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)
Thus even in sleep conscience’s anxiety/pounds the heart awake — Christa Wolf, translating Aeschylus, Cassandra (p 216)
Dear friends and readers,
Today I returned for a third time to my project to read carefully, review and evaluate and then write a comprehensive accurate review of the new Cambridge edition of Anne Finch’s poetry. What strikes me most is “what lengths of time” I have been about this project: beginning sometime in April and then writing on June 30, 2020 on a first phase — that’s a year and six months ago — ; having had to put it down because of press of other work, and starting again, probably in August, and writing up my findings on September 20, 2020 — that’s three months later –; and now here I find, astonishingly, another whole year and six months have passed again, as I once again begin.
You will say this must be procrastination, and yes it is partly that. I am intimidated; I am referred to in the volumes in a sublimely impersonal condescending way, and I’ve been snubbed by this editor, perhaps unconsciously. I cannot say she recognized me, though it was in a zoom where I spoke and I cannot believe she does not remember my name as she mentioned my work quite a number of times throughout the first volume, at one point taking out paragraphs to argue with my view, and I’m cited as a key source in both volumes. So I am working to be utterly accurate and when I disagree (which I will) want to make my case in a way that she will not be able to dismiss me (or others who agree with me), especially on some of the unattributed poetry.
But it also has been that it was not until this June (2021) that I actually got my hands on Volume 2. That is when I began work again, and produced twolists of Finch’s poem, each representing work done individually and comparatively. I went over manuscript cultural studies, caught up on all the new studies of Finch that had been written about since I reviewed the Hinnant-McGovern edition of the Wellesley ms, and wrote a couple of papers for 18th century conferences.
Gentle reader, I began with Anne Finch so long ago: really it was 1980, shortly after I finished my dissertation. I took up two women when I moved to Virginia: Charlotte Smith and Anne Finch, two 18th century English poets whose poetry I loved. Then after I spent some years translating Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara, I studied Finch as a translator in 1993-94, then I tried writing a Life but put it on the Net unfinished in 2004 as I On Myself Can Live because I learned of McGovern’s biography, and understood I didn’t have the connections, money, social wherewithal to do it right. Then I got involved with a musical quartet, Apollo’s Muse, 2001 I wrote again a shorter Later Life. What lengths of time.
Well now I will not give over. I have promised myself not to volunteer for any more papers, or any more reviews until I’ve finished writing this and sending it to the editor of the 18th century Intelligencer. I will not take too many courses; I’ve done a lot of the basic work towards the courses I will be teaching for the coming winter, spring and summer — I can read more of course and will. But I will weave Anne Finch in. I’ll work on Austen slowly and continuously but as for a blog (I’m reading Sheila Johnson Kindred’s Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: the Life and Letter of Fanny Palmer Austen as a central text to review here)
What I want to do tonight beyond marking this date for myself is add another poem by Anne Finch and sum up my findings thus far concisely.
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A photograph of a singing nightingale
Yes a new poem definitely by Anne Finch has been found, which is not on my website; I’m sorry I cannot add it there, but I can describe it here and tell where it may be found — beyond the New Complete Poems. Vol 2, pp 215-16, with annotations pp 458-64. It is another bird poem, a fable, and about song: titled “The Nightingale & the Cuckoo,” it was found by Gillian Wright in another of the Northamptonshire Record Office’s manuscripts, MS 258, deposited there as part of the Finch archive in 1930, by the Earl of Nottinghamshire and Winchilea. Like the other unattributed poems I found in other ms’s, it is part of a row or list of poems, all known to be by Anne Finch. The 8 page manuscript is described, its history told, the other four poems in the ms, all by Anne Finch for sure, cited; the text of “The Nightingale and the Cuckoo quoted as it appears in the manuscript and then interpreted by Wright, all in her “The Bird and the Poet: Self-Representation and the Early Editing of Anne Finch’s poetry,” in The Review of English Studies, New Series, 64:264 (2013):246-66
“The Nightingale & the Cuckoo” is not a neglected masterpiece. It’s a wry tale or fable, a little awkward towards the end, and Finch uses imagery and ideas found in her poetry elsewhere. “The Musicians of the Wood” had long provided music for young men to “mollify their loves” without payment. It was “nois’d in every tree” that “Men resolv’d at last” to “pension” “the sweetest Voice.” Now this winner, the Nightingale (so she or he thinks) would no longer be hungry, “When Barns lock’d up the Grain.” The Nightingale, though, was assuming “merit Awards can raise,” but “not a Cuckoo left untry’d/Her Title to the Bays,” and in the end the “few” who understood the beauty of the Nightingale’s song “their Thoughts conceal’d,/Nor wou’d oppose the Crow’d.” The moral is “real Wits” who “contend with an ill-judging Age/Thus do You all your Labours spend” uselessly:
In vain, You wou’d sublimely write
An Epigram, a Punn;
A foul Burlesque gives more Delight,
King Charles’s days are done.
I agree with Keith that Wright’s idea in her essay that this unprinted poem was meant as a gift to Heneage, to thank him for being her amanuensis, is not convincing, and find Wright’s elaborate reading of the poem in the context of print publication over-reading though she does show how reluctant Anne Finch was to print anything that could be construed into mockery. But equally Keith’s invented narrative, concluding, based on speculation (as she often does) about the relationship between Anne and her nephew, the heir, and between “The Nightingale & Cuckoo,” and the four other poems, that it was meant for Charles Finch, as a way of complimenting him as “real wit,” seems to me slightly off.
Keith has decided that Charles Finch wrote “The First Edilium of Bion English’d by the Right Honourable the Earl of Winchilsea,” partly on the basis of her idea he was a fine serious learned poet, and seriously encouraged Anne Finch to write poetry, to publish her work, for which she was earnestly grateful. We had three poems by her where she directly and indirectly addresses Charles. It seems we now have a fourth. On the translation of Bion James Woolley and John Irwin Fischer have decided (as have I) it is by Anne Finch.
The first poem we know of that was written to Charles Finch, who became fourth Earl of Winchilsea, was in response to his return to the UK from Holland in spring 1703 to take up his position as apparent heir to the Winchilsea estates. It seems to me she doesn’t know him very well as yet but is of course taking a hopeful view, and lavishing praise on him. It is an intendedly beautiful ode, and reads like a poem intended for circulation, impersonal (unlike the third, below), “NOW blow, ye Southern winds, with full release,” An Invocation to the southern Winds inscrib’d to the right honourable CHARLES Earl of WINCHELSEA, at his Arrival in LONDON, after having been long detained on the coast of HOLLAND. By the honourable Mrs. FINCH. There is no ms, and it first appears many years after in Pope’s Own Miscellany, 1717, long after Charles himself had died.
The second is an apology for “trying his patience” with reading aloud some of her tragedy, Aristomenes, here called “a tedious Play.” She pleads her loneliness at “Godmersham … Not sure to be endur’d, without the Muses.” She begs his pardon rather abjectly, and promises this play or poem read aloud will be the last time she does this. On Charles’s behalf it is apparent that she also tried to read aloud one of her plays to Pope over a dinner and it went down very badly (see below).
The third poem about Charles Finch is an exquisitely beautiful landscape poem which includes a reference to a curious story (not fully printed until 1903 by Myra Reynolds) where Finch refers to a superstitious story that attributed the death of Heneage’s father’s second wife and his eldest son to the Earl’s decision to take down a grove of oak. It was the death of this eldest son (Heneage’s older brother) which led to Charles Finch inheriting the property. Finch might have thought he would take this reference as a comical reference as the rest of her poem is an ambiguous compliment to him for replacing the old mullioned windows at Eastwell with clear glass and planting a new garden that mends all the faults (in taste) that “in the Old was found” (presumably one of the reasons the old Earl pulled it down). In her notes to this poem Myra Reynolds registers discomfort over the tactlessness of retelling the family history. At the time in the house was the old Earl’s young widow, with her four children, and the old earl’s oldest son’s widow, with her son, Charles Finch, destined to be heir. In one note I came across it seems the two women sometimes fought over who owned what furniture. (Shades of Spoils of Poynton, only much worse because more than one widow of very different ages, and a new wife to the new heir, Charles Finch.)
I do not disagree it is possible this fable was intended for Charles Finch; if so, and if we pay attention to what Anne’s epilogue to Aristomenes suggests, and the queasy feel of her ambiguous compliments to Finch (which Myra Reynolds were responsible for leaving lines out in the printed version), and the tradition of fables to which “The Nightingale & the Cuckoo” belong, we have our explanation for why it was never printed or re-copied out. There is a description of Charles Finch which suggests he was a rather ordinary but generous young man who enjoyed crude jokes. This is quoted in John Irwin Fisher’s essay “In pitying to the emptying town:” “He loves jests and puns, and that low sort of wit” (p 294). Charles Finch wrote no serious verse that we know of. Fischer says except for Anne Finch (so beholden to this young man), no one ever “accused Charles Finch of versifying” and no manuscript of verse in his handwriting or anyone else’s attributing a poem to him survives (p 295). Keith prints none of his letters nor does she quote from any and I have not myself been able to read any.
But I have read several of the fables in the tradition of the Nightingale in competition with birds who sing poorly, or plainly, or not at all (the hawk, the owl, the cuckoo) and those who present a contest where the moral is either against the prideful assumption you will be admired (often the nightingale in this role) or more than half mocks the judge. The version that is the closest source for this new poem is, as Keith suggests in her notes, L’Estrange’s 414, “An Ass Made a Judge of Music,” 1692 text, reprinted 1704, pp 386-387. I agree the bird fable might have been written with Charles in mind, but not as a way of making him into a serious wit. Rather he was the kind of person who likes epigrams, puns, and burlesques. The solution to why it was never printed is that again someone decided Finch had been tactless and worried lest the poem be misinterpreted as implying Swift’s Charles Finch would have liked burlesque and therefore seen as an insult. I suggest she never forgot that he was bored at her play (as apparently was Pope whose comment about being given a headache by being asked to listen to a play read aloud, where he includes Lady Winchilsea at the table is probably to her Aristomenes). But I doubt she meant an outright insult; it was more in the vein of uncomfortable teasing.
I find that Keith idealizes a number of the people connected to Anne Finch or simplifies them psychologically — she never so much as brings out the considerable tensions between Anne and her husband we find here and there in Anne’s more personal poems. So I suggest that Anne Finch had been made uncomfortable by the nephew’s lack of real appreciation of her poetry — by the time of her reading her play aloud (or parts of it), each of them knew the other was far from sincere in the veneer of politeness and mutual admiration kept up. Yes he urged her to print, but apparently this was a trope among several of her friends and associates. The poem to Charles urging his return home was not published until way after his death. We should remember she brought no dowry, had had no children. I assume the marriage was tolerated because of her aristocratic heritage and because at the time it would have been thought highly unlikely Heneage would inherit (he was the fourth son). When it became apparent that Charles would have no children, that is when Heneage and Anne moved back into Eastwell because it was seen that Heneage might, now not so unexpectedly by that time, become the heir.
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Visit to the Composing Room (or typesetting) of the printing house/establishment of Clément Pomteux
I sum up my findings thus far this way: This new edition is an edition of the manuscripts and first printed book, so an addition to book history and those interested in the world of manuscript circulation before print took full hold in the 18th century. The team are apparently attempting to give the scholarly reader as close an experience of the four primary sources as is humanly possible in a book format. They also reprint or print for the first time those few poems where the attribution to Anne Finch is undeniable in a format which also imitates the way the text appears in the source as closely as one can do in a book meant to be read.
From the same series as above: attributed to Léonard Defrance (1784)
There is also a conscious attempt to avoid giving a poem a personal or autobiographical motive if this will bring out clearly Finch’s lifelong battle with depression, social anxiety, and troubled existence with Heneage as a non-juror. If you know her poetry from elsewhere and have read some of the considerable secondary material (criticism) that has come out on this poetry, you will recognize the attempt to erase a major complex emotional terrain across her oeuvre that, together with any observation of the traumas she endured with difficulty (as an orphaned child, an intellectual learned woman without a considerable dowry, and, as it turned out, childless woman), would go a long way towards explaining persuasively how all the poems relate to one another. See, for just one example, Vol 1, pp l-li (50-51) where these aspects of her personality are omitted all together, and the silence over the distressing personal content in the two poems Finch partly obliterated but could not get herself to destroy (Vol 1, pp 3-6, 408-13). (Another memo to self: I must find in Keith’s own book and/or essays where she explicitly vows not to present Finch as a weak woman or victim because, as a feminist, she dislikes such treatments of women. Such women are not good role models.)
A Song [for my Br. Les Finch: added]. Upon a Punch Bowl.
From the Park, and the Play,
And Whitehall come away,
To the Punch-bowl, by far more inviting;
To the Fopps, and the Beauxs [sic],
Leave those dull empty shows,
And see here, what is truly delighting.
The half Globe ’tis in figure,
And wou’d itt were bigger;
Yett here’s the whole Universe floating,
Here’s Titles, and Places,
Rich lands, and fair faces,
And all that is worthy our doating.
‘Twas a World, like to this,
The hott Gracian did misse.
Of whom History’s keep such a pother,
To the bottom he sunk,
And when one he had drunk
Grew maudlin, and wept for another.
— Anne Finch, it is telling how she does not forget the importance of money & rank in her poetry; she & Heneage had some lean years; she also did not like the heavy drinking the male Finches indulged in at night, which, of course, she was helpless to stop …
Ellen
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.
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).
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
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
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.
Drawing Room at John Murray, 50 Albemarle Street, London
Bee Rowlatt, Dear Mary, In Search of Mary Wollstonecraft
Dear friends and readers,
I continue my account of the talks and interviews variously recorded at the Chawton House Lockdown Literary Festival last weekend. We’ve covered Friday and half of Saturday, May 15th and 16th; today we’ll have the second part of Saturday and Sunday, the 16th through 17th.
I have a new observation to apply to all the proceedings: as I watched and listened I began to notice that almost all the women (all the speakers but two were women) had remarkably similar backdrops. At first, the tasteful cream-white room with its bookcase on one side, perhaps a window on the other seemed real, but a while, it could not be that all the people would be in a room with a bookcase to the side, all the rooms of a light creamy-white.
What fools you at first is they are not exactly alike. Some women seemed to be sitting and looking down at notes from time to time; others seemed to be standing up. Some people didn’t have it — Caroline Jane Knight didn’t — she came across appealingly in the way upper class Brits know how – she can tell seemingly charming/frank stories of this house as she grew up in it, and perhaps it was thought more piquant to give her as background a room in Chawton House; Devoney Looser didn’t conform either. But most did.
I now also add the titles of fiction and a brief description of one of the talks about fiction that were part of this festival in the comments to this blog — as I can see people are reading these blogs.
I began with Alison Daniells, whose YouTube went on line at 3 pm British summer time. She talked of Elizabeth Knight, who, very unusually for a woman, owned Chawton House and the surrounding properties in the earlier 18th century. She was not the elderly Knight woman who was kind to Jane Austen, but an ancestress (1674-1737) who, unlike most women at the time, inherited a vast property and its income. Despite the law of coverture (explained by Daniells) and primogeniture, sometimes a woman could end up owning a family’s property – basically when there were no direct sons or sons-in-law and when there was no entail put on the property (as became popular in the later 18th century).
We were told of Knight’s two marriages and then her pro-active behavior on behalf of controlling her property, doing with it as she wanted, and also exercising a right to vote. Apparently a woman could vote in some circumstances in the later part of the 17th and early 18th century.
Louisa Albani. 5:00 pm British summer time, is an artist who created a short video where she expressed through visual pictures Mary Wollstonecraft’s experience of Paris and during a visit to Versailles in 1792. She was directly followed by Bee Rowlatt, interviewed by Clio O’Sullivan.
Rowlatt has written imitation of Richard Holmes (who literally followed in the footsteps of his biographical subjects in a book called Footsteps): In Search of Mary Wollstonecraft Rowlatt tells of her trip following Wollstonecraft as Wollstonecraft reports in her brilliant travel book, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Rowlatt did some research (though she said that was not her emphasis) and her book includes why Mary was there –- not clearly told in the superb, melancholy, and picturesque book; Mary was working for her ex-lover, Gilbert Imlay. American, then smuggling silver and goods stolen perhaps from aristocrats. She had had a baby by him, which baby she took with her, and also a maid (whose name is never mentioned). She had tried to kill herself when Imlay left her and her baby, took up with another mistress and resumed his amoral peripatetic existence. She was partly trying to maintain contact with him, but also trying to build a new life for herself, to rescue a relationship, and to explore Scandinavia, which Rowlatt did too and describes. Mary never found the silver (which had, ironically justly) been in turn stolen; the captain won a legal battle in court. Imlay was also smuggling arms out of Paris – working all ends this unscrupulous man.
Rowlatt read aloud some of the beautiful pieces of peaceful description in the book. Mary did recover her health. Rowlatt talked of Godwin’s biography, how it functioned to hurt Mary’s reputation for a couple of hundred years – myself I think she would have been erased altogether if not vilified so that Godwin’s book is not what was to blame. Rowlatt remarked that the suffragette Millicent Fawcett was the first person publicly to defend Wollstonecraft after a century of sustained vituperative misogynistic attack. Men & the upper classes in general (she was a socialist for her time, very like Paine in her outlook) must’ve seen in her book real danger.
A Valancourt book
Devoney Looser, a Professor of English at Arizona State, at 6:00 pm, “All the Janes.” She is writing a dual biography of Jane West (1758-1852) and Jane Porter (1774-50). Looser pointed out that in Austen’s era thousands of books were published and hundreds of them by women, who often wrote novels, but not that much fewer than men (men 300 to women 295). Women more prolific than men. She did not say if all these were in English.
Everyone knows about West’s A Gossip’s Story, where one of the dual heroines is called Marianne. What was interesting to me was that Jane West may also have written a another novel influencing Austen’s beyond Sense and Sensibility. (Looser never mentioned Caroline de Lichtfield, but I didn’t expect it – she may have mentioned de Stael). West though also wrote a novel called Ringrove (1827), which seems to be an imitation of Emma, the motherless rich heroine. Devoney has published an essay with someone else “Admiration and Disapproval before Jane Austen: Jane West’s Ringrove, Essays in Romanticism, 26 (2019): 41-54.
Jane Porter was much better known than Austen during Austen’s lifetime and since, especially for her children’s books and for adults The Scottish Chiefs (1810). Where she lived is now crumbling down or flattened altogether. Her sister, Anna Maria Porter (1778-1832) wrote historical fiction too. Jane Austen wrote her brother Edward about this sister’s book, The Lake of Killarney. Stainer Clarke, the librarian (the one so easy to despise for presuming to encourage Jane Austen) encouraged Jane Porter to write the same romance for the royal family and she did, Duke Christian of Luneberg.
Looser suggested had Austen lived maybe she would have changed her mind, because she liked money (the pewter comment was trotted out). To me to say this is to misunderstand the source and nature of Austen’s art. She couldn’t write such a romance as her whole stance towards life, towards what kinds of writing she could do that was valuable and she enjoyed doing, her determination to ground herself in moral comic truth by writing of what she knew, precluded such book.
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On the third night I started earlier in the evening (US EST time). Perhaps it is well to recall here that research in this library and museum from a scholarly standpoint is far more about 18th century women writers or the 18th century matters affecting women in general. For fans it’s a shrine for Austen but in the library room she is rightly and naturally among dozens of women.
A promotional photo
Caroline Jane Knight, 11 am 4th great granddaughter of Edward, 5th great niece of JA, began the day. She is probably the present heir to the house, and seems (since Sandy Lerner pulled out) to be shaping what the house will become — much more popular in orientation. She told us of how she grew up in the house, its rituals; she stressed that her family didn’t feel rich, and many branches of the Knights lived in the house at one time, each with its own living quarters, rather like a rabbit warren. Since the opening of this house to the public after the Jane Austen Society became involved and Sandy Lerner endowed it so richly for many years (herself paying for the hugely expensive restoration), the house is becoming a local community and British public community space as well as place for AGMs, Austenian and other 18th century women. There was little about Austen’s books — I wondered if she had read them much until lately.
In her talk she made it clear she knows she lived a privileged life. Nonetheless, the house as described by her sounded like some castle where there’s a court and everyone in lives in little crowded corners. It is true that these mansions were at times turned into the equivalent of hotels or apartment houses. She looked very strongly made, and I wondered if she rides? (is a horsewoman). She was very upbeat. See my blog on Devoney Looser’s review of her book, Jane and Me.
Caroline Knight was followed by Martin Chaddick, at noon, telling us of the supposed secrets of Chawton House –- he had photographs of the house before it was restored. First built in 1583-1590; the Knight family failed to provide an heir after Sir Richard Knight; it was passed to other branches of the family where the owner would change his named to Knight as did Jane Austen’s brother, Edward Austen, after he was adopted. He said he was researching house and its actual occupants, and started with how many had this first name and that; his work was that of a genealogist. You can read the literal history of the place at wikipedia.
In a third connected talk (about the neighborhood), at 1:20 Katie Childs and Lizzy Dunford discussed the village around the house in a similar practical local history fashion.
To turn to Austen’s contemporaries and other women writers, Kimberley James, began at 1 pm; she is the Collector and Manager at Gilbert White house. She spoke about the friendship of Hester Chapone and Gilbert White as seen through their letters. We learned of how they met through Hester’s brother, John Mulso, who was at Oxford when Gilbert White arrived. All three very intelligent people; White trained as a barrister. The two men became very close and from ages 20-70 Mulso wrote letters to White and there we find the history of this pair of people as friends. In 1745 Mulso brought White to meet the Mulso family, and Hecky and White hit it off. Gilbert tried to pursue a career at Oriel, Oxford and gardened. Hester married in 1760 but her husband (Chapone) died soon after, and she had the liberty and desire to live in London middling society where she met Elizabeth Carter who introduced her to Elizabeth Montagu; she became part of several circles of learned ladies, among them one surrounding Samuel Richardson, author of Clarissa and Grandison. Mulso died in 1790 and until then his letters describe these groups of people as Hester and Gilbert interacted with them. Then there is silence.
We come now to the two best talks of the last day: first, with no pictures: EJ Clery, 2 pm. Professor at Uppsala and author of a biography of Henry Austen. Clery said she had come to discuss literary societies. “All great writers need a gang” she began. Literary societies are about nostalgia, purpose conservation, they have archives, a shared love of books. The Jane Austen Society (of Britain), however, began 80 years ago, with the aim of restoring the small house Jane Austen lived in with her mother, sister, and friend, Martha Lloyd, and the throwing out of a grate from a fireplace. In 1949, we find an inscription on Chawton, which commemorates when the society and hopes for restoration began. Basically we owe the existence of the house still to Dorothy Darnell (1877-1953), who founded the society in 1940; it was at first a small gathering. Dorothy Darnell was also an artist (1904-1922), studied with Nicolson and exhibited in Royal Academy of Paris; she painted portraits; Emily, a sister, married (1856-1949), went to the Royal College of Music. We are in the period of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Dorothy’s sister, Alice Beatrix Darnell (1873-1995) was made chairman. A Rev Darnell was involved too. Carpenter who paid for an estimation; the Duke of Wellington at the time agreed to have his name used in the restoration of the small building.
Clery gave portraits of other early members of the JA British Society. Dorothy knew the writer Elizabeth Jenkins (1905-2010), Cambridge educated, wrote novels, 6 biographies, a very retiring, who destroyed her first novels. Elizabeth the Great is her best known book; she worked for Victor Gollancz during the war years, and chronicles her society in her writing and editing. She had no money, but was connected to upper class people and in Oxford, Mary Lascelles (1900-1995), one of the first scholars to produce a solid close reading of Austen, involved herself, RW Chapman (1881-1960) worked with Jenkins; they wrote Catherine Mecalf, that they need trustees, wanted to give prize, to produce annual reports In 1950 came the first one: 8 pages. 1938 appeared the first published articles about Jane Austen that became the traditional article in the journals (edited by Jenkins). At some point, Edward Knight agreed to sell his house for 3000£. The rooms became shrines, but meticulous research went into the making of them.
As to the Jane Austen Society journal reports, it is regularly published, each on average 100 pages, 10 articles, reports of talk (with much solid antiquarian research), reports from groups. David Selwyn edited them at first, and slowly a house of research was built: it’s from these reports Clery’s first information about Henry Austen> TABCorley and Clive Kaplan: Corley was an economic historian, had 4 children, a widower; Caplan involved with founding of JASNA. (My biography of Henry Austen as a blog is based on these men’s essays). Then Brian Southam and LeFaye built and expanded the society more to become what it is today. She told us where we may access the volumes nowadays: http://www.janeaustensocietyfreeuk.com/index.html and memsec@jasoc.org.uk
Now a YouTube of Gillian Dow, where she speaks for herself, but I’ll add a description too in case you want some notes:
Gillian Dow, who used to be the manager of Chawton House, has returned to Southampton University, and is writing a book on John Murray II (1778-1843) and his female authors, supporters, his networks. The Office at 50 Albemarle Street is above (the top of this blog). Bryon’s memoirs were burnt in that fireplace. She went there where literary gatherings once held (and Byron’s Memoirs deliberately burnt, Germaine de Stael once there, Scott too); also did research at the National Library of Scotland. She calls these women his 4 o’clock friends. JM2 was the son of John Murray I, who started the business in 1763. Gillian Dow read the letters of the women whose books he published or who tried to be published. David McClay published a good book just on Murray in 2018.
The story: 1793 JM2 inherited the business; he established The Quarterly Review in 1809, published landmark works, among them Byron and Austen. Egerton had published Austen’s first 3 novels; 1815 she resolved to go to Murray (much more prestigious, a publisher of literary books), and was offered 450£ for Emma with copyrights for S&S and MP; she and Henry refused (calling Murray a “rogue” in one letter), and published on commission, paying for production and distribution costs. Murray also published (1804) Genlis’s Duchess de la Valliere; radical women’s books, novels, listened to Caroline Lamb; went on with travel books, Heman’s poetry, an early woman scientist’s books; Susan Fevrier, Frankenstein; he was a supportive man. So it turns out Murray was no rogue (and Henry not such a good businessman); they made much less than 450£; 530 were remaindered at 2 shillings. The women he was involved with include Maria Graham (1785-1842), Sarah Austin (1793-1867), who followed her husband to Germany, kept in touch, provided Murray with a sort of readers’ reports, for example on someone she is asked to translate (1830). A third woman, Louis Swanton Belloc (1796-18881), who wrote a 2 volume biography of Byron; she was a translator, turned Cranford into French, Maria Edgeworth. She supported her husband and 3 children, was aggressive asking Murray to support this or that woman.
In the zoom period answers to questions included: unlike Austen most of these women did not work with brothers or come with male relatives on their behalf; yes, women are more likely to be translators. Very fashionable French readers liked to read English. Yes the women knew one another.
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Joshua Reynolds, The Ladies Waldegrave (sewing), 1780
Janine Barchas, 5 pm. The lost books of JA. Prof Barchas went over cheap reprints, embarrassing covers, lousy translations (mostly French, Italian and Spanish), and unreliable texts of Jane Austen’s novels. She presented herself as caring for these books and this readership but her tone was one of laughter. She showed mawkish covers and titles, saying we should regard these books as beacons in the darkness to readers left out, readers who need a chance to rebel. She was implying ideas about the readership of such books about which we know very little. The covers amused her, as did small grotesque female dolls called bobble heads (almost memorably ugly they are so distasteful) which she interspersed with the covers. I thought about her book on Northanger Abbey from where she claims to unearth as places she argues central to NA for which there is no evidence in the book, none; they are described as seriously chilling gothic places though are in fact highly problematic sensationalized tourist attractions.
Jennie Bachelor 6:00 pm, who was the first Chawton House fellow, and is now a professor of English at Kent University. Together with Alison Larkin, she has published a part craft, part critical and historical reading book on Jane Austen and Embroidery. Wollstonecraft regarded the perpetual sewing activity by women as oppressive, but many women (she said) did and do not. Austen appears to have taken pride in her sewing, and showed an avid interest in clothes.
Bachelor went over the kinds of materials you find in (considered as a type) Ladies Magazines: novels reviews, foreign news, advertisements, fashions, plates, poetry, but also frequently patterns for embroidery, but endlessly cut out for use (with no instructions — you were expected to know what to do). Her dissertation and an article she published includes some of the kinds of fiction found in these books: in one from 1790s, tale of shipwreck, we read of a Mrs Brandon attached to a Mr Willoughby; in 1802 a Case of Conscience has a Mr Knightley who marries an obscure orphan boarding at a school. Charlotte Bronte one of the later subscribers. These issues would be bound up (rather like single plays) – they were never meant to be kept.
Bachelor said she was very frustrated because she could find so few patterns, hunted for them, and then one day came across an issue with six. She started a Great British Stitch-in –- devised craft projects for all levels of ability, skill, some patterns for historically minded, others mixed media. She showed us a reticule made from embroidery. Among those who contacted her was Alison Larkin, from Yorkshire, they met and dreamed of a book. Sections organized with histories, biography, novels – an embroidery muff makes her think of Tom Jones. Well the book happened and she was here to show it to us.
The festival for me concluded with Hilary Davidson, at 7:00 pm, telling us of her Dress in the Age of Jane Austen. She traced the changes from exaggerated fashions of mid- to later 18th to a new apparent simplicity of dress for a while, until again a new set of exaggerations emerged (1830s). Sewing was very important; these were social acts. She studied women’s account books. They bought and wore differently textured clothing. How did women keep warm: they wore flannel underwear, a riding habit, woolen dress and habit, shawls, mantles, a pelisse, a spenser. Cossack trousers came in 1810 as armies crossed Russia and vice versa. From India lace-making, net machines, silk slips. She looked at Edgeworth’s Belinda’s depiction of assembly carefully. She showed us and analysed one of the covers on Margaret Drabble’s many women’s novels of our own era.
How did people use clothes in the Regency period and just after was the kind of question she asked herself and tried to answer. What exactly was stylish and why? What is meant by vulgar? Were you self-creating or ludicrous? Clothes represent complex identities are represented: she wanted to know how women experience these identities and the clothes that projected them?
Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth wife (for the origin and my first adumbration of this perspective: What she said about Tudor queens)
I read history a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all … Catherine Morland, Northanger Abbey, I:14)
Friends and readers,
After all, for my first 2020 blog I have an innovative perspective on Jane Austen’s Juvenilia to share. For the coming JASNA to be held in St Louis, Missouri, in which the topic is to be Jane Austen’s Juvenilia, I sent in a proposal where I said I would demonstrate that in her The History of England, Jane Austen meant to burlesque the norms shaping the way “history, real solemn history” was written in her era, and to include and to defend not just infamous women, but forgotten and underappreciated ones. Her text goes beyond vindicating Mary Queen of Scots, and the Stuart kings and the English house of York, well beyond parodying Oliver Goldsmith’s popular history. She is a partisan defender of women, and places them in her text at every opportunity given, and ostentatiously refuses to make numinous figures out of powerful men.
This is a development from that proposal.
Mary Queen of Scots, contemporary portrait by Federico Zuccai or Alsonso Sanchez Coello
From 2018 Mary Queen of Scots (directed by Rosie Rourke); we see Ismael Cruz Cordova, Maria Dragus, Izuka Hoyle, and Saoirse Ronan as Mary and her ladies and David Rizzo: the most recent image
The effect of Austen’s attitude, tone, details, parody and insistent bringing in of women is to go beyond Tudor and Stuart history as it is usually found in books published in the 18th century: say Robertson’s and Hume’s histories of the Tudor and Stuart period, and what is found in Catherine Macaulay’s Whiggish history. I was going to quote from these works to show the way they are male-dominated, with a perspective that is top down and (ultimately) Big Man history even if the culture and social and economic life of the country is not ignored. This is a little book which should be included in the history of history writing by women.
The startling thing is how Austen surprises even the alert reader by how much she knows about obscurer women and men, and must herself have read in an alienated way, against the grain of her courses to get beyond common bogus distortions. The only cited date is a letter between Anne Boleyn and King Henry: that’s easy, it comes from Goldsmith. But one concise sentence referring to Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth wife, is packed with suggestion: “The King’s last wife contrived to survive him, but with difficulty effected it” (Austen, Juvenilia, Cambridge ed P. Sabor, 181-82). Parr did not just passively luckily outlive the king; she had to actively thwart his attempt to arrest her when her intelligent writing and political and religious views threatened (as Anne Boleyn had done) to go beyond what he meant to do by taking over the Church of England. Yet where can she have learned that Parr actively rescued herself — she is not included in Shakespeare or the better known plays about Perkin Warbeck (by John Ford).
Portrait of Anne Boleyn (1507-London, 1536), Queen of England. Painting by unknown artist, oil on panel, ca 1533-1536
From 2003 The Other Boleyn Girl scripted by Philippa Lowthorpe: Jared Harris and Jodha May as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn
There is an excellent book on Katherine Parr’s life, reading, writing, intelligence by Linda Porter: Katherine the Queen, which I would have used. Also other good biographies of Renaissance women, of which there are many. Yes it’s true that Austen could not have time-traveled and read this book; rather she has to have read with alertness all the comments, assertions and counter-assertions on Tudor women in the romances and various histories of the era. In her letters in her later years she writes of reading history aloud with Fanny and Cassandra; she would have read the kinds of sources that went into Sophia Lee’s The Recess and later Walter Scott’s The Abbot and Monastery. Austen makes fun of the historical informative impulse in Scott after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, but in this earlier work we see she went for the same kind of material we find referred to offhand by Charlotte Smith and Anne Radcliffe (in her 1794 A Journey Made in the Summer [Germany into Italy was planned). Radcliffe has read astonishingly in the annals of the places she visits. Scott did not write out of a vacuum. It interests me how avid a reader Austen was of Scott, obtaining each volume as it came out (including, she was in time for, The Antiquarian)
Early depiction of Elizabeth Tudor (I) attributed to William Scrots
Glenda Jackson as the young Elizabeth, just come to the throne (1971 BBC serial drama)
A second context for her depiction of women in this young woman’s parodic didactic text will be her letters where she explains why she takes the adamant tone she does when defending a woman. In a letter to Martha Lloyd she remains fiercely on the side of “Poor Woman,” Queen Caroline of Brunswick “because she is a woman & because I hate her husband. She admits Caroline’s flaws but resolves nevertheless “to think that she would have been respectable if the Prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first … “
— I suppose all the World is sitting in Judgement upon the Princess of Wales’s Letter,” Poor Woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband — but I can hardly forgive her for calling herself “attached & affectionate” to a Man whom she must detest — & the intimacy said to subsist between her & Lady Oxford is bad. — I do not know what to do about it; — but if I must give up the Princess, I am resolved at least always to think that she would have been respectable, if the Prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first. —-(Austen’s Letters, ed LeFaye, 4th edition, 16 February 1813, 216-17).
I will argue the attitude of mind here, is one which pays attention to the original perpetrator of abuse, notices how harassment which claims love as its motive is a form of torment that inflicts misery on even unsympathetic women (Elizabeth I, 185-86). I counted no less than 18 women (Catherine, French wife of Henry V; Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI; Joan of Arc; Edward IV’s bethrothed, Bona of Savoy [referred to, not named) and wife, Elizabeth Woodville, his mistress Jane Shore; Richard III’s wife, Anne (whom she denies was murdered by her husband); Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth of York, his daughter Margaret who married the Scottish James V; five of Henry VIII’s six wives, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Katherine Parr [not named referred to as “the king’s last wife”], Lady Jane Grey, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scot, Anne of Denmark). Some are not named and our narrator frets then that she does not know the woman’s name.
Hers is a history with plenty of women in it. I intended to go over and use the marginalia to Austen’s copy of Goldsmith’s History of England, and the copious notes found in the Cambridge Juvenilia volume edited by Peter Sabor. Austen’s History of England is an exuberant but also richly intertextual work.
From excellent forgotten 1970 Shadow of the Tower (first episode by Rosemary Anne Sisson): James Maxwell as Henry VII and Norma West as Elizabeth of York (also a poet)
I would have used Thomas Penn’s The Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England; here is a YouTube, 15 minutes of an hour long lecture by Penn on the “most notorious invader of England” (he whole available on Amazon Prime) because he had so little right to the throne: Henry Owen Tudor
Finally I proposed to have some fun showing how Austen’s extraordinarily alert iconoclastic stances (as when she treats historical characters in the same way she does fictional ones by showing how she anticipates some of the more interesting film history and adaptations of our own era. I was going to bring in my laptop and show clips from older and recent film history and adaptations of novels set in the Renaissance era.
But my proposal was rejected and so now I’ll not do any of this. What a shame! It is speculation, not evidence. Meant to stir the mind to see Austen in another light as well as her era. Also to be feminist. I could have read part of Elizabeth of York’s (1465-1503) “sestina,” one of the earliest poems in English by a woman (see one of my earliest foremother poet essays):
I pray to Venus
My heart is set upon a lusty pin;
I pray to Venus of good continuance,
For I rejoice the case that I am in,
Deliver’d from sorrow, annex’d to pleasance,
Of all comfort having abundance;
This joy and I, I trust, shall never twin –
My heart is set upon a lusty pin
I pray to Venus of good continuance,
Since she has set me in the way of ease;
My hearty service with my attendance
So to continue it ever I may please;
Thus voiding from all penseful diease,
Now stand I whole far from all grievance –
I pray to Venus of good continuance,
For I rejoice the case that I am in,
My gladness is such that giveth me no pain,
And so to sorrow never shall I blynne,
My heart and I so set ’tis certain
We shall never slake, but ever new begin
For I rejoice the case that I am in,
Deliver’d from sorrow, annex’d to pleasance,
That all my joy I set as aught of right,
To please as after my simple suffisance
To me the goodliest, most beauteous in sight;
A very lantern to all other light,
Most to my comfort on her remembrance–
Deliver’d from sorrow, annex’d to pleasance,
Of all comfort having abundance;
As when I think that goodlihead
Of that most feminine and meek countenance
Very mirror and star of womanhead;
Whose right good fame so large abroad doth spread,
Full glad for me to have recognisance –
Of all comfort having abundance.
This joy and I, I trust, shall never twin –
so that I am so far forth in the trace,
My joys be double where others are but thin,
For I am stably set in such a place
Where beauty ‘creaseth and ever willeth grace,
Which is full famous and born of noble kin–
This joy and I, I trust, shall never twin.
Note the puns.
The JASNA members would have loved this paper. I got the usual hypocrisy over how there were so many applicants and how they had to turn away so many excellent proposals for papers of merit. Papers are also chosen by who is giving the paper and what kinds of people the organizers want, who they are connected to, how they relate to Austen. My hunch is they hardly looked at it. If you tell me it is too learned, I will laugh at you. Much of it a stretch. And meant to be fun. But yes grounded in the era and Austen’s texts and those she liked to read.
Why do I not write it up and send it to Persuasions? the two organizers asked. Ah yes. Right. As they well know, because Persuasions prefers papers given at the conference. As my daughter, Izzy, said to me last year when we did not make some final cut to join 800+ at the JASNA in Williamsburg (even though we were quite early in registering online), what do we pay this yearly fee for? She belongs to two organizations, one professional, American Library and another which professes to be a combination of personal interest (fans) and scholars; in both cases your money guarantees you a space at the AGM. I suggested it was the periodical and newsletter.
A photograph of the wall at Lyme from the water side (contemporary) — see my review of Lucy Worseley’s JA at Home, book & film
Dear friends and readers,
I finally unsubscribed from Janeites on this past Sunday night, and will no longer be putting any postings on Austen-l — after being on the first list for more than 20 years and the second some quarter of a century. A sad evening. I asked myself if I learn anything about Austen on Janeites, now at groups.io (after considerable trouble and work) and previously at yahoo; do I experience any pleasure in ideas about her, gain any perspective on her era, contemporaries, the books or authors or people or places she was influenced, and the sad answer was no. Often just the opposite. I faced up to the reality that the listserv space is one Arnie Perlstein’s playground for preposterous sexed-up and male-centered (he is ever finding famous white males like Milton or more modern males in Austen) theories and from others who support him semi fan-fiction postings (such as the idea that Mr Knightley wrote or dictated Mr Martin’s letter to Harriet). The latest very long thread was once again about how Jane Fairfax is pregnant in Emma (I’m not sure if Frank Churchill or John Knightley was the candidate this time) and the idea the full fantasia of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is central to Austen’s Emma.
I felt bad about deserting the list-moderator but it seemed to me the latest series went beyond previous in a tone of triumph and enjoyment which suggested one motive was to show contempt for the purpose of the listserv (and mockery of the helpless membership), which disdain and exultation the moderator (in effect) replied to by writing (as she has so many times before) with the purpose of the list: its terrain was to read Jane Austen’s actual texts, discuss them, her era, and her real life. She has said also repeatedly how she dislikes these sexed-up “shadow texts” and how what is said about Austen, their content ruins her enjoyment of the books. A couple of people then told me (through the message mechanism on face-book) how they laugh at such threads — that reminded me of the way people enjoyed Scottie Bowman on Austen-l years ago (he had a gift for needling malice). One person had the courage to onlist explain she stayed only for sentimental reasons — remembering what was. Maybe it was the latter sentiment that determined me to face up to the demoralization and aggravation this particular kind of debasement of Austen the money- and career-making cult leads to.
Lest my last phrase be misunderstood what I am referring to is that part of the reason Jane Austen (as a name, a picture, a set of titles) has spread so widely is the pair of words makes money for many people and has been used by many to further their careers — from getting tenure, to heritage businesses, to touring oneself, to selling objects, to setting up tours for others (at a price), from business as far apart as the hotel industry (JASNA is kept expensive in order to keep the meetings smaller), to toy and knick-knack manufacturers and (at one time) séance mediums, to running sites de memoire.
It matters that while the secondary literature on Austen has grown exponentially, her oeuvre remains tiny and easy to read through in say less than two weeks. Yet I’ve met people at these JASNAs who at best have read 2 of the novels. And yes many of these participants will say they “hate” Mansfield Park; lately participants I’ve met suggest Mr Knightley is “really” in love with Jane Fairfax; they get this from some of the Emma movies. JASNA having finally “allowed” in panels on sequels is now not just flooded with them — you see it in the shop — one of the years the very topic was in effect these sequels and movies. JASNA grew to its present size after the first of the contemporary Jane Austen movies in 1995/96.
Maybe now with so many vying to publish about her, it’s not so easy to be published in journals, and fan fiction is no longer a publisher dream of an easy sell, but an essay on her, an umpteenth film adaptation of Emma will get further than than any essay on a “minor” (obscure) woman writer? Who has heard of Margaret Oliphant? Charlotte Smith? The situation may be similar for Sherlock Holmes as a name and set of titles — as well as a literal place Holmes lived in — as if the character actually existed. Readers can invest whatever they want into these post-texts (or sequels).
I find very troubling how reputable scholars have argued in print that it’s okay to tell lies, it’s okay if the printed material or what is taught is all wrong, is the product of political censorship, or if what is on display is salacious, misogynistic, just plain stupid. I objected to this supposed neutrality in Devoney Looser’s latest book. She implied it’s elitist to insist on accuracy and truth and explicitly undervalued the difference between knowledge and illusion, credible evidence and lies.
Group and social dynamics in cyberspace work differently than in real space, so one or two people can take over and ruin a listserv, silence everyone else; scapegoating is easy. So one of the things some site-owners (face-book moderators, listserve owners and moderators) whose platforms survive do is early on or soon enough establish parameters on what is somehow pernicious nonsense — Hardy Cook had a hard time at first with his Shaksper-l and now just forbids all stupidity over the idea that Wm Shakespeare did not write his books; these kinds of ideas circulate among lots of (foolish snobbish) people; or (as I have seen many times now), you say this face-book page is for this author and no other authors; discussions about contemporary politics are out; this is not the space to talk of movies or your favorite star-actor. Today Shaksper-l is a sober discussion of Shakespeare’s plays, the productions, real cruxes in the scholarship &c Athurnet years ago is another place where setting boundaries on theories of where the Arthur matter came from finally worked. I’ve seen this on face-book fan pages — more than one determined moderator is sometimes needed. Most of these kinds of posters fall silent without an audience to triumph over.
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On the Janeites list I had been trying with the list moderator to agree on a book of literary criticism or history about Jane Austen where each chapter would bring us to the text or her life again. We would try to post weekly on Austen through such a text. I had tried posting on the essays in the most recent Persuasions (as a text many members might own) starting in summer but few people were interested in serious analysis or any discussion at all, in reading such writing.
I have been having a difficult time keeping this blog going — with all the literary and film and other study (for teaching and classes I go to) I do in the other parts of my life, and had proposed to go back to series: of actresses, fore-mother poets, women artists, serial dramas based on the 18th century or film adaptations of historical fiction based on the early modern to early 19th century European cultures. But I know this excludes Austen. So now I’ll have an alternative thread if I can manage this: once a week or so, blog on a chapter on a book genuinely engaged with Austen’s texts, life, era. I’ll begin with Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Long range I’d like also to try for one of the books on the relationship of Jane Austen’s texts to the plays or theater of her time.
Accordingly, I have changed my header picture to a picturesque illustration found in one of the older handbooks for Austen, F. B. Pinion’s A Jane Austen Companion. Pinion’s is a beautifully made book (sewn, heavy paper, a lot of rag content in the boards). It’s filled with various kind of pictures (plates, photos, vignettes) where the material is written as clear essays critically surveying Austen’s life, the early phases of her writing, a chapter each for the major novels, topics like influence, her reputation. Places, character studies. Dulce and utile is a phrase that is rightly applied to this book. Manydown house is now gone: it was the Bigg-Wither home where Austen bravely went back on a weak moment where she said yes to an unsuitable man for her as an individual; and it was the place where assembly-type balls were held in her time. Thus it seems to me appropriate.
Susan Herbert’s parody of Adelaide Labille-Guiard’s Self-portrait with Two Pupils (1785)
Ferrante suggests her model for her books was Little Women and the English writers, Alcott and Austen; Diana Gabaldon several times alludes to Dorothy and her red shoes, and by extension The Wizard of Oz, suggesting first Claire’s then Brianna’s travel through the stones was analogous to Dorothy in her red shoes
Dear friends and readers,
To begin with, a retrospective long overdue .
I’ve been blogging in this space for some fifteen years now. I have completed four years’ worth of analyses of her letters (as edited by Deirdre Le Faye), blogs on the Austen papers, on Austen’s close family relatives fresh biographical perspectives and chronologies, and the occasional review. I’ve linked in papers I’ve published or delivered at conferences. I meant this place as a blog meant for Austen matters as generously understood as the Folger library’s definition of things Shakespearean: her contemporaries, mostly women novelists and memoir-writers: Fanny Burney, Charlotte Smith, Mary Brunton, Edgeworth, French women writers and translators, Scottish women poets. But even that soon morphed into the three linked categories I felt she fitted into: women’s art, the long 18th century, and her life, work, influences, and near contemporaries and post-texts and films. I’ve done series: women poets; women artists; actresses, mostly from the long 18th century (but not all, as Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher were the subject of one commemorative blog); women’s films; women’s TV serials, women singers and musicians (not nearly enough of these), and women’s fashions (ditto). Film adaptations of books set in the 18th century, of documentaries. I still keep these up and reviews of books on Austen’s life, books, issues. 18th century conferences. Small projects: Virginia Woolf in her own right, Virginia Woolf and Johnson as modern biographers.
So what now? Carry on the above when the spirit takes me. Yes
A once beloved volume
My header or title line is a play on words from Fleur Adcock’s “Instead of an interview,” about what she imagines she tells the interviewers instead of what she is supposed to say: what has meant most to her in life, what she dreams of, what she’s lost, and what keeps her going now:
memories of her past
and every corner revealed familiar settings
for the dreams I’d not bothered to remember —
ingrained, ingrown ….
… quite enough friends to be going on with [which I do not have]’
bookshops, galleries, gardens …
And not a town or a city I could live in,
Home ….
home is [New York City], and England, Ireland, Europe,
I have come home with a suitcase full of stones —
and here they lie around the floor of my study
as I telephone a cable “Safely home …”
… But another loaded word
creeps up now to interrogate me.
have I made myself … an exile
I hope not; I hope this blog’s purpose all the while, which is to help me keep connected, part of imagined communities, can take some new turns. One project I had hoped to write a book with a friend-partner about and have described her, “The Anomaly” has now fallen through, but I am thinking that I can work it out now in this blog. One of the two latest books I’m reading for this: Rebecca Traistor’s All the Single Ladies demonstrates that while independent or women living without a man for long periods of time has actually become a near unacknowledged norm, was not an anomaly ever. As a group we only became visible since the mid=19th century when larger numbers of women began to be able to support ourselves.
The other, Anne Boyd Rioux’s Writing for Immortality: Women Writers and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America. Roux concentrates on Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stoddard (I’ve read nothing by her), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps later Ward (ditto) and Constance Fennimore Woolson (where I have read a good deal), Louisa May Alcott. She is again “doing” the literary history of the US, and her context is the withering scorn heaped on women as “popular” and second rate, not great art by Hawthorne (famously) and Henry James (insidiously). She argues it is important to understand this presentation of one’s book as primarily there as a great art, great vision and the real goal of the woman as creating great art (not for supporting herself) as radical and important in building esteem and validation for women as a group.
We are so used to valuing things for the money, book history as turned into a branch of let’s study how capitalism, fame, and industry worked and the idea of writing as a vocation becomes something we scorn people for: what? they must be hypocrites and just say that because their books don’t sell. We are so corrupted to the folds of our minds.
Vocation as radical behavior
She goes over the lives & writing of her four chosen women writers (Phelps, Stoddard, Woolson and Alcott) and one thing stands out for all of them: they are all to some extent crippled in their ambition or fame or even what they were able to achieve or write because of the demand they be conventional heterosexual and marry. One of them did: Stoddard and that stopped her producing any more than two good novels. The others fought and produced and led a life they found satisfactory but to do so took tremendous energies and got in the way. I’d say this is even true of Alcott — fine as her achievement in children’s books is and here and there in adult fiction, it’s not what she could have done. Some of the enemies of promise including having to support the man and family as a woman. I think of how Gaskell’s life of Bronte is really an apology for the woman artist and that she was remarkable (I now realize) for presenting that final marriage as simply getting in the way and destroying Bronte. Now I’ve read a long section on the four women’s fiction ad debating whether there be a difficult conflict in a woman between choosing love, having a family, participating in a community as wife, mother and spending your life dedicated enough to art, spending time, money, travel, solitude enough to produce the fine book, or picture — or performance.
I single out two for tonight as I recently finished both, was very moved (at times, and with a peculiar uncomfortable painfulness) by Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon, and (continually, mostly with complete accord) by The story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante, and because they are part of cycles or series of brilliant creative novels, Outlander and the Neapolitan Quartet, which type of writing when good can be so deeply satisfying. Nothing like a recurring character in whom we have invested our minds and hearts whom I feel are invested with questions of the world deeply connected to me, feeling their reactions as deeply crucial to what I call my inner life, even if they are also capable of being taken in as information (to display in papers making arguments) or used as thoughtless gossip (especially the kind that bashes the women characters).
One way in which we can distinguish both series as l’ecriture-femme , as women’s versions of roman fleuves, is both series demonstrate that a girl, then woman’s need for a meaningful career outside taking care of home, child, partner, whoever else is there, is interwoven with her being. The women in all cases (Claire, Jenny, Lenu, Lila) all also naturally seek insistently intensely to find a congenial enabling partner who loves her too.
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Italian edition
“I was dead, my Sassenach–and yet all that time, I loved you … And when my body shall cease, my soul will still be yours. Claire–I swear by my hope of heaven, I will not be parted from you” — Diana Gabaldon, Drums of Autumn
The accent in all four Gabaldon novels falls first on the self-negation Claire practices when she becomes part of Jamie. How when she returns to the 20th century she builds on her time as a nurse in WW2 to become a surgeon. And then when she returns to the 18th century 20 years later she enacts an irresistible return to nursing, doctoring and inventing a pharmacy in whatever form she can build.
For Drums of Autumn I’d like to record just this:
In general those parts of the novels where Claire is the narrator and we are going back and forth in time — as in the opening sequence of Dragonfly in Amber are favorites with me; and now those sequences where Roger is the narrator and we go back and forth in time.
There is much beautiful contemplative description – the US as a kind of arcadian paradise physically – Strawberry Fields Forever one part is called. OTOH, she drives him to us how horrifically the enslaved black were treated: another story like the one of the woman gang-raped just after Culloden in Voyager: an enslaved black girl either kills herself directly or dies horribly trying to give herself an abortion. With her is another enslaved woman who presents herself a midwife sometimes and she will if caught be blamed and hung – by the sergeant who was responsible for this pregnancy. So Jamie and Claire find her with the help of the trader and enable her to go into the mountains and meet up with a native American tribe who will take her in. There’s a long stretch of Claire making a home for her and Jamie in North Carolina circa 1767 – all about how she cooks things, sets up furniture, goes out and about as a doctor. Very detailed about the era. It does begin with how safe she feels with Jamie as her husband and the house is his arms around her.
The characters most punished and ferociously in the serial drama are the chivalrous kind heroes; Jamie Fraser, tortured, hand smashed, raped by the English soldiers; and now Roger Wakefield Mackenzie, humiliated, treated with great brutality by Native Americans. Fergus is also raped and his hand cut off by British and Scots colonialist officers after Culloden. These vulnerable sweet men are made to suffer excruciatingly in a sort of disciplinary culture in which people have to be raped and punished and have physically inscribed on their bodies the “lessons” the colonizer, the tribe, the powerful authority figures deems they “need” to learn. We see that early on when in the first episode (this is in the book too) Jamie beats Claire with a belt. There is the brother-helper figure (Murtagh) who the film-makers felt they could not do without. One gentle hero (Lord John) is given a super-high rank to protect him; another the Reverend Wakefield who is a pack-rat with papers I am very fond of too. I have argued in another blog that Frank Randall is a poignant proud tragic hero.
Other protected good women figures include Mother Hildegarde — I just loved Frances de la Tour in that part in Dragonfly in Amber – and the French apothecary, Master Raymond (Dominique Pinon) who saves Claire’s life after the stillbirth of Faith.
A long sequence in the novel is about the raping of Brianna and its long and varied aftermath and affect on the people around her as she tells them ever so slowly the full story. Much on male reactions, male suffering, and it’s clear that Gabaldon does not see simple or non-aggravated rape (not assault) as a serious crime; she is for having the baby whom she sees as half-owned by the father (rapist or no). Gabaldon is grappling with crucial issues directly I’ll give her that as does Ferrante — both raw, graphic, visceral. I suppose the uselessly bitterly complaining heroine of the Brianna type is a rarity among the heroines – she stands for a helpless self-assertion that gets no where, feminism defined as blind indignation. The rest live with it, resort to magic (or its modern equivalent, surgery).
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“he knew how to connect texts that were very unlike one another and he quoted them as if he were looking at them … ” — Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name (p. 407)
The Story of a New Name begins in 1966 Lila who we are told is no longer close to Lenu gives Lenu a large metal box with 8 — need I say precious – notebooks in it. After reading these fat important unrepeatable diaries, Lenu dumps them in a river. It took me a while to sit down after that one. In Little Women so important to Lila and Lenu when girl children, and cited once again at the close of this novel as Lenu’s frst book is being published, Jo could recreate her novel after Amy destroyed it. Eight densely detailed diary disorganized notebooks are impossible to recreate. A brief recounting and commentary:
Then Stefano and Lila’s wedding night puts paid to all the idealized sex of Outlander. He beats her up and we get a graphic account stage by stage. It is the most raw account I’ve ever read — but she does not leave him though he continues to beat her for a while.
Lenu is so confused by what happens at the wedding — how she is not at all respected by her mother or anyone for all her efforts and how awful to her Antonio is (plus she is bored silly by him), she leaves off going to school for a while. Just drops out and wanders all around Naples. Tellingly it is Antonio (who ends up in a sad low job by the end of this book) breaks with Lenu after they have sex scenes just as graphically written as Lila and Stefano only more satisfactory. It is Lila who enables Lenu to go back by providing a room in her splendid and owned apartment. Only slowly does she get back and she is never undisturbed in the way she was so does not do as well. Lenu attractssomeone I never had a version of: a genuine mentor, a woman professor, Galiani.
Lila is taken to a modern doctor and oh did this resonate with me. Room filled with customers, everyone in awe of this man. From Lila’s point of view, he gets to invade her with his metal instruments. She feels violated. And he says (I have heard a male doctor say this of me after examining me): “it’s all there” in this satisfied voice. I don’t know why I didn’t report him to Kaiser, but suspect it was because he was a black doctor (I’m really honest here) and was worried I wouldn’t be believed and be thought racist. There you go. But after that I never went to any male gynecologist ever.
When I was 16 I was taken to just such a prestigious place and was violated similarly — or felt so. And given this “down from the throne advice” in this disdainful manner. I think the same things go on today in the US – clearly they go on in Italy. I never went to a male gynecologist in the British national health but remember the woman I got contraception from also treated me with a lack of respect because at the time I was not married.
Anyway the doctor says it’s not Lila’s fault:she needs to build her strength, which becomes she needs to go on holiday and rest. So who is she to go with but the now spiteful sister-in-law Pinuccia and her mother-in-law, Nunzia. Lila now turns to Lenu and demands she quit her bookstore job. The bookstore job is not getting Lenu any closer to that elite world she glimpsed and was partly of temporarily when her mentor, professor woman invited her to that party (Lila came and didn’t fit as I said). At first Lenu says no: what horror fights she envisages but then she learns that Nino is at Ischia with his family again. She agrees to quite and come if Lila goes to Ischia.
Anyway the doctor says it’s not Lila’s fault: she needs to build her strength, which becomes she needs to go on holiday and rest. So who is she to go with but the now spiteful sister-in-law Pinuccia and her mother-in-law, Nunzia. Lila now turns to Lenu and demands she quit her bookstore job. The bookstore job is not getting Lenu any closer to that elite world she glimpsed and was partly of temporarily when her mentor, professor woman invited her to that party (Lila came and didn’t fit as I said). At first Lenu says no: what horror fights she envisages but then she learns that Nino is at Ischia with his family again. She agrees to quite and come if Lila goes to Ischia.
Lila agrees; she is paying Lenu – that is kept secret — so Lenu, the academic in the school is Lila’s servant. When the men are there the women aren’t free. The men are ever taking them into the bedroom to have sex. Lenu says Lilia is so used to this far from demurring she seems to show off. But it’s a burden. They don’t get to go the beach. At first she can’t locate Nino; she has an idea to visit the woman whose house they stayed at and finds them not far off.
Now Lila teases her — not nice — for wanting to be there for Nino. Nino is standoffish but eventually they have real conversations about books, politics — the feel though is not of joy but of somehow this being prestigious and it’s not satisfying because of this, it’s ruined. Donato teaches Lila to swim – he is a kind man.
I identify viscerally with both Lenu and Lila. Lenu has no money for even a new decent bathing suit. It’s a real problem. she has an inferior room which does not look over the beach. she has to hide her books when in the house with Lila & co. Mosquitoes, no air conditioning so it’s so hot in her room. Ischia is no longer enchantment ….
Many of my memories are still deeply embittering, searing and so I understand why Lila behaves in the counterproductive way she does, but I also understand Lenu’s abjection — I had clothes but no room of my own …. and was a outsider, not in the AP classes because my mother didn’t know how to get me into these and my father was unaware this was important.
Now it’s come out that Pinuccia has fallen in love with Bruno, and not being able to cope with this and her pregnancy and marriage to Rino, demands to go home. The conflict is too hard for her to endure. Her departure makes an inevitable reconfiguration and lo and behold Nino is in love with Lila and she with him and it’s transparent. They are probably lovers.
Lenu then tells of her own life. I like this part of her studying, her trying to pass exams, finally the books she read, one young man she gets involved with and they fuck. But she says that she and Lila somehow came together in the old intense way and now she must tell of how wrong she was about what was going on.
What is not surprising is Lila carries on with a torrid mad affair with Nino — reminding me of Paul and Virginia only this time there is a husband. But in her notebooks (which we know after the first sequence Lenu unforgivably has dumped into the sea) what Lila exulted in was not so much the sex as what they read and talked about.
Unexpectedly Lila was courageous enough to flee Stefano and go live with Nino is a poverty-stricken area in a wretched apartment. At first all seems bliss, but this does not last long at all, and it is probably only bliss from Lila’s point of view. What happens is she doesn’t fit in — Nino does want his middle upper class life and connections and future prospects and it’s not enough to be highly intelligent and creative: you have to modulate your voice (as I’m sure Emma Woodhouse would put it) and Nino finds she is too loud, too strident, she embarrasses him, her talk is exaggerated. His father won’t give him money just like this and at the end of 23 days he leaves Lila.
Like Austen’s S&S where the point of view of Elinor’s and Marianne is the one we watch, so here the point of view is Lenu remembering and so everything is softened, remembered, seen from afar or guessed at based on these notebooks that Lenu has dropped in the river. Lenu is utterly buying into the same middle class life Nino is trying to get into. This also has the effect of not having to show us the pain, humiliation, difficulty that Lenu has with her manners, lack of clothes, who she has to kowtow to. The earlier novels gave us Lila’s kind of experience raw and angry or nightmarish; or (Il figlia oscura Englished as The Lost Daughter), a quiet interlude of a Lenu kind of character at the beach contemplating the fraught experience from afar but only talking of what is happening now — as she steals a doll say, or marks papers.
several of the others characters have emerged as distinct real presences. To be expected I suppose, several of the males are coming to sad ending. Maybe they had less prospect than the girls, since the fascist order certainly doesn’t respect elite education for men. So Antonio, Pasquale, Rino (who I can’t sympathize with as a continual wife-beater) all end up with no decent future — no getting out of the mindless exploitative materialistic culture. Lila is forced out when Ada gets pregnant by Stefano; Ada withstands beatings by Stefano and Lila runs off with Enzo — who rescued her in the first place. When last seen by Lenu, Lila has a peculiarly horrible job (stuffing sausages, in a vile sausage factory where she is sexually harassed) living in squalid quarters with Enzo; he works at a locomotive very dangerous: but at night they study together like some Paul and Virginie of the bitter early 21st century. Lenu has carried back to her her early story, The Blue Fairy, which Lenu says is the inspiration for her novel. Lila burns it.
Maestrio Oliviero has died — she never would help Lila because Lila’s parents got in her way. Lenu reflects it was this teacher who first saved her and how unfair and egoistic and cruel she had been to Lila.
Lenu has emerged as a sort of winner. She kept at it and now graduated with high honors and noticed by her boyfriend’s mother who is Somebody in the Society and in publishing, her first novel is published. The money astonishes and quells Lenu’s mother’s spirit — she is still living with her parents on and off. Her book is castigated by much of the press as absurd and that is painful but it seems the boyfriend will marry her in two years. In the meantime she must train for teacher’s college, which is looked upon as a come down, not truly part of the world that counts. I do know that in Italy the high academic world is very rigid, restricted, utterly unjust. But in the closing scene where she is enduring having to give a speech and she gives a bad one – she hates it as much as I would have, has no idea what’s wanted — very young as yet – and someone from the crowd stands forth and offers a decent sympathetic understanding of her book.
Of course it’s Nino. This is weak ending for obvious reasons but regarded as part 2 of a single book I suppose it’s forgivable. A better code is Lenu goes to the public library still and finds the old copy of Little Women she and Lila used to read together. This too was inspiration for her book, her book carried on what was valuable in Little Women.
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So, to conclude, in these two highly disparate books, we see the question glimpsed, but very much there, how far and just how can a serious woman’s career, her vocation, her profession be combined with an equally insistent or at least (as society is now constructed) intrusive set of needs, wants, desires of people (if she has a real heart and passionate body) she wants to meet, feel herself and be validated as belonging to these people and tasks. And how does the larger society’s economic, political, social and gender arrangements impose its will on individuals who do not want to make or follow the choices offered. These are not rootedly natural or instinctive (impossible to eradicate), but sort of imposed on us. Another quartet which might be telling to compare is Byatt’s Frederica Quartet (Virgin in Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, Whistling Woman).
A photograph of Tom Carpenter, the trustee of Chawton Cottage; he is carrying a portrait of Jane Austen’s brother, Edward
Friends,
Last night I came across in the latest issue of Times Literary Supplement (for January 25, 2019), an informative piquant review by Devoney Looser of a autobiographical book, Jane & Me. Its author, Caroline Jane Knight, a fifth great-niece (with now a little help from Devoney & the TLS), is launching this book maybe to provide herself with a raison d’être (a not “very promising heroine-in-training” says Devoney), a basis for her living independently someday. I think the information here and acid insights make it required reading for the Janeite, and discovered it’s behind the kind of magazine paywall where you must buy a whole subscription for a year, before you can read it. It is almost impossible to share a TLS article online as if you subscribe to the online version, you can only do it through an app on an ipad or some such device. So I here provide a summary, contextualized further by what I have drawn from Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites.
Why is the review valuable in its own right too: we learn a good deal about the history of Chawton House Library this century from the point of view of the family who owned it — Jane Austen’s collateral descendants. Caroline is a poor transmitter: Looser points to where Caroline has not even begun to do the research necessary on her own life, but there is enough here to make do, and if you know something from your work, or can add further research like Devoney, you can have some insight into Austen’s family and what she was up against as she tried to write honest entertainments.
In brief, Devoney tells the story of a downwardly mobile family who let the house fall into desuetude and the present Richard Knight leased it to Sandy Lerner whose great luck on the Net had brought her huge amounts of money, some of which she expended by renovating, it’s not too much to call it rescuing Chawton House into a building one could spend time in comfortably enough so that it could function as a library. While she set about building, she started a board of informed people who would know how to turn it into a study center for 18th century women’s writing. Austen’s peers & contemporaries.
Richard Knight and Sandy Lerner walking on the grounds together during some occasion
Let me first bring in Yaffe’s account who also sheds light on Richard Knight who was at the conference as a key note speaker and we can here gather a few truths about him. He had “inherited a crushing estate-tax bill and a `16th century house in need of a million British pounds’ worth of emergency repairs.” A developer’s plan to turn the place into a golf course and expensive hotel had collapsed by 1992. Enter Sandy Lerner. She had made oodles of money off an Internet business, is another fan of Austen, one common today who does not like the idea of Austen as “an unhappy repressed spinster,” something of a recluse, not able to see the money and fame she wanted. When Dale Spender’s book, Mothers of the Novel, presented a whole female population writing away (as Austen did), a female literary tradition, she found a vocation, collecting their books. After she heard a speech by Nigel Nicolson, where he offended her (talking of a woman who thought Jane Austen didn’t like Bath as “a silly, superstitious cow,” described himself as heading a group who intended to open a Jane Austen center in Bath even though Edward Austen Knight’s Chawton House was on the market (too expensive? out of the way for tourists?), she decided to “get even.” When she had the money two years later, she bought Chawton House. She wanted to make it “a residential study center where scholars consulting er rare-book collection could live under 19th century conditions.” This super-rich woman loved the sense these people would gain “a visceral sense of the historical moment,” wake up to “frost on the windows, grates without fires, nothing but cold water to wash in.”
She paid six million for 125 year lease on the house and its 275 acre grounds; another $225,000 for the stable block. She discovered it to be badly damaged, inhabited by tenants she found distasteful, “ugly,” rotting. Crazy rumors abounded in the village she was going to turn the place into a lesbian commune, a Euro-Disney style theme park, her husband testing missile systems in the grounds. She thought of herself as this great philanthropist. Culture clashes: the Chawton estate sold its hunting rights for money; she was an animal rights activist. Disputes over her desire to remove a swimming pool said to be a badger habitat protected under UK law. I saw the Ayrshire Farm here in Northern Virginia that she bought during the protracted lawsuits and negotiations over Chawton: an 800-acre spread in northern Virginia, where “she planned to raise heritage breeds under humane, organic conditions, to prove socially responsible farming was economically viable.” She started a cosmetics company whose aesthetic was that of the Addams Family (TV show). Chawton House was finally built using a sensible plan for restoration; a cemetery was discovered, a secret cupboard with 17th century telescope. Eventually Lerner’s 7000 rare books came to reside in a house you could hold conferences, one-day festivals and host scholars in. It had cost $10 million and yearly operating costs were $1 million a year.
Lerner’s Ayrshire Farmhouse today — it’s rented out for events, and hosts lunches and evening parties and lectures, has a shop ….
Lerner is unusual for a fan because she dislikes sequels and does not seek out Austen movies; it’s Austen’s texts she loves — yet she too wants to write a P&P sequel. I sat through one of her incoherent lectures so know first-hand half-nutty theory that every concrete detail in an Austen novel is crucial information leading to interpretation of that novel. I’ll leave the reader to read the details of her way of research, her travels in imitation of 18th century people: it took her 26 years to complete. How she has marketed the book by a website, and how Chawton was at the time of the book thriving (though her Farm lost money). Yaffe pictures Lerner at a signing of her book, and attracted many people, as much for her Internet fame as any Austen connection. Yaffe has Lerner against distancing herself from “our distastefully Twittering, be-Friending world, for the e-mail boxes overflowing with pornographic spam.” But she will buy relics at grossly over-inflated prices (“a turquoise ring” Austen wore) and give them to friends. She launched Chawton House by a fabulously expensive ball, to which Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul (dressed as aging Mr and Mrs Darcy) came. A “prominent chef” made 18th century foods (“nettle and potato soup, pickle ox tongue, sweetmeats”). She was in costume: “a low-cut, pale-blue ball gown. She even went horseback riding with Rintoul. A real thrill for a fan.
Chawton House Reading Room — there are two rooms, one open to the public, the other locked and filled with rare 18th century books
Devoney doesn’t say this nor Yaffe but I will: Chawton House never quite made it as sheerly a study center for women’s writing as originally envisioned; instead it became a sort of Jane Austen tourist site where festivals and conferences dwelling on Austen for fans were necessary, sometimes becoming a semi-popular community center like the Bronte Haworth house seems to be turning into. That’s not so bad, far worse was the people working for and at the place never acquired enough funding to do without Lerner; and over a fit of pique and probably long-standing resentments, some two years ago now Lerner pulled all her money out. It turns out 80% of funds came from her, and no way has been found to locate a substitute so the place can carry on its serious functions in the same way. Some new compromise will have to be found. Nearby is Chawton Cottage, now a small research center (for those select people who get to see its library), but more a tourist site; also nearby is the Austen family church where (among others) Austen’s sister, Cassandra and their mother, are buried. The house now (Looser says) “stands to revert back to Richard Knight’s family,” of whom Caroline is a member. All of us who know something of the house, who have experienced its scholarly meetings, its library, walked on its grounds, heard a concert at the church, mourn the fact that its fine director, Dr Gillian Dow has gone, to return full time as a scholar and lecturer to the University of Southampton.
This is the larger context for the story of Caroline and her older relatives from the turn of the century to now. Like other of these aristocrats who cannot afford to life the extravagant life of leisure they once did, Caroline (says Devoney) presents herself a slightly downtrodden: she and her parents lived in the basement of Chawton house while the rich tenants occupy the plum apartments above. One of the houses I was shown in the Lake District/Nothern Borders of England is owned by an aristocrat’s wife’s family; and the husband himself works to hold onto it by throwing it open to the public for various functions. He is clearly a well-educated man who lived a privileged elite life; nonetheless, he gave one of the talks. He told us he and his family living in the basement quarters below; their paying tenants above stairs.
The various Knights during Caroline’s life didn’t have many servants (oh dear poor things) and spent their time in less than admirable ways (watching TV say, horse racing — which costs). None of them were readers, and (as opposed to Devoney) I would say none of them ever produced anything near a masterpiece or important book, except maybe JEAL — if you are willing to consider how central his Memoir of his Aunt has been and how it has cast its spell over ways of reading Austen and understanding her ever after. A few have been minor literary people, and Joan Austen-Leigh and others been influential valued members of the British Jane Austen Society and they “grace” the JASNA every once in a while with their presence. Several have written sequels. Looser goes over a few of these, giving the impression that a couple which JASNA has promoted are better than they are.
Various financial troubles and also legal ones (including one male relative running over a local person with his car and “found not guilty of manslaughter” although he fled the scene) are covered by Devoney. When it comes to explaining the financial problems, Caroline says they are all a mystery. She omits any clarifying description of what the estate was like and which Knights lived here in WW2. Devoney supplies this: she tells of one recent Edward Knight’s time in India — his father had had been a royal favorite and a public-spirited magistrate, who loved to shoot birds. In 1951 thirty cottages in which tenants lived were auctioned off, and some went to occupants. They were in such bad shape apparently (again that is my deduction from what Looser gently implies) that one lucky man who could afford to buy the cottage said he got it for the price of a TV. Devoney implies this was dirt cheap. Not so: for many British people in 1951 the price of TV was out of their range; in the 1950s most Brits rented their TV
Chawton House recently from the outside
Death duties, genuinely high taxes each time the house changed hands is what did them in. (We no longer have even that in the US and the Republicans are salivating to change the death tax laws once again — these are important tools to prevent the growth of inequality.) I thought interesting that Chawton House was sold to one Richard Sharples, a conservative politician (1916-73) who served as governor of Bermuda and was assassinated (in Devoney’s words) “by black power militants.” Of course this bad-mouths these people, and when they were hung for the murder, there were days of rioting. I remember how horribly the white treated black and native people on Bermuda — so cruel that there are famous rebellions (Governor Eyre) wth terrifying reprisals by the British and colonial gov’ts. In the 20th century Sharples’ widow’s only recourse was to sell the property, furniture, books, portraits in 1977. There have over the century been a number of such sales to pay off death duties and some of the objects prized in museums, libraries came out of just such Sotheby auctions. Looser tells us in an aside there is a ditigal project trying to reconstruct the Knight Library as it was in 1935 (“Reading with Austen,” readingwithausten.com)
As to Caroline, she has apparently read very little of Austen’s fiction — that must very little indeed since Austen left only 6 novels which can easily be reprinted in one volume. She has appeared on TV, and is now she’s trying what a book can do. It’s not a memoir worthy of Jane Austen, says Devoney: the lack of elemental research even about her own life; Caroline’s account of herself features James Covey’s self-help book, The Habits of Highly Effective People, as the one that has gotten her through life. Wouldn’t you know it was seeing the 1995 P&P film by Andrew Davies that “kindled” Caroline’s interest in Jane Austen. I watched a documentary with Andrew Davies aired on BBC recently about just how much he changed the book to be about men; how much “correction” of it he made. Caroline still dreams of moving back to Chawton with the present male Richard Knight as ambassador (of what it’s not clear). I’ve been to JASNAs where Richard Knight gave a talk about his family in the mid-morning Sunday breakfast slot of the JASNAs. Here is Arnie Perlstein’s reaction to one.
Devoney ends her review with suggesting how much this history might remind us of Persuasion and the Elliot family and quotes Darcy in P&P: “I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these.” Devoney does justice at her opening to a few of the immediate Austens who showed some literary ability and genuine interest and integrity towards their aunt: James, her brother was a minor but good poet; his three children include JEAL; Anne Austen Lefroy who tried to finish Sanditon and wrote a brief touching novel, Mary Hamilton; Caroline Austen wrote her Reminiscences; Catherine Hubback several novels, a travel book of letters, and a continuation of Austen’s The Watsons as The Younger Sister. Her son, grand-nephew, and granddaughter all wrote books to add to our knowledge of the family; Edward Knight’s grandson produced the first substantial edition of Austen’s letters. There the inspiration coming through and about the aunt seems to have ended.
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From Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, Jeffrey Palliser tells Alice, a visitor to this aristocratic family at their country mansion who wonders what there is to do all day, about what he as an example of his relatives’ lives does with his time:
“Do you shoot?”
“Shoot! What; with a gun?”
“Yes. I was staying in a house last week with a lady who shot a good deal.”
“No; I don’t shoot.”
“Do you ride?”
“No; I wish I did. I have never ridden because I’ve no one to ride with me.”
“Do you drive?”
“No; I don’t drive either.”
“Then what do you do?”
“I sit at home, and—”
“Mend your stockings?”
“No; I don’t do that, because it’s disagreeable; but I do work a good deal. Sometimes I have amused myself by reading.”
“Ah; they never do that here. I have heard that there is a library, but the clue to it has been lost, and nobody now knows the way …
None of this loss and mismanagement or lack of literary interest or ability as part of a family history is unexpected. In her discreet last chapter of her fine biography of Jane Austen, Claire Tomalin records the earliest phases of this decline, together with or amid the real attempts of Catherine Hubback’s part of the family and other descendants of Frank to publish respectable books about Jane Austen. I imagine the valuable library gathered since Chawton House Library became a functioning study center (a large room in the present Chawton house) will remain intact but nowadays (as some of us know) libraries filled with books are not valued by booksellers or even libraries or universities in the way they once were. I know people who found they could not even give away a particularly superb personal library, and others driven to sell theirs for very little in comparison say for what they would have gotten in 1980 or so and that would not have covered how much it cost them over a lifetime.
Jessika Williams as Margaret of Anjou (The American Shakespeare Center, Blackfriars Playhouse, 2018)
Friends and readers,
EC/ASECS 49th annual conference, held in Staunton, Virginia, October 25th to 27th, 2018, has just ended a rewarding two days of panels, papers and presentations on the theme of performance in 18th century art and life. We were next door to the Shenandoah Shakespeare company (“We do it with the lights on!”), now in its 30th year. Up the street is Mary Baldwin University (once all-women, now co-ed). On Friday night the Shenandoah troop performed George Etheridge’s The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter; on Saturday afternoon, Emma, as adapted from Jane Austen’s novel, by Emma Whipday; and on Saturday night, a rousing Shakespeare’s Richard III.
A scene from the current production of Richard III
Our plenary talk was by Dr Paul Menzer, on aspects of the history of performing ghosts and other problem characters and scenes in Shakespeare. He is Professor and Director at Mary Baldwin University of the MLitt/MFA Shakespeare and Performance graduate program and himself continually actively involved in the Shenandoah program as a director and writer. He and two colleagues, Profs Katherine Turner and Matt Davies also ran a panel on Fielding’s Tom Jones as a vehicle for discussing Shakespeare and 18th century performance, with special attention to Book XVI, Chapter 5 where Jones goes to see Garrick in Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Mrs Miller and Partridge.
David Tennant addressing Yorick’s skull (Gregory Doran 2008 production of Hamlet at the RSC)
On Saturday evening Maestro Robert Mayerovitch of Baldwin-Wallace College, performed a wondrous recital of two symphonies, one by Haydn and the other by Beethoven. The conference theme was performing the 18th century.
Since my paper was not on performance, but rather on Austen’s Bakhtinian use of dialogics in the tone and complex moving themes of Persuasion, I thought I’d download it separately on academia.edu before proceeding to a two blog-essay report on this entertaining conference.
Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Poems (9th edition, 1800)
Matthew Prior, Poems upon Several Occasions (1719)
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 