Sequels, films & Jo Baker’s Longbourn; Unseen & Unnoticed Servants & Confinement in Austen’s writing

“So you just assumed me to be ignorant.” [the servant James, who is a central consciousness in the book & reads serious history].
No, but — “[Sarah, our main heroine]
“But it never occurred to you that I might read more widely than, say you, for example?
“I read all the time! Don’t I, Mrs Hill?
“The housekeeper nodded sagely.
“MrB allows me books, and his newspapers, and Miss Elizabeth always gives me whatever novel she has borrowed from the circulating library.”
“Of course, yes. Miss Elizabeth’s novels. I’m sure they are very nice.”
“She set her jaw, her eyes narrowed. Then she turned to Mrs Hill.
“They have a black man at Netherfield, did you know? she announced triumphnty. “I was talking to him yesterday.”
James paused in his work, then tilted his head, and got on with his polishing.
“Well,” said Mrs Hill, “I expect Mrs Nicholls needs all the help that she can get.” (Longbourn, p 49)

Our family affairs are rather deranged at present, for Nanny has kept her bed these three or four days with a pain on her side and fever, and we are forced to have two charwomen which is not very comfortable. She is considerably better now, but it must be some time, I suppose, before she is able to do anything. You and Edward will be surprised when you know that Nanny Littlewart dresses my hair ….

Anna has not a chance of escape; her husband called here the other day, & said she was pretty well but not equal to “so long a walk; she must come in her “Donkey Carriage.”–Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.—I am very sorry for her.–Mrs Clement too is in that way again. I am quite tired of so many Children.–Mrs Benn has a 13th… (Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Le Faye 22, 336, Letters dated Sunday 25 November 1798; Sunday 23- Tuesday 25 March 1817)

Dear friends,

Another unusual kind of blog for me: I’m pointing out three other very good postings on three other blogs. The content or emphases in two of them are linked: these bring before us the direct underworld of Austen’s experience: the lives of servants all around her and her characters. The first by Rohen Maitzen, is valuable as an unusually long and serious review of an Austen sequel or post-text. Maitzen suggests that Longbourn is so much better than most sequels because Baker builds up her own imaginative world alongside Austen’s. It’s another way of expressing one of my central arguments in my blog on the novel. I also partly attributed the strength of the book to Baker’s developing these marginal (or outside the action) characters within Austen. Longbourn reminded me of Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly or Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead : they too focus most of the action and intense subjectivities from within the marginalized characters. I thought Baker also used elements from the Austen film adaptations, and particularly owed a lot to Andrew Davies’ 1995 P&P; I wondered if she got the idea from the use made of the real house both in the film and companion book:

And this allegiance suggests why Longbourn does not rise above its status or type as a sequel, not a book quite in its own right: Baker’s research stays within the parameters of Austen’s own Pride and Prejudice except when she sends the mysterious footman (Mr Bennet’s illegitimate son by Mrs Hill) to the peninsular war. Had she developed this sequence much further, researched what happened in Portugal and Spain, Longbourn might have been a historical novel in its own right the way Mary Reilly and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is.

While I’m at it, here’s a good if short review from The Guardian‘s Hannah Rosefield of Longbourn. Baker has written another post-text kind of novel, A Country Road, A Tree: a biography of Samuel Beckett for the period leading up to and perhaps inspiring Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

And a note on The Jane Austen Book Club by Joy Fowler, film adaptation Robin Swicord, and link to an older blog-review.

Sylvia, our part Fanny Price, part Anne Elliot character reading for February

Jean Chardin’s Washerwoman and a Cat

Vic Sanbourn has written an excellent thorough blog called Unseen and Unnoticed Servants in the background of Jane Austen’s Novels & Life. Of course dedicated readers of Austen are aware of the not infrequent and sudden referrals in the texts to a servant right there all the time, ready to take a character’s horse away, there in the room to pick something up, to fetch someone, as someone one of Austen’s vivid characters refers to and may even quote; if you read her letters, especially those later in Bath, you find her referring (usually comically) to one of the servants. When it’s a question of discussing when a meal is to be served or some task accomplished a servant is mentioned. In her letters we hear of Mr Austen’s worry about a specific servant (real person)’s fate once the family leaves Steventon; Jane borrows a copy of the first volume of Robinson Crusoe for a male servant in Bath. Vic has carefully studied some of these references, and she provides an extensive bibliography for the reader to follow up with. She reprints Hogarth’s famous “Heads of Six Servants.”

I’ll add that some of Austen’s characters come near to being servants: Fanny Price, Jane Fairfax. We see Mrs Price struggling with her one regular servant, Rebecca, trying to get her to do all the hard or messy work, the continual provision of food. Austen was herself also friends with people who went out (as it were) to service. Martha Lloyd worked as a companion. Austen visited Highclere Castle (renamed Downton Abbey for the serial) to have tea with its housekeeper. A young woman we know Austen had a deep congenial relationship with, Anne Sharpe (“She is an excellent kind friend”, was governess for a time at Godmersham.

Elizabeth Poldark Warleggan (Jill Townsend) suffering badly after a early childbirth brought on by a doctor via a contemporary herb mixture she herself wanted, a puzzled Dr Enys (Michael Cadman) by her side (1978 BBC Poldark, Episode 13)

Lastly, while Diana Birchall’s blog on Austen’s mentions of confinement (the last weeks of a woman’s pregnancy, the time of self-withdrawal with people helping you to give birth, the immediate aftermath) is not on marginalized characters, it is itself a subject often marginalized when brought up at all in literary criticism and reviews. It is not a subject directly addressed in the novels, and it is a subject frequently brought up through irony, sarcasm, and sheer weariness and alienated mentions in Austen’s letters. Readers concentrate sometimes with horror over Austen’s raillery and mockery of women in parturition, grown so big that they must keep out of large public groups (by the 9th month), and her alienation from the continual pregnancies and real risks to life (as well as being all messy a lot) imposed on all women once they married. So this is a subject as much in need of treatment as distinguishing what makes a good post-text and servants in the era. From Diana’s blog we become aware that had Austen wanted or dared (she was a maiden lady and was not by mores allowed to write of topics that showed real knowledge of female sexuality) she could have written novels where we experience women giving birth. Diana shows the process also reinforced the social confinement of women of this genteel class in this era.

I gave a paper and put on academia.edu that her caustic way of describing parturition can be aligned with her wildly anti-pathetic way of coping with death and intense suffering: the more pain and risk, the more hilarity she creates — we see this in the mood of Sanditon, written by her when she too is very ill and dying. See my The Depiction of Widows and Widowers in the Austen Canon

It has become so common for recent critics and scholars to find “new approaches” by postulating preposterous ideas (about her supposed Catholic sympathies, her intense religiosity; see my review of Battigelli’s Art and Artefacts; Roger Moore has become quite explicit that in Mansfield Park we have a novel as religious sacred text) partly because there is still a strong inhibition against associating Jane Austen with bodily issues and people living on the edge of gentility dependent on a very few too hard-working servants. So issues right there, as yet untreated fully, staring at us in plain sight go unattended. In Downton Abbey she would not have associated with Lady Mary Crawley, but rather Mrs Hughes. Until recently many readers would not have wanted to know that or not have been able to (or thought to) comprehend that is where fringe genteel people also placed.

Ellen

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Andrew Davies & Co’s Sanditon, Episodes 5-8: Zigzagging into a Conclusion in which Nothing is Concluded

Esther Denham (Charlotte Spencer) and Lord Babbington (Mark Stanley) enthusiastically tie the knot (Sanditon Episode 8)

Mary Parker (Kate Ashcroft) and Charlotte’s adieu (Episode 8) — they had a real friendship

Mary: Despite everything, I do hope you don’t regret coming to Sanditon.
Charlotte: How could I? It’s been the greatest adventure of my life

Pleased and exasperated readers,

I follow on from my first blog review of this series.

Since Esther and Lord Babbington do marry and we see them making love in bed, it’s not quite true that Episode 5 through 8 take us through a series of ratcheted up climaxes as the character zig first this way to no purpose.  There is a slender skein of satire and sensible human feeling spun through the second half, with again an attempt at showing us, the viewers, a joyous time in the natural and romantic worlds:

Episode 5 gives us yet another repeat of Georgiana Lambe (Crystal Clarke) defying Sidney (Theo James) and her governess, Mrs Griffiths (Elizabeth Berrington), with the help of Charlotte (Rose Williams) and a decoy novel, Mary Brunto’s Self Control, more crises over money, ending in all down to the beach for a rousing game of cricket, with Charlotte taking Tom Parker’s [Kris Marshall] place as he characteristically lets everyone down and then tries to cover up and lie, demanding the referee take back a decision

Tom Parker as sore loser demanding a re-decision (Episode 5)

(5)

With good-natured Charlotte taking over and ever compromising decent James Stringer (Leo Suter) accepting the injust recall (Episode 5)

Episode 6 is zag again as Georgiana flees to London, with Sidney and Charlotte hastening after (in hot pursuit? arguing all the way, he Sherlock, she Girl Friday); they rescue Georgiana in a wild high speed chase of coaches from a brothel where she was improbably captured by a unscrupulous man to whom Georgiana’s gambling suitor, Otis, (Jyuddah Jaymes) was in debt and to whom Otis seems to have sold Georgiana! After which all who count return to Sanditon (Otis is out), where again we have a repeat of near bankruptcy (the now utterly disillusioned embittered Mr Stringer still trying to get Tom to pay him and his men), staved off this time by Charlotte’s idea “let’s have a regatta!” to make money, with time out along the way for Babbington and Esther to take a walk by a waterfall. The episode ends with a ball so we can watch Sidney and Charlotte enacting falling in love through elegant dancing:

During the coach chase, Sidney swings his body from one coach to another (Episode 6)

Dancing falling in love — another extravaganza of a ball, the 2nd of the series (Episode 6)

Then Zag in the divagating circles of Episode 7 as we begin move into various water antics, while the subplot of the fierce competition between Edward Denham (Jack Fox) and Clara Brereton (Lily Sacofsky) over who will inherit Lady Denham’s (Anne Reid) wealth as she seems truly to be on the edge of death, becomes absurdly melodramatic: the two fuck on the floor, they frantically seek the will and bargain and burn it. All to no avail, as Lady Denham suddenly gets better, after which she is seen in her usual nagging way commanding Esther to please (and this time marry) Lord Babbington. I have been omitting various walks and drives on the beach for Esther and Babbington (among others), and Sidney and Charlotte’s growing friendship, suddenly cut off by the appearance of Mrs Eliza Campion, now widow, once engaged to Sidney and come to fetch him back …

One appealing scene has Arthur (Turlough Convery) once again being kind to (talking sensibly as no one else does) to Georgiana (Episode 7)

From the water race (Episode 7)

I will not attempt to follow the zigzagging of the great crises of Episode 8, which include yet another extravagant ball, interrupted by a vast fire destroying all Tom Parker’s buildings, the death of old Stringer (caught in said fire), Sidney rushing once again to London for money, only to return to say he got some in the one way left – he has engaged himself again to Eliza. Vic Sanborn’s blog covers this episode step-by-hurried step.

Sidney now adding to all his hero’s deeds, frantic fire-fighting (Episode 8)

Stringer looking up at the fire and realizing his father has died beyond one of the upper windows(8)

Charlotte facing going home, trying to accept that Sidney now cannot marry her

As to the content of the stories, the only thing I regret is the sense Tom has he’ll be all right. He does not deserve to be all right. As written, it seems Charlotte may after all marry Mr Stringer, and he will be her reward as Esther’s is the Babbington as good husband material (she is rescued from the pit of incest and seething envy of Clara) and maybe Sidney will marry Eliza — all pragmatic. Diana Parker is for a moment desolate as all Arthur’s kindness to Georgiana begins in her mind to add up to love, until Arthur reassures her he has no desires for women (is homosexual) so will not marry Miss Lambe. Arthur with his money will go home with his faithful side-kick sister, Diana, so the comic spinster too will now not be alone — as she feared.

Diana and Arthur: she to him: “Home’s best. You’re so right, Arthur!” —

I dislike happy endings unless I am made to believe in them. Most of the time Austen qualifies her happy ending by ironies and other astringent comments or a downright melancholy possibility in the future (as in Persuasion‘s final paragraph). Sentimentality such as in the scene between Tom and his wife, and then Sidney and Charlotte on the cliff grates on me by its untruthfulness. You might say I so long for joy that meretricious substitutes depress me. In life this ending seems to me just what might happen. I can hope that after all Charlotte marries Mr Stringer and, like Esther, learns to love her worthy kind consistent tender hard-working husband (Stringer can still take up the offer of an apprenticeship to an architect in London once he recovers from his grief over his father’s death).

I wouldn’t mind if there was another season, but would be very unhappy if Charlotte did not marry Stringer as I find Sidney has shown himself to be a volatile, difficult and often tyrannizing violent man. As I feel that at no point did the writers make me truly believe in Georgiana or Otis (they were not created as portraits of African people as they really might have been snatched from their environment, given little security, disdained for their race), I don’t know what I want for her. I’m glad Edward is ejected (poetic justice there). I would hope Clara comes back and is reconciled with her aunt (though who would want to live with such a harsh bully?), but if we are to be treated again to these seething melodramatic absurdities I’d just as soon skip Clara doing more hand-jobs and Sidney exposing himself (low points in the series).

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This remains the best edition for the money — the editor is Margaret Drabble

This edition has a long full introduction (history, interpretation, text)

Again, the important questions to ask are, is this a good movie series? how does it relate to Austen’s Sanditon, its source (with or without continuations). To take the questions in reverse order: as opposed to the first four episodes (and perhaps some of what was planned) just about nothing from these 4 episodes comes from any Sanditon. All that could be taken was taken and now they are trying for further character development, changes and story matter. Much that is developed is melodramatic, cliched, and when written with some attempt at human truth, not given enough time for development. Continuity and smoothness of transition were ignored. The scenes between Sidney and Charlotte as they begin to try to get to know one another and seem to be much attracted needed much more time and words. Charlotte Spencer’s acting of Esther a difficult role was effective, and, given the number of swiftly juxtaposed scenes she was in, there was enough for the actress to convey a miserably abused young woman. Rose Williams’s Charlotte made sense and if more quiet time had been granted to Theo James as Sidney, not so much rapid switching back and forth, he might have conveyed a man whose masculinity and self-respect was threatened as he watches his family go broke. Tom suggests Sidney was in some before time jilted by Eliza; Sidney hints at remorse over his life in Antigua. But so little time was given for any development or nuanced dialogue.

Two of four shots of Charlotte walking along grieving … (Episode 8)

One sign of haste is the Deus ex machina of Lady Susan. She is suddenly there, is never explained.  Why should a high society woman, or (if she) a prince’s mistress take an interest in the obscure Charlotte and help her?

A shot from Chris Brindle’s Sanditon material

A dull fairy tale shot from this series

Perhaps the film-makers (writers, directors) didn’t trust their viewing audience for a moment not to be bored. Its dramaturgy reminded me of the new Poldark. I find the Outlander series vastly superior: why? they will sometimes spend (really) 10 minutes on a interlude; they give time to dialogues to develop and we get real thought from the characters. Not enough time or money was spent on the Sanditon sets: the buildings were uninteresting, shot from afar, with the same stills used over and over again. It was clear a minimum of what was suggestively needed inside was created; the best “sets” were the beaches and water.

It’s a shame since it did seem to me that the conception of the series suggested experimentation. Could they build another kind of Austen adaptation, one which took in contemporary attitudes towards family life, sex, money, and new film-making techniques and audience acceptance of lives not lived according to some narrow set of norms? They did not manage it because the series is not the careful work of art it needed to be – and I have seen many a Jane Austen adaptation have. There is a companion volume. It does not say much about the movie series. Why break a butterfly upon a wheel?

Ellen

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