My Jane Austen Library

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

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

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

Dear friends, readers — lovers of Austen and of books,

Over on my Ellen and Jim have a Blog, Two, I provided the four photos it takes to capture most of my books on and by Anthony Trollope, and explained why. You may also find a remarkably informative article on book ownership in England from medieval times on and what makes up a library. I thought I’d match that blog with a photo of my collection of books by and on Jane Austen, and in her case, books about her family, close friends, specific aspects of her era having to do with her. Seven shelves of books.

I have a second photo of 3 wide shelves filled with my DVD collection (I have 33 of the movies and/or serial TV films), my notebooks of screenplays and studies of these films, as well as books on Austen films of all sorts. These three shelves also contain my books of translations of Austen into French and/or Italian, as well as a numerous sequels, many of which I’ve not had the patience or taste to read but have been given me.

My book collection for Austen is smaller than my own for Trollope because even though I have many more books on her, she wrote only seven novels, left three fragments, some three notebooks of juvenilia, and a remnant of her letters is all that survives. For each of her novels or books I have several editions, but that’s still only seven plus. By contrast, Trollope wrote 47 novels and I won’t go on to detail all his other writing. OTOH, there are fewer books on him, and the movie adaptations of his books are in comparison very few.

There’s no equivalent movie for The Jane Austen Book Club where members vow to read all Jane Austen all the time

So although I won’t go to the absurdity of photographing my many volumes of the periodical Persuasions, and what I have of the Jane Austen Society of Britain bulletin like publications, I can show the little row of books I’m reading just now about her and towards a paper for the Victorian Web.

The project includes reading some Victorian novels written with similar themes, and Henry James’s Spoils of Poynton; for me it is true that Austen is at the center of a group of women (and men too) writers and themes that mean a lot to me, so I have real libraries of other women writers I have read a great deal of and on and have anywhere from two to three shelves of books for and by, sometimes in the forms of folders:

these are Anne Radcliffe (one long and half of a very long bookshelf), Charlotte Smith (two long bookshelfs), Fanny Burney (three, mostly because of different sets of her journals), George Eliot (one long and half of another long bookshelf), Gaskell (two shorter bookshelves), Oliphant (scattered about but probably at least one very long bookshelf). Virginia Woolf is another woman writer for whom I have a considerable library, and of course Anne Finch (where the folders and notebooks take up far more room than any published books).

As with Trollope starting in around the year 2004 I stopped xeroxing articles, and now have countless in digital form in my computer; I also have a few books on Austen digitally. The reason I have so many folders for Smith, Oliphant, Anne Finch (and other women writers before the 18th century) is at one time their books were not available except if I xeroxed a book I was lucky enough to find in a good university or research library. You found your books where you could, went searching in second hand book stores with them in mind too.

One of my favorite poems on re-reading Jane Austen — whom I began reading at age 12, and have never stopped:

“Re-reading Jane”

To women in contemporary voice and dislocation
she is closely invisible, almost an annoyance.
Why do we turn to her sampler squares for solace?
Nothing she saw was free of snobbery or class.
Yet the needlework of those needle eyes . . .
We are pricked to tears by the justice of her violence:
Emma on Box Hill, rude to poor Miss Bates,
by Mr Knightley’s were she your equal in situation —
but consider how far this is from being the case
shamed into compassion, and in shame, a grace.

Or wicked Wickham and selfish pretty Willoughby,
their vice, pure avarice which, displacing love,
defiled the honour marriages should be made of.
She punished them with very silly wives.
Novels of manners! Hymeneal theology!
Six little circles of hell, with attendant humours.
For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbours
And laugh at them in our turn? The philosophy
paused at the door of Mr Bennet’s century;
The Garden of Eden’s still there in the grounds of Pemberley.

The amazing epitaph’s ‘benevolence of heart’
precedes ‘the extraordinary endowments of her mind’
and would have pleased her, who was not unkind.
Dear votary of order, sense, clear art
and irresistible fun, please pitch our lives
outside self-pity we have wrapped them in,
and show us how absurd we’d look to you.
You knew the mischief poetry could do.
Yet when Anne Elliot spoke of its misfortune
to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who
enjoyed it completely, she spoke for you.

—– Anne Stevenson

The Jane Austen Book Club meets in a hospital when a member has a bad accident

Gentle readers, I can hardly wait to see the second season of the new Sanditon on PBS; my daughter, Laura (Anibundel) much involved with WETA (PBS) nowadays, writing reviews and such, who has read the fragment and books about Austen tells me it is another good one.

Chapman’s classic set (appears as Christmas present in Stillman’s Metropolitan): for our first anniversary Jim bought me a copy of Sense and Sensibility in the Chapman set (1924, without the later pastoral cover)

Ellen

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

An eighteenth-century mask

Friends and readers,

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

Supposed to have been written in the Hebrides:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Used for Christmas concerts today

One of two blogs,
Ellen

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“Hardly any women at all:” Jane Austen’s inclusions of women in her History of England

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.

Ellen

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Jane Austen & Anne Sharp: “She is an excellent kind friend”

19th century drawing of imagined woman writer

Friends,

I’ve not created a chronology for an Austen relative or friend for quite a while, but I have one for you today: of the life of Anne Sharp (or Ann Sharpe — the names appear with and without the “e’s” in various sources). I’ve been reading Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney’s A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, & Virginia Woolf. The goal of their book is to ferret out and present as deeply meaningful friendships of famed women writers with other women, which have been neglected, strongly downplayed, or presented in a distorted manner, or not known at all. For Austen they did not choose Martha Lloyd, who might seem the more natural candidate (a lot more known, many more letters, the two lived together on and off for years, traveled together), but the more obscured Anne Sharp, for about two years, a too brief a time for our purposes (but not necessarily her comfort) governess to Fanny Austen Knight, Austen’s niece, at Godmersham. For Charlotte Bronte, not Ellen Nussey whose correspondence and friendship with Charlotte provides the lifeblood of Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte, but Mary Taylor; for George Eliot Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote each other extensively and intimately but never met, and for Virginia Woolf her “frenemy” and colleague for a short while, Katherine Mansfield.

Midorikawa and Sweeney’s book grates on anyone not used to fluff, a sort of “women’s magazine style,” which provides a distorted upbeat tone and often falsifying perspective for many events; worse yet the stories are not told chronologically, and the notes are inadequate or not there. Such as it is, however, they have made a contribution, which may be built upon. There is no implicit sub-textual suggestion these are lesbian friendships (whether overtly sexualized in private or not); unlike Emma Donoghue and others (see also Suzanne Juhasz on Emma in her Romance from the Heart), M&S steer clear of any larger patterns or political statements.  Sometimes they go on and on just about Austen’s activities familiar to anyone who knows anything about her — say in London when she went to picture galleries and spotted her “Jane” but could not find “Elizabeth:” sheer sillyness and a waste of space.  . You might say they aim at the equivalent marketplace niche as Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B Stern did with their ground-breaking Speaking of Austen so many years ago.

So I’ve unraveled their confusing story, corrected a couple of errors (or different interpretations now and again) and added references of my own from Deirdre LeFaye’s works, books I’ve read (among others) on Fanny Austen Knight, Maggie Lane’s JA’s Family, Caroline and Anna Lefroy’s short biographical papers, Lucy Worsley’s JA At Home. What one discovers is strong evidence for an at times close friendship between Sharp and Austen from 1804 until Austen’s death, a friendship thwarted by Austen’s family and then covered up from posterity because they saw Sharp as too low in status for their prestige and the whole relationship as subversive of their conservative heteronormative familial centered way of life.

What is most telling is the lack of evidence for Miss Sharp’s early life, the destruction of both women’s letters, and the obscuring of Austen’s desire to create a female community of like-minded spinster friends. I cannot believe they do not realize that Martha Lloyd was part of the inner sanctum: they dismiss her as kept around because she was so “cheerful!” The text which may be said to explicate what we have of Anne Sharpe’s life and friendship with Jane Austen is Virginia Woolf’s poignantly ironic “The Mysterious Case of Miss M,” from her Memoirs of a Novelist, the “life” story of a spinster before the 20th century about whom the biographer deliberately manages to say nothing at all lest the least whiff of unconventional thought or behavior be attributed to her.

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Godmersham mansion in its park setting today

In February 1773 the only baby to be called Anne Sharp christened in London ecclesiastical records is born; her father is listed as a gardener in Deptford; no street address given just WH. M&S suggest WH is an abbreviation for workhouse.

Sometime late in 1803 Anne Sharp hired to be Fanny Austen Knight’s governess; she is described as “having suffered a bereavement.” M&S found record of woman named Elizabeth Sharp buried in London in April 1803. Could this woman have been Anne’s mother? a sister?

Meanwhile, in spring of 1803 Austen sent a novel called Susan (a version of Northanger Abbey) to Richard Crosby, a publisher, who paid her £10, and she assumed he would publish it

January 23, 1804 Anne Sharp, arrives at Godmersham, this is a Monday, Fanny’s 11th birthday and Anne joins in the family party, which includes an elegant sumptuous breakfast. There are then four young children in this family home: William 6; Lizzy (remarks about her suggest she was seen as “bright” or smart early on); Marianne a toddler, Charles, curly haired carrying a doll around whom he called his wife; and Louisa, a dark eyed very young baby. At school were Henry, Edward and George, all younger than Fanny.

For 6 months Anne Sharp is reading with and teaching Fanny; they go for walks; Miss Sharp is said (from Fanny’s diaries) to secretly work on a play June 19 the children revving up for some festivity with strawberries and cream, but Anne said to be “not quite well.” Next day she loses track of lesson, is grey in color, her legs give way and she faints. She cannot eat the syllabub and cream Fanny brings to her

Anne Sharp has intermittent spells of ill health; M&S say Elizabeth the mother dismissed staff who took to their beds citing illness.

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Green Park Buildings, Bath, it’s thought the Austens lived at the end of the row

January 19, 1805 George Austen dies. Austen brothers offer tiny sums of money compared with what they spend on themselves (James, Henry and Edward), by contrast Frank gives as much as he can afford (numbers in Clery, JA, Banker’s Sister and elsewhere); they move to 25 Gay Street, and Mrs Austen pays a rate on lease for Green Park Buildings. These Buildings were rejected when the family first came to Bath as damp and low. I’ve walked by them and they are on the western fringe, and on a slop going down near the river. When people visit Gay Street, Austen is embarrassed by its “dark” “pokey” rooms.

Fanny’s diary now shows Miss Sharp has gone away from from Godmersham in 1805 during the time the Austens lived in Gay Street. Miss Sharpe leaves March 18th. In April 1805, there are several “mentions” in Austen’s letters of “Miss Sharpe.” Here M&S tell of Le Faye’s note buried in annotations where LeFaye says “clearly” there must be two Anne Sharps because 1) no proof Austen had met Miss Sharpe, and on the grounds Miss Sharp is a sick frail woman (as LeFaye characterizes her disdainfully who could not even care for a 6 year old a couple of months after she left Godmersham; this is a distortion of what happened after Anne Sharp left Godmersham; see below) and “horridly affected” (JEAL’s word).

There are problems: it’s not clear that Miss Sharp was living in Bath itself at the time, and the references to her in Austen’s April 1805 letters don’t quite tell the story M & S want them to tell. They claim Miss Sharp came to stay with the Austens and Jane tried to find her another position.

Gay Street, Bath, today — where Austen lived around the time she knew and Anne Sharp may have visited her

April 9, Gay Street (Letter No 43). Jane Austen records as an apparently intrusive unwelcome visit a Miss Colbourne who owned a girls school in Lansdowne Crescent.” Miss Colbourne has come to check a reference on a servant named “Anne” – that is, this snobbish woman whom Austen says looks around at their house with disdain wants to know if Austen will confirm an Austen letter of recommendation that this servant was good servant. Why would Austen lie to Cassandra? Was the Miss Colbourne actually lured there to see Miss Sharpe in the hope she’d hire her? That is not what is written down.

Then April 23, Gay Street (Letter 44) Austen writes that an “Amelia” is to “take lessons of Miss Sharpe.” Amelia belonged to a genteel Bickerton family. In the same passage Austen records Miss Blachford has come, and that “among so many friends, it will be well if I do not get into a scrape.” We don’t know that Austen was the one who actuated this job, nor why she thinks she could get into a scrape or what Miss Blachford has to do with this. Perhaps Austen fears she will be seen as too friendly with these women? and scolded by her family. Was Miss Sharp living nearby and Miss Blachford a friend living with or near Miss Sharp in a lodging house too.

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On June 19, 1805 began a series of events in the nursery at Godmersham that have often been retold—found in Fanny’s diary and first retold (as far as I know (in Margaret Wilson’s A Third Sister.) That evening Mrs Austen, Jane, Cassandra and two favorite cousins of Fanny, Anna Austen and Fanny Cage arrive at Godmersham. M&S say the Austens intend to look for a cheaper place than Gay Street, which their allowance will not cover.

The governess cancels lessons and all six women are in Fanny’s diary shown catering to her every desire — to the point of a grand ceremony of baptizing one of her dolls. They do go to Canterbury, gather around the family pianoforte, pony rides, inspections of chickens and fresh eggs. M&S tell this story as fun events that “must have bolstered” the Austens’ spirits.

June 26, 1805, five days later, a group of children’s didactic dramas are put on — some of this written by Anne Sharp. Anne Sharp plays the “sergeant,” Jane is Miss Popham a teacher, Cassandra a Miss Teachum (this could be an allusion to to a dour didactic and book on a grim disciplinarian girls’ schools by Sarah Fielding). Mrs Austen is “piewoman” and M&S imagine her with a rolling pin just having the time of her life. Elizabeth, the mother, played a sea-side bathing attendant. Dancing was included – “scotch reels.” So music is played. Later in the day a play known to be by Miss Sharp, Virtue Rewarded is performed. Fanny Cage (an orphan) is Duchess of St Albans, Anna Austen (M&S remind us “the black sheep of the family,” which is unfair, and they don’t say that the stepmother would eventually forbid any more such visits) is “Shepherdess Flora” and Fanny “Fairy Serena.” The scripts were not saved.

The Austen women and cousins stayed another two weeks. One day Miss Sharp has the three young girls chose a gothic novel each and go into the estate grounds to its Folly to read their books. Another day they are sent off with basket of books, papers, and pencils, encouraged to pretend to be gypsies. It’s for a chunk of the day (freeing these adults) as they are given a bottle of water, hunk of bread and cheese.

Next day though Fanny ill, cold, fever, and couldn’t recite her lessons, Elizabeth, the mother catches the complaint and goes to bed for two weeks. M&S think maybe Miss Sharp was blamed.

We can imagine Jane and Anne – and don’t forget Cassandra left to themselves with just two cousins. At least some of the time Jane and Anne might talk, go into the big library (which Austen mentions she loves staying in in later letters and visits to Godmersham). Upon rising from her bed, sister-in-law, who calls the shots, takes Jane to balls, visits, and leaves Jane to stay at Goodnestone with her ailing mother and her paid companion.

Goodnestone Park mansion today

A reference to Miss Sharp occurs in a letter of August 24 (No 45) when Jane is still at Goodnestone Park taking care of Elizabeth’s mother, and writes to Cassandra in Godmersham, that Fanny has been walking with Miss Sharp & Miss Milles, “the happiest being in the world.” It’s not clear who is this happy being. Fanny? Miss Milles. Anne Sharpe came into Goodnestone briefly and impressed the two women favorably: Mrs Knight said Miss Sharp had beauty and Miss Milles found her “judicious” (it seems).

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We may assume that the Austen women had nonetheless had had a good time, one preferable to returning to Bath. They had no place to go which they wanted to live in. So a plan was concocted that they and Edward, Elizabeth, Fanny, Miss Sharp, now with Martha Lloyd to to Worthing later in the summer: a seacoast place “on the other side of the Downs”. Fanny Cage and Anna Austen are now out of the picture (from Fanny’s diaries, later Anna Lefroy remembering and Caroline Austen’s reminiscences). They set off after August 30 when Jane still at Goodnestone (is she being kept away from Anne Sharp or just disliked by Elizabeth) writes Cassandra that “We shall not be at Worthing so soon as we used to talk of, shall we? There will be no evil to us, we are sure of my mother and Martha being happy together.” I suspect that’s ironic and Mrs Austen and Martha did not get along. The note resembles Elizabeth Bennet’s longing to go with her uncle and aunt and having to wait longer than she wanted. Austen did want this time at Worthing – though not Anne Sharpe but Martha is mentioned as coming. It’s here M&S justify Martha’s presence by quoting someone who described Martha as this “cheery” woman.

M&S tell a story for which they have no documentary evidence that the actuating spirit of the trip to Worthing was Jane Austen, that she successfully argued for the inclusion of Anne Sharp on the grounds of Miss Sharp’s illness and migraines. Is this probable? Had Jane ever been listened to before?   Less than six months later, in January 1806 Elizabeth Austen fired Anne Sharp suddenly in the dead of winter, leaving Fanny distraught and shocked in her diary. As with other trips where Martha Lloyd is omitted, JEAL telling of this trip omits Miss Sharp. Martha who was there also omitted.

Worthing Town center today — a holiday beach town

The beach and pier today

They came slowly over the Downs, stayed at Horsebridge for the night, the next day saw Brighton – and M&S imagine what they saw by looking at contemporary tour guides, next day they rent a property and all walk on the sands in the evening. Still five days later Elizabeth and Edward Austen and Fanny leave.

M&S imagine an idyllic time (using contemporary tour guide) for Jane, Anne, Martha, Cassandra — and Mrs Austen too — on the beach, reading, writing and so on together. There is a record Jane won 17 shillings at a raffle one night. 1805 was a year Austen was at work on The Watsons, perhaps rewriting or writing in the first place Lady Susan (Deborah Kaplan, among women has these as mid-career novels). And M&S speculate that at the same time perhaps Anne Sharp produced a revised version of her play — which will be used when she returns to Godmersham in the next December – remember no manuscripts have survived. None of these details in any writing.

They all stay to the first of November. But during this time, Fanny invites a previous governess to come and stay at Godmersham, Dorothy Chapman (surely with her mother’s permission, maybe encouragement). Chapman stays in Anne’s room and there is no record of hours in library or having headaches and taking to her bed the way Miss Sharp did, instead Fanny records in her diaries that Chapman goes gardening with the children. How convenient. They do needlework. Meanwhile Edward had been scaring up a regiment of troops and Trafalgar won in October 1805.

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Looking at the set of letters in Bath 1804-1805, spring 1805 (Bath and Godmersham to Worthing), fall 1805 have repeated references to Martha Lloyd. An especially important comment is Jane’s to Cassandra in April 1805 “I am quite of your opinion of the folly of concealing any longer our partnership with Martha.” When I went through the letters it seemed to me now the brothers were pitching in their little bits, Jane wanted to make a circle of women minus her mother – she wanted to include the Bigg sisters maybe and a couple of other single women. In a later she reports this was utterly squashed; no money unless they lived with the mother.

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Miss Sharp returns, and Fanny and she return to their previous routine. Fanny records that when Miss Sharp returned, she looked “uncommonly well.” To the house 3 days later came a Miss Crowe, a professional “paintress” said to have painted pictures of Fanny and her governess, which have not survived. Fanny didn’t like them. “We are all quite sick of Miss Crowe’s pictures.” They are all “detestable,” Fanny says the one of herself is most like her, but the one of Miss Sharp makes her look “silly,” with “sleepy eyes, a “mumped up mouth.” These are pictures “fit for nothing but to be thrown in the fire”

The diaries record that just then – a few days after her return — Miss Sharp’s migraines reached a peak; when the painter left, the family actually called for a specialist doctor, Mr Lascelles and he advised measures requiring his presence (and payment) for 7 days. He was a quack; there were men in the 1790s who knew much better than these torturous techniques and useless compounds. e made her much worse – absolute torture techniques, she did get to have a room to herself as Fanny moved into her mother’s downstairs’ closet.

November 1805: the quack doctor Lascelles actually sews a blister onto the poor woman’s neck, this seems to have lasted until December. M&S says the most recent baby’s birthday (without naming which one, Louisa born May 1805) and that cannot be since Anne Sharp was abruptly fired in January 1806, but also the most recent baby making noise and walking so that would be the 8th to 9th month baby, Louisa. Before December Anne Sharp’s treatment is over and she is expected to resume sleeping with Fanny and teaching.

In December Anne Sharp with the children put on a series of “theatricals’, there are these Christmas style games, Fanny enjoys acting these plays, but says in her diary that they are “too long to be detailed,” but she had “given an account of them as a piece of paper to be found in the pocket of this book.” M&S says there is no manuscript catalogued but hidden within Fanny’s “tiny calfskin books” is a glued document that contains a detailed account of these theatricals.

Alas M&S do not describe these secreted-away plays at all.

They also acted a short play called Alfred (printed in Evenings at Home), a patriotic drama about Alfred the Great, then a scene from John Home’s Douglas (as the Bertram family in MP did). Recitations from poetry annals and then tea and then lottery. Fanny goes to bed happy thinking all well “pieces were performed uncommonly well as we were afterwards told.”

Another theatrical by Anne Sharp planned for January 4, 1806, this one still extant glued by Fanny inside a Daily Lady’s Companion. Anne now called “Anny” by Fanny told the girl not to show the play to her parents. Anne embroidered the costumes, the mother and her sisters agreed to play musical accompaniments; servants invited, and again more recitations from Christmas. Play now renamed Pride Punished or Innocence Rewarded.

A week later (!) Miss Sharp is fired. Fanny distraught. She was told to regard this as “a disagreeable ceremony” but wrote to former governess, Miss Chapman, she could “I hardly know how I shall bear it, she has been so long with us & uncommonly kind to me.” LeFaye disdainfully attributes this firing to Anne Sharp’s ill health, saying she could not last caring for a single 6 year old for her next job, but in fact what happened was she was switched to care for a very frail ill older woman, a much harder continuous task. Kentish Austen simply cite “ill health.”

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Mid-20th century photo of Trim Street

By March 1806 Miss Sharp was a governess for a 6 year old daughter of a Mrs Raikes. January 1806 our Austens reduced to Trim Street, so small Martha Lloyd is not living with them, so they cannot help Anne Sharp. M&S do not repeat LeFaye’s sneer but just say by spring 1806 Miss Sharp is required to work as paid companion to Mrs Raike’s unmarried sister (called “frail”), one Miss Bailey, living in Hinckley in midlands, a market town.

In July (2nd) Austens leave Trim Street for Clifton, and she writes a poem to Martha Lloyd who is now off to Harrogate (so she had stayed in Trim Street some of the time) – it’s about how a Mr Best has disappointed Martha in not even flirting with her; and then one of her most felicitous performances in verse upon Frank and Mary marrying. Then the women, Mrs Austen and her two daughters travel about relative to relative, at one point without Martha going to Adlestrop arriving in early August 1806, the 5th, because frantically aggrandizing relative, Thomas Leigh, trying to stake a claim to Stoneleigh. Mrs Austen writes a letter whose details anticipate Northanger Abbey.

1806 December or 1807 January the three Austen women and Martha Lloyd and Frank’s first wife, Mary are living in Castle Square, Southampton – rescued by Frank.

Now during this time Anne Sharp and Austen write to one another. Very very irritating is that M&S don’t tell of each and every reference. Instead we are told that Austen wrote Anne when Elizabeth died, October 10, 1808, but no specific letter cited, no date, nothing of how they know this. looked into Austen’s 1808 letters and found several references to Miss Sharp showing an on-going correspondence. For example, this, a longer one, showing Austen concerned about her friend’s employment.

2 October 1808, from Castle Hill, Southampton Austen writes to Cassandra. “I have heard today from Miss Sharpe, & find that she returns with Miss B to Hinckley & will continue there until Christmas, when she thinks they may both travel southward. – Miss B however is probably to make only a temporary absence from Mr Chessrye, & I shd not wonder if Miss Sharpe were to continue with her; — unless anything more eligible offer, she certainly will. She describes Miss B as very anxious she should do so” (p 141, 3rd edition)

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Chawton cottage, recent photo

Less than 2 weeks after Elizabeth dies, Edward offers to find a lifelong residence on one of many properties to his mother and sisters; they chose former bailiff’s cottage at Chawton, in Hampshire, big enough for Martha Lloyd to join them.

We are told by M&S about continuing correspondence but again no dates, no pages, no years. While Austen at long last writing and publishing S&S (M&S call this a novel about a neglectful brother and sister-in-law), October 1811, Miss Sharp told Austen about how Miss Bailey requires her full time ministrations, her terrible headaches continue, also eyestrain. Sounds like Austen’s own complaints, but also her reasons for not writing the way her friend is. Anne resorts to quackery: cuts her hair again and attaches electrodes to her skull. Fanny’s diary: “Anne’s “eyes have been worse than ever, & she had all her air cut off, & continual blisters on her head all to no purpose.” Perhaps April 1811, no clear annotation.

A proposed visit a month later is frustrated: Jane proposes Anne visit May 1811 when some house-guests cancelled, and calls this “magnificent project.” Anne had a holiday leave. Jane writes Cassandra and Martha “by return of post if you have any reason for wishing it not done . I shall consider Silence as Consent.” They were not silent: “I have given up all idea of Miss Sharpe’s traveling with you & Martha, for tho’ you both all compliance with my scheme, ye as you knock off a week from the end of the visit, & Martha rather more from the beginning the thing is out of the question” (see letter 74-75, 3rd edition, pp 190-93).

[I remember visiting my mother one year and her playing tricks like this; oh yes she wanted to go to this museum but first we had to do this and then that and then it’s 4 o’clock, alas too late. I had seen her do that to my father and left for my own home the next day.]

The question is why Jane asked – why not just invite? Because Miss Sharp needed a way to come and she, Jane, needed permission to offer the space. How helpless against these obstacles this pair are; they cannot even experience the joy of a congenial friend ….

Still August 1811 (3 months later) – a throwaway line in Mary Lloyd’s pocketbook says Anne was staying in Chawton Cottage. Miss Sharp had secured a place with a Lady Pilkington and her four children, in a fancier rich house than Godmersham: Chevet Hall in Yorkshire. Anyway she is there with Jane at Chawton as S&S about to be published. M&S think Cassandra, Martha and Mrs Austen allowed Anne Sharp to come because this was a rise is status …

November 1813 Anne sends a letter of congratulation after publication of P&P published January 1813; and Austen writes: “I have more of such sweet flattery from Miss Sharpe! – she is an excellent kind friend.” (Letter 95, p 250, 3rd edition)

Spring 1814: MP was published May 1814, and M&S surmise Austen asks Anne to send an assessment of MP – there is no explanatory note beyond the BL ms, printed in Chapman, JA: Minor Works, as Opinions of MP, p 432. I can hear Austen’s voice as the one copying these out: “I think it excellent — & of its good sense & moral Tendency there can be no doubt. – Your characters are drawn to the Life – so very very natural & just – but as you beg me to be perfectly honest, I must confess I prefer P&P (p 434).

June 1814: Jane from London to Cassandra: how she wishes Anne’s employer’s brother in law, Sir Wm Pilkington would propose to Anne (Letter 102, p 265, 3rd edition)

June 1815, a year later: Anne “certainly” at Chawton cottage (from a typical word and note in LeFaye, Chronology, p 573)

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A copy of the first edition of Emma

February 1816 (Emma published May 1814) Anne receives her copy of Emma after December 1815 (LeFaye, Chronology, p 525) – she gave this book to two friends and they passed them down and so we have the book today. Anne paid to cover her copy with “just enough calfskin for the spines and corners.”

September 1816: surprisingly back-bitingcomment about Anne Sharp by Austen to Cassandra: JA has received “quite one of her letters” (Letter 145). JA is irritable with bad back pain, and Jane’s remarks about Anne follow upon describing Ms Perigord’s melancholy letter of Paris, and this tone suggests empathy also, though at the end Austen shows herself weary of this ever-looking-on-the-bright side and attributing goodness to people: Miss Sharpe is “obliged to exert herself – more than ever – in a more distressing harassed state — & has met with another excellent old Physician, & his Wife, with every virtue under heaven, who takes to her & cures her from pure Love & Benevolence … “ Anne might have relied too much on doctors, and Jane now needing one that didn’t exist as yet (who could help against her disease) has has enough of this kind of remark (p 321, 3rd edition).

Austen copies out “Opinions of Emma – this time the entries are much shorter. From Miss Sharp: “better than MP – but not so well as P&P – pleased with the heroine for her Originality, delighted with Mr K — & called Mrs Elton beyond praise – dissatisfied with Jane Fairfax” (Chapman, Minor Works, p 436)

May 22, 1817, the one letter we have from Jane to Anne, M&S, p 57 (Letter 159, pp 340-41) – not a candid letter say M&S; still it has that “Galigai de Concini forever remark …. And by the end Jane Austen is bidding adieu to this friend. From LeFaye’s note in Letters, p 572; letter went to South Parade, Yorkshire where there was a boarding school run by Miss Haugh. So Miss Sharp working as a teacher in a boarding school.

See text printed out and exegesis: https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2014/06/29/austen-letter-159-to-anne-sharpe-thurs-22-may-1817-chawton-to-doncaster/

College Street, Winchester, where Jane was headed for, the last house she lived in, died there

28 July 1817, CEA NO 2, Cassandra’s grudging letter, p 346:

See text printed out and exegesis: https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/cassandras-2nd-letter-on-janes-death-to-anne-sharp-mon-28-july-1817/

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August 1820 according to laconic note by Mary Austen, Anne visited Chawton cottage and Cassandra. LeFaye: she was still there in September when JEAL met her and mocked her as “horridly affected” but “most amusing.” LeFaye again presents theory about two Miss Sharps, one in Bath different from the one who visits …

By 1823 Anne Sharp has set up boarding school for girls 14-15, on Everton Terrace, high street in Liverpool; from the place one can see across to River Mersley to Birkenhead and beyond. Anne kept this up for 18 years, that is, until 1841 when she retired to York Terrace, Everton. An 1841 census said she employed three teachers, three servants, eleven girls in her school. So an independent woman!

1843: the year that Cassandra destroyed the majority of Austen’s letters she left a will and £30 to Anne Sharp, then aged 70

January 8 1853, Anne Sharp dies, buried in Everton churchyard (in a vault?).

In 1926 the first publication by Chapman in TLS of Austen’s letter to Anne Sharp (now No 159, 22 May 1817) to Anne Sharpe; and Cassandra’s brief to Anne Sharp (now CEA 2, 28 July 1817).

In response Times prints a letter from Mrs Creaghe-Howard of Ottery St May, who wrote: “she was very reticent about her early life before coming to Liverpool, and also made a mystery of her age.” Not a kind statement, casting an aspersion on a working woman who acknowledged no family

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There is a sort of mystery here, perhaps something deliberately hidden, never written down: how did Miss Sharpe become an educated woman. She had to have been to be hired at these expensive country house estates, and later in life run a boarding school herself. We basically know nothing beyond the minimum of birth, perhaps death of her mother shortly before she appears at Godmersham. No documents, no explanations written down.

Unlike for Martha Lloyd, I see no evidence for any kind of homoerotic relationship between Jane Austen and Anne Sharp. It may be they never had an intimate enough one-on-one relationship for a long enough time together. What I see from Austen’s tones to Anne and about her (except the one letter late in 1816) is a deeply congenial friendship. They were drawn to one another’s natures. Anne Sharp sympathized deeply with Austen as a writer as well as reader. It seem to me semi-tragic that the economic bases of their existence and Austen’s family prevented them from (or refused to help them achieve) a way of living nearer to one another and spending more of their existences together.

I am again drawn to Austen’s allusive comment to Miss Sharp about the court case. “Galigai de Concini for ever & ever.” Chapman says it’s a reference to a devastating story of a woman burned to death who asked what she had used on her mistress to “charm” her (the mistress was getting back at this poor woman), answered the power of strong souls over weak. I wish I knew the Voltaire contextual letter: he would be telling the story with sardonic irony perhaps. The full context is at least a story of court intrigue and a woman sacrificed as a scapegoat (see Marie de Medici, wikipedia). This was a kind of shared motto for these two women: the source is as revealing as the surface content. They seem themselves as strong-minded women. But here we have a strong-minded maid of honor at court burnt to death as a witch. Their strength may influences weakness, but with such strength they may garner envy and blame and be at high risk of destruction you are powerless to avoid or escape from. We must not press this dark conclusion too strongly; perhaps Austen meant only to refer to the power of strong minds; if so, unconsciously, writing swiftly and near death, she is undercutting the idea that strength of personality allows women to win out over others in life.

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JASNA 2017, at Huntington Beach Hotel: an Austen watershed, donor, the fandom — and my own story

Chawton House — somber photo (the way the house looks today)

The Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach hotel — patio and lounge

Dear friends and readers,

One last report about the JASNA 2017 held at a Huntington Beach hotel. I’ve one session, a lecture, and an interview-talk group held during the ball to cover, which I’ll add to (as I did in two of the other reports) with related material from one of the recent books about the worlds of people forming around Austen’s name, and texts; houses, relics and sites de memoire, writing scholarship, sequels, making films:Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites. Her book enables us to ask a fundamental question about the people who form Jane Austen’s followers, who have through their earnestness of approach, true belief in Austen’s “greatness” or their view of her, said she and her books have functioned centrally in their lives. To see this almost unbelievable truth can make more serious the existence of this cornucopia of scholarship, sequels, heritage behavior, and events as a result of Austen’s celebrity.

Virginia Woolf laughed at the fanaticism of “certain elderly gentleman” in upper echelon neighborhoods in London and said she had to take care not to offend them by what she had to say about their favorite female author (perhaps the only female they read). But she does not explain it. I end on my own journey through life with Austen as a sustaining presence and her books as what have never failed me, and my own theory about a code in them. The first book I’ll discuss was written by two British novelists during World War II, a horrific catastrophe coming out of the worst impulses of humanity, and one could look at as touching because Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B. Stern seem sincerely to believe and act on the idea that Austen’s texts if probably understood form a bulwark against seeing and/or experiencing the full evil of the world.

First edition

Saturday afternoon Annette LeClair in her “In and Out of Foxholes: Talking of Jane Austen During and After World War II,” discussed a bellwether book, Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern’s Speaking of Jane Austen. I wrote a thorough summary and assessment of Kaye-Smith and Stern some years ago now; LeClair differed from me in that she contextualized K-S and Stern by other 1930s and 40s critical reactions. First Kipling’s “The Janeites,” arguing that an analogous perspective on Austen as refuge and support was first described in this semi-parodic endorsement. E.M. Forster began this way, but after he read Chapman’s unabridged and uncensored edition of Austen’s letters, he found himself alienated from the narrow, snobbish, and spinsterish mind in the letters. Ms. LeClair did not counter this view by saying (as I have done), remember most are to Cassandra, written to please, impress, and interest her, plus she destroyed what she thought might hurt her sister’s and/or family’s reputation. So the letter mirror Cassandra more than Jane. We learned about collectors, scrapbooks, libraries bombed and flooded out; during WW II committees sent books to the troops: Pride and Prejudice was one of these. 1944 brings us K-S and Stern; Ms LeClair found a “diversity of topics,” Austen treated with respect, but she denied any gender faultline in what they wrote (!),and did not differentiate their books from others at the time or more recently. It seemed the books attracted attention because they were all there were at the time book-length. This is not quite true: a vast Austen industry did not exist, but Mary Lascelles on the art of Austen’s books, D. W. Harding’s essays. These were harbingers of what was to come in the 1960s, e.g., J. Walton Litz on Austen’s art, Murdock on her vision. She did talk of emails on Austen-l about Stern and K-S and I saw one of mine put on screen, but LeClair did not read these aloud or say who wrote them or what they were precisely about.

The 18th century printing press brought along looked like this

Hard upon this was a lecture and demonstration of how books were printed during Austen’s era by Mark Barbour of the International Printing Museum in Carson, California. Mr Barbour took us through the history of printing from inception (1450) to shortly after Austen published her books. I’d never seen a demonstration using one of these presses before, and he provided much information about paper, how multiple pages are printed at a time, were interwoven, what were the costs of printing, typical numbers printed, what profits were made, and then a brief summary of Austen’s dealings for the four books she brought out in her lifetime, and the posthumous novels and biographical published by Henry and Cassandra a year after she died. These are readily available in a number of sources, Jan Fergus’s book is the most thorough and concise I know of.

During the ball, there were two events in another room. The one I attended was intended to be a panel of fan fiction writers, with Diana Birchall as moderator. What emerged was Diana talking to the group of people (fairly large) who made up the audience. The topic became what kinds of sequels (or post-texts) there are, which books is most re-written or expanded (Pride and Prejudice), and what kinds of sequels characteristically produce the best books. For me the last question made for the most content-rich and revealing replies, though it seemed a continuation (say Diana’s own Mrs Darcy’s Dilemma and P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley) was as likely to be strong as a wholly new invented book (Cindy Jones’s My Jane Austen Summer, Kathleen Flynn’s The Jane Austen Project) as modernizing rewrites (Joanna Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility) or rewrites from another or questioning perspective (Jo Baker’s Longbourn).

Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood and Gregg Wise as John Willoughby suddenly unexpectedly finding themselves partners at the assemble ball in the 1995 S&S (perhaps it’s not irrelevant to say they fell in love during this movie and have been married happily enough ever after since)

I always enjoy the kind of dancing done during Austen’s era, and left the panel for the ball (where I danced for a couple of hours); and was sorry I and Izzy couldn’t stay for Richard Knight’s history of the Chawton estate from he Knight family’s point of view (it was the Knights who adopted Edward Austen enabling him and his heirs to inherit Chawton and Godmersham), which he briefly anticipated during the dinner. Again on papers I wish I had heard and somehow overlooked: as I’ve written and delivered a paper on widows and widowers in Austen’s fiction and family, for Saturday I regret missing Jackie Mijares’s talk (apparently) on how Austen characterizes widows and widowhood, portrays dependence and independence, and uses widows “to facilitate action.” Probably the title, “Mrs Jennings & Company: Husbands in Paradise” misled me; Sara Bowen’s “Writing on Austen’s Coattails in the 1930s: Angela Thirkell and the Austen revival” was about Thirkell’s work; sometimes seen as continuations of Anthony Trollope in a narrower veing (schools for example), these are novels which feed as much on the desire for more texts by or in the Austen vein as do the sequels, post-texts, variations and movie and play adaptations.

On the whole it was a very rich conference which covered many aspects of Austen’s work, life, era, and (especially) legacies. As usual, I wish there had been twice as many sessions, so only four papers were on against one another, making for less free or (for me) empty time. If they would begin officially on Thursday instead of Friday, and organize Sunday so that the earlier morning (before “brunch”) had sessions, this could easily be accomplished without disturbing the “sorority party” atmosphere, inconveniencing or making for conflicts for the private parties and networking that does on (which I take no part in), or interfere with the tours (which begin on Monday and carry on to the following Monday). Still this time the excellent special lectures and late night talks and activities (the movie with Whit Stillman as introducer) made up for this wastage. I missed the semi-serious participatory singing around a piano we enjoyed in Montreal one night (and remember occurred in Portland). Those were good inclusive moments.

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Staged, colored promotional shot of David Rintoul and Elizabeth Garvie as Darcy and Elizabeth (1979 BBC P&P, scripted Fay Weldon) — this is said to be Sandy Lerner’s favorite Austen film

Richard Knight and Sandy Lerner

I’ll conclude with with two stories, the first about someone who because of her immense wealth and/or income and willingness to build and to fund a new Austen institution is now an important person in the kinds of histories of the “Austen aftermath” this conference centered on. She is also someone others want to meet and who can get famous people to come to her when she wants them to. And Sandy Lerner is a fan wedded to her conception of Austen (as opposed to others), a personal view that has functioned centrally in some choices in life she’s made. She forms a whole chapter (“Sandy’s Pemberley,” pp.45-64) in Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites (Mariner Books, 2015): this is a very readable “journey” through the “fandom” surrounding Jane Austen, mostly found through the Internet, going to conferences and festivals and interviewing people (Yaffe is a journalist); she sought after named or somewhat well-known listserv owners, bloggers, published post-text writers, whatever actors or people involved with films she could get to talk to her, scholars she could send up, or writers on the Net who have made a splash or seem to stand out for peculiar or “outlier” ideas (Arnie Perlstein gets almost a whole chapter, “The Jane Austen Code,” pp 216-37). She presents her as a quietly fervent — and reasonable — fan since she was a teenager.

Sandy Lerner’s story as told by Yaffe 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. Tremendous thrills.

The house rented to use as Longbourn for the 1995 P&P (scripted Andrew Davies — a older woman needed the money and lived upstairs in a sort of attic while the filming went on all over the place)

I am told as of this year Lerner has in the same spirit in whch she got rid of her cosmetics company (for a big sum) when it went utterly conventional – she tired of it, it grated on her — she has withdrawn (or threatened to) her support of Chawton House, and they will have to find an enormous sum yearly to make up for the gap.

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Izzy, Diana Birchall and myself during a lunchbreak

Yaffe often refers to herself as a humble fan unlike Lerner content to express herself through some “community service,” “modest local efforts;” she satisfies her “acquisitive urges with coffee mugs and tote bags:” “What would I do with an Elizabethan manor house anyway?” (p. 61) I’m not this reasonable. I have satisfied my urge to do something by writing thousands of emails over the past 22 years here on the Net, filled three blogs now with material on Austen, and (connected) the 18th century and women’s art. Ive bought hundreds of Jane Austen books (nearly 500), many editions of novels by her, and a wall of a bookcase and a half of books on her, sequels (not that many of these), DVDs, screenplays, books on her films and stenography notebooks filled with hand-written screenplay and notes from hours, days, weeks, years of watching.

Austen has functioned centrally in my small life too: I believe her character of Elinor Dashwood helped keep me sane and from sucide at age 17. Fanny Price makes me feel I’m not alone; the world is filled with others like me, or at least one other who empathizes: her author-creator. I can move beyond, put aside my wretchedness over my disabled psychological state when I lose myself in her books, watch some of the movies. I’ve made a few friends through my obsession — though I often find these JASNA AGMS places I feel and am much alone in (as I would be had I ever been invited to be in any sorority). I’ve played in my car audiotapes and CDS so many times and with such passion that my younger daughter, Isobel, is a genuine fan, has herself written much fan-fiction published here on the Net. She once attempted to publish a book which incorporated part of the Sense and Sensibility plot-design.

And I have a theory too: that in all the novels but Persuasion, Tuesday functions in the calendars as a day when crucial, often humiliating life-transforming events happen (This includes two of the fragments, Lady Susan and The Watsons). I must write a book too — if I can ever find a publisher, though mind would have a shorter title than Arnie Perlstein’s: it’d be called “The Important Tuesday.” The whole purpose of my doing my timelines was to show to the world how serious Tuesday is in Austen. Another hidden code no one but me wants to take seriously. Perhaps someday I’ll get up the courage to propose a paper at a JASNA AGM on the topic of Tuesdays in Austen. I don’t because I fear ridicule, find being laughed at emotionally painful so don’t think I could do it. But perhaps my proposal would be rejected; a couple of those I’ve offered have been, e.g. “Disquieting Patterns in Jane Austen” (on parallels between her and other spinster-sisters like Dorothy Wordsworth), “The Value and Centrality of Jane Austen’s letters” (where we find frankly stated the brutality of the world towards women, something crucially implicit in the books) . This thought could embolden me.

Enough,
Ellen

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Videos of A Song for Austen; an opera; those Magical time-travellers Constance & Ellen Hill

Deane House: a slightly antiqued reprint of Ellen Hill’s illustration

Dear friends and readers,

I assume none of us has forgotten this year’s 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, with its outpouring of books, meetings, events, including lectures, parades, dances. I wrote no less than three blogs, one on the books and reviews published on and round that day, and Austen’s own last lines, in her novels, and that last week she lived one final parting shot (an ironic poem), the discovery that a picture long known is of Austen’s aunt Philadelphia, cousin Eliza, the aunt’s husband and Eliza’s legal father, Saul Hancock, and the maid, Clarinda, and the first where I sent along Chris Brindle’s poem and “Song for Jane.”

This evening I’ve two videos to share, one of Clara Chevallerau singing Chris’s song with herself in iconic places in Bath:

The other the Annual Jane Austen Festival Regency Parade, Bath, for this 200th year:

Chris is the author of the script and the director of the filmed play for Sanditon based on Austen’s fragment and her niece, Anna Lefroy’s continuation. Chris writes about the filming and Clara. She is “an intelligent girl; from Switzerland she speaks French, English, German and Spanish fluently. Only 20 she has already toured Europe and the USA in musical theatre productions. She read Pride & Prejudice at School (in English) and carried on to read Sense and Sensibility.
I wrote all the lyrics for the song, apart from the French chorus which is pretty much a literal translation of the English. Clara contributed:-

“Comment une jeune enfant, fille de vicaire
Née dans un petit village du Hampshire
A pu autant, changé la face de cette terre”

The filming took place in a day. I had caught the 6.30 from Colchester and had met Clara at Paddington and together we caught the 8.30 to Bath getting there at 10 o’clock. We caught the 5.43 back. I was carrying the guitar, my camera and a tripod, whilst Clara carried a bag which seemed to contain half her wardrobe. I had my phone and a bluetooth speaker and through that we played the song which Clara sang along to in numerous relevant locations. The glory of doing this is all the little incidents that you capture quite by accident.

You see all the tourists enjoying Bath in large part because of the association with Jane Austen, and which Clara sings with the Pulteney Street Bridge in the background, through which the Austens would have walked into town from their house at 4 Sydney Place.”

The reader may also want to know about a new opera adapted from Mansfield Park: in The Guardian Jonathan Dove explains the sources from Austen’s novel of his inspiration

To me, her reticence invited music, a way of revealing those hidden emotions.

Two scenes stood out as especially poignant – and musical.

In the first, Fanny’s beloved Edmund is distracted and entranced by the vivacious Mary Crawford, but one evening he joins Fanny to gaze out of the window at the stars. Fanny is overjoyed – but then Mary starts to sing, and Edmund is drawn back into the room away from the window where Fanny now stands alone, looking out into the night.

This follows a scene in which Fanny – alone, seated on a bench – helplessly watches Edmund as he walks off to explore a wilderness beyond the garden with Mary Crawford.

These scenes have haunted me for years

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/11/the-silence-of-the-lamb-opera-jane-austen-mansfield-park-fanny-price

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I’m just now reading one of the books reviewed at the time: Devoney’s Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen in order to review it for an academic periodical. Physically, the hardback is a beautiful book, good paper, sewn signatures, with good illustrations. As I do when I take a book seriously, I’m going to follow Looser on some of her trails. Most of the reviews remained on a level of generality where they did not tell the specifics of her arguments so that’s one way I can differ. Her tone (by-the-way) is anything but snarky or belligerent in the way of Helen Kelly in her JA: Secret Radical; Looser projects such generosity, benignity and charity to all, she makes the reader who might complain (or differ irritatedly) into someone grumpy.

In her first chapter, she adds a third text to the crucial early ones shaping the Janeite view of Austen first announced in modern terms by G. B. Stern and Sheila Kaye-Smith in their first published departure from male academic critics’ high-minded close-reading of the generally moral thematic kind, Speaking of Jane Austen: they openly sided with this character and against the other from a woman reader’s point of view; more importantly Austen’s books and the worlds she presented were refuges, sanctuaries. Looser says this began with two we know well (the “usual suspects”), James-Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir ofh his aunt, and the sanitized, cut, rearranged presentation of her correspondence by Lord Edward Brabourne, the son of her niece, Fanny Austen Knight. But Looser insists there was a third: Constance and Ellen Hill’s Jane Austen: Her Home and Her Friends. The book is by both sisters, Constance wrote the text, and Ellen drew the crucial picturesque illustrations.

Looser does sort of dismiss Margaret Oliphant’s keenly insightful review of JEAL which anticipates some of the arguments D.W. Harding was to make in his transformative “Regulated Hatred” (a paper published in Scrutiny): Oliphant understood Austen’s text clearly as acid; the work of a sharp satirist and skeptical female. I think Oliphant important but I agree her review was not influential. (It was only reprinted and noticed after Southern published his Jane Austen’s Heritage two volumes.)

Looser claims the Hill book was innovative, original — went beyond the family view — because they visited the places Austen lived in, visited, and they read original sources (borrowed manuscripts from the family). They were trying to evoke the past for us to enter into and picture places perhaps we have not the money or wherewithal to go to. In lieu of photos lovely picturesque illustrations. This is before cameras became so ubiquitous. Looser says they invented the term “Austen-land” (used recently by Shannon Hale in her book and then the film adaptation).

So I began the book. The Hill’s opening chapter shows the ploy. They are tracing the footsteps of the Austen ghosts: where did Mr and Mrs Austen drive that first night they were married. Ellen and Constance are seeking Steventon. But the sky darkens. There is no roadway, no map. Nothing where Steventon was either. The place they are told they can stay at has no room. But wait, the people suggest another, an inn in Deane! Was not Deane a place Austen stayed at? It’s nighttime but they forge on. You see all the world is good and all is right with the world now. They have trouble finding this place too, but not to worry, again they encounter good people who are eager to take them in. When this happens they know they have arrived in Austen-land.

Their destination: the pump where the vicarage stood (as drawn by Ellen in the original book)

The Hill sisters go beyond reinforcing JEAL; they are turning his view into something magical magical. This is time-traveling criticism. And it has been influential in anticipating a whole way of picturing Austenland.

Again a fan has worked on one of Ellen Hill’s illustrations: Ellen had pictures Manydown Park in the snow in the evening from the side; here it has been made more dramatic:

And of course I hope my reader will not define me as grumpy when I inject a note of somber realism: the 1790s was a period of severe repression of any political movement for social justice and equality in England, pressings were frequent and massive (read Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers), mutinies punished harshly, the life of the average person, from whom Austen was not and never wanted to be immune was hard long working hours for a subsidence existence, women had no rights under the law and by custom. See Carolyn Steedman’s Labours Lost on the working livese of women in this era and until the mid-20th century. Let us not forget the Hills’ Austenland was a fantasy then too. Photographs (were there any) could have shown this. Those are real 21st century people walking in that Jane Austen parade got up somewhat incongruously in an attempt to wear styles from another era.

Ellen who loves pictures

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On the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death: Last lines

Cassandra’s drawing of Jane — close-up

“We are all offending every moment of our lives.” — Marianne Dashwood, Austen’s S&S

“We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing” — Elizabeth Bennet, Austen’s P&P

Sitting with her on Sunday evening—a wet Sunday evening, the very time of all others when, if a friend is at hand, the heart must be opened, and everything told…” Edmund from Austen’s MP

“She regained the street — happy in this, that though much had been forced on her against her will, though she had in fact heard the whole substance of Jane Fairfax’s letter, she had been able to escape the letter itself.” Emma from Austen’s Emma

My dear Alicia, of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a man of his age! — just old enough to be formal, ungovernable and to have the gout — too old to be agreeable, and too young to die … May the next gouty Attack be more favourable — Lady Susan from Austen’s Lady Susan

But why he should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable! How were people, at that rate, to be understood? …. Catherine Morland from Austen’s NA

One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering….’ Anne Elliot from Austen’s Persuasion

Friends,

July 18th, 1817: Not, one might think, an occasion for happy commemoration. On that day a relatively young woman ended a long painful period of dying (dying is hard work), in bad pain (opium could not cope with it except as dope), cradled in the arms of her loving sister, a close friend, Martha Lloyd, and relatives near by. She had managed to publish but four novels, and no matter how fine, there were so many more she could have written or drawn from her stores of fragments. Two came out the next year, posthumously, one clearly truncated (Persuasion), the other not in a satisfying state according to Austen herself (Northanger Abbey). (Titles given by her brother and said sister.) She had been writing for 21 years at least before her first novel was published — Sense and Sensibility, by herself with money saved up and money and help from said brother, Henry and his wife, her beloved cousin, Eliza Austen. After Emma and a couple of unwise (seen in hindsight) decisions, she was just beginning to make money — or there was a hope of it. She was not altogether silenced as her books were reprinted in sets of novels over the 19th century, while over the next 170 years (1951 was the last date for a new text) fragments and letters by her emerged, albeit framed by contexts set up by her family and then academic critics. A sentimental identity was concocted for her by her loving nephew, Edward Austen-Leigh in 1870, in a memoir of her, an important year and publication because his portrait and picturesque edition was the beginning of a wider readership for her novels.

It will be said the poem she is said to have composed on her last days where she wrote: “Behold me immortal,” has been fulfilled. All her extant writings seem to be in print; some are widely read, the major six filmed over and over, and recently a seventh (Lady Susan) and an eighth (Sanditon) added, with influence on many other familial romanes and witty romantic comedies, and from her work, a growing number of appropriations to boot. All written and/or discussed in newsprint, on public media, TV, in conferences as of the utmost importance. Her fictions has been translated into the major languages of the world. Who has not heard of Jane Austen? A New Yorker joke of 30 years ago was a good alibi on the stand was you were writing a biography of Jane Austen. The Bank of England commmemorates her today with a £10 note.

Nonetheless, she had so much life left in her, she was so open to trying new trajectories, looking for new ways to develop her novels (as Persuasion and Sanditon seem to suggest), that the commemoration ought to be done with a sense of loss, of what might have been before us (and her) — as well as acknowledgement of what her journey’s end was. That this is not the tone can be accounted for in numerous ways, but a central one is the phenomenon of celebrity — as it is enacted in her case. For all such individuals, a kind of “ideological magic” (Theodor Adorno’s word) is ignited which may be sold through respected cultural industries’ institutions because it is recognized to confer power on people surrounded by this awe — such a person can get elected to be president of the United States however ill-qualified, or simply be worshipped as genius and each decade his or her identity (biography) reshaped to fit the new decade’s ideas of what is most admirable. That this re-shaping is going on before us can be seen in the various articles that were published in the New Times Book Review on Austen yesterday (on which more below).

For my contribution, for yes I’m pulling my little bandwagon along behind or with the others too, I’m prompted by Diane Reynolds’s fine blog on the first lines in Austen’s fiction.

I thought to myself, What more fitting in thinking how she was cut off, than her last lines? Tracing these in order of publication (so at least we know that there is evidentiary basis for our chronology),

Sense and Sensibility (1811):

Between Barton and Delaford there was that constant communication which strong family affection would naturally dictate; — and among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that, though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.

Pride and Prejudice (1813):

With the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.

Mansfield Park (1814):

On that event they removed to Mansfield; and the Parsonage there, which, under each of its two former owners, Fanny had never been able to approach but with some painful sensation of restraint or alarm, soon grew as dear to her heart, and as thoroughly perfect in her eyes, as everything else within the view and patronage of Mansfield Park had long been.

Emma (1815):

The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade; and Mrs. Elton, from the particulars detailed by her husband, thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own. — “Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! — Selina would stare when she heard of it.” — But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.

Northanger Abbey (1817):

To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen is to do pretty well; and professing myself moreover convinced that the general’s unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their knowledge of each other, and adding strength to their attachment, I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.

Persuasion (1817):

His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish that Tenderness less; the dread of a future War all that could dim her Sunshine. — She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance.

Lady Susan (1871)

For myself, I confess that I can pity only Miss Mainwaring; who, coming to town, and putting herself to an expense in clothes which impoverished her for two years, on purpose to secure him, was defrauded of her due by a woman ten years older than herself.

The Watsons (1871):

As for me, I shall be no worse off without you, than I have been used to be; but poor Margaret’s disagreeable ways are new to you, and the would vex you more than you think for, if you stay at home —
    Emma was of course un-influenced, except to a greater esteem for Elizabeth, by such representations — and the visitors departed without her.

Love and Friendship (1922)

Philippa has long paid the Debt of Nature, her Husband however still continues to drive the Stage-Coach from Edinburgh to Sterling: — Adieu my Dearest Marianne, Laura

Sanditon (1925)

And as Lady Denham was not there, Charlotte had leisure to look about her and to be told by Mrs. Parker that the whole-length portrait of a stately gentleman which, placed over the mantelpiece, caught the eye immediately, was the picture of Sir Henry Denham; and that one among many miniatures in another part of the room, little conspicuous, represented Mr. Hollis, poor Mr. Hollis! It was impossible not to feel him hardly used: to be obliged to stand back in his own house and see the best place by the fire constantly occupied by Sir Harry Denham.

Catherine, or The Bower (1951)

A company of strolling players in their way from some Neighboring Races having opened a temporary Theater there, Mrs Percival was prevailed on by her Niece to indulge her by attending the performance once during their stay — Mrs Percival insisting on paying Miss Dudley the compliment of inviting her to join the party when a new difficulty arose.

If we pay attention just to these last lines, we do not see the ironist and satirist primarily. Yes there is a barb in the Sense and Sensibility line; and the ending of Emma brings us yet another exposure of the complacent shallowness of Mrs Elton’s moral stupidity (she does though have the last word); however muted, some hard ironies in Lady Susan, plangent ones in Sanditon. In a novelist supposed to pass over death, two have direct allusions to death (fear of widowhood for Anne Elliot, a more pragmatic re-enacting of life now without the partner). If we cheat just a little and go back one sentence we begin to darker emotional ironies: Elizabeth Watson will stay in a seethingly bitter home so Emma can visit a brother not keen to have her. Go back two or three paragraphs, and we learn for Sense and Sensibility the moral of our story has been:

The whole of Lucy’s behaviour in the affair, and the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held forth as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to self-interest, however its progress may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of time and conscience.

More famously in Mansfield Park:

… Sir Thomas saw repeated, and for ever repeated, reason to rejoice in what he had done for them all, and acknowledge the advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh puts in a final appearance before the happy coda of Pride and Prejudice:

But at length, by Elizabeth’s persuasion, he [Darcy] was prevailed on to overlook the offence, and seek a reconciliation; and, after a little farther resistance on the part of his aunt [Lady Catherine], her resentment gave way, either to her affection for him, or her curiosity to see how his wife conducted herself; and she condescended to wait on them at Pemberley, in spite of that pollution which its woods had received, not merely from the presence of such a mistress, but the visits of her uncle and aunt from the city.

Still, I suggest what we have in these last lines, is coda, resolution, a sense of quiet satisfaction at the way things turned out for the characters (like all of us far less than perfect people) at journey’s end. This continuum of stability, of order, of reasoned perspective is central to what many readers seem to value Jane Austen for still.

According to Cassandra, Austen’s last written lines were:

“Henceforward I’ll triumph in shewing my powers
Shift your race as you will it shall never be dry
The curse upon Venta is July in showers–‘.”

As Hermione Lee in a good book on biographical writing has shown (she is not the only biographer to do this), what is often asserted as the dying person’s last words won’t stand courtroom-like scrutiny. Emotionally involved people have their agendas just as surely any more distanced politicized (as who isn’t?) group of people. And it’s hard to remember or get the emphasis accurately: Cassandra says that towards the end of conscious life Austen said “she wanted nothing but death & some of her words were ‘God grant me patience, Pray for me Oh pray for me” (LeFaye’s edition of Austen’s letters, Cassandra to Fanny Knight, Sunday, 20 July 1817).

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Another portrait of Jane Austen by Cassandra — when she was in good health as may be seen from her strong body (see JA and Food). Some readers/critics complain vociferously that we don’t see her face refusing to recognize this was at the time a trope for absorption in landscape reverie

But, as I mentioned, the usefulness of Jane Austen as icon makes for a ceaseless attempt to get past such texts, peer into them to find what is wanted by the viewer, and pry something new out. I recall how Hamlet did not like being played upon by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Matthew Arnold congratulated Shakespeare that he eluded it: “Other abide our question; thou art free …” Since her nephew’s memoir, Jane Austen has not been so fortunate. And this pronounced phenomenon – the re-invention of Jane Austen as well as an exploration of who these millions of readers are (now recorded in book reading groups and blogs across the Internet) is found across the many publications this year. I’ll confine myself to what was printed in the New York Times Book Review and their Sunday Review for some examples.

The most to the point was John Sutherland’s on Helen Kelly’s JA: Secret Radical: at first he lightly and deftly, but definitely skewers Kelley: he picks out precisely the most untenable of her theses and arguments. I did not know that Kelley trashed Tomalin’s biography (I missed that), Sutherland picks up that as as well how she is deliberately insulting, provocative. One online review I read said she combines blog-style snark and literal readings with academic (sort of) approaches; I know that she misreads in a peculiar way: if we do not see Catherine doing something then she didn’t do it — no novelist conventions are allowed the usual play.

Bu then he says something significant: that the aim of Kelley’s book (as with many other readers who want to turn Austen into a political radical) is ultimately against the Marilyn Butler thesis that Austen is a deep conservative.  The problem here is as with other critics Kelley is dependent on, she no where mentions Butler. But the opposition is important: Butler’s thesis is persuasive and convincing in her first book especially, Romantics, Rebels and Revolutionaries because there Butler analyses at length true radicals in the era against which both Scott and Austen emerge as reactionary. Butler’s thesis fits  William St Clair’s about “the reading nation” that it is no coincidence Scott and Hannah More and Austen a little later were readily available and the likes of Wollstonecraft’s works and Charlotte Smith, Holcroft, &c were not. Butler’s edition of Northanger Abbey remains the best and she wrote the present authoritative ODNB of Austen.

Jane Smiley on Deborah Yaffe, a book about readers and writers of Austen, especially of the common reader kind (“Fandom”), complete with interviews. She is a journalist. Smiley says the second half of Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen contains worthwhile analyses: it is a “book history” book, tracing the literal publications, what they looked like, who bought them. It’s weak on illustrations, but then in the second half she discusses the way Austen has been discussed in the 20th century: by male academics, and then by women readers (Speaking of Jane Austen by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B. Stern is important), and now the new manipulations of her texts. Smiley feels just about all of Paula Byrne’s book on Jane Austen and the theater of the time teaches us in an interesting insightful way: about the theater, when Jane Austen went there, and how the plays of the era relate to her books. From my reading I find Byrne’s claims for sources in specific plays won’t bear scrutiny, but as a book about an aspect of the cultural world of Austen, it’s fascinating. Byrne’s other book (A life in Small Things) explores Jane Austen through small things she left and marginalized texts adds real information and readings of Austen’s life-writing.

Sutherland is followed by an essay by Lizzie Skumick on sequels, the writer and texts in question, Joan Aiken. I have one of them somewhere in my house and remember I found it unreadable. Then a Francesco Moretti like analysis of Jane’s vocabulary using computer cluster technology by Kathleen Flynn (who wrote the JA Project, a time-traveling tale, claiming to unearth further secrets about Austen’s private life and death) and Josh Katz. They find Austen uses many intensives (very, much), lots of abstractions, in fact defies prescriptions for good writing. What then is her magic? they fall back on interpretation (forgetting Sontag who we recall instantly was against interpretation) and argue the tension between appearance and reality, pretense and essence (a good nod to Marvin Mudrick book on irony in Austen: “defense and discovery” were her modes). Moving on, Rahhika Jones reveals no deaths in Austen’s pages while we are reading them — we hear of a stillborn Elliot. But we hear of a number of deaths before the fictions start is the truth. And these deaths are important: Lady Susan’s husband, her support, Mrs Tilney, Eleanor’s, Mr Dashwood — all these set the action and it’s not just a question of property and money. Not content, we get a quiz with “famous” people (small celebrities) who alluded to Austen. Finally on p 16 it gives out.

Not to despair, in the Sunday Review we find Devoney Looser arguing suggestively against the idea that Austen did her major writing on a tiny desk with a handy set of pages to push the little bits of writing under. It does sound improbable as long as you don’t take into consideration she might have done it once in a while when company was expected. Looser is also not keen on the assumption that Austen carried about much of her papers in a writing desk (rather like an ipad). Again it does seem improbable she took them all — but that she took some when she traveled (the way one niece describes) is demonstrated in one of her letters where she talks about a panic when her writing desk with was carried off in another carriage during trip. The desk was rescued.

Some of these revisions of Austen in each era’s image can add much to our knowledge. Such a book is Jan Fergus’s on Austen as an entrepreneurial businesswoman, a professional (a word with many positive vibes) writer. Each must be judged on (my view) on its merits as contributing to sound scholarship (documents explicated using standards of probability and historicism) or ethical insight into Austen’s creative work.

Susan Sontag in several of her essays on the relationship of art (especially photography) and life (especially the representation of pain, of illness) asks of works of art, that they advance our understanding of the real. Do they instead conceal reality under the cover of sentimental versions of what probably didn’t happen or not that way. Austen’s own fervent adherence to doctrines of realism in her era (probability, verisimilitude) suggests she thought the justification for her irresistible urge to write and to reach a readership is to promote an understanding of the reality of another person’s experience of life. I suspect such a standard would produce contemporary serious critiques of Austen’s fiction along the lines of the older irony-surveying Marvin Mudrick. This, as Amy Bloom on Lucy Worseley’s documentary about the houses Jane Austen lived in (also in the New York Times Book Review) concedes is not what’s wanted by a majority of Austen’s readers; Bloom reviews a BBC “documentary” (as much myth as fact) by Lucy Worseley on Jane Austen’s houses. It’s characterized, Bloom says, by “shameless ebullience” is a composite phrase using Worseley’s frank admission.

One counter is Elena Ferrante’s unusual (and obsessive) defense of anonymity as the only true way to elicit for a piece of art its value in its own right (not as belonging to some group, some identity, some agenda). While her choice of anonymity has been defended on the grounds she has a right not to tell her name or about her life, the principles she tirelessly repeats in Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey has not received the endorsement it should. Online when she has put an essay arguing why anonymity is important, against in effect celebrity (fame) and icon worship, commentators don’t believe she really thinks as she does. Her idea, like Sontag’s, Austen’s own, and numerous of Austen’s more sober critics, that it’s the duty of the fiction-writer to “get close to the truth” of reality calls out for more attention. Sontag puts it in her Regarding the Pain of Others, that falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, and allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection (I condense and paraphrase).

Are there any terrifying moments in Austen. Yes. Some of this important material in found across her letters (which are often glossed over or dismissed on the grounds she never meant them to be read by others); some in the Austen papers (the life history of Jane Austen’s great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Weller Austen, how badly she was treated as a widow and her struggle to provide for herself and for her children), in Austen’s fiction, an undergirding of deep emotions held at bay, which I think come outs strongly in her treatment of death as experienced by widows in her fiction. At this level Austen also (in some words Victor Nunez gives his Henry Tilney hero in Ruby in Paradise about reading Jane Austen): “Saved me from evil. Restored my soul. Brought peace to my troubled mind. Joy to my broken heart” (Shooting Script, p 41).

It’s good the books survive, and some of the films, biographers, and literary critics do justice to them.

From the Jane Austen Book Club: Sylvia (Amy Brenneman) reading Emma

Ellen

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Jane Austen and the picturesque: Mavis Batey’s JA and the English Landscape

Bath House, for Mrs James Henry Leigh by John Adey (1755-1860, Humphry Repton’s son)

“Those cottages are really a disgrace. The church spire is reckoned remarkably handsome. I am glad the church is not so close to the great house as often happens in old places. The annoyance of the bells must be terrible. There is the parsonage: a tidy–looking house, and I understand the clergyman and his wife are very decent people. Those are almshouses, built by some of the family. To the right is the steward’s house; he is a very respectable man. Now we are coming to the lodge–gates; but we have nearly a mile through the park still. It is not ugly, you see, at this end; there is some fine timber, but the situation of the house is dreadful. We go down hill to it for half a mile, and it is a pity, for it would not be an ill–looking place if it had a better approach — Mansfield Park, Chapter 9

“… the Cobb itself, its old wonders and new improvements, with the very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of the town, are what the stranger’s eye will seek; and a very strange stranger it must be, who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better. The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet, retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme; and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest-trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight: these places must be visited, and visited again to make the worth of Lyme understood — ” Persuasion, Chapter 11

Dear friends and readers,

I thought before going on to notes from my last conference this fall, “EC/ASECS: The Strange and Familiar,” I would devote a working blog to my project and thinking about “Ekphrastic patterns in Jane Austen.” After all this is supposed a blog focusing on Jane Austen.

For the past month, I’ve been slowly making my way through Austen’s famous six novels alongside many studies of the picturesque in landscaping, about landscape architects in her era and their debates, on how literary people, gardeners, historians have approached the mode (especially different when it comes to the use of enclosures to take the land from the propertyless and vulnerable), and how writers about Austen in particular place her and her novels in these debates. One might expect her outlook to change because the worlds of her books have different emphases, and since her stance towards life changed over the years: from (generalizing) a mildly rebellious, personally acid (as a woman) point of view to seriously politically grave and questioning, to acceptance, ever with irony, mockery of the very gothic mode she had loved, to late melancholy over what she wished she had known, and a new valuation of the sheerly aesthetic.

Yet I find broadly across the thirty years of writing life (1787-1816/7) a sameness, a steady holdfast to a point of view. This may be voiced as a strong adherence to judging what is presented as aesthetically pleasing or true by its usefulness. How far is what is created useful for those who live in or near it — use includes how much comfort and pleasure an individual can have from art, which seems to depend how far it works with the natural world (or against it, destroys the natural world), at what cost does this use come, and she counts as cost not only the removal of people and destruction or neglect of their livelihoods (especially in Mansfield Park and Emma), but how far it erases history or the past which she sees as giving meaning to the present through group memory and identity. She excoriates those who seek only status through their purchases and efforts, shaping what emerges from this motive as hypocritical at least as regards joy in all the aspects of the natural world, and disrespectful of animals, plants, whatever has been built. There’s nothing she despises more than someone who professes to love something because it’s fashionable — as say the gussied-up cottage. She has little use for celebrities: partly she is too snobbish and proud to chase after someone whose work so many profess to admire but in fact understand little of. To appreciate any art, no matter what it is, from drawing, to singing and playing an instrument, to curating (as it were) an estate, you must do it diligently and caring how it will turn out for its own sake, not for the reward you might personally get.

John Linnell (1792-1882), Gravel Pits in Kensington (1812)

This is what I found to be true of the implied author’s attitudes and to account for the treatment of pictorialism wherever it be found in her works. I began with the idea that she found very funny viewers, readers who approach art and judge it insofar as it literally imitates what happens in life: walking in the autumn or death of the year, sitting in a garden in the cool fall, working in a kitchen, aboard a boat — these three are the subject of aesthetic conversations, however brief, in, respectively Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion. Now I see she partly wants to take aboard critiques from characters who never forget the practical realities of life, so remain unable to engage with improbable conventions of design, typical scene drawing, and what’s left out and/or assumed. The aesthetically naive or obtuse reaction has something direct to tell us about what is the relationship of what is seen to person seeing. I originally saw in the gap between artistic convention in a medium and what it’s representing in real life as allowing for enjoyment in contemplating how the convention is just a convention and we could presumably choose another. So we are free in art. Now I’m seeing the importance of going outside convention, our own enjoyment of whatever it is, to understand ourselves better. Then we can do justice to others who may not be able to respond imaginatively on a sophisticated level but have other valuable traits.

John Crome (1768-1821), A Heath

This is a very serious or moral way of putting this matter but I think in what seems to be the beginning of an era of indifference to the needs of others, to previous understood relationships, to truth anything less is a further betrayal.
I found myself so strengthened by Austen as I went along (as I have been before) this time because in contrast our world outside is seeing remorseless attacks on the natural world, most people inhabiting the earth, worship of pretension, competition for rank and accumulation of money at whatever cost to others and group loyalty (never mind what to). A different version of these latter probably dominated the world-centers and made the later 18th century world the suffering-drenched place it was, but there were at the time groups of reformists, revolutionaries who were (to use FDR’s formulation) for a much better deal for all, even including animals.

George Morland (1763-1804), The Artist’s Cat Drinking

I’m going to hold back on working this thought pattern out in close reading of appropriate places in Austen’s books for my paper, and here just briefly survey one old-fashioned book published surprisingly recently (1996) for the way Austen is treated as knitted to and writing for her family.  Matey belongs to those who read Austen’s books as non-critical of her era, to some extent unexamined creations (staying away from “politics”), belonging to a closed small world of what I’d call rentier elites. I thoroughly disagree with most of this; I think Austen’s outlook to be so much larger than this, and critical of her world and family too, but Batey understands what is provable by close reading and relevant documents (which recent published critics seem not to). Matey’s book is good because Matey uses the particulars of Austen’s family’s lives and their neighborhood (and its inhabitants), their properties and how they treated them wisely.  She looks at how authors that Austen is known to have read or from her novels probably knew and how their topics and attitudes are treated in Austen’s books. Her documented sources  are books Austen quotes, alludes to, or are unmistakably part of her text). She researched about these common sensically and with discrimination, ever thinking of what is Austen’s tone as Batey decides whether this or that text or garden place or drawing could be meant to be part of Austen’s discourse.

Contemporary illustration: Box Hill

Each of the chapters is attached either to a period of Austen’s life or one or a group of her texts; they all have beautifully appropriate reproductions of picturesque landscapes; they all pick up on some aspect of debates on the picturesque in the era, often closely attached to, coming out of the particular Austen texts (but not always). “The Background” (1) tells of Austen’s family’s life briefly, how they lived in picturesque landscapes, how Edward the third brother was adopted by a rich couple who gifted him with immense wealth in the form of two country mansions and wide lands with all the patronage, rents, and power and education that came with that. The Austen family is presented as highly intelligent, wanting few personal relationships outside themselves (unless it be for promotion) and their gentry world. Austen wrote for her family is Batey’s assumption. We learn how Austen grew up inside “The Familiar Rural Scene” (2), loved Cowper, band egan her first long novel as epistolary narrative .  Batey dwells on Austen’s love of Cowper and how his poetry educated her into the kind of writing she did. Cowper is much quoted, how Marianne is passionate over his verse, Fanny has imbibed it in the deepest recesses of feeling and memory.

Selbourne today —

Batey swerves slightly in “Agonies of Sensibility” (3): as she is herself politically deeply conservative, she makes fun (unexpectedly given how she’s presented Austen thus far) of the writers and the texts she says influenced Austen profoundly: Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther (where, I suggest, the hero kills himself as much because he has to live in a sycophantic court as any love affair he has), Charlotte Smith’s deeply depressed poetry and more desperate novels (highly critical of the social and political arrangements of the day): as with Cowper, Batey quotes at length and Smith’s poetry does justice to itself. Batey shows how the family paper, The Loiterer mocks “Rousseau’s half-baked” (her words) ideas. She goes over the juvenilia she can link directly to the family members: “Henry and Eliza” where she uses names and places of people close by:

Lady Harcourt’s flower garden in Nuneham Courtenay (based on precepts in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise)

The same paradoxical pull-back shapes her “The Gothic Imagination” (4):  Batey talks of “the whine” of this material: the graveyard poets, the grand tour, Ossian, Blake. Batey does not take seriously any of this as deriving from contemporary anguish; her perspective is that of the aesthete (very 1950s American); she discuss the sublime from Burke apolitically, the lucky landowners, and even (or perhaps especially because ever sceptical). Samuel Johnson is hauled for his sceptical assessments (no sign of his Journey to the Western Islands). So Batey’s outlook on Northanger Abbey is it is about this “craze” which Austen saw through. Nonetheless, she quotes tastefully, and you can come away from this chapter with a much richer terrain and Austen text than Batey herself allows for. And she combines, so Smith’s Emmeline now comes in. She quotes from the effective presence of the abbey, the Tilney’s conversations on the picturesque and history, Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest as found in Austen’s text (amply quoted with illustrations appropriate).

Thomas Jones (1742-1803), The Bard

Batey has not heard of feminism but she does know these are women’s texts and includes a reproduction of an landscape by a woman I’d never seen before but alas tells nothing of the artist, not even her first name:

Lady Leighton, a watercolor of the gothic seat at Plas Newyd where the ladies of Langollen (a famous lesbian couple) read Ossian together (it was said).

I must start to condense. “Enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque” (5) and “The Beautiful Grounds at Pemberley” (6) contain a valuable discussion of Gilpin, who he was, how he came to wander all over England and write books on landscape and accompany them with evocative illustrations. She goes over the flaws in these (they are semi-fake, omitting all that is unpleasant, like exhausted hard-working human beings, and “eyesores” like mines), his theoretical works, of course the mockery of him (Batey is big on this). She does tell how Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price exposed the way these landscapes avoided showing how exploitative of the people and landscape products (for use) these enclosures and picturesque-makers were, but does not apply this to Austen: rather she quotes Marianne either engaged with the sublimely or critical of hypocritical cant. For the Sense and Sensibility discussion (where Batey stays on the surface again) she includes many lovely black-and-white and grey illustrations of real landscapes (ruins that real, i.e., crumbling buildings), tourist sites (Netley Abbey to which Austen’s family came). The productions for Pemberley are gorgeously colored: a Turner, a Joseph Wright of Derby, photographs of vast green hills. For Pride and Prejudice Batey simply dwells on the visit to Pemberley saying how unusually detailed it is, without asking why. She does notice Darcy has left much of the original placement of streams in place, and invites gentlemen to fish there; but how is it that every window has a gorgeous view from it, how did this come about, were these specifics originally related to some discussion (in a previous longer P&P) of how Darcy made the landscape never crosses her mind.

Batey thinks Ilam Circuit walk gives us a sense of what was to be seen outside Pemberley windows

No matter how much was “lopp’d and chopp’d” says Batey, we have all in place that we need.

Batey approves of the chapters on Mansfield Park, “A Mere Nothing Before Repton (7)” and Emma, “The Responsible Landlord” (8), because there is so much serious criticism of the picturesque which Batey finds herself able to enter into in the first (land should be useful, should honor history, the church). She has a fine thorough discussion of Stoneleigh Abbey which Mrs Austen’s cousin tried to take over when its owners died so took his aunt and her daughter with him, possession being nine points of the law: the letters are quoted and they feel like a source for Northanger Abbey. Repton’s work for the Austens as well as generally is done far more justice to than Mr Rushworth ever understands.

Stoneleigh Abbey before (Batey includes an “after” too: all the animals, the gardening work are removed as unsightly)

Batey believes Mr Knightley is modeled on Austen’s wealthy brother, Edward, who did work his own land, who valued his cows, who was conscientious — within limits: she does not bring out how later in life Edward was among those who refused to pay for a share of improvements of roads as he himself would not profit from it (we can’t do that, must not share). She does not seem to realize the earlier portrait of John Dashwood is also Edward nor that Edmund (whom she also identifies with Edward) is more than a little dense. But yes Mr Knightley is our ideal steward of land, working hard to make sure all can get something from nature (though, let me add, some do get more than others as the pigs in Animal Farm said was only right), and has not bowed to fashion, kept his trees, his house in a low sheltered place, has not spent enormously for “an approach.”

It comes as no surprise that Batey’s last chapter, “The Romantic Tide” (9), does not concentrate on Persuasion or Sanditon. These do not fit into her idealization of wealthy mansions, landscapes of and from power (I’d call them) . The aesthetic debates of MP and Emma set in a larger social context do not reach her radar. Thus that the Elliots have lost their house as Austen’s sixth longer book begins, the money basis of the economy, of war (Wentworth’s business like William Price’s is when called for killing and grabbing the property of others) and increasingly transient nature of existence for the fringe gentry are not topics here. We begin in Upper Cross but move to dress and harps in Mansfield Park (Regency costume enables Batey to bring in Fanny Knight and Austen’s times together in London). The furor over cottages orne probably represents an association from Mary Musgrove’s house, but the details are now all taken from the satire on Robert Ferrars’s despising of large buildings, worship of cottages and hiring Bonomi (without further context) in Sense and Sensibility. Sanditon‘s seaside gives way to “the insufferable Mrs Elton’s” lack of a real abode, her origins in trade in Bristol, and Lydia Bennet’s vulgarity. Batey’s text turns snobbish itself.

Where originality comes in again is not the sublimity of the sea, but in how the Austens enjoyed themselves in summer after summer of Austen’s last few years on the coast, “undeterred by threats of invasion.” Batey thinks the source place for Sanditon Bognor, which made a great deal of money for its entrepreneur, something what we have of the fragment suggests Mr Parker will not do. Anna Lefroy’s apt continuation has him going broke but for brother Sidney, a hero only heard of in the extant text. Jane Austen, we are told, disapproved of challenges to the traditional way of life, was against exploiting sickness and hypochondriacs like the Parker sisters. Batey seems to forget Austen was herself dying but includes the idea she “had little time for the socialistic propaganda of William Godwin”! In Sanditon Austen is harsh towards Burns and (we know from her letters) was strongly enamored of Crabbe — he has a hard look at nature and the rural landscape. A Fanny Price, name and character type, the story of a couple separated as imprudent with no retrieval are found in Crabbe. However, as Batey acknowledges in her book’s last few paragraphs, in Persuasion Austen revels in Charmouth, Pinny, Lyme.

William Turner, watercolor of Lyme Regis seen from Charmouth — Austen stayed there in 1803 and 180 and Anne Elliot discusses romantic poetry with Captain Benwick there

Batey’s is a useful book if you don’t look in it for any perception of why Austen was compelled to write and the full complicated nature of her texts. If it seems to be, it is not much different from Janine Barchas’s comparable History, Location and Celebrity, recent, respected: Barchas’s book is not filled with matters of fact in Austen, but in other books (of genealogy), in Barchas’s case buildings Austen never mentions (interesting if lurid), in amoral people not connected to her except by chance of first or last names (of which Austen does not have much variety). A “proof” can hinge on a number: Thorpe and Catherine have driven seven miles to one place, well seven miles in another there is this other gothic place, and Barchas has her subject matter. Both give us historical context, and between the two, Barchas remains speculative, a matter of adding one speculation to the next, and then crowding them around a text that never mentions them; Batey has the merit of writing about texts and movements Austen discussed, alludes to, quotes from, places we know for sure she visited, lived in. Both have good bibliographical references and you can use them as little encyclopedias.

Ellen

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A comparative review of the two Cambridge Companions to Austen. 1997-2011

A contemporary illustration (John Edmund Buckley) for Marmion (Scott used to be seen as Austen’s rival)

Dear friends and readers,

A third short blog, just to announce I’ve put onto my site at Academia.edu, a copy of the comparative review of the two Cambridge Companions to Jane Austen (1997 and again 2011) I wrote for ECCB, which will appear in due time (I hope), either this fall or next spring.

Another of the Cambridge Publications

I’ve already blogged on the individual essays in the two volumes, summarizing and evaluating them individually, but have been asked for a quick overview several times now so thought this pre-publication appropriate.

The Place setting for Mary Wollstonecraft from Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (Austen did not make the cut) — How we contextualize her today

Ellen

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Essays on Austen: from the Cambridge Companions

2nd edition — 2011

Dear friends and readers,

I am relieved to say that two years after having being sent Lisa Moore’s Sister Arts, and the 2nd edition of the Jane Austen Cambridge Companion, I’ve sent the reviews of book to ECCB. I originally wrote about the two books in a single review but was asked to divide them into two. So I won’t be putting the two onto any site, but rather (eventually) the earlier version bringing the two together. For now I written enough about Lisa Moore’s book, but very little about these two companions which could have been important as bellwethers; in the event both are too discreet, too careful, a result of the intense and intricate politics of Jane Austen studies, fashions, sequel, heritage, film, and institutions. I read and evaluated the essays of the 1st edition (1997), and compared them with this second one (2011), and thought the least I could do was put a brief summary and evaluation of the most worthwhile or innovative (or notable, e.g., Clery) essays in the Cambridge Companions. The essays summarized below might be of use or interest to my readers. If anyone would like to see either of the separate reviews, contact me off blog. As to simple practical advice, if you have the first edition, it’s a waste of money to get the second, so much has been reprinted. Further, much has been lost so don’t discard the valuable essays of the 1st edition, instead take a copy of the 2nd edition out from a library and xerox (or scan into your computer) the essays whose subject is of interest to you. I recommend Selwyn and Sutherland.

1st — 1997

Only in the 1st edition: Rachel Brownstein on NA, S&S, PP: Mr Bennet’s comment: we love the phrasing, economy, symmetry, sense, detachment even as when we look at the context we critique it; social interactions the substance of life; we condemn most people for wanting feeling, sympathy, love; she looks at conjunctions of romantic narrative and irony in the 3 books. Heroine centered, there is an irony that undercuts Austen’s use of conventions. NA parodies tropes of romance, giving new meaning to clichés; S&S, laughter hollow, opposing pairs, much more pain than pleasure as we compare; it’s as certain as death world a hard mean place (p. 45); couples together make for an anti-social activity, attitudes, the unsuitability of the couples; final irony against sisters as such. P&P a witty undercutting delight (it’s men who traffic in women not women men) where narrator, heroine and reader come to identify – Elizabeth holds back in self-control, detached; we are given enough about Darcy’s mind; we are not so very different from our neighbor – she is careful to say the chronology set up is a construct and across Austen’s oeuvre we find a set of many constants though Brownstein to give her credit opens and closes her essay on the problematic nature of these pairings, or trios. Brownstein admits the chronology she has used has nothing to do with the book’s themes. Irrelevant. This is an essay from a woman’s point of view as none of the three there are any more. Brownstein wrote a famous history of the novel: Becoming a Heroine. A number of her authors are men, and the choice of women’s books very much canonical (e.g., no Oliphant). Becoming a Heroine nonetheless approaches how we read as women in our books, our autobiographical self-narrative as we go

Only in the 1st edition: John Wiltshire: MP, Emma, Persuasion: Central to his description of Emma: it is about a restricted life, restricted spaces, restricted in POV and what Emma can do; she contributes a buoyancy of spirit, and confidence and has intuitive knowledge throughout. Restrictions in walking are part of it — Jane Fairfax going to the post office in the rain overdid we recall. Wiltshire sees that Mr Knightley represents a continuation of restriction, but that Emma moves to his point of view and within this restriction can thrive. He does see the unpleasantness of the walk for Emma a function of the probable poverty she sees. MP a contrast: everybody wealthy but Fanny, Mrs Norris neurotic, compulsive bully; Fanny the POV who is transient, dependent. Austen moves in and out of the characters, and creates through Henry and Mary Crawford appealing pair through their sympathy and agendas. That there is much sympathy for Mary when we begin to see her as negotiating social life, she was abused or neglected too, is seeking an emotional center for her life. They too have a fraternal tie. Novel has psychological depth with narrative portraiture; a physical world. Broad and wide. Persuasion we get a continuous registration of a inward and physical state and slowly we watch heroine break out; she becomes herself though emerging through her physical environment. The intricacy of her psychology a new reach, and development, setting focuses tensions and increases them. In this novel we see bonds elective affinities replace family bonds, themes of loss and mourning, fidelity and transience come into narrative, she is finally eloquent in words and thus if enabled to enact a life, (which she does by marrying Wentworth, that not in Wiltshire) find a place in this world. Wiltshire says he has united these so-called Chawton books artificially: he shows that the relationship between character, theme, and setting he has been making so much of is utterly different or incommensurate in all three. Novels combine romantic narrative with social satire and psychological insight; from MP on broader, more thoughtful social critique, greater power of imagining her figures within the social setting and spaces they inhabit. Distinct social and physical words are conceptual worlds. How Austen does this by her narrative techniques.

1st reprinted in 2nd: Juliet McMasters, “Class.” McMasters sees that Emma and Miss Bates are prophetic of Fanny Knight and Austen: years later Lady B was equally condescending; JA’s low position; McMasters goes over ladder; then JA’s attitude and then her characters – she goes carefully through the characters using the ladder, with an emphasis on Emma as Emma has them all more detailed and mentioned; Austen’s attitude towards class seen in her judgement of such characters and also whether she makes a character of this or that rank fine or contemptible; for Austen rank matters but identity more; humane and social values in daily life for her people much more

1st reprinted in 2nd: Edward Copeland, “Money.” Copeland wants to make the case that a complication of engagement with money characterizes the three later novels where the first three are about heroines acquiring a man who will support them – put that way especially with his qualifier that the later novels all turn on or focus on a single woman without money. (The problem is that the first three novels do tell of incomes, thought P&P least of all –it’s that the first two concentrate on land and clergy; and NA concentrates its energies on gothic satire. Very useful though as he goes through each level of income and shows by recourse to Austen’s novels just what that income brings; for Emma it’s signs of consumerism that matter; in Persuasion sheer money beat out land; we have the complication of the estate and Portsmouth pension. He admits some characters seem to know nothing: Henry Crawford is not real quite. Also answers question the women are usually cited as what they get a year except heiresses; for inherited income you make a 5% equation and you have the yearly sum. He does carefully cite many sums including Austen’s nuclear family’s own.

1st reprinted in 2nd: Isobel Grundy, “Jane Austen and literary traditions.” Grunday begins with the reality that Austen did not write her novels with a tradition in mind: they did not belong to theLlatin one; she had no BA as a modern reader might in English literature, she could not know of the novels of her period with clarity or extension; she read what what came along and had been in her father’s library and then Edward’s. A letter shows her rejoicing at a better book club in Chawton; at access to Paisley (but mocking Mrs Grant which Grundy omits when she mentions Austen reading Grant). Grundy find these letters relatively stuffed with literary references that are appropriate to whatever she speaks of, so we have a woman who read extensively and understood insofar as she could, but this combined with “real intellectual deprivation,” lack of choice of books, lack of stimulating varied conversation, and what she could glean about reactions to her own books couldn’t help; she shows no recognition or authority but her own taste. There seems to have been nothing deep entrenched in her from her reading (I’m not sure about that, how about Grandison or Johnson); no dialogue with forerunner to what she’s doing – yes, far from that, she wants to erase anyone she thinks is a peer, ridicule them (Grundy again omits this). Books in Austen’s novels further delineate the inner life of a character – but when Grundy says Austen does not attach herself to a tradition, I reply, “ah what about Ch 5 of NA?

Grundy sees the problem of trying to unearth some coherent understanding of books or schools of writing in the teeth of Austen’s reticence and non-cooperation, an insistence she is not to be taken seriously. Here’s where the hagiography comes in: why not say what Austen did from nature and what she did read extraordinary, but no, she wants to find evidence of classics. So there is what her brothers were taught when young. Grundy then concedes that Austen might mock pedantry, but “I will not accept she dislikes scholarship.” she points to Austen’s insistence on accuracy, not the same as scholarship. She cannot avoid hagiography; otherwise she would not try to get through this thicket of disjunctive jokings (Goldsmith and historical novels). She uses “surely” several times. Myself I do see a tradition in her mind: Edgeworth, Burney, Radcliffe, Brunton, West – novelists of her day that she sees herself vying with and dialogues with indirectly – Doody in the older Grey’s Handbook takes the easier task of simply finding out her reading, but I think Austen did see this is a tradition no one was recognizing. Isabelle de Montolieu assumes it – as does Stael.

Then Grundy turns to the novels, and despite some lapses into hagiography and wishful thinking (Austen is not thinking of Lady Winchilsea), and the usual overstretched attempt to show allusions, once she gets to the novels where we are given not just a text but an intelligent use of it, she shows Austen made genuine intelligent use of a wide range of texts you might expect from her class, gender, type, background, and she probably gets the emphasis right: while Austen saw her novels in terms of other novels, especially those by women, in the attitudes she is directly in Augustan school. I agree that Catherine is better read than we realize but then NA is a literary book. Austen was a strong reader and took what she read – would read against the grain, would not accept others’ aims; though we have to take into account her unqualified admiration for Edgeworth, the presence of Burney, Johnson, Grandison, Cowper.

1st reprinted in 2nd:  Claudia Johnson, “Austen cults and cultures” (the word Janeites is eschewed in the title.” It’s better than I remembered. Thoughtful , not condescending, informative and insightful. JA “a commercial phenomenon and a cultural figure,” HJ aimed at “her faddish commodification by publishers and marketers.” The growth of readers first occurs in 1870 JEAL Memoir. James cannot stand she is loved by the wrong people for the wrong reasons (233). Austen’s appeal reaches those who do not recognize the authority of those who like to think they adjudicate literature.  She is looking at the history of her reception: what writer can be seen independent of this? Difficult to disentangle “the real Austen” from the agendas of those discussing her. Modern Austen criticism begins with DWHarding who “claimed Austen herself was above her admirers, meant to rescue her from them.” She sees turn of century male scholarship as a form of play, and Kipling’s story presenting Austen not as an escape but what helps you in the trenches of life. People who attacked (Harrison, they are ahistorical; ridicule the idyllic dreams). Chapman accords her intense respect (as others) books seen as “refuge from realities”.  Harding and Booth are two different forms of bullying, Harding elitist and Booth from the angle of marriage and other disciplinary norms for women (Johnson rightly lists under this approach quite a number of critics, with Sedgewick as the protester against it). Then there are the male critics who are concerned not to be gender deviant because they reads these books (Lewis, she’s acerbic, serious, moral). Mudrick comes out of mindset, is an attack on JA as frigid, lesbian (Austen can do no wrong). The problem with the inclusion of this essay is it needs to be updated, the latest fashions in Austen criticism (which may be seen as a cross between Janine Barchas and Sarah Raff) are not here, but they fit into a point of view.

Johnson’s point is that Austen criticism turns out to be a matter of disciplinary self-identity. They differ from the other books taken up by cults and fan groups (among them just now the Poldark novels because of the mini-series) because her novels “hold a secure place in the canon of high as well s popular culture.”  The academic criticism of all the amateur and bellestristic study has not assailed its object (Austen’s texts) but the “triviality of its non-knowledge.”  She says it’s not the novels that police us as has been claimed by some, but novel criticism as a discourse. Here where I think she “falls down” is she too participates in hagiography and is unwilling to critique why Austen lends herself (what in her fiction and letters) to these skewed, half-nuts and overdone evaluations.

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A recent cover illustration for Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho

2nd edition (new): Thomas Keymer – NA & S&S begins with usual praise using Scott — see how this is verisimilitude and has power of Wordsworth, only to knock it down by saying rightly texts show immersion in popular modes; where he’s fashionable is wanting to situate her in “market-leading genres of the day.” But she did use gothic and nervy routines and formulas for S&S. Long tradition wants to make NA and S&S early, callow somehow but in fact we see that NA was revised several times and ready for publication in 1803; the latter three not technically flawless experiments but do bear witness to earlier fragments. So we are talking of a novel parts of which refer to what no longer exists (dress and other streets) after 1807 (so it reflects a Catherine of 1809).

Keymer demonstrates intertextual range, what is generally alluded to and what he can cite: he cites a list of novels with word Abbey in them; comedy is to frustrate expectations; he does admit the interweaving of gothic elements. Nonetheless, Austen playing on idiom in general; goes into Radcliffe and says Austen distinguishes Radcliffe from debasements and horrid novels. Wants us to see her assured tones – but I wonder about how the tone one takes in public is different from the tone one feels in private (p. 27). How the register of parody is pitch perfect. But she is not just kidding because in her fifth chapter the strong praise, elsewhere she shows anxieties about her rivals doing more than she, shutting off possibilities; superficial simply to see it as satire for admiral is awful, not that such novels have nothing to say for themselves. He then turns to references in the text: the Blaise castle visit has having genuinely sinister implications (p 29); nothing at all authentic about Blaise. Slavery can be brought in because the builder of Blaise, Thomas Farr was a Bristol merchant – we learn that by the time the book published Farr bankrupt by American war and folly bought by John Scandrett Harford, a quaker and abolitionist and had made the estate a center for abolition activity p 30; as for Tilney we see how he married wife for money and how Radcliffe has helped Catherine to see what Henry admits is true Not about what the novel is, but about what it’s doing. For S&S he turns to Barbara Benedict and her thesis this is a state of the art regency novel; did not resist but repeated marketable routines; Lynch too on the character types &c&, still he has to say Austen disrupts these stereotypes. Marianne like Catherine reading life out of novels.

Keymer does find the ending of S&S dispiriting. It bears comparison to alternative fictional types where the heroine is over-emotional and has to be taught a lesson – what this kind of thing is doing is preventing us from seeing how differently and in a superior deep way Austen is embodying this clichéd theme (p 34). Finally he turns to Butler who says it’s congruence, and Elinor learns legitimacy of feeling. Novels quoted: Elizavbeth Gunning Orphans of Snowdon (1797) Isabella Kelly Abbey of St Asaph (1795). By no means is sensibility entirely rejected – and Keymer concludest Elinor’s self control does show a perverse endorsement of social codes that work to restrict and oppress Marianne – histrionics her only way of fighting back. So he brings NA and S&S together at last: Catherine and Marianne responding to calculating world with justifiable screams of distress.

2nd edition (new): Penny Gay on Emma and Persuasion. She remarks how different are MP and P&P. Her task to see how the mature artist who never repeated herself produced two novels in a row so different one has to find new generic descriptions (p 55). Gay wants to find the theme of a novel about novel writing in Emma – after in passing she says it’s like a detective story – she has some insights about the novel – such as Mr K and Emma have a strong sincerity between them because their relationship is familial, p 57 – notices how Frank plays games and does nothing about Emma’s dangerous gossip over Jane; that Emma hardly goes anywhere; has not been to Donnwell in a couple of years, not to London because Mr W won’t Jane Fairfax as tragic heroine well supported; Persuasion rooted in larger world, in navy, aware of larger political happenings too, Anne is carried about from place to place without her wanting this; on a sensitive soul whose feelings are validated; romance motifs pulled out; a comparison of two endings shedding light – I feel it’s the lack of comedy in the second that makes for the superior quality of it (not Gay, it’s Anne participating more, and the theatricality of the letter scenes); a comic and elegiac novel; social commentary in both, a stable optimistic man the hero.

2nd edition (new): David Selwyn, “Making a Living,” comes from the older school of criticism: genuinely historical and close reading: JA had many relatives of people who could be no means take an income for granted. How people behave towards their estates characterizes them, so most Crawford and Rushworth do decorative improvements; Dashwood ruins his property, but Mr Knightley’s Donwell Abbey is “unimproved,” when he makes changes like a footpath which will “not cut through the home meadows” it is to increase productivity, not satisfy aesthetic whims; he retains the “abundance of timber in rows and avenues”. He is involved in day-to-day business of his estate, careful scrutiny of a drain, acres destined for weath or spring corn or turnips. He is vital part of economic structure of his locality. Selwyn gives deep, accurate thorough portrait of economic arrangements of Austen’s characters, again a great deal taken from Emma; along the way explains many terms, e.g., parlour boarder, a boarder who lives with the family, eats with them. He is too optimistic, saying “good people” did that and this … honest people making a comfortable enough living in Highbury shows stance of Austen’s novels her fans like; people seem far more precarious in Sanditon – commercialism at its center; real sources of income which enable some characters to hold up heads are ‘decently obscure’ (the Woodhouses, Sir Thomas Bertram).Joke at close: Emma would be shocked by some of Sanditon – so too The Watsons.

2nd edition (new): E.J. Clery has written brilliantly on the gothic, especially Sade and Radcliffe. He quotes Tauchert as an authority on a conservative woman-reading feminine approach. “Gender” begins with idea that Austen mocks heroines equipping themselves with superficial training that makes for gender identity; males must project gender too – and Tilney show this to be silly stuff. Clery shows Austen uses words like “queer,” Strange” half-witted by Tilney when the character admits to awkwardness. He talks of de-stabilizing of gender identity in recent queer theory; 19th century it was a form of impropriety merging on antisocialness. Critics notice many misdirections of feeling in Austen, violations of code. Social artifice is made visible alongside Enlightenment ideal of rational individual. Her renown is as a conventional romancer; he thinks 70s and 80s feminists wrested Austen from canonical readings; the queering the latest manifestation of D.W. Harding impulse to prove the readers of the novels those Austen would have most detested. With the movies overtaking discourse on Austen and their insistence on romance, is there any way of reconciling these positions; Austen who plays with and subverts, Austen who ends books stupidly (S&S especially). He says he is going to address this through literary form: movies end on bliss, kiss, novels have brusque endings, Austen enjoys giving pain to romantic readers.

Throughout her books she is mocking romance in all sorts of ways while heroine quietly long for it. In the books we do not project forward after the happy ending, and we see all the things that will be troublesome in the “union” (indeed I’d add Juliette Towhidi under the guidance of PDJames in Death comes to Pemberley who insists on Darcy as still rank obsesses insists on these until near the end). Is there real cohesion at the endings? No attention paid in NA, S&S, not much in P&P. DAMiller narrative mocks what it cannot do without. Emma though presents perfect happiness and Darcys have the Pemberley and Gardiners. He argues we transcend because it’s such hard work to get there; we enter mind of heroine throughout, closed off from hero (his idea this is radical departure is unreal and silly – very common in 17th century long haleine romances, 18th century, like Burney). Communication problem not just social but psychological. He suggests a second plot-design in the background of hero chasing a vocation, having to have independence, proper manliness (fact not unnoticed by modern parasitic sequel writers as in Mr Darcy’s Diary) his solution is we are ecstatic when these two minds come together, the utopian potential of understanding is what we are given.

From Davies’s 1995 P&P: two sisters living together (Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth, and Susannah Harker as Jane)

2nd edition new, a valuable addition: Kathryn Sutherland: “JA on Screen.” She begins from a broad perspective angle and then bring in cultural reading comparisons and finally ends on particular films. How film and novels are good at telling stories; one is motionless words, the other moving (and aural) pictures. That Austen is a singularly anti-visual novelist, stays with generalities; characters focusing on a particular object often pathological; it’s the interplay of subjective understandings that brings us the characters and stories. Her visual transformation first seen in first illustrated editions of 1890s; not among earliest films but staged in 1935 and then play turned into film meaning to convey ideas about war. 1970s BBC mini-series, first are influenced by stage and illustrations; Fay Weldon breaks away, but we are still in Laura Ashley land. Huge media attention, and it has become impossible in discussions and thinking about Austen to disentangle the novels from the films; they reflect our time (so Transpotting and 1995 S&S can be brought together). But it was out of the same nostalgia (1870s) that the cult of Austen began; what then is the link between academic and popular understanding as two march together, occur together. The personal identification with character filled out found in AC Bradley likened to the intelligent reinvention of Lost in Austen where some essential solace is found – both have supplied what is implied in the Austen text but not brought out. Lost in Austen substitutes the reader for Elizabeth in the fantasy. Tie-in books and readings have reinterpreted these books as romances (refers to Becoming Jane Austen as an absurdity) but what how different is false emphasis from super-edited academic texts.

Turns to films: they are interpretive, the visuals in the 1990s are high luxury, and camera work of the gorgeous cinematic landscape type of far shots; post-2005 shabby and minimal, with hand held cameras. But if we look we find since Said no one can discuss without discussing Antigua though before him few ever mentioned it. “We are always reading new novels even when they are the same old novels”. Screen interventions have momentous impact: we see the hero and heroine so it must be a courtship marriage story from the outset; the McGrath with its arrow scene; Davies use of Colin Firth, his turning on its head Willoughby’s seduction of Eliza Williams so what damned him later is made to damn him before we meet him. Davies’s language sounds like Austen’s and he substitutes himself (so does Emma Thompson do this feat.

Interestingly Sutherland is impressed by Miss Austen Regrets. Film good at delivering the silences in the books; silent images of Amanda Root which begin 1996 Persuasion convey the meaning of the novel well; no intrusive voice, no voice-over (why is she against this?); she feels Hughes used Austen’s letters with tact and understanding, Olivia Williams played the part with complex understanding and it is a contribution to Austen studies when we go back and read the letters – she does not realize Nokes an intermediary. A bleak and beautiful film. European use of camera work, triangulation of Fanny Knight, Haden and Austen before last turn of film. She does connect this to one woman whose engagement broken leaving her in emotional wasteland and another marrying in middle age in the novel Emma: we are viewing the novels and Austen from the perspective of a woman who reneged on a promise to marry. New observational style, drab wardrobe, luminous use of light at times. She sees this as showing us Austen’s life and its little matters (what Paula Byrne turned to though Sutherland does not say that).

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Olivia Williams as Jane Austen in Miss Austen Regrets (2009, scripted Gwyneth Hughes)

The politics of Jane Austen studies in which so many have invested careers, businesses, to say nothing of people’s self-conceptions and on-going fan communities have prevented the second edition of the Cambridge Companion from doing anything more than differing from the first in a couple of new subject matters and in a few indirect mirrorings of recent fashionable norms and ways of framing in order to praise Jane Austen and her writing. The assumption in both volumes is Austen’s novels are pretty nearly flawless, Austen herself made to fit as far as possible today’s ideals for women writers. I concluded my review with the comment that we need a sound edition of Austen’s letters (perhaps together with a second volume from the Austen Papers) of the type represented by those published by the McGill Burney scholars. The one we have, with its appendices muddled and contradictory, the information offered biased and not precisely aimed at the references and individuals in the letters, falls under the rubric of “family friends” and “advocates” (as described by Donald Reiman in his The Study of Modern Manuscripts: Public, Confidential and Private [Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1993]).

Ellen

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