Three Northanger Films [includes Ruby in Paradise], Jane Austen’s World (Vic Sandborn, April 6, 2008: online: https://janeaustensworld.com/2008/04/06/the-three-northanger-abbey-films/
Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.
Southam, B.C., ed. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion: A Casebook. London: Routledge, 1968.
Stevenson, Anne. “Diana Gabaldon: her novels flout convention.” Publishers Weekly 6 Jan. 1997: 50+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 15 Apr. 2016. Online.
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out. Canada: Harper Flamingo, 1998.
Tomalin, Clair. Jane Austen: A Life. NY: Vintage, 1997.
Williams, Anne. The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: Univ Chicago P, 1995.

Claire (Caitronia Balfe) among the stones, just arrived in 1743 (Outlander S1, E1, 2015)

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Coming winter course finalized: The Heroine’s Journey

Early still of Clare turning away from vase in window, Inverness, Halloween, evening (Outlander S1Ep1)

I’ll do it online from OLLI at George Mason:

Our foundational books will be Maria Tatar’s, The Heroine with 1001 Faces, and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey. The class will read as a pair Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad and Liz Lochhead’s Medea; and for the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th sessions, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales; Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter; and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Participants will discuss what journeys the heroines of classical myth, fairy tales, realistic fiction, historical and gothic romance, and in detective stories take; what ordeals and life experiences they typically have; archetypal patterns in art by women; and what they value themselves for. The instructor will suggest people watch (but they need not) as part of our two compelling heroines from TV serials, and we’ll discuss over the first half of the term, Outlander, S1E1 (Caitriona Balfe as Claire Beauchamp transported), and over the second half, Prime Suspect S1E1 (Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison).

Wonderful book

Ellen

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My top Austen films

The journey from Norland to Barton Cottage, found in all S&S films, both heritage and appropriations (this from Davies’s 2009 JA’s S&S)

Gentle readers,

As an appendix to my review of Persuasion 2022, plus 4, I’m answering a query I got in three places: what are my choices for Austen films very much worth the watching. I came up with 3 sets for heritage films, and a small group of appropriations. I don’t say others do not have good qualities and interest, but these to me are outstanding.

My criteria: I think a film should convey the book in spirit: the following films are very well done throughout, add to and enrich our understanding of the books, and are works of art in their own right fully achieved

1st set:

1995 Persuasion, BBC, Michell and Dear (Amanda Root & Ciarhan Hinds)
1996 Sense and Sensibility, Miramax, Thompson & Ang (Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet)
1995 Pride and Prejudice, BBC A&E, Andrew Davies & Langton (Colin Firth, Jennifer Ehle)
1983 Mansfield Park, BBC, Giles and Taylor (Sylvestre Le Tousel & Nicholas Farrell)
2007 Northanger Abbey, ITV, Andrew Davies & Jones (Felicity Jones & JJFeilds)
1972 Emma, BBC, John Glenister & Constanduros (Doran Goodwin & John Carson)

Sylvestre Le Tousel as Fanny Price writing from her nest of comforts to her brother William (note his drawing of his ship), one of my favorite chapters in the book (1983 MP)

2nd set

1979 Pride and Prejudice, BBC, Fay Weldon (Elizabeth Garvie & David Rintoul)
2008 ITV (BBC and Warner, among others) Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Andrew Davies & John Alexander (Hattie Morahan, Charity Wakefield)
2009-10 BBC Emma, Jim O’Hanlon, & Sandy Welch (Romola Garai & Johnny Lee Miller)
1999 Miramax Mansfield Park (MP and Juvenilia and JA’s letters), Patricia Rozema (Francis O’Connor & Johnny Lee Miller)

Doran Goodwin as Emma deliberately breaking her shoestring so as to maneuver Harriet and Mr Elton to be alone (1972 Emma)

3rd set
1996 BBC Emma, Davies and Lawrence (Kate Beckinsale & Samantha Morton)
2007 ITV (Clerkenwell in association with WBGH) Persuasion, Snodin & Shergold (Sally Hawkins, Rupert Penry-Jones)

Aubrey Rouget (Carolyne Farina), the Fanny Price character at St Patrick’s Cathedral with her mother, Christmas Eve (Metropolitan is also a Christmas in NYC movie)

Appropriations

2000 Sri Surya Kandukondain Kandukondain or I have found it (S&S), Menon (Tabu, Aishwarya Rai)
1990 Indie Metropolitan (mostly MP, w/Emma), Whit Stillman (Christopher Eigeman, Taylor Nichols, and Carolyn Farina, Allison Rutledge-Parisi, Isabel Gilles)
1993 Republic Ruby in Paradise (NA), Victor Nunez (Ashley Judd, Todd Field)
2008 Granada/ITV/Mammoth/ScreenYorkshire Lost In Austen (P&P), Andrews and Zeff (Jemima Rooper & Elliot Cowan)
2013 BBC Death Comes to Pemberley (P&P), Daniel Percival & Juliette Towhidi (Anna Maxwell Martin, Mathew Rhys)
2007 Mockingbird/John Calley The Jane Austen Book Club (all 6), Robin Swicord (Mario Bello, Kathy Baker, Emily Blunt)
2006 Warner Bros. Lake House (Persuasion), Agresti & Auburn (Sandra Bullock, Keenu Reeves, Christopher Plummer)

Olivia Williams as Jane Austen in reverie, during a walk, facing the river (Miss Austen Regrets)

Biopic

008 BBC/WBGH Miss Austen Regrets (from David Nokes’ biography & JA’s letters) Lovering & Hughes (Olivia Willias, Greta Scacchi, Hugh Bonneville)

See my Austen Filmography for particulars

My Austen Miscellany contains links to many of the blog-reviews I’ve written.

Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood wandering: as Elinor is my favorite of all the heroines, so Hattie Morahan is nowadays my favorite embodiment (Davies’s S&S, Part 3)

Ellen

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My Jane Austen Library

Sylvestre Le Tousel as Fanny Price, writing to her brother, amid her “nest of comforts” (which includes many books) in 1983 BBC Mansfield Park

“Our books, dear Book Browser, are a comfort, a presence, a diary of our lives. What more can we say?” (Carol Shields, Mary Swann).

“La bibliothèque devient une aventure” (Umberto Eco quoted by Chantal Thomas, Souffrir)

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)

Ellen

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

An eighteenth-century mask

Friends and readers,

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

Supposed to have been written in the Hebrides:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Used for Christmas concerts today

One of two blogs,
Ellen

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Devoney Looser’s “The Austen family’s complex entanglements with slavery”

An Austen family tree

Dear friends and readers,

An article with new significant information about the Austen family and slavery has been published by the Times Literary Supplement for May 21, 2021: Devoney Looser’s “Breaking the Silence.” Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall, and, as a TLS paper and digital subscriber, the only way I can access the online article is through an app on my ipad (which I have never succeeded in downloading). A complicated app arrangement effectively prevents me from reading, much less sharing the text (History Today plays the same game). I have read the paper version and so share the article by summarizing the content — and offering a few comments on the article and topic. I add material as well.

Castle Ashby, Northamptonshire; one of a number of country houses who are currently candidates as inspiration for Mansfield Park

It’s been long known that Jane Austen’s father, George had economic and social ties to a West Indian plantation through his familial relations and friendships. Looser sets out to correct misinformation, exaggeration, and confused muddles. Briefly, George Austen met James Langford Nibbs at Oxford where he may have been a tutor or proctor. Nibbs’s second son was sent home to be educated by George Austen among his other male pupils at Steventon. George married Nibbs to Barbara Langford (an heiress) in a London church; Nibbs chose the George Austen to educate his second son in the school set up in the parsonage; and George was co-trustee in a marriage settlement that involved disbursing legacies or funds for chosen relatives. The other co-trustee was Morris Robinson, brother to Elizabeth Montagu, a pivotal person among women intellectuals in Bath, London, and elsewhere. Looser suggests maybe we could find more connection between this famous bluestocking and Jane, at the same time as she dissociates George from direct economic activity and any personal gain from slavery. It was the tenant or owner who directly directed what happened on and to the property and it was probably Morris Robinson who managed the trust.

On Jane’s naval brothers: Looser goes on to Francis and Charles who it has been known for some time had abolitionist sympathies. She requotes the quotations usually cited. She does not mention that Francis was known as a severe flogger — pressing is a form of kidnapping and in effect enslaving white men for a period of time; flogging them to force them to do the work they were kidnapped to do is horrible. She also omits Francis’s awards from the imperialistic investments and insurers (part of what any captain who was successful in ventures would get); these Brian Southam tries to list and finds to have been modest (Jane Austen and the Navy, p 120-21).

As to Henry, it seems that late in life Henry Austen attended an 1840 anti-slavery convention in London and heard Thomas Clarkson, whose writings Jane in a letter said she admired so much, speak. He was not among those painted by Benjamin Robert Hayden in a well-known picture of the people who attended this convention, but he was one of two delegates for Colchester where he was a clergyman. We cannot know what if anything he actively did besides show up. I wrote a short life of Henry Austen for this blog (from research I did and articles I read before Clery’s book on Henry as a banker came out) and discovered that in his career as a military man he attended a court martial of men (again originally pressed) who had mutinied. So equally he publicly supported harsh cruel punishment of men kidnapped and in effect enslaved. Henry’s motives for attending public political spectacles seem to me problematic.

Charlotte Haywood (Rose Williams) and Georgiana Lambe (Crystal Clarke) becoming friends in the ITV Sanditon

Of course the real interest in finding all this out is what were Jane Austen’s attitudes, and it seems from Looser’s account (on my own reading of the letters here on this blog over 3 years) on the whole Austen was quietly anti-slavery. The evidence consists of her admiration for Thomas Clarkson’s writings (not specified, it must be admitted, what she admires Clarkson for). In Mansfield Park there is Fanny Price’s famous question to her exhausted uncle home from Antigua where “the slave trade” was central to extracting wealth; his answer is not told but rather our attention is directed to how silent his children become, and we are to see them as arrogant, ignorant or indifferent about slavery or their father’s hard work, or uncomfortable that such a subject is brought up — or perhaps feeling Fanny is showing off in front of her uncle (a suspicion her girl cousins feel about her when younger). Looser also mentions Austen’s “mixed race West Indian heiress named Miss Lambe” in the unfinished Sanditon: this character gets a lot of attention nowadays since the TV serial adaptation.

Jane Fairfax (Laurie Pypher) telling Emma she has been “exhausted for a very long time” and needs to go back to her aunt’s small apartment (2009 BBC Emma, scripted Sandy Welch)

Alas, Looser is another critic who (to me) mysteriously overlooks Emma, where the amount of concrete specific reference to slavery is, if anything, far longer and interestingly complicated with women’s subjection than the single dramatic dialogue (a passage) in Mansfield Park. Jane Fairfax likens governessing to slavery, and employment offices to marketplaces dealing in selling human flesh (she does not allude to anything sexual in the masters of such houses, but rather the body and strength of the repressed hard-worked young woman who puts herself in service to caste-ridden households). Mrs Elton (an heiress herself) takes up Jane’s allusion to deny that her brother-in-law’s wealth (and Maple Grove, the mansion and estate she has so boasted about) owe anything to “the slave trade;” maybe not, but Bristol was one of the ports where enslaved people were brought, held, sold, and she and her family hail from there.

Looser concludes by addressing and also talking about those whom she suggests resist such discussions and says their silence is wrong, a form of erasure of the full context of Austen’s world and books. Silence today is collusion and complicity with enslavement — in the way the Bertrams’ cousins’ silence feels like in Mansfield Park.

Ellen

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

A Review of Art and Artifact, ed Anna Battigelli

Tonight I am also (with this review)

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

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

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

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

Jane Austen:

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

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

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

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

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

Ragazza che legge: A Girl Reading by Jean Raoux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rachel Ruysch

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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October: two virtual conferences: EC/ASECS and JASNA

From the East Central region, American Society of 18th century Studies site: Art and Rarity Cabinet c. 1630 by Hans III Jordaens

Cassandra’s portrait drawing of Jane Austen graces the JASNA home page

Dear friends and readers,

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.

There have been some attempts at good illustration for Catherine, or the Bower

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.

Ellen

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On-line: “Her 1st & her last, Northanger Abbey & Sanditon” (Janet Todd) & “Jane Austen’s Feminism & Its Relevance to Girls Today” (Georgina Newton)

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.

Prof Todd began by saying it’s not clear that NA is finished (see my calendar) and Sanditon is an unfinished fragment (no precise calendar is possible).

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.

Ellen

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

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

1946 reprint

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

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

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

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

Friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jane Austen in French

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

Ellen

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