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

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

An Austen family tree

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

A Jane Austen Study Day, JASNA-DC: Life in Regency England (2)

Miniatures of Philadelphia and George Austen — Jane Austen’s aunt and father

Five Dancing Positions

Dear Friends,

The second half of the Jane Austen Study DC hosted by JASNA-DC at the American University Library, as “curated” by Mary Mintz. In the morning we listened to excellent papers on some realities and perceptions of religious groups and servants in Austen’s day; the afternoon was taken up with the equivalent of photographs, miniatures, and drawn portraits, and how dance was so enjoyed and a source of female power in the era.

After lunch, Moriah Webster spoke to us about miniatures in the era; her paper’s title “Ivory and Canvas: Naval Miniatures in Portraiture [in the era] and then Austen’s Persuasion.” Moriah began by quoting Austen’s pen portraits in her letters on a visit she paid with Henry Austen to an exhibition in the Spring Gardens in London, where she glimpsed

“a small portrait of Mrs Bingley, excessively like her. I went in hopes of seeing one of her Sister, but there was no Mrs Darcy; — perhaps I may find her in the great exhibition, which we shall go to if we have time. I have no chance of her in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s paintings, which is now showing in Pall Mall, and which we are also to visit. Mrs. Bingley’s is exactly herself -— size, shaped face, features, and sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite color with her. I dare say Mrs. D. will be in yellow… Letter 85, May 24, 1813, to Cassandra, from Sloane Street, Monday)

Samantha Bond as the faithful Mrs Western, next to her Mr Elton, to the back Mr Knightley (Mark Strong) and Emma and Mr Woodhouse (Bernard Hepton), trying to lead a discussion of picture looking to favor Emma’s depiction of Harriet (1996 BBC Emma)

The detail and visual acuity reminded me of many other verbal portraits in Austen’s letters and novels, which I wrote about in my paper on “ekphrastic patterns in Austen,” where I went over the attitudes of mind seen in the way she explained her own and others picturing process, both analysing and imitating the picturesque seriously, and parodying it. She asks how does the way we think about and describe, the language we use and forms we absorb enable and limit what we can see.

Moriah was not interested in the philosophical and linguistic issues (which were the subject of my paper)

“He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances — side-screens and perspectives — lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape (Northanger Abbey, 1:14)

One of the many effective landscapes from Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility (director and screenplay-writer and Elinor n Miramax 1995 film)

Marianne argues passionately “that admiration of landscape scenery is become a mere jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning (S&S, 1:18)

but rather the real miniatures and drawings we know about in Austen’s life as well as how the way drawing is approached distinguishes a character’s traits of personality, and the way pictorial objects function in the plot-designs of her novels.

I offer a few examples of what interested her — though these were not delineated in her paper:

Irene Richards as Elinor Dashwood is a fairly serious artist (1981 BBC Sense and Sensibility) who can be hurt by people’s dismissal of her work

Sylvestre Le Tousel as Fanny Price dreams over her brother’s precious drawings of his ships (1983 BBC Mansfield Park)

For Kate Beckinsale as Emma drawing is a way of manipulating situations, defining her relatives, a vanity she does not work hard enough at (again the 1996 BBC Emma, with Susannah Morton as Harriet)

She did dwell on Persuasion. The novel opens with Anne cataloguing the pictures at Kellynch Hall; and has a comic moment of Admiral Croft critiquing a picture of a ship at sea in a shop window in the same literal spirit as Mr Woodhouse objects to Emma’s depiction of Harriet out of doors without a shawl.

Here I am, you see, staring at a picture. I can never get by this shop without stopping. But what a thing here is, by way of a boat! Do look at it. Did you ever see the like? What queer fellows your fine painters must be, to think that anybody would venture their lives in such a shapeless old cockleshell as that? And yet here are two gentlemen stuck up in it mightily at their ease, and looking about them at the rocks and mountains, as if they were not to be upset the next moment, which they certainly must be. I wonder where that boat was built!” (laughing heartily); “I would not venture over a horsepond in it.” (Persuasion 2:6 or 18)

John Woodvine as Crofts regaling Amanda Root as Anne and us with his reaction to a picture in a shop window (1995 BBC Persuasion)

More crucially we have a cancelled chapter and one about a miniature of someone who Captain Benwick was engaged to and died (Phoebe Harville), and is now prepared to discard and use the framing for a miniature of her substitute (Louisa Musgrove); this becomes the occasion of a melancholy and passionately argued debate over male versus female constancy and prompts Wentworth (listening) finally to write Anne Elliot a letter revealing the state of his loving mind.

What Moriah concentrated on was who had miniatures made of them, for what reasons and how much individual ones cost; how these were made, and who they functioned as social and cultural capital in these specific people’s lives. All the miniatures we have testify to the status of the person pictured, a status (I remark or add) that Austen (apparently) never achieved in the eyes of those around her.

Although she didn’t say this it’s obvious that Austen’s brothers had miniatures made of them because they rose to important positions in the navy; her father was a clergyman; her aunt became the mistress of Warren Hastings.

Francis who became an admiral and Charles in his captain’s uniform

She did imply the irony today of the plain unvarnished sketch of Austen by her sister, located in the National Gallery like a precious relic in a glass case in the National Gallery while all around her on the expensive walls are the richly and expensively painted literary males of her generation.

I regret that my stenography was not up to getting down the sums she cited accurately enough and the differing kinds of materials she said were used to transcribe them here so I have filled out the summary with lovely stills from the film adaptations — it’s easy to find many of these because pictures, landscapes and discussions of them are more frequent in the novels than readers suppose. Miniatures as a subject or topic are in fact rare.

Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth during her tour of Derbyshire with the Gardiners (1995 BBC P&P) is placed in a clearly delineated landscape (1995 A&E P&P scripted by Davies) and is reminiscent of

A William Gilpin depiction of Dovedale

There was some group discussion after this paper, and (as seems to be inevitable) someone brought up her longing for a picture of Austen. She was reminded that we have two, both by Cassandra. But undeterred she insisted these were somehow not good enough, not acceptable. Of course she wanted a picture that made Austen conventionally appealing. At this point others protested against this demand that Austen be made pretty, but she remained unimpressed by the idea that women should not be required to look attractive to be valuable.

It is such an attitude that lies behind the interest people take in Katherine Byrne’s claim a high-status miniature (the woman is very dressed up) that she found in an auction with the name “Jane Austen” written on the back is of Jane Austen. See my blog report and evaluation, “Is this the face I’ve seen seeking?”

**************************************

Dancing in the 2009 BBC Emma: at long last Jonny Lee Miller as Mr Knightley gets to express himself to Emma

The last talk was delightful: Amy Stallings on “Polite Society, Political Society: Dance and Female Power” dwelt on the dances themselves, how accessible they were, the social situations, how they are used in Austen’s books, and finally how in life they were used to project political behavior or views in assemblies and private parties and balls too. Her perspective was the political and social functioning of dancing (reminding me of Lucy Worseley), going well beyond the literary depiction of dance in Austen. She scrutinized ballroom behavior and dance to show that the ballroom floor was a kind of stage on which a woman could find paradoxical freedom to talk with a young man and older women might project political agendas and alliances (especially if she was the hostess).

If we look past the movie and see this scene as filming a group of famous admired actors and actresses we can see the same game of vanity and power played out (everyone will distinguish Colin Firth as Darcy in this still from the 1995 BBC P&P)

Her talk fell into three parts. First, she showed how dance was made accessible to everyone in the class milieu that learned and practiced such social behavior. This part of her talk was about the actual steps you learned, the longways patterning of couples, how it enabled couples to hold hands, made eye contact. Longways dancing is a social leveller, she claimed. I found it very interesting to look at the charts, and see how the couples are configured in the different squares. As today, it was common to see women dancing in the men’s line. People looked at what you were wearing and how well you danced. She quotes Edgeworth in her novel Patronage (which like Austen’s Mansfield Park has both dancing and amateur theatrics). There was pressure to perform in dancing (as well as home theater).

Dancing difficult maneuvers in the 1983 Mansfield Park: Fanny and Edmund

The second part dwelt on dancing in novels of the era. She quoted from Henry Tilney’s wit and power over Catherine in their sequences of dancing:

JJ Feilds as Tilney mesmerizing Felicity Jones as Catherine (2007 ITV Northanger Abbey)

Her partner now drew near, and said, “That gentleman would have put me out of patience, had he stayed with you half a minute longer. He has no business to withdraw the attention of my partner from me. We have entered into a contract of mutual agreeableness for the space of an evening, and all our agreeableness belongs solely to each other for that time. Nobody can fasten themselves on the notice of one, without injuring the rights of the other. I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both; and those men who do not chuse to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours.”
“But they are such very different things!–”
” –That you think they cannot be compared together.”
“To be sure not. People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour.”
“And such is your definition of matrimony and dancing. Taken in that light certainly, their resemblance is not striking; but I think I could place them in such a view. — You will allow, that in both, man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal; that in both, it is an engagement between man and woman, formed for the advantage of each; and that when once entered into, they belong exclusively to each other till the moment of its dissolution; that it is their duty, each to endeavour to give the other no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere, and their best interest to keep their own imaginations from wandering towards the perfections of their neighbours, or fancying that they should have been better off with any one else. You will allow all this?”
“Yes, to be sure, as you state it, all this sounds very well; but still they are so very different. — I cannot look upon them at all in the same light, nor think the same duties belong to them (Northanger Abbey, I:10.

and alluded to (by contrast) how Darcy will not permit Elizabeth to achieve any power over him through dance or talk; in his downright refusals and more evasive withdrawals he robs her of status and any hold on him. So she becomes grated upon, frustrated. Amy discussed Scott’s Redgauntlet as containing a particularly effective pointed description of a tête-à-tête; the disruption of walking away, walking out and its potential to humiliate is drawn out in this novel.

One of Jane Austen’s most memorable masterly depictions of social humiliation and kindness is in the scene where Mr Elton deliberately sets up Harriet to expect him to ask her to dance, and then when Mrs Weston takes the bait, and asks him to ask Harriet to dance, he can publicly refuse her. I thought of a similarly crestfallen hurt in the dancing scene in the unfinished Watsons where a young boy is carelessly emotionally pained and (as Mr Knightley does here), so Emma Watson there comes in to rescue him at the risk of herself losing social status by dancing in the lead position with a boy.

Mark Strong as Mr Knightley observing what the Eltons are doing

The expression on Samantha Morton’s face as she is drawn up to dance by the most eligible man in the room is invaluably poignant (once again the 1996 BBC Emma)

Amy’s third part was about the politics of the dance floor and particular assemblies in particular localities. First she did insist that Austen’s novels are explicitly political in various places (including Fanny Price’s question on slavery, Eleanor Tilney’s interpretation of Catherine Morland’s description of a gothic novel as about the Gordon riots &c). She then went on to particular periods where politics was especially heated and cared about, often because a war is going on, either nearby or involving the men in the neighborhood. She described assemblies and dances, how people dressed, what songs and dances were chosen, who was invited and who not and how they were alluded to or described in local papers in Scotland and England in the middle 17th century (the civil war, religious conflicts and Jacobitism as subjects), France in the 1790s (the guillotine could be used as an object in a not-so-funny “debate”), and in the American colonies in the 1770s.

Amy went on at length about particular balls given in 1768, December 1769, May 1775, where allusions were made to loyalist or American allegiances, to specific battles and generals. One anecdote was about a refrain “British go home!” While all this might seem petty, in fact loyalists were badly treated after the American colonists won their revolution, and many died or were maimed or lost all in the war. Her argument is that women have involved themselves in higher politics (than personal coterie interactions, which I suppose has been the case since people danced) through dance from the time such social interactions occurred in upper class circles and became formal enough “to be read.” We were way over time by her ending (nearly 4:30 pm) so no questions could be asked, but there was a hearty applause.

Again I wish I could’ve conveyed more particulars here but I don’t want to write down something actually incorrect. I refer the interested reader to Cheryl A Wilson’s Literature and Dance in 19th century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman. The early chapters tell of the many dances known at the time, the culture of dance, and what went on as far as we can tell from newspapers and letters at assemblies, with a long chapter on doings at Almack’s, where Jane Austen just about whistles over Henry her brother’s presence. Frances Burney’s Cecilia, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair are among the novels mined for understanding. Wilson goes over the quadrille (squares) and how this configuration changed the experience of hierarchy and then wild pleasures of the waltz. Here Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? and The Way We Live Now are brought in. Lady Glencora Palliser and Burgo Fitzgerald almost use an evening of reckless dancing as a prologue to elopement and adultery. I imagine it was fun to write this book.

At Lady Monk’s ball Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora and Barry Justice as Burgo Fitzgerald dance their way into semi-escape

He begs her to go off with him as the true husband of her heart and body

It was certainly good fun to go to the Jane Austen Study Day and be entertained with such well thought out, informative and perceptive papers very well delivered. I wish more Austen events were like this one.

Ellen

Retrospective: quite enough books to be getting on with

Jo in a Vortex

Dorothy’s red shoes

Ferrante suggests her model for her books was Little Women and the English writers, Alcott and Austen; Diana Gabaldon several times alludes to Dorothy and her red shoes, and by extension The Wizard of Oz, suggesting first Claire’s then Brianna’s travel through the stones was analogous to Dorothy in her red shoes

Dear friends and readers,

To begin with, a retrospective long overdue .

I’ve been blogging in this space for some fifteen years now. I have completed four years’ worth of analyses of her letters (as edited by Deirdre Le Faye), blogs on the Austen papers, on Austen’s close family relatives fresh biographical perspectives and chronologies, and the occasional review. I’ve linked in papers I’ve published or delivered at conferences. I meant this place as a blog meant for Austen matters as generously understood as the Folger library’s definition of things Shakespearean: her contemporaries, mostly women novelists and memoir-writers: Fanny Burney, Charlotte Smith, Mary Brunton, Edgeworth, French women writers and translators, Scottish women poets. But even that soon morphed into the three linked categories I felt she fitted into: women’s art, the long 18th century, and her life, work, influences, and near contemporaries and post-texts and films. I’ve done series: women poets; women artists; actresses, mostly from the long 18th century (but not all, as Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher were the subject of one commemorative blog); women’s films; women’s TV serials, women singers and musicians (not nearly enough of these), and women’s fashions (ditto). Film adaptations of books set in the 18th century, of documentaries. I still keep these up and reviews of books on Austen’s life, books, issues. 18th century conferences. Small projects: Virginia Woolf in her own right, Virginia Woolf and Johnson as modern biographers.

So what now? Carry on the above when the spirit takes me. Yes

A once beloved volume

My header or title line is a play on words from Fleur Adcock’s “Instead of an interview,” about what she imagines she tells the interviewers instead of what she is supposed to say: what has meant most to her in life, what she dreams of, what she’s lost, and what keeps her going now:
memories of her past

and every corner revealed familiar settings
for the dreams I’d not bothered to remember —
ingrained, ingrown ….

… quite enough friends to be going on with [which I do not have]’
bookshops, galleries, gardens …

And not a town or a city I could live in,
Home ….
home is [New York City], and England, Ireland, Europe,
I have come home with a suitcase full of stones —

and here they lie around the floor of my study
as I telephone a cable “Safely home …”

… But another loaded word
creeps up now to interrogate me.

have I made myself … an exile

I hope not; I hope this blog’s purpose all the while, which is to help me keep connected, part of imagined communities, can take some new turns. One project I had hoped to write a book with a friend-partner about and have described her, “The Anomaly” has now fallen through, but I am thinking that I can work it out now in this blog. One of the two latest books I’m reading for this: Rebecca Traistor’s All the Single Ladies demonstrates that while independent or women living without a man for long periods of time has actually become a near unacknowledged norm, was not an anomaly ever. As a group we only became visible since the mid=19th century when larger numbers of women began to be able to support ourselves.

The other, Anne Boyd Rioux’s Writing for Immortality: Women Writers and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America. Roux concentrates on Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stoddard (I’ve read nothing by her), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps later Ward (ditto) and Constance Fennimore Woolson (where I have read a good deal), Louisa May Alcott. She is again “doing” the literary history of the US, and her context is the withering scorn heaped on women as “popular” and second rate, not great art by Hawthorne (famously) and Henry James (insidiously). She argues it is important to understand this presentation of one’s book as primarily there as a great art, great vision and the real goal of the woman as creating great art (not for supporting herself) as radical and important in building esteem and validation for women as a group.

We are so used to valuing things for the money, book history as turned into a branch of let’s study how capitalism, fame, and industry worked and the idea of writing as a vocation becomes something we scorn people for: what? they must be hypocrites and just say that because their books don’t sell. We are so corrupted to the folds of our minds.

Vocation as radical behavior

She goes over the lives & writing of her four chosen women writers (Phelps, Stoddard, Woolson and Alcott) and one thing stands out for all of them: they are all to some extent crippled in their ambition or fame or even what they were able to achieve or write because of the demand they be conventional heterosexual and marry. One of them did: Stoddard and that stopped her producing any more than two good novels. The others fought and produced and led a life they found satisfactory but to do so took tremendous energies and got in the way. I’d say this is even true of Alcott — fine as her achievement in children’s books is and here and there in adult fiction, it’s not what she could have done. Some of the enemies of promise including having to support the man and family as a woman. I think of how Gaskell’s life of Bronte is really an apology for the woman artist and that she was remarkable (I now realize) for presenting that final marriage as simply getting in the way and destroying Bronte. Now I’ve read a long section on the four women’s fiction ad debating whether there be a difficult conflict in a woman between choosing love, having a family, participating in a community as wife, mother and spending your life dedicated enough to art, spending time, money, travel, solitude enough to produce the fine book, or picture — or performance.

I single out two for tonight as I recently finished both, was very moved (at times, and with a peculiar uncomfortable painfulness) by Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon, and (continually, mostly with complete accord) by The story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante, and because they are part of cycles or series of brilliant creative novels, Outlander and the Neapolitan Quartet, which type of writing when good can be so deeply satisfying. Nothing like a recurring character in whom we have invested our minds and hearts whom I feel are invested with questions of the world deeply connected to me, feeling their reactions as deeply crucial to what I call my inner life, even if they are also capable of being taken in as information (to display in papers making arguments) or used as thoughtless gossip (especially the kind that bashes the women characters).

One way in which we can distinguish both series as l’ecriture-femme , as women’s versions of roman fleuves, is both series demonstrate that a girl, then woman’s need for a meaningful career outside taking care of home, child, partner, whoever else is there, is interwoven with her being. The women in all cases (Claire, Jenny, Lenu, Lila) all also naturally seek insistently intensely to find a congenial enabling partner who loves her too.

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Italian edition

“I was dead, my Sassenach–and yet all that time, I loved you … And when my body shall cease, my soul will still be yours. Claire–I swear by my hope of heaven, I will not be parted from you” — Diana Gabaldon, Drums of Autumn

The accent in all four Gabaldon novels falls first on the self-negation Claire practices when she becomes part of Jamie. How when she returns to the 20th century she builds on her time as a nurse in WW2 to become a surgeon. And then when she returns to the 18th century 20 years later she enacts an irresistible return to nursing, doctoring and inventing a pharmacy in whatever form she can build.

For Drums of Autumn I’d like to record just this:

In general those parts of the novels where Claire is the narrator and we are going back and forth in time — as in the opening sequence of Dragonfly in Amber are favorites with me; and now those sequences where Roger is the narrator and we go back and forth in time.

There is much beautiful contemplative description – the US as a kind of arcadian paradise physically – Strawberry Fields Forever one part is called. OTOH, she drives him to us how horrifically the enslaved black were treated: another story like the one of the woman gang-raped just after Culloden in Voyager: an enslaved black girl either kills herself directly or dies horribly trying to give herself an abortion. With her is another enslaved woman who presents herself a midwife sometimes and she will if caught be blamed and hung – by the sergeant who was responsible for this pregnancy. So Jamie and Claire find her with the help of the trader and enable her to go into the mountains and meet up with a native American tribe who will take her in. There’s a long stretch of Claire making a home for her and Jamie in North Carolina circa 1767 – all about how she cooks things, sets up furniture, goes out and about as a doctor. Very detailed about the era. It does begin with how safe she feels with Jamie as her husband and the house is his arms around her.

The characters most punished and ferociously in the serial drama are the chivalrous kind heroes; Jamie Fraser, tortured, hand smashed, raped by the English soldiers; and now Roger Wakefield Mackenzie, humiliated, treated with great brutality by Native Americans. Fergus is also raped and his hand cut off by British and Scots colonialist officers after Culloden. These vulnerable sweet men are made to suffer excruciatingly in a sort of disciplinary culture in which people have to be raped and punished and have physically inscribed on their bodies the “lessons” the colonizer, the tribe, the powerful authority figures deems they “need” to learn. We see that early on when in the first episode (this is in the book too) Jamie beats Claire with a belt. There is the brother-helper figure (Murtagh) who the film-makers felt they could not do without.  One gentle hero (Lord John) is given a super-high rank to protect him; another the Reverend Wakefield who is a pack-rat with papers I am very fond of too. I have argued in another blog that Frank Randall is a poignant proud tragic hero.

Other protected good women figures include Mother Hildegarde — I just loved Frances de la Tour in that part in Dragonfly in Amber – and the French apothecary, Master Raymond (Dominique Pinon) who saves Claire’s life after the stillbirth of Faith.

A long sequence in the novel is about the raping of Brianna and its long and varied aftermath and affect on the people around her as she tells them ever so slowly the full story. Much on male reactions, male suffering, and it’s clear that Gabaldon does not see simple or non-aggravated rape (not assault) as a serious crime; she is for having the baby whom she sees as half-owned by the father (rapist or no). Gabaldon is grappling with crucial issues directly I’ll give her that as does Ferrante — both raw, graphic, visceral. I suppose the uselessly bitterly complaining heroine of the Brianna type is a rarity among the heroines – she stands for a helpless self-assertion that gets no where, feminism defined as blind indignation. The rest live with it, resort to magic (or its modern equivalent, surgery).

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“he knew how to connect texts that were very unlike one another and he quoted them as if he were looking at them … ” — Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name (p. 407)

The Story of a New Name begins in 1966 Lila who we are told is no longer close to Lenu gives Lenu a large metal box with 8 — need I say precious – notebooks in it. After reading these fat important unrepeatable diaries, Lenu dumps them in a river. It took me a while to sit down after that one. In Little Women so important to Lila and Lenu when girl children, and cited once again at the close of this novel as Lenu’s frst book is being published, Jo could recreate her novel after Amy destroyed it. Eight densely detailed diary disorganized notebooks are impossible to recreate. A brief recounting and commentary:

Then Stefano and Lila’s wedding night puts paid to all the idealized sex of Outlander. He beats her up and we get a graphic account stage by stage. It is the most raw account I’ve ever read — but she does not leave him though he continues to beat her for a while.

Lenu is so confused by what happens at the wedding — how she is not at all respected by her mother or anyone for all her efforts and how awful to her Antonio is (plus she is bored silly by him), she leaves off going to school for a while. Just drops out and wanders all around Naples. Tellingly it is Antonio (who ends up in a sad low job by the end of this book) breaks with Lenu after they have sex scenes just as graphically written as Lila and Stefano only more satisfactory. It is Lila who enables Lenu to go back by providing a room in her splendid and owned apartment. Only slowly does she get back and she is never undisturbed in the way she was so does not do as well. Lenu attractssomeone I never had a version of: a genuine mentor, a woman professor, Galiani.

Lila is taken to a modern doctor and oh did this resonate with me. Room filled with customers, everyone in awe of this man. From Lila’s point of view, he gets to invade her with his metal instruments. She feels violated. And he says (I have heard a male doctor say this of me after examining me): “it’s all there” in this satisfied voice. I don’t know why I didn’t report him to Kaiser, but suspect it was because he was a black doctor (I’m really honest here) and was worried I wouldn’t be believed and be thought racist. There you go. But after that I never went to any male gynecologist ever.

When I was 16 I was taken to just such a prestigious place and was violated similarly — or felt so. And given this “down from the throne advice” in this disdainful manner. I think the same things go on today in the US – clearly they go on in Italy. I never went to a male gynecologist in the British national health but remember the woman I got contraception from also treated me with a lack of respect because at the time I was not married.

Anyway the doctor says it’s not Lila’s fault:she needs to build her strength, which becomes she needs to go on holiday and rest. So who is she to go with but the now spiteful sister-in-law Pinuccia and her mother-in-law, Nunzia. Lila now turns to Lenu and demands she quit her bookstore job. The bookstore job is not getting Lenu any closer to that elite world she glimpsed and was partly of temporarily when her mentor, professor woman invited her to that party (Lila came and didn’t fit as I said). At first Lenu says no: what horror fights she envisages but then she learns that Nino is at Ischia with his family again. She agrees to quite and come if Lila goes to Ischia.

Anyway the doctor says it’s not Lila’s fault: she needs to build her strength, which becomes she needs to go on holiday and rest. So who is she to go with but the now spiteful sister-in-law Pinuccia and her mother-in-law, Nunzia. Lila now turns to Lenu and demands she quit her bookstore job. The bookstore job is not getting Lenu any closer to that elite world she glimpsed and was partly of temporarily when her mentor, professor woman invited her to that party (Lila came and didn’t fit as I said). At first Lenu says no: what horror fights she envisages but then she learns that Nino is at Ischia with his family again. She agrees to quite and come if Lila goes to Ischia.

Lila agrees; she is paying Lenu – that is kept secret — so Lenu, the academic in the school is Lila’s servant. When the men are there the women aren’t free. The men are ever taking them into the bedroom to have sex. Lenu says Lilia is so used to this far from demurring she seems to show off. But it’s a burden. They don’t get to go the beach. At first she can’t locate Nino; she has an idea to visit the woman whose house they stayed at and finds them not far off.

Now Lila teases her — not nice — for wanting to be there for Nino. Nino is standoffish but eventually they have real conversations about books, politics — the feel though is not of joy but of somehow this being prestigious and it’s not satisfying because of this, it’s ruined. Donato teaches Lila to swim – he is a kind man.

I identify viscerally with both Lenu and Lila. Lenu has no money for even a new decent bathing suit. It’s a real problem. she has an inferior room which does not look over the beach. she has to hide her books when in the house with Lila & co. Mosquitoes, no air conditioning so it’s so hot in her room. Ischia is no longer enchantment ….

Many of my memories are still deeply embittering, searing and so I understand why Lila behaves in the counterproductive way she does, but I also understand Lenu’s abjection — I had clothes but no room of my own …. and was a outsider, not in the AP classes because my mother didn’t know how to get me into these and my father was unaware this was important.

Now it’s come out that Pinuccia has fallen in love with Bruno, and not being able to cope with this and her pregnancy and marriage to Rino, demands to go home. The conflict is too hard for her to endure. Her departure makes an inevitable reconfiguration and lo and behold Nino is in love with Lila and she with him and it’s transparent. They are probably lovers.

Lenu then tells of her own life. I like this part of her studying, her trying to pass exams, finally the books she read, one young man she gets involved with and they fuck. But she says that she and Lila somehow came together in the old intense way and now she must tell of how wrong she was about what was going on.

What is not surprising is Lila carries on with a torrid mad affair with Nino — reminding me of Paul and Virginia only this time there is a husband. But in her notebooks (which we know after the first sequence Lenu unforgivably has dumped into the sea) what Lila exulted in was not so much the sex as what they read and talked about.

Unexpectedly Lila was courageous enough to flee Stefano and go live with Nino is a poverty-stricken area in a wretched apartment. At first all seems bliss, but this does not last long at all, and it is probably only bliss from Lila’s point of view. What happens is she doesn’t fit in — Nino does want his middle upper class life and connections and future prospects and it’s not enough to be highly intelligent and creative: you have to modulate your voice (as I’m sure Emma Woodhouse would put it) and Nino finds she is too loud, too strident, she embarrasses him, her talk is exaggerated. His father won’t give him money just like this and at the end of 23 days he leaves Lila.

Like Austen’s S&S where the point of view of Elinor’s and Marianne is the one we watch, so here the point of view is Lenu remembering and so everything is softened, remembered, seen from afar or guessed at based on these notebooks that Lenu has dropped in the river. Lenu is utterly buying into the same middle class life Nino is trying to get into. This also has the effect of not having to show us the pain, humiliation, difficulty that Lenu has with her manners, lack of clothes, who she has to kowtow to. The earlier novels gave us Lila’s kind of experience raw and angry or nightmarish; or (Il figlia oscura Englished as The Lost Daughter), a quiet interlude of a Lenu kind of character at the beach contemplating the fraught experience from afar but only talking of what is happening now — as she steals a doll say, or marks papers.

several of the others characters have emerged as distinct real presences. To be expected I suppose, several of the males are coming to sad ending. Maybe they had less prospect than the girls, since the fascist order certainly doesn’t respect elite education for men. So Antonio, Pasquale, Rino (who I can’t sympathize with as a continual wife-beater) all end up with no decent future — no getting out of the mindless exploitative materialistic culture. Lila is forced out when Ada gets pregnant by Stefano; Ada withstands beatings by Stefano and Lila runs off with Enzo — who rescued her in the first place. When last seen by Lenu, Lila has a peculiarly horrible job (stuffing sausages, in a vile sausage factory where she is sexually harassed) living in squalid quarters with Enzo; he works at a locomotive very dangerous: but at night they study together like some Paul and Virginie of the bitter early 21st century. Lenu has carried back to her her early story, The Blue Fairy, which Lenu says is the inspiration for her novel. Lila burns it.

Maestrio Oliviero has died — she never would help Lila because Lila’s parents got in her way. Lenu reflects it was this teacher who first saved her and how unfair and egoistic and cruel she had been to Lila.

Lenu has emerged as a sort of winner. She kept at it and now graduated with high honors and noticed by her boyfriend’s mother who is Somebody in the Society and in publishing, her first novel is published. The money astonishes and quells Lenu’s mother’s spirit — she is still living with her parents on and off. Her book is castigated by much of the press as absurd and that is painful but it seems the boyfriend will marry her in two years. In the meantime she must train for teacher’s college, which is looked upon as a come down, not truly part of the world that counts. I do know that in Italy the high academic world is very rigid, restricted, utterly unjust. But in the closing scene where she is enduring having to give a speech and she gives a bad one – she hates it as much as I would have, has no idea what’s wanted — very young as yet – and someone from the crowd stands forth and offers a decent sympathetic understanding of her book.

Of course it’s Nino. This is weak ending for obvious reasons but regarded as part 2 of a single book I suppose it’s forgivable. A better code is Lenu goes to the public library still and finds the old copy of Little Women she and Lila used to read together. This too was inspiration for her book, her book carried on what was valuable in Little Women.

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So, to conclude, in these two highly disparate books, we see the question glimpsed, but very much there, how far and just how can a serious woman’s career, her vocation, her profession be combined with an equally insistent or at least (as society is now constructed) intrusive set of needs, wants, desires of people (if she has a real heart and passionate body) she wants to meet, feel herself and be validated as belonging to these people and tasks. And how does the larger society’s economic, political, social and gender arrangements impose its will on individuals who do not want to make or follow the choices offered. These are not rootedly natural or instinctive (impossible to eradicate), but sort of imposed on us. Another quartet which might be telling to compare is Byatt’s Frederica Quartet (Virgin in Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, Whistling Woman).

Ellen

Caroline Jane Knight’s Jane & Me — Austen’s “fifth-great niece” as reviewed by Devoney Looser

A photograph of Tom Carpenter, the trustee of Chawton Cottage; he is carrying a portrait of Jane Austen’s brother, Edward

Friends,

Last night I came across in the latest issue of Times Literary Supplement (for January 25, 2019), an informative piquant review by Devoney Looser of a autobiographical book, Jane & Me. Its author, Caroline Jane Knight, a fifth great-niece (with now a little help from Devoney & the TLS), is launching this book maybe to provide herself with a raison d’être (a not “very promising heroine-in-training” says Devoney), a basis for her living independently someday. I think the information here and acid insights make it required reading for the Janeite, and discovered it’s behind the kind of magazine paywall where you must buy a whole subscription for a year, before you can read it. It is almost impossible to share a TLS article online as if you subscribe to the online version, you can only do it through an app on an ipad or some such device. So I here provide a summary, contextualized further by what I have drawn from Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites.

Why is the review valuable in its own right too: we learn a good deal about the history of Chawton House Library this century from the point of view of the family who owned it — Jane Austen’s collateral descendants. Caroline is a poor transmitter: Looser points to where Caroline has not even begun to do the research necessary on her own life, but there is enough here to make do, and if you know something from your work, or can add further research like Devoney, you can have some insight into Austen’s family and what she was up against as she tried to write honest entertainments.

In brief, Devoney tells the story of a downwardly mobile family who let the house fall into desuetude and the present Richard Knight leased it to Sandy Lerner whose great luck on the Net had brought her huge amounts of money, some of which she expended by renovating, it’s not too much to call it rescuing Chawton House into a building one could spend time in comfortably enough so that it could function as a library. While she set about building, she started a board of informed people who would know how to turn it into a study center for 18th century women’s writing. Austen’s peers & contemporaries.

Richard Knight and Sandy Lerner walking on the grounds together during some occasion

Let me first bring in Yaffe’s account who also sheds light on Richard Knight who was at the conference as a key note speaker and we can here gather a few truths about him. He had “inherited a crushing estate-tax bill and a `16th century house in need of a million British pounds’ worth of emergency repairs.” A developer’s plan to turn the place into a golf course and expensive hotel had collapsed by 1992. Enter Sandy Lerner. She had made oodles of money off an Internet business, is another fan of Austen, one common today who does not like the idea of Austen as “an unhappy repressed spinster,” something of a recluse, not able to see the money and fame she wanted. When Dale Spender’s book, Mothers of the Novel, presented a whole female population writing away (as Austen did), a female literary tradition, she found a vocation, collecting their books. After she heard a speech by Nigel Nicolson, where he offended her (talking of a woman who thought Jane Austen didn’t like Bath as “a silly, superstitious cow,” described himself as heading a group who intended to open a Jane Austen center in Bath even though Edward Austen Knight’s Chawton House was on the market (too expensive? out of the way for tourists?), she decided to “get even.” When she had the money two years later, she bought Chawton House. She wanted to make it “a residential study center where scholars consulting er rare-book collection could live under 19th century conditions.” This super-rich woman loved the sense these people would gain “a visceral sense of the historical moment,” wake up to “frost on the windows, grates without fires, nothing but cold water to wash in.”

She paid six million for 125 year lease on the house and its 275 acre grounds; another $225,000 for the stable block. She discovered it to be badly damaged, inhabited by tenants she found distasteful, “ugly,” rotting. Crazy rumors abounded in the village she was going to turn the place into a lesbian commune, a Euro-Disney style theme park, her husband testing missile systems in the grounds. She thought of herself as this great philanthropist. Culture clashes: the Chawton estate sold its hunting rights for money; she was an animal rights activist. Disputes over her desire to remove a swimming pool said to be a badger habitat protected under UK law. I saw the Ayrshire Farm here in Northern Virginia that she bought during the protracted lawsuits and negotiations over Chawton: an 800-acre spread in northern Virginia, where “she planned to raise heritage breeds under humane, organic conditions, to prove socially responsible farming was economically viable.” She started a cosmetics company whose aesthetic was that of the Addams Family (TV show). Chawton House was finally built using a sensible plan for restoration; a cemetery was discovered, a secret cupboard with 17th century telescope. Eventually Lerner’s 7000 rare books came to reside in a house you could hold conferences, one-day festivals and host scholars in. It had cost $10 million and yearly operating costs were $1 million a year.

Lerner’s Ayrshire Farmhouse today — it’s rented out for events, and hosts lunches and evening parties and lectures, has a shop ….

Lerner is unusual for a fan because she dislikes sequels and does not seek out Austen movies; it’s Austen’s texts she loves — yet she too wants to write a P&P sequel. I sat through one of her incoherent lectures so know first-hand half-nutty theory that every concrete detail in an Austen novel is crucial information leading to interpretation of that novel. I’ll leave the reader to read the details of her way of research, her travels in imitation of 18th century people: it took her 26 years to complete. How she has marketed the book by a website, and how Chawton was at the time of the book thriving (though her Farm lost money). Yaffe pictures Lerner at a signing of her book, and attracted many people, as much for her Internet fame as any Austen connection. Yaffe has Lerner against distancing herself from “our distastefully Twittering, be-Friending world, for the e-mail boxes overflowing with pornographic spam.” But she will buy relics at grossly over-inflated prices (“a turquoise ring” Austen wore) and give them to friends. She launched Chawton House by a fabulously expensive ball, to which Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul (dressed as aging Mr and Mrs Darcy) came. A “prominent chef” made 18th century foods (“nettle and potato soup, pickle ox tongue, sweetmeats”). She was in costume: “a low-cut, pale-blue ball gown. She even went horseback riding with Rintoul. A real thrill for a fan.

Chawton House Reading Room — there are two rooms, one open to the public, the other locked and filled with rare 18th century books

Devoney doesn’t say this nor Yaffe but I will: Chawton House never quite made it as sheerly a study center for women’s writing as originally envisioned; instead it became a sort of Jane Austen tourist site where festivals and conferences dwelling on Austen for fans were necessary, sometimes becoming a semi-popular community center like the Bronte Haworth house seems to be turning into. That’s not so bad, far worse was the people working for and at the place never acquired enough funding to do without Lerner; and over a fit of pique and probably long-standing resentments, some two years ago now Lerner pulled all her money out. It turns out 80% of funds came from her, and no way has been found to locate a substitute so the place can carry on its serious functions in the same way. Some new compromise will have to be found. Nearby is Chawton Cottage, now a small research center (for those select people who get to see its library), but more a tourist site; also nearby is the Austen family church where (among others) Austen’s sister, Cassandra and their mother, are buried. The house now (Looser says) “stands to revert back to Richard Knight’s family,” of whom Caroline is a member. All of us who know something of the house, who have experienced its scholarly meetings, its library, walked on its grounds, heard a concert at the church, mourn the fact that its fine director, Dr Gillian Dow has gone, to return full time as a scholar and lecturer to the University of Southampton.

This is the larger context for the story of Caroline and her older relatives from the turn of the century to now. Like other of these aristocrats who cannot afford to life the extravagant life of leisure they once did, Caroline (says Devoney) presents herself a slightly downtrodden: she and her parents lived in the basement of Chawton house while the rich tenants occupy the plum apartments above. One of the houses I was shown in the Lake District/Nothern Borders of England is owned by an aristocrat’s wife’s family; and the husband himself works to hold onto it by throwing it open to the public for various functions. He is clearly a well-educated man who lived a privileged elite life; nonetheless, he gave one of the talks. He told us he and his family living in the basement quarters below; their paying tenants above stairs.

The various Knights during Caroline’s life didn’t have many servants (oh dear poor things) and spent their time in less than admirable ways (watching TV say, horse racing — which costs). None of them were readers, and (as opposed to Devoney) I would say none of them ever produced anything near a masterpiece or important book, except maybe JEAL — if you are willing to consider how central his Memoir of his Aunt has been and how it has cast its spell over ways of reading Austen and understanding her ever after. A few have been minor literary people, and Joan Austen-Leigh and others been influential valued members of the British Jane Austen Society and they “grace” the JASNA every once in a while with their presence. Several have written sequels. Looser goes over a few of these, giving the impression that a couple which JASNA has promoted are better than they are.

Various financial troubles and also legal ones (including one male relative running over a local person with his car and “found not guilty of manslaughter” although he fled the scene) are covered by Devoney. When it comes to explaining the financial problems, Caroline says they are all a mystery. She omits any clarifying description of what the estate was like and which Knights lived here in WW2. Devoney supplies this: she tells of one recent Edward Knight’s time in India — his father had had been a royal favorite and a public-spirited magistrate, who loved to shoot birds. In 1951 thirty cottages in which tenants lived were auctioned off, and some went to occupants. They were in such bad shape apparently (again that is my deduction from what Looser gently implies) that one lucky man who could afford to buy the cottage said he got it for the price of a TV. Devoney implies this was dirt cheap. Not so: for many British people in 1951 the price of TV was out of their range; in the 1950s most Brits rented their TV

Chawton House recently from the outside

Death duties, genuinely high taxes each time the house changed hands is what did them in. (We no longer have even that in the US and the Republicans are salivating to change the death tax laws once again — these are important tools to prevent the growth of inequality.) I thought interesting that Chawton House was sold to one Richard Sharples, a conservative politician (1916-73) who served as governor of Bermuda and was assassinated (in Devoney’s words) “by black power militants.” Of course this bad-mouths these people, and when they were hung for the murder, there were days of rioting. I remember how horribly the white treated black and native people on Bermuda — so cruel that there are famous rebellions (Governor Eyre) wth terrifying reprisals by the British and colonial gov’ts. In the 20th century Sharples’ widow’s only recourse was to sell the property, furniture, books, portraits in 1977. There have over the century been a number of such sales to pay off death duties and some of the objects prized in museums, libraries came out of just such Sotheby auctions. Looser tells us in an aside there is a ditigal project trying to reconstruct the Knight Library as it was in 1935 (“Reading with Austen,” readingwithausten.com)

As to Caroline, she has apparently read very little of Austen’s fiction — that must very little indeed since Austen left only 6 novels which can easily be reprinted in one volume. She has appeared on TV, and is now she’s trying what a book can do. It’s not a memoir worthy of Jane Austen, says Devoney: the lack of elemental research even about her own life; Caroline’s account of herself features James Covey’s self-help book, The Habits of Highly Effective People, as the one that has gotten her through life. Wouldn’t you know it was seeing the 1995 P&P film by Andrew Davies that “kindled” Caroline’s interest in Jane Austen. I watched a documentary with Andrew Davies aired on BBC recently about just how much he changed the book to be about men; how much “correction” of it he made. Caroline still dreams of moving back to Chawton with the present male Richard Knight as ambassador (of what it’s not clear). I’ve been to JASNAs where Richard Knight gave a talk about his family in the mid-morning Sunday breakfast slot of the JASNAs. Here is Arnie Perlstein’s reaction to one.

Devoney ends her review with suggesting how much this history might remind us of Persuasion and the Elliot family and quotes Darcy in P&P: “I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these.” Devoney does justice at her opening to a few of the immediate Austens who showed some literary ability and genuine interest and integrity towards their aunt: James, her brother was a minor but good poet; his three children include JEAL; Anne Austen Lefroy who tried to finish Sanditon and wrote a brief touching novel, Mary Hamilton; Caroline Austen wrote her Reminiscences; Catherine Hubback several novels, a travel book of letters, and a continuation of Austen’s The Watsons as The Younger Sister. Her son, grand-nephew, and granddaughter all wrote books to add to our knowledge of the family; Edward Knight’s grandson produced the first substantial edition of Austen’s letters. There the inspiration coming through and about the aunt seems to have ended.

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From Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, Jeffrey Palliser tells Alice, a visitor to this aristocratic family at their country mansion who wonders what there is to do all day, about what he as an example of his relatives’ lives does with his time:

“Do you shoot?”
“Shoot! What; with a gun?”
“Yes. I was staying in a house last week with a lady who shot a good deal.”
“No; I don’t shoot.”
“Do you ride?”
“No; I wish I did. I have never ridden because I’ve no one to ride with me.”
“Do you drive?”
“No; I don’t drive either.”
“Then what do you do?”
“I sit at home, and—”
“Mend your stockings?”
“No; I don’t do that, because it’s disagreeable; but I do work a good deal. Sometimes I have amused myself by reading.”
“Ah; they never do that here. I have heard that there is a library, but the clue to it has been lost, and nobody now knows the way …

None of this loss and mismanagement or lack of literary interest or ability as part of a family history is unexpected. In her discreet last chapter of her fine biography of Jane Austen, Claire Tomalin records the earliest phases of this decline, together with or amid the real attempts of Catherine Hubback’s part of the family and other descendants of Frank to publish respectable books about Jane Austen. I imagine the valuable library gathered since Chawton House Library became a functioning study center (a large room in the present Chawton house) will remain intact but nowadays (as some of us know) libraries filled with books are not valued by booksellers or even libraries or universities in the way they once were. I know people who found they could not even give away a particularly superb personal library, and others driven to sell theirs for very little in comparison say for what they would have gotten in 1980 or so and that would not have covered how much it cost them over a lifetime.

Ellen

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.

E.J.Clery, Jane Austen, The Banker’s Sister

I have always respected her for the courage in cancelling that yes … All worldly advantages would have been to her — & she was of an age to know this quite well — Cassandra Austen speaking of Jane Austen’s refusal of Harris Bigg-Wither (quoted from Family Record, 93)

Ah! those were pleasant days when I had the Laconia! how fast I made money in her … ” (Wentworth, Persuasion I:8:67)

Once once we are buried you think we are dead
But behold me immortal” — Austen’s last writing, on it having rained hard on the Winchester Races

Friends and readers,

This is to recommend not just reading but obtaining E.J. Clery’s Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister. Clery carefully correlates documents left by Henry Austen’s life’s activities and those left by people he did business with, was friends or connected to (letters, life-writing, other texts as well as military, banking, lease and all sorts of contractual and court records), with close readings of Austen’s novels and her and her family’s papers, to create a fresh coherent story that sheds real light on aspects of her life and outlook, on his character, and on Jane and Henry’s relationship.

Clery gradually produces a portrait of Henry Thomas Austen as an ambitious, chance-taking, highly self-regarding man who aspired to gain a higher status in life and more respect for his personal gifts than the fourth son of an Anglican clergyman was thought by his world entitled to. At the same time or throughout each chapter Clery attempts to create the contemporary socially engaged businesswoman Austen favored today moving through the familiar events of Austen’s life (there have been so many biographies of Austen by this time) and writing or thinking about writing each novel.

Clery is not the first critic-scholar to assume that Jane was closer in mind to Henry than any other of her brothers, nor the first to credit him with the initiative and knowhow to help Jane achieve her heart’s desire to publish her novels. (And by this earn our gratitude.) But Clery is the first to interpret these novels metaphorically and literally as engaging in and critiquing or accepting financial outlooks literally analogous to or undergirding the outlooks Clery assumes Henry’s military, business and clerical behavior showed he had. Each chapter of Clery’s study begins with a retelling of Henry’s business and social life at the time of the publication or writing of each of Austen’s novels (chronologically considered). Clery then produces an interpretation of the novel in question, which assumes Jane’s cognizance of Henry’s state of mind or business at the time and that this alert awareness actuated some of the novel’s major themes (perhaps hitherto overlooked or not quite clearly understood).

Henry late in life, a curate

Beyond all this, as a mine of information the book is as useful as James Thomson’s explication of the money system in the era in his “Patterns of Property and Possession in Fielding’s Fiction (ECF, 3:1 [1999]21-42)

This book, then, is not a biography of Henry Austen. Its matter is made up of explications of Henry’s business practices, living arrangements, day-to-day activities in the context of what was happening in business, military, court and city events. His marriage to Eliza Hancock de Feuillide takes a very much second place in the scheme of things nor do we learn much new about her, though Clery is concerned to defend Eliza against the implication she was a bad mother or somehow cool, shady or amoral person, which the insistence on a direct connection between her and Austen’s portrait of Lady Susan and Mary Crawford has led to in the past. She also suggests, I think persuasively, that over the course of the relatively brief marriage Henry and Eliza grew somewhat estranged: she had not been eager for the marriage, and once obtained, he was not especially keen on her company nor she on the life and Austens at Godmersham.

A very poor miniature of Eliza Austen when an adolescent girl

Her gravestone: appropriately Henry buried her with her mother and son

After Henry’s life considered almost sheerly from a career and advancement standpoint, we are given an explication of one of Austen’s novels: like David Nokes in his underrated biography of Jane, Clery has read the letters with an original thoughtful alertness as to the events found in them. She tells us what on a given afternoon Jane or Henry (or Eliza), was doing and with whom, and how this related to what they did yesterday and the following evening and some ultimate career goals (which these business friendships fostered). In these vignettes she comes near to recreating Henry and Eliza and Jane as characters, but is hampered in the case of the first two complicated, enigmatic (neither wore his or her heart on sleeve) people by her acceptance of the Austen’s family’s adversarial dismissive portraits of them, with Henry “wayward” and Eliza ever a flirt (see my blogs on Henry and Eliza). The book is then or feels like a sort of constrained dual biography which then morphs into not always wholly persuasive yet intriguingly innovative literary criticism of Jane Austen’s oeuvre.

There is so much to be learned about financial practices and banking in each chapter; she goes well past the level of generality found in the previous articles (by Clive Caplan and T.A.B. Corley) to give us an in-depth picture of how Henry actually got himself promoted, put into positions where a lot of money went through his hands (a good deal of it which legally stuck to said hands), who he knew who mattered, who they knew whom they pressured, and how once “fixed,” Henry preceded to develop his interests further. Receivership, speculation, the “rotten” credit system come one by one under the reader’s eye. We learn the state of the economy in crucial moments, especially with regard to war, which all these people looked upon as a money-maker for them (thus Tory and Whig enthusiasm). Where we the Austens living in London when the successful business of publishing Sense and Sensiblity began, and what it (and the other novels) entailed. I give Clery great credit for providing us with the sums to see the profoundly immoral and unjust systems at work (for example, the money in the military sector was to be made buying and selling commissions off the table). Henry was of course “conscious of no criminality” (290).

Modern photo of the site of Henry’s bank in Alton today

One is struck by the small sums (£100) Henry and Francis disbursed yearly for a few years to the mother and sisters in comparison to the thousands they pulled in and spent on themselves. Clery mentions the Austen women were utterly dependent on these men who controlled the women’s movement and spending. The year Henry was said to have gone completely bankrupt and he said he could only supply £50 for his sisters, and mother his closest long-time partner, and Henry Maunde probably killed himself (283-84); there were intense recriminations among those involved about how much money Henry and Francis had held back. Suits and countersuits. Henry was resilient enough to almost immediately turn back to a clerical career, begin study for a title, and two years ahead of time (of James’s death) write begging letters in order to gain his brother James’s vicarage (312). Clery also reports in slow motion Henry’s two illnesses during the period of the decimation of the country and other banks when the (“rotten”) credit system (based on massive loans unaccounted for) imploded, and it seems to this reader by no means was Henry’s much boasted about optimism thick-set into his being.

But if it’s clear he had to know (it’s right before him, us and Clery and all) how insecure were all these securities, nonetheless he gave both his sisters crucially bad advice when it came to offers of money for Jane’s books. It’s important to remember that when Jane self-published Sense and Sensibility, and lopped and chopped First Impressions into Pride and Prejudice and sold it outright for £150, not only had her work been continually rejected, no one had offered her anything. It’s repeatedly said in his behalf (for the letter disdaining Murray’s offer of £450 is in Henry’s idiolect) that self-publishing was the common way: not when you were given such a ready money large offer. In just about all the cases of self-publishing I know of there has been nothing like this offer; as for the other common route, to solicit subscribers you need to know people, you need to be well-connected, you need really to be known and you have to have people solicit for you — those cases I’ve read of slightly later (including Burney much later in life) the person hates to solicit. It’s more than half what Radcliffe was paid for The Italian. Murray was not a “rogue” in this offer; he knew the market for fiction far better than Henry or Jane did. Another comparison might be Charlotte Smith; the sums she was offered early on with her first successes are smaller than that offered Austen. Murray was said to be a generous publisher (as was Johnson to Smith).

Henry repeats the same mistake years a few years later when Murray makes an overture to buy the copyrights of all six novels. After “consultation with Henry, Cassandra refused. Murray had “remaindered the 539 unsold copies of Emma at two shillings, and the 498 copies of the second edition of Mansfield Park at two shillings sixpence.” Of course he didn’t offer more for a “new edition” as she hinted. They ended selling all the copyrights to Bentley for £210 minus the £40 Bentley paid to Egerton for Pride and Prejudice, and they reappeared as inexpensive cheaply produced volumes for six shillings each (“sales were less than predicted and the number of copies issued each time was reduced”, 318-19)

Here is the source of the continual itching of the acid chip-on-the-shoulder consciousness that wrote the biographical notice, the continual bitterness, albeit mild, of some of his satire in The Loiterer. Henry cannot accept that the real gifts he felt in himself and by extension in his sister were not valued by a world he himself knew indifferent to integrity. He kept hoping otherwise when, Edmund Bertram-like, he studied for a face-to-face examination in the New Testament and Greek, only to be told by the Bishop “As for this book, Mr Austen, I dare say it is some years since either you or I looked into it” (291). He got the position based on his connections and family status.

Close up detail of Cassandra’s one portrait of Austen’s face

Some of the readings of the novels may surprise long-time readers of the criticism of Austen. Emma is interpreted as Austen’s rebellion against commercialism, a “self-flagellation” where we are immersed in a world where most of the characters who count are indifferent to money (242-43). Emma has been repeatedly read as a seriously Marxist analysis of society. I was surprised by how little time Clery spent on Sanditon. Clery seems to me accurate that the fragment represents a return to the juvenilia mode, but is after all a fragment and nuanced and subtle enough to support persuasive continuations about the proposed novel as about financial bust. Clery does uncovers some new sources of inspiration: a novel by Thomas Skinner Surr called The Magic of Wealth (his previous was A Winter in London); the author, a banker, also wrote a pamphlet defending the Bank of England’s paper money policy (see 295-96 and my blog on Chris Brindle’s stage adaptation).

But there is much to be learnt from Clery’s analysis of the juvenilia themselves, what’s left of Austen’s letters, the Austen papers; Clery’s reading of Sense and Sensibility as an “austerity novel” exposing ruthless “greed” and measuring everything by money as the center of society (139-51) and her reading of Mansfield Park as dramatizing and exploring “a speculative society” on every level (194-214). Clery precedes MP with an account of Eliza’s dying, Henry expanding his banking business by becoming “Receiver General for Land and Assessed Taxes” (190) and Warren Hastings’ pose of indifference: there is no need to over-interpret Fanny’s position as an exploited bullied dependent, or her famously unanswered question on slavery. Everything in MP lends itself to talk about money, only this time what is wanted and achieved by many is luxurious ease. Finally, Persuasion is presented as defending “embracing risk” (274-76), with Wentworth linked to Francis Austen’s admiration for a naval hero accused of “wrongdoing in connections with the Stock Exchange Hoax of 1814” (216, 275).

Details of their lives come to hand for each novel: “How appropriate that the party had a chance to see Midas at Covent Garden Theatre during a short three-night stopover at Henrietta Street” (204). The quiet disquiet over Austen’s possible incestuous feelings towards at least one of her brothers now becomes part of a Henry story across Austen’s oeuvre.  I’m not alone in feeling it was Frank, given the poem about his marriage, Frank’s providing her and her sister and mother with a home, the infamy of the letter “F” and clandestine Jane, the destruction of their letters (attributed to his granddaughter), not to omit Frank marrying Martha Lloyd (whom Jane loved) later in life (see Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life).

Green Park Buildings, Bath, end of the row — Austen and her family lived in Green Park buildings 2 centuries ago

In recent years there have been a number of books claiming to link this or that Austen novel with a building, a real life person or event never mentioned in the novel in question or Austen’s extant letters so it is so refreshing to be able to say of the bringing of contextual matter outside the novels into them not discussed before is not dependent on theories of invisibility or subtexts. I especially liked when Clery brought Walter Scott’s career, Austen’s remarks about him and his texts together. She brings out that Patronage is the contemporary novel by Edgeworth with Mansfield Park (193) but what Austen continually took notice of in her letters is how Scott is doing. In Clery’s book just as a number of financial scandals come into public view as well as Henry’s “precarious position” (Edward gives him a promissory note for £10,325), Mansfield Park is lagging in the “performance” department and Emma is not electrifying the reading world, Scott’s Antiquary is published, at a much higher price than either MP or Emma, and withing 3 week 6,000 copies sold, the author gaining half-profits of £1,632.” Jane Austen tells the truth as far as she knows it: it was disheartening.

When they all returned to Chawton Cottage, Jane wrote her niece Fanny of Henry: “London is become a hateful place to him, & he is always depressed by the idea of it” (292). I detect a strong plangent note in her closing letters quite apart from her last fatal illness. Stress can kill.

Deign on the passing world to turn thine Eyes,
And pause awhile from Letters to be wise,
There mark what ills the Scholar’s Life assail,
Toil, Envy, Want, the Patron and the Jail,
See Nations slowly wise and meanly just
To buried Merit raise the tardy Bust.

Clery attributes Jane’s burial in Winchester Cathedral and the floor plaque with its inscription to Henry and the publication of her novels too. He ended his life impoverished but, Clery asserts, Henry ‘s courage in life gave us his sister’s novels (324-25).

Ellen

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

Peter Weir’s Master and Commander out of the Aubrey-Maturin novels; Jane Austen v Byron’s perspective

A heroic scene done exquisitely realistically in Weir’s Master and Commander (2003)

The contrasting geologizing scene on the Galapagos Islands

Dear friends and readers,

As it was more than 2 weeks ago now that I spent three nights as much mesmerized by the features about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander as by the movie itself, I had better write now before I lose contact with what made the movie the meaningful experience it is, and (as I am told) reflects the poetic center of Patrick O’Brian’s historical adventure fiction. It’s this: it combines utterly incompatible feelings (Robert Graves wrote about this regarding verse): on the one hand, the worship necessarily blind to reality of violence on behalf of securing power (and with it wealth, privilege, status, the ceremonies of admiration), and on the other, the realization this demands death, maiming, torture (whipping, flogging, whatever it takes to enforce discipline to be cruel) when what makes life worth living is friendship, imaginative arts, knowledge and immersion in the natural world. Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe in the film) enacts the thrust of the first, and Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) the activities and point of view of the second, with all the characters arranging themselves variously on a continuum between them.

This kind of intense quiet music-making punctuates the sequences

I seem to remember best a wholly naturalistic (it was filmed not computer generated) of Russell Crowe as the captain going for a swim, and everyone aboard watching him with bated breathe lest they lose him.

Russell Crowe as hero

Also the horror of the ship hospital, the operating table as the maimed men were amputated, sewn, and on beds left to die. Richard McCabe as Mr Higgon’s surgeon’s mate’s anguished terror at making a mistake as he imitates Maturin as surgeon whose arm is too hurt to perform himself.

The boy has lost his arm, we watch him follow Maturin around the Galapagos; he is groomed to be a captain himself

I have listened to a marvelous reading aloud on books-on-CD of the third book of the series, H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick Tull where the character of Stephen Maturin emerges fully for the first time as sceptic, objector, doubter, sensitive soul, the alternative voice, and have now placed the first book high on a TBR pile of historical fiction.

Paul Bettany as questioner

I’ve also looked up on my Eighteenth Century World at Yahoo list to see if there was any commentary on the film in 2003 when I saw it with Yvette. I had gone to a session in a ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) panel on film where:

A young Spanish professor, Diego Tellez Alarcia, gave a remarkably well-organized, lucid, and detailed exposition on Master and Commander, an adaptation of several novels by Patrick O’Brian. Mr Alarcia went over the type of film M&C represents, the real historical & contemporary events (one involving the USS Essex) it alludes to, its relationship to O’Brian’s novels, and how it functioned to whip up patriotic emotion after 9/11. Mr Alarcia first used Krakauer, an important film critic (who I’ve read) to argue that films provide a new way of studying history: we can study our culture as an engine of history itself as well as a mirror of society. Films are a new way of writing history as valid as speech and the written word. Mr Alarcia went on about how much effort was put into making the details of the film historically accurate (ship, food, clothes &c). The genre this film belongs to also is the swash-buckler, the rebellious adventure film, the tongue-in-cheek (Captains Courageous, Mutiny on the Bounty, Billy Budd, Pirates of the Carribean). I learned something new about O’Brian’s career: I had thought the Jack Aubrey novels are a roman fleuve, but did not know that O’Brian also translated 30 books from French.

I’ve appended as the comments I received on that listserve some 12 years ago on the film, beginning with a person who loved the books to someone who differed on the film but was glad of the attention repaid to journalism at the time.

We can connect this to Austen in various ways because of her sailor-brothers: here I choose to compare her with her brother’s Francis’s viewpoint on a renegade hero of the time, and Byron’s ironic understanding.

One chapter in Southam’s JA and the Navy is about a little known satire by Austen which shows her to have been a narrowly partisan amoral imperalist Tory type. Southam prints a little known and until now Austen’s little understood satire in the manner of Pope, Swift and others:

Of A Ministry Pitiful, Angry, Mean Of a Ministry pitiful, angry, mean, A gallant commander the victim is seen. For promptitude, vigour, success, does he stand Condemn’d to receive a severe reprimand! To his foes I could wish a resemblance in fate: That they, too, may suffer themselves, soon or late, The injustice they warrent. But vain is my spite They cannot so suffer who never do right.

In brief, Popham was court-martialed for disobeying an order to protect ports in the Cape of Good Hope. Instead he took his ships and attacked some ports in Argentina in order to steal their cargo and help friends upset the Argentinian gov’t and eventually take over. Among other helpmates were the revolutionaries: politics makes temporary bedfellows this way. There’s a long chapter in Southam’s JA and the Navy which shows that in this case Austen was fiercely on the side of an amoral thug-pirate type, Popham.

Why? because he was supported by her brothers; for among other things, his relationship with Moira and others to whom Henry had (very unwisely, but trying hard to make money from money) lent big sums of money. It’s a good instance of her narrow Toryism. The man was out for himself to make huge amounts of money; left his post to go over to another country and simply grab it. One of the sorts of people that make the world miserable for the average person. Even Nelson thought him a horror: Nelson, we have to give this to him, did not seek wealth personally except as it came as part of actions he thought genuinely for the good of the people and land of England.

People like to ignore or not talk about how Wentworth is presented as making money from his ships; we are not told what this actually means in reality. He, though, is not the charlatan type Popham was.

Now Southam keeps saying that the brothers (Francis and Charles and in this case Edward and Henry) would have approved of Popham, but while Henry clearly has behaviors that resemble Popham’s (and Edward is fiercely partisan on behalf of his property, will not help other landowners), not Francis and the two passages that Southam quotes are filled with comments that were they turned to look at Popham would judge him “horrible” and very wrong. In the chapter he registers the idea that it’s just “horrible” for people to bomb others. Popham was an early inventor of the equivalent of today’s drones (drop it on the ship and blow it up), but it was real claptrap and when used as often killed those using it. Nonetheless, he tried it and destroyed four ships in the process.

A drawing-illustration made from the movie — the officers studying maps, planning strategy

Given the continual dropping of bombs on people helpless against them and the targeting of civilians since WW2, it’s worth it to quote some of Francis’s words here. He speaks first (at length, a long sentence) of how impossible it is to “direct” the bombs with “any tolerable precision.” When people drop drones, we are often told a single “terrorist” is killed; not so; you cannot direct them that way; the drone drops the bombs on a house and destroys the house and anyone in it plus usually the whole street. Hundreds are killed and maimed and lives destroyed. Francis Austen:

“This horrible mode of warfare seems scarcely justifiable in principle (amongst civilized nations) short of self-preservation and perhaps its entire want of success may have been a fortunate circumstance for England who could not have expected to be the only power to use such machines and whose shipping would be constantly liable to similar attacks with much greater facility from the exposed situations of the anchorages then used.”

In other words, such bombs could be used against England’s ships. The second is a long passage where he says one must obey the orders of one’s commander. When one is ordered to stay and protect a port, one must. Francis always behaved that way and he missed Trafalgar (which he regretted all his life because it meant less money and less prestige and fewer connections he could pressure) because he obeyed an order. Jane Austen was taking precisely the opposite position. Throughout her letters we see her usual mockery (Southam calls this joking) and adversarial positions to whatever is happening.

Here Southam cavalierly says that Austen liked Popham because her brothers did. One can see parallels with Henry’s banking and loan practices and who he was more than willing to be friendly with but all the evidence suggests Francis would have judged Popham fiercely and said he should be court-martialed.

During this time Jane Austen was reading Charles Pasley’s Essay on Military Policy (you can download this as an ebook and I have) and we find in her letters one of these short phrases, but it is in full admiration. The man advocates the most ruthless of imperalist policies, the sort that leads to what Belgium did in the Congo. I wondered what Austen would have thought of Maturin.

Byron provides a rejoinder to Jane Austen, Pasley, and Popham: Wellington: The Best of Cut-Throats (1819)

Though Britain owes (and pays you too) so much,
Yet Europe doubtless owes you greatly more:
You have repaired Legitimacy’s crutch,
A prop not quite so certain as before:
The Spaniard, and the French, as well as Dutch,
Have seen, and felt, how strongly you restore:
And Waterloo has made the world your debtor
(I wish your bards would sing it rather better).

You are ‘the best of cut-throats’: – do not start;
The phrase is Shakespeare’s, and not misapplied;
War’s a brain-spattering, wind-pipe-slitting art,
Unless her cause by right be sanctified.
If you have acted once a generous part,
The world, not the world’s masters, will decide,
And I shall be delighted to learn who,
Save you and yours, have gained by Waterloo?

I’ve done. Now go and dine from off the plate
Presented by the Prince of the Brazils,
And send the sentinel before your gate
A slice or two from your luxurious meals:
He fought, but has not fed so well of late.
Some hunger, too, they say the people feels: –
There is no doubt that you deserve your ration,
But pray give back a little to the nation.

Never had mortal man had such opportunity
Except Napoleon, or abused it more:
You might have freed fallen Europe from the unity
Of tyrants, and been blest from shore to shore:
And now – what is your fame? Shall the Muse tune it ye?
Now – that the rabble’s first vain shouts are over?
Go! hear it in your famished country’s cries!
Behold the world! and curse your victories!

To return to the 21st century film, Stuart Klawans, the film critic of The Nation provides a perceptive commentary on this film helps explain why it’s alluring experience. His argument is that it has a

deeply erotic charge … which turns out to be powerful and strange.” “It’s there from the first wordless, nocturnal sequence, in which the camera follows a prowling character through the sleeping quarters below deck, where rows of hammocks, seen from below, swing from the ceiling like multiple scrotums. Perhaps the penis is Russell Crowe himself, who makes his first appearance semi-dressed, bursting erect from the captain’s quarters through doors that part like a loosely buttoned fly. Never mind that the Surprise, like all ships, is calls ‘she.’ Weir conceives of it as a huge male body, whichis literally suffused with its crew’s blood. [Klawans was puzzled to read reviews claiming the picture was “stupendously entertaining” and “thrilling”.] You might have thought these writesr were describing The Adventures of Robin Hood rather tnan movie that lingers over the amputation of a young boy’s arm. Sailors are lavishly blown apart; a skull is opened and the brains probed before a fascinated crew; in one extended scene Maturin even performs surgery on himself, digging into his own guts while watching the spectacle in a mirror. Even during the longueurs, when male bodies are not being ripped into, Weir reminds you of the permeability of flesh by providing all the actors with highly visible scars. So it came to me: This penetration of male bodies is what’s thrilling about Master and Commander. How’s that for an S&M title? The infliction and endurance of pain is the sex …

Klawans isn’t “belittling the grandeur, the magnificence, the meticulous recreation” of details of “nautical life, or neglecting “Crowe’s wonderfully assured performance, which is as self-amused as it is amusing.” He agrees with Crowe “that M&C is one enormously expensive art movie.”

I was struck by the emotionalism of Maturin’s intellectual senstive-physician sidekick. I liked how the film questioned and exposed the values behind the male world. Yvette said to that they are the same pair of A Beautiful Mind. Maybe it’s a woman’s emotion picture shot into the center of a swashbuckler by way of Captain Hornblower. It is also siimply a bunch of men enjoying themselves enormously, pretending they are the men at sea, in danger, winning battles, exploring, watching punishment of those who risk all, or betray or undercut the rules. All this under the cover or rational of historical accuracy.

And given my return to historical fiction (Poldark novels, Wolf Hall) and its relationship to historic fiction (older), biography, our understanding of history, now I would like to read a few of the novels

Ellen

JASNA, Montreal: Mansfield Park: & Oliphant’s Perpetual Curate, Pasley’s imperialism, Rozema’s MP, and French culture (2)

Flirting amid piles of plays (Maria and Henry with Tom and Yates in the background, the 1983 MP by Ken Taylor)

Dear friends and readers,

Herewith my second blog report on the gist of the individual papers delivered on Saturday, October 10th, at the JASNA AGM in Montreal. Looking over the 7 to 8 break-out sessions on against the one I chose, I again regret that so many papers were on against one another.

I went to hear Br. Paul Byrd’s paper comparing Mansfield Park with Margaret Oliphant’s Perpetual Curate because I’m a reader of Oliphant’s fiction, and know she was influenced by and wrote a perceptive essay on Austen’s fiction and Austen’s nephew’s memoir of his aunt. He brought the two novels together as by two Anglican women who saw the need for reform in the church with clerical heroes who suffer repeated attacks. Mansfield Park: Edmund is distracted by his personal involvement from his vocation; his religion though more often discussed than portrayed; pluralism and absenteeism condemned. He is contrasted to Dr Grant. Mary argues priests have little influence on people, represents a segment of society that no longer believes thoroughly in the Christian religion; mercenary considerations strongly influence her judgement; Henry Crawford is sensual, self-indulgent. Edmund’s relationship to Fanny shows him thoughtful, meaning to be reflective though he fails to be an accurate observer. The Perpetual Curate: Frank Wentworth presents a Victorian ideal and knows what a clergyman ought to be; but is his own worst enemy, not politic, handles a scandal foolishly, yet remains true to himself; Br Byrd brought in each author’s male relatives who were clergymen, and seemed to believe that Austen assumed her readers believed that Anglicanism could be an effective force in the world while Oliphant delivers a blistering critique of Anglican church of her day: Br Bryd thought Oliphant was showing a cultural shift from a gentleman who is a clergyman to clergyman who have a calling; he also read Mansfield Park as seriously about religion and religious failings in Austen’s characters and the cultural world they belonged to.

I went to hear Kathryn Davis’s “Charles Pasley’s Essay and the ‘Governing Winds of Mansfield Park,” because during the long course of reading and analyzing Austen’s letters (see my blog analysis of Letter 78) I became aware of how she admired the ruthless imperialism of Pasley through what she said in a letter and Southam’s analysis of Pasley’s career and writing (in his book on Austen’s brothers) and how narrowly partisan Austen could be when it came to what she thought were her brothers’ interests. Ms Davis talked of Austen’s admiration for this man, and of his life as retold in the ODNB, and then presented Pasley’s writing in terms of his patriotic ideals and worry about the navy weakening; how he reminds his audience of the commercial good (profit, well ordered places) the military could lay the grounds for in conquest and expansion; she quoted eloquent passages (duty is service); he recognizes there is a loss of social and economic liberty but such bonds as are formed are a deterrent to war. I had not realized Pasley wrote specifically about the West Indies (e.g., Antigua must be held onto). I was much relieved when Robert Clark who had given a paper in the previous break-out session on the British empire at the time of and as reflected in MP (I heard a version of his excellent papers at the ASECS in Williamsburg last spring), when Mr Clark brought out the murder and destruction of societies found in these colonial places, the suffering inflicted on these native peoples; that Pasley’s is a ruthless militarist deeply anti-liberal argument, where the East India Company’s doings are an exemplary norm. Southam shows how he disobeyed orders to aggrandize himself. Mr Clark remarked that it’s telling that Pasley was republished around the time of WW1.

Fanny Price and Henry Crawford dancing foreground, Mary and Edmund just behind them, at the Mansfield ball (1999 MP by Rozema)

I went to hear Nora Stovel Forster’s paper because it was about film, specifically “dancing as a blueprint for marriage in Rozema’s MP.” Ms Forster argued that Rozema modernized MP by politicizing its themes to push her own agenda. Austen’s MP is relentlessly about money as intertwined with love (Mary sees everything in terms of money; Maria marries to gain the use of a great deal of money). Ms Stovel spent a lot of time on the Portsmouth episode in the movie where (Ms Stovel felt) the poverty of the Prices is exaggerated, and drives Fanny to accept Henry Crawford’s proposal momentarily. Slavery is brought in as Fanny journeys around England; through the horrors illustrated in Tom’s sketches of his father’s plantation in Antigua; the sexuality made explicit for us to see the corruption of the hollow characters. Fanny’s character is much changed and she is (in effect) made the author of the movie. I liked how Ms Stovel showed us some of her stills in slow motion. It was hard to tell but I thought the audience this time was more pleased by Ms Stovel’s talk about Rozema’s movie than they had by Sorbo’s presentation because it could be taken as implicitly criticizing the movie for not being faithful (but that is not why they dislike it so as other movies as unfaithful, say Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s S&S is very popular among such people).

The Harp arrives (1999 MP)

I did not know that the session where Jeanice Brooks and Gillian Dow were listed was actually an attempt to present two papers in the 60 minutes. Ms Brooks’s paper was on French culture and music in Paris and as sold and mirrored in London and the provinces of England around the time of MP. I hope hers is one of those papers published in Persuasions for she presented much valuable information in a perceptive way applicable to Austen’s novel and life too (Austen played the pianoforte; Eliza, her cousin, the harp). She told of the invention and history of the harp in the 18th century, the music books in Austen’s household, and went over two volumes of selections from 18th century periodicals which only Eliza de Feuillide could have supplied. She gave a brief resume of Eliza’s movements in France and England from 1780 to 1813 when she died (1780 in Paris with harp; 1781 married, lived in Paris; 178-86 lives on husband’s estates; 1786-87 visits Steventon; Sept 1788 returns to Paris, back in 1789; death of Feuillide, of her mother, her marriage to Henry, the musical party Austen records in April 1811; Fanny Knight’s note on Eliza’s cancer); she then played a lovely piece of music to which one of the songs in the book was set at the time. I regret not having a copy of the text to share with others. I was unable to take it down in sten quickly enough.

Edmund reading to Fanny as children (he made her books meaningful to her, 1983 MP)

I was not able to stay for much of Gillian Dow’s paper which had to be fitted in to the tail end of the session. Ms. Dow attempted a speculative answer to the question, from what books did Fanny Price learn French? She talked of what we know of Austen’s interactions with Grandison (reading, alluding, the playlet) and how she uses Lovers’ Vows in MP, to show Austen’s interest in plays, and she suggested Austen may have meant us to think the Fanny learned French by reading the plays Madame de Genlis wrote for children. While I agree that Adele et Theodore is an important source in two of Austen’s novels (Emma and NA) and Austen seems to have been an avid reader of Genlis’s fiction (which we can see from her reading with her sister in her letters), but at the time I left the session I had heard no evidence Austen read these plays or meant us to feel Miss Lee would be a person who would teach from them. Sir Thomas seems to have instructed his sons through having them declaim plays but there is no sign his daughters or niece were encouraged in such self-displays (even if the texts were impeccably moral).

My daughter, Izzy, may have chosen more wisely than me.

Everyone reading and rehearsing playscript (2007 MP by Maggie Wadey)

On Saturday she listened to Nancy Yee outline how Shakespeare’s Henry VIII relates to MP (she had a sheet of passages from Henry VIII); she was amused by Arnie Perlstein’s paper on subtexts in the allusions to plays in Mansfield Park; she said she understood Susan Allen Ford’s paper on Hester Chapone’s Letters and their relationship to Mansfield Park (was persuaded there really was one), and she positively enjoyed Sara Bowen’s “Fanny’s future, Mary’s Nightmare, on Jane Austen’s understanding of a clergyman’s wife’s life in the context of all the clergyman’s wives that she knew, from her mother, to her sisters-in-law, her niece, Anna Austen Lefroy and many other kin, friends and acquaintances.

From 1982 Barchester Chronicles, scripted Alan Plater (the clerical families dining, Mr Harding and his daughter, Archdeacon and Mrs Grantley and Mr Arabin, adapted from Trollope’s Barchester Towers)

Izzy talked of (I imagine from this paper) Trollope’s presentation of the life of Archdeacon Grantly’s wife in Barchester Towers, Mrs Proudie across the Barsetshire series, and what we see of clergymen’s wives in his mid- to later 19th century books, and said Ms Bowen argued that the demands on a woman’s life as a clergyman’s wife were changing and are reflected in Austen’s books: we see little expectation of religious doings or doctrine in Elinor Dashwood; we seem never to see Henry Tilney do or think about religion or doctrine (even if he does not neglect his parish and preaches there of a Sunday); in Mansfield Park things are changing, expectations growing. Izzy was amused to try to count up all the female characters in Austen’s fiction who either might have or do become clergyman’s wives.

Mrs Norris humiliating Fanny over her refusal to play (1983 MP)

The most fun she and I had together while at the JASNA conference was when she downloaded all of MP onto my ipad (there is a library APP which permits this, offering free books out of copyright and books you must buy) and we read together parts of MP found suggestive hints in the first three chapters of the book tending to prove McMaster’s thesis that Mrs Norris loathed Fanny because she had wanted to have her as a vicarious child through Sir Thomas and found her personality one a vindictive, selfish, aggressive, competitive and greedy personality would bitterly resent.

I know I reported that my proposal to present a paper on the relationship of the four Mansfield Park films with the novel was rejected, though happily I wrote a brief elaboration of what I would have said and it was published on-line by BSECS, but I believe I never wrote about how I had had an idea to compare Smith’s Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake with Mansfield Park. A well-meaning friend suggested to me my idea was too dry or scholarly or narrow (who reads Ethelinde?) and the MP proposal was more likely to find acceptance. I’ll end on this proposal I never sent: “Empire, Marriage, and Epistolarity in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.”

I propose to give a talk on revealing parallels between Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde; or the Recluse of the Lake, and Austen’s Mansfield Park. First, the novels both use visual space, be it a country, rural, town or city, a prison or a great house, to project the inner psychic and moral state of a character in the context of a larger exploration of empire. Characters in both value male work which is part of a professional career to gain money and rank; whether they travel widely or spend their days in a local parish, the two novelists justify and/or critique the means by which the characters succeed or fail. Second, the novels contain slowly evolving love stories which end in an unexpectedly welcome misalliance for one couple and adultery for another, destroying the destined hopes of some of the characters, all seen in the context of arranged, mercenary, and far-flung marriage, further career moves. Last, the development of the novels’ plot-design relies on epistolary situations, characters who reach others only through letters, and reading with all the tension, misunderstanding and critique from afar distance creates and facilitates.
In other words, I’ll be discussing these novels from a post-colonial standpoint. Smith’s central characters are openly driven by economic need, caught up in wars, bad marriages and illegitimate yet loving liaisons, exile and painful and distant correspondences; while most of Austen’s characters’ circumstances are economically comfortable, and adultery is only adumbrated; nonetheless, her characters go through the same paradigms of need, war, mismatch and have to force themselves to write and read their letters Whether it’s a question of intertextuality or influence, a comparison of the way Smith’s and Austen’s characters discuss, dramatize and solve their career, marital and social or moral needs, will shed light on these novels and contemporary attitudes towards the demands of the local mercenary and rank-based and global commercial worlds as these intersect with the people’s private needs and desires.

After Harvest Storm, Richard Westnall by R.M. Meadows (early 19th century)

E.M.