JASNA 2017, at Huntington Beach: Austen fervency: continuations, sequels & variations

The old pump at Steventon as drawn by Ellen Hill for her and her sister, Constance Hill’s, Jane Austen: Her Home and Her Friends

Friends and readers,

Saturday began with a lavish morning breakfast on a terrace overlooking the beach, after which the second keynote speaker, Devoney Looser delivered a remarkable speech, and there were two breakout sessions, one directly after Devoney’s, and another after an hour and one half break for lunch. At this the conference proper seemed to be over, unless you count the “special events,” and at the last moment I paid for and heard an informative talk by a man running a local museum on printing about printing in the 18th century. Since the third keynote speech on Sunday morning was (like all the other JASNAs I’ve gone to) in mid-morning, and Izzy and I had a plane to catch (and a drive through congested highways to get there), we had to miss this once again. I have yet to hear the third keynote speech. It is not designed for those who are not staying for yet another day, half of which has no scheduled events having to do with Austen (this time it was expensive tours, wineries, beach and cruise excursions, dinners). And of course that means payment for yet another night at the typical expensive JASNA hotel. And very like the other three JASNAs where Izzy and I stayed at the hotel for Wednesday through Sunday morning, many people were leaving Sunday morning — as witnessed by the plethora of cabs, shuttles and other non-pedestrian modes of getting away (as there is no public transportation and few sidewalks in this area of California one cannot walk anywhere).

Devoney’s keynote speech was (in my case) followed by two outstanding presentations in sessions (I chose luckily at last) and a third of suggestive interest about Austen criticism. As I will try (as I have been doing) to tell a little of what I could not hear from what others told me of talks they heard, I will have four blogs after all. Here I discuss just the keynote speech and the papers I heard during Sessions D and E.

Devoney’s title was neutral: “After Jane Austen.” Like Gillian’s and the theme of the conference, her matter was not directly about Austen, but post-Austen matters, with this difference: the unusual areas she had researched, a resolutely neutral stance which allowed for much (I at least assumed) irony towards the absurd, commercial, and bizarre material she uncovered, and for a nervily dry delivery. She offered the kind of apology people do when they are not apologizing but defending a stance: she was not going to assume a “solemn” or “mournful” tone (even though this was 200 years after a relatively early death of a remarkable writer, a death I would add in great pain). No, her stance is that or closer to that of Rebecca Munford on Emma Tennant (the essay is “The Future of Pemberley: Emma Tennant, the ‘Classic Progression’ and ‘Literary Trespassing’ in Dow and Hanson’s collection, The Uses of Austen); she accepts Jane Austen and Zombies even if the argument of whatever text is pro-war is for the common good (arguably the stance of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; see my “The Violent Turn”); her view that the 1960s/70s formed a rallying time for social transformations that included Austen; she is open to ghosts of Austen haunting us, even literally and unscrupulously (if I understood her correctly). Throughout her speech her power-point presentation gave us illustrations of “the bizarre stuff” that’s out there: outrageous headlines about Austen, ludicrously unhistorical pictures, ridiculous contests and assertions, and she told several exemplary stories.

Lily James as Elizabeth and Sam Riley as Darcy fighting over a gun, guns are regarded as good ways of remaining safe in Burt Steer’s film (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies)

Devoney’s first story was about putting a plaque for Austen in Westminster Abbey in 1967; there were large sculptures of writers there, mostly male, and the burden of her theme was that quite a number of people in the Jane Austen society were not exactly for this, nor were the Westminster Abbey individuals. Yet it happened, and she could name only those she assumed had the contacts to do it (one woman who lived in Winchester all her life who “had no profession”). A sermon was given which was an attempt to diminish Austen or put her as a woman in her place Austen with “small things,” like apple pieces; absurd straining to find analogies with Biblical metaphors. The last and fourth story had a similar theme: it included as one of its principals Joan Austen-Leigh, a descendant of Austen, active in the Jane Austen Society in Britain; she wrote sequels as well as plays, and was an entertaining raconteur. The story told highlighted how rigidly prissy one of the elected officials of that society had been in, someone who had never read any Austen (as apparently several of those involved in the politics of the plaque would never have read any Austen). The second story was about the pump that stood on the site of the Steventon vicarage (torn down in the 1830s). In fall of 1793 it was reported stolen by the New York Times, and a melodramatic account was given: it happened in the “dead of night,” a Chief Inspector was involved, and it was concluded (by at least the person who wrote this remark) that it had been spirited away to the United States “by a mad Austenite.” Research on the pump that was reputed to have been there began to question a photograph of the old pump. A third was about the statue of Colin Firth as naked to the waist in the water. It seems this has been destroyed. She regaled us over silly goings-on in these incidents.

The fourth (perhaps the most interesting to follow up on) on a script for a TV movie in 1974 by Stromberg Junior (the son of the man who produced the 1940 P&P featuring Laurence Oliver and Greer Garson). Writers included Christopher Isherwood; perhaps Peter O’Toole would have been in it. Devoney had read the script and found it “a hoot:” she took the view that it mocked Austen’s book by mocking the cult values (sweetened up heterosexual romance ending in conventional marriage and family). This Lizzie can’t see spending one’s life to find a man. Devoney quoted dialogues intended to be funny; it seemed to me (like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) to have a strong gay subtext. Stromberg Jr was not a liked man, and the deal fell through; indeed there was a threat of a lawsuit. Devoney mourned that we had not had this version of P&P after the 1940 one (which she seemed to like); the implication was maybe we would have been able to have a differently framed Austen than the one which did emerge. The 1979 dramatic romance by Fay Weldon, where it should be said Elizabeth was made the center, and other serious familial romance mini-series and cinema movies? Amy Heckerling’s Clueless has been, until recently, an exception to the rule. (I’m not sure about that; it seems to me that movies made for movie-houses have tended to be broadly comic, e.g., Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility has much comedy; the Indian Bride and Prejudice and Aisha [an Emma appropriation]).

She received a standing ovation, after which there were questions and semi-speeches. One elicited from Devoney stories of the 1970s and 80s when the first feminist criticism of Austen emerged (e.g., Alison Sullaway, a friend of hers). Juliet McMaster told of her memories of the 1970s JASNAs.

I thought it a spectacular speech, beautifully delivered, probably appropriately because it was (in effect) a celebration of celebrity culture. She intended to be or presented herself (though ironically) as respectful of popular reactions to Austen’s works (or to the framing of them); and among the books she praised at the outset was Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites: A Journey through the world of Jane Austen Fandom. Jane Smiley remarks (rightly) that this book includes interviews with quite a few men: as someone who has been a long-time inhabitant of the listservs and pays attention to the blogs, I know that this is a distortion: at no time over the years I’ve been on-line have I ever seen more than one or two men active on the listservs, and most of the time they acted as thorns in the bush, aggressively insulting (Arnie Perlstein used to do this) or objecting “robustly” (as some put it) to other views. Scottie Bowman, whose death was responsible for his disappearance used to enjoy himself mocking Austen-l members; with his pretense of urbanity and gift for poisonous banter he was one of the causes of the famous Fanny wars. He was a troll though a published novelist. But men have more prestige than woman, and it’s not that acceptable to admit that still most of the most fervent fans are women. Yaffe’s book is not broadly accurate but spotlights what she thinks will be entertaining and attract readers and sales, and those interviewed are delighted by the attention Other books deliberately turn for their findings not to the unknown ordinary female Janeite (or unnamed except on the Net), but to published books, films, which are usually skilfully manipulated commodities intended to reach far more than Jane Austen fans whose appeal is quite different than Austen’s books. It’s easier to catalogue tourist sites than track down the unpublished (see Kathryn Pratt Russell’s “Everybody’s Jane Austen,” South Atlantic Review, 76:3 (2011):151-57; she reviews Juliette Wells’s Everybody’s Jane and Claudia Johnson’s Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures. Russell finds that Claudia Johnson uses her findings to describe powerful ideas about class, sex, and culture (of the type that feed into populism).

I know I am unusual in critiquing celebrity culture for its falseness and for maintaining that one can evaluate and judge between works. In fact Johnson evaluates and is condescending; how could she not be? But I am not alone. John Sutherland (on Helene Kelly’s Jane Austen: Secret Radical; scroll down “on the anniversary”) and Ruth Bernard Yeasell hestitate and critique too (see Yeazell’s “Which Jane Austen,” NYRB, 64:14 (Fall 2017):63-65.

Charlotte Heywood (Amy Burrows), Felicity Lamb (Bonnie Adair) Clara Brereton (Lucy-Jane Quinlan), Brindle’s Sanditon play

Mary Marshall’s “Sanditon: Inspiring Continuations, Adaptations, and Spin-offs for 200 Years” (Session D) drew me because I’ve gotten to know Chris Brindle’s filmed play, Sanditon and have the edition of Sandition by Prof Marshall which includes Anna Lefroy’s continuation, which Marshall was respectful of. She began with the larger picture: Sanditon is the least adapted of the novels, Pride & Prejudice the most adapted, with Emma at this point coming in second (though S&S is still a strong contender for second place). Sanditon was first known to the public in 1871 when James Edward Austen-Leigh described it, summarizing it in the 2nd edition of the Memoir. It was first published in 1925; 1954 Chapman made a much more accessible edition; it is the largest surviving manuscript we have (longer than The Watsons, though The Watsons is far more polished and finished, with implications much fuller as to how it was to proceed): 24,000 words in 12 chapters. Austen was giving us a much wider world than she had before, her language is more relaxed and at times so fresh the descriptions; the plot is unfolding slowly, with its direction not yet clear. Basically Marshall then described several of the continuations. Anna Lefroy’s, written between 1845-60, was first published in 1983 by Marshall; she had been working as a rare book cataloguer, and came across this working draft. It was Anna who had the cancelled drafts of Persuasion (she reminded us). She carefully developed the Parker family in a direction consonant with what Austen wrote. There is a real aptness and similarity of tone. The POV is Charlotte, Charlotte and Sidney are to marry; Sidney is clearly going to help his brother-in-law; Marshall was reminded by one of the new names of Hasting’s man of business, Woodman; the ambiguous character of Tracy is developed – a business world is being put before us.

A brief list: 1932 Alicia Cobbet (?), whose text is not faithful to the original personalities at all, with its melodramatic plot about kidnapping, smuggling and the like. A best known continuation: by Austen and “another lady (Marie Dobbs): Dobbs extended the story in a direction Dobbs thought Austen’s novel might have moved; Charlotte, for example, thwarts Edward’s seduction of Clara; Sidney proposes to Charlotte. 1981 Rebecca Baldwin who hopes the reader may take what she has written as homage to Austen; Julia Barret 2002 whose book Ms Marshall said is said to be terrible; Regina Hall 2008, where a mere description showed ludicrousness; Helen Marshall 2012 wrote a bizarre short story. Carrie Brebis, The Suspicion at Sanditon; or, The Disappearance of Lady Denham 2015, a “Mr and Mrs Darcy mystery,” was characterized by Marshall as “a well-written mystery.” Then there are several self-published texts: Juliet Shapiro 2003; Helen Barker The Brother 2002; David Williams’s Set in a Silver Sea 2016 with Miss Lamb as the main character. This is not the complete list she went over; I am missing titles; it was clear that Ms Marshall enjoyed some of these.

She then told us about Chris Brindle’s play, the film, the documentary; he owns the Lefroy ms, recruited Amanda Jacobs who sang his music very well (especially the beautiful duet, Blue Briny Sea; you can listen here to his most recent music for Jane Austen). Her last text was the coming (she hoped) new Sanditon commercial film (2018-19), with Charlotte Rampling as Lady Denham, Holliday Grainger as Charlotte, Toby Jones as Tim Parker, John O’Hanlon ,the diretor, Simone Read scripting. After she finished, I asked if she agreed with me that Chris Brindle’s was a fine continuation and Chris was right to take the two texts (Austen’s and Lefoy’s) in a direction exposing corrupt financial dealings, and she said yes. I regretted more than ever not having gone to listen to Sara Dustin on Friday on “Sanditon at 200: Intimations of a Consumer Society. I had chosen the paper on Jane Austen’s letters, wrongly as it turned out, for it was just a basic description and introduction to the problematic nature of the letters, which I’ve known about since blogging about this letters here for over 3 years. Peter Sabor said he had had the privilege of reading the script for the coming film, and it seemed a work of reminiscence. Many questions were asked about the textual sequels. This was perhaps the best session overall that I attended.

Emma Thompson as Elinor writing home to her mother

After lunch, I listened with much profit to Susan Allen Ford’s “The Immortality of Elinor and Marianne: reading Sense and Sensibility” (Session E). She was interested in using the development of the sequels and films (sometimes from one another) as a way of understanding Austen’s novel, both how it has been read and what it is in itself. She covered three sets of texts, the books, the staged plays, and the films. I’ll start with what she said of the films: since Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s 1995 Sense and Sensibility, the novel has been read through it again and again, and it has influenced all other Austen adaptations (including non-S&S ones), she covered it thoroughly, including its many departures. The treehouse, the use of the handkerchief, and the way Marianne is rescued twice, first by Willoughby and then by Brandon have been especially influential; Rickman’s performance has mesmerized audiences, the gorgeousness of landscapes and houses, the melancholy music. I’ll add the lighting and coloration and that what Thompson “corrects” others have before her too. Rickman is anticipated by Robert Swann in the 1983 mini-series, but it had a somber dark vision (it’s by Alexander Baron) that has not been influential; Susan commended this mini-series for the use of complex contrasting depictions of Elinor and Marianne and its the first to include a loving depiction of landscape. She mentioned the Tamil Kandukondain Kandukondain or I have found it, as effective modernizing (Elinor looking for a job for example) but under the influence when Bala (Brandon) rescues Meenu (Marianne) from a sewer. There is a deep intensity in Davies’s 2008 film, which by the end has lost contact with the original scepticism of Austen’s book in its comic joy; Barton cottage is now by the sea and Brontesque in appearance.

The book sequels exist because of readers’ desire to spend more time with Austen’s characters, to experience the book’s conflicts. Like the films, they often give a bigger role for Margaret, maked the heroes more central, more acceptable, and more (erotic heterosexual) loving. It’s obvious (Susan thinks) that Jane West’s A Gossip’s Story lies behind Austen’s novel. The didactic and verbal parallels are striking. Austen changes a lot, gives psychological complexity, so her book resists easy encapsulating moralizing. Early on Isabelle de Montolieu’s adaptive translation changed the novel in her translation to be much more sentimental. Rosina Filippi wrote dialogues in the early 20th century, including the debate betweeen John and Fanny Dashwood over how much money to give his “half-sisters.” Susan suggested Emma Brown, an Austen great-great niece, wrote a strong sequel. In hers Margaret wants to observe life, to travel and elopes to Scotland. Susan went over Joanna Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility: the story is updated; the situations repeated in modern terms. She too has a treehouse.

Irene Richards and Tracy Childs as Elinor and Marianne debating whether Marianne can take Willoughby’s offer of a horse (1983 S&S)

Susan said the two recent staged plays have been a delight, especially Kate Hamil’s which returns us to Elinor as central POV; she breaks with realism for high activity and comic effect. Both repeat elements not found in Austen’s novels but now part of the collective memory of all these post-texts. I saw Hamil’s play and can confirm the script is intelligent, thoughtful, and reflects Austen too. Susan rightly said that Austen was deeply sceptical of the rescue fantasy; of the risks of emotional and erotic openness; aware of the pains of romance, and she summarized a couple of critics recently who took her point of view. During the discussion period afterward people emphasized how important Elinor and Marianne’s relationship to one another is; that the book is not primarily a romance and that is why people keep “correcting” it. There is great pain in Elinor when she discovers Edward’s lies, and shame in Marianne after she realizes she has been deluded. The films have embraced nostalgia; the narrative voice become cosy instead of almost unfriendly.

Kate Winslet as Marianne playing the deeply melancholy music of “The dreame” on the piano, a present from Brandon (borrowed from Austen’s Emma story and transformed).

I cite two post-texts that Susan did not mention: during Emma Brown’s era, E.H.Young wrote a moving rewrite of S&S as Jenny Wren: two sisters, Jenny and Dahlia Rendall with their mother, Louisa, lose their father/husband, are forced to move and try to make a living taking in lodgers; andCathleen Schine’s The Three Weismanns of Westport, which does the same thing as Joanna Trollope with rather more depth, originality, and yes dignity and grave pleasure in the style and stance. They do not fit into Susan’s trajectory as both did not add the typical elements of the above sequels, and both picked up on what Margaret Drabble in her introduction to an older Signet edition of S&S argued: that the economic and social milieu of the novel is its true interest.

The title alludes to Dickens’s disabled seamstress in Our Mutual Friend

Schine writes as a reviewer for the NYRB occasionally

For myself I have enjoyed many of the film adaptations. Recently I just loved Towhedi’s film adaptation of P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley, and feel Jo Baker’s Longbourn is a good novel, not to omit Helen Fielding’s brilliant Bridget Jones books, and The Jane Austen Book Club (both the movie and books by and centered on women). I was interested by Anna Lefroy’s perceptive continuation of her aunt’s story (she did understand her aunt as few can, none of us having known her), and found Young’s book to be a quiet gem; Young is one of the authors covered in “The Virago Jane” by Katie Trumpener (in Deirdre Lynch’s Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees). Miss Mole is a truly effective novel in the tradition Jane Austen started within women’s novels.

Miss Mole would be in my terms a variation

Next up: Annette LeClair’s “In and Out of Foxholes,” what Izzy heard at her choice of sessions, Eighteenth Century Printing and some remarks on widows and widowers in Austen, more on Darcy, and, a conversation on Austenesque Variations, i.e., yet more on sequels from a panel conversation held in another room during the fall, and last thoughts on these American JASNA extravaganzas.

Ellen

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JASNA 2017: at a Huntington Beach Hotel: post-Austen matters

From Whit Stillman’s Love and Friendship aka Lady Susan (Chloe Sevigny as Lady Alicia, Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan)

Dear Friends and readers,

Friday was a long day. The morning was filled with yet more “pre-conference” activities,” and from these, Izzy and I went to a dance workshop. We both enjoy 18th century dancing, and for this day she wore an 18th century day dress, a lovely shawl and a hat I bought for her at the “Emporium.”

A photograph I took of her on our balcony

It was great fun, the dancing, but I was tired afterward and went back to the room, and so forgot that I had intended to go to a special “event,” a lecture on the churches Jane Austen attended. Probably this was the first disappointment of the conference and it was my own fault. A number of the other special events (like the dance workshop) one needed a ticket for, but not this. So I surmise the organizers didn’t think too many people would go. A friend told me it was many slides, pictures of the basic churches Austen attended in Hampshire, Kent, Bath, and London, and had a contemporary twist. What these churches do today. As I don’t know their names, I can supply no more than that.

Gillian Dow

Then the first event of the conference proper: Gillian Dow’s keynote speech called “The Immortal Jane Austen and Her Best-Loved Heroine, 1817-2017,” it was not about Elizabeth Bennet (as I expected), nor Isabelle de Montolieu, which the blurb led me to expect (a French writer was to be compared); she rather spoke at length about Germaine de Stael’s Corinne, or Italy and compared Stael’s heroine to Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet. Gillian began by offering the usual connections: while in London in 1815, Austen had a chance to go to a party where Stael was and declined (or so Henry implied), in her letters she tells Cassandra that she recommended a man at an assembly (who may have been deaf and thus not connected to what was happening) to read Corinne, presumably as a very good novel (December 27,1808); Stael read Austen and is said to have pronounced Austen’s books to be vulgar (commonplace, banal). Corinne was of course one of many contemporary novels by women Austen read and described. Then she quoted Virginia Woolf on how hard it is to catch Austen in the act of greatness.

The most felicitious translation into English available today: Sylvia Raphael’s Corinne, or Italy

Well, using the Victorian English translator of Corinne, Isabel Hill’s comments on Corinne, and conceding there was a lot more commentary in the 19th century by other women writers on Corinne than Austen’s books (George Eliot in Mill on the Floss, George Sand, Louisa May Alcott), and comparing scenes in Emma to Corinne as well as other novels to Corinne, Gillian critiqued Corinne to show that Corinne is unacceptably sentimental, Austen’s heroines are more interesting and believable characters than Stael’s heroine, so Austen has a staying power with contemporary readers and writers that Stael nowadays lacks. The larger context showed the “aftermath” or afterlife of Austen’s books. She recited an appalling poem to Austen by Kipling, talked of the publishing history of these and the illustrations that accompanied them (Corinne is part travelogue).

Gillian wanted to argue for the value of studying other women authors contemporary with Austen, as a way of understanding her context and achievement. It was a strong speech, but by emphasizing how superior Austen is, and Stael’s flaws she may have reinforced what she set out to discourage: the dismissal of other novels of Austen’s era — at any rate to the popular readership listening, not the academics so much who might read for historical reasons. The same holds true for some of the treatment by Ellen Moers who was the first in the 20th century feminist movement in literature to treat Corinne for its serious treatment of how women’s lives are shattered by society if they disobey the restrictive conventions. For my part despite its flaws, I love the book: its meditations on history, on culture, on travel and Italy, on Scotland are deeply stirring. And here we see where Stael has qualities and an experience on offer Austen doesn’t begin to think of.

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Chawton House

It was then time to go to the break-out sessions of which there were three that afternoon. Suffice to say that the paper I had wanted to go to for the first session (A), Jeffrey Nigro’s on illustrating Austen was cancelled; he had become ill and couldn’t attend, and didn’t have a good back-up. One of the problems at this conference for me was the target content was not Austen, but her aftermath, her reputation, what people did with her (as in writing sequels, making films), her fan groups. Peter Sabor’s talk on “the Digital Godmersham,” was on his work on a digital recreation of the library Austen used at Godmersham Park for Chawton House; he knows some of the books, and is researching to find more. Had I understood this was the content of his talk, I would have gone.

For the second session (B) I listened to Ruth Williamson give a crowded room a sensible history of what happened to Austen’s letters after she died. James Edward Austen-Leigh’s (JEAL) daughter, Mary wrote that a majority of Austen’s letters were destroyed by Casssandra; that Francis’s letters to Austen (three packets he saved all his life) were destroyed almost immediately after he died by an irate daughter (Fanny Sophia); JEAL used what was left for his biography of his aunt. Fanny Knight Austen’s son, Lord Brabourne published a semi-censored edition of Austen’s letters, with Chapman the first scholarly attempt to publish all we have edited impartially. She told of individual responses, and attitudes towards letters we find in Austen’s novels. In the discussion afterward she was a bit more interesting, saying for example, that readers read Austen’s letters as by a woman. Austen’s letters are crucially important for understanding her and her fiction, and I would have preferred a close reading approach towards the letters themselves.

There was one at that time (B) on using Pride and Prejudice as therapy (“I want my Mr Darcy”), had “Deciphering Mr Darcy” by Monica Alvarez on how other characters beyond Darcy were the center of attention for 19th century readers been on at that time I would have gone: another later talk (Saturday) by Sayre Greenfield and Linda Troost seems to have been on how Darcy was seen as a satiric figure before the 20th century; as described in the catalogue it looked like it was about which characters were most written about in the 19th century. Neither was (like Dow’s talk) engineered so as to try to give us insight into Austen’s text itself.

The last paper I heard, the early evening (C) session was Alice Villasenor’s “evidence from the archives.” She had diligently read contemporary local chronicles, especially about local elections (as these were reported on), but she had wanted to prove connections between specific big-wig individuals and Jane Austen, and there is no evidence, so it (seemed to me) was a matter of unsubstantiated nuances. She wanted to ferret out attitudes towards slavery of those few who got to vote and came up with the idea only “a small minority” (of a small minority of people) “wanted to keep the slave trade,” yet again the evidence was slim (in an election only 16 people voted against abolition of the slave trade). Again I might have done better to listen to Jane Darcy talking of “periods of anxiety and cheerlessness” in Jane Austen. I spoke with someone who had gone to that, and she said Ms Darcy talked about the underlying conditions of Austen’s characters, threat of genteel poverty, Emma’s father so frail and dying (perhaps). I think Austen’s texts are far more melancholy than many readers seem willing or able to understand.

Whit Stillman

Later evening there was a great treat: in one of the large rooms JASNA screened Whit Stillman’s Love and Friendship, a film adaptation of Lady Susan. (Despite his using a title of one of Austen’s juvenilia, this film had nothing to do with that.) I’ve written about the film in a blog so will not write about the film here. I had noticed (too late) that there were two talks in the conference on this film. One for the B session, by two people, Pauline Beard and Jennifer Snoek-Brown, where they proposed to briefy “overview” the novel, show clips from the film and then thrown the discussion to the audience on the topic of “moving from letters to narrative.” I’m not sure that Stillman’s film is a narrative. Another by Margaret Case proposed to compare clips from Stillman’s film with clips from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to see what they “illustrate” about “the ‘mix’ of violence” and “romance” in Austen’s novels. she labeled her talk half-comically, “seriously” perhaps because some fans refuse to take this Zombie movie seriously, but it can be treated seriously as another example of the ratcheting up of violence everywhere in US films (“The Violent Turn”).

From Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Lily James as Elizabeth Bennet (2009, Sethe Graham-Smith)

Stillman’s talk was done as an interview by an Austen scholar, Peter Graham, who brought along carefully devised questions. Stillman mostly ignored these or turned them around to talk interestingly about his film and a novel he has written out of the film since, Love & Friendship (In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated). He did the same after Last Days of Disco: wrote a good novel taking off from the matter of his movie. Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards is a sophisticated commentary on young adult life in the middle and upper middle class in the US in cities (which he had been part of), as well as books like Austen’s in genre (melancholy-satiric comedies of manners, a favorite kind with him). He was there partly to sell his second movie book. He told us about how he had been very depressed as a young man, and tried Northanger Abbey which he thought an essay on books in the form of a novel. Much later he went on to read Mansfield Park, and realized how Lionel Trilling had misread it. Stillman made Metropolitan to refute Trilling and turned Fanny Price into his heroine, Audrey Rouget (Carolyn Farina played the part). He so loved Kate Beckinsale in his Last Days of Disco, saw her as perfect as a heroine in a Cold Comfort Farm kind of book (by Stella Gibbons, and in his mind the same kind of satire as Northanger Abbey), so he wanted her for Austen’s satirically derived Lady Susan. He insisted Lady Susan is not an early book; if the manuscript comes from 1905 that’s a suggestion the book was written after 1805 not before.

From Stillman’s Metropolitan: Audrey Rouget aka Fanny and Edward Clements as Tom Townsend aka Edmund discussing Trilling on Mansfield Park (1990)

To him it’s a serious challenge to make a film from an Austen novel because these books are masterpieces; he didn’t feel confident that he could imitate an 18th century voice; turning to contemporary comic actresses and actors helps. He had wanted to write novels, but found this was not his metier, and turned to film as a substitute, trusting to a belief there were enough intelligent film-goers to react to his work as an attempt at realization. He then went into particulars of his film this time; he was trying to take the characters further, extrapolating out of what Austen had written. He likened Lady Susan to her as a (hidden, self-obscuring) social climber. He talked about how Austen never went as far as moral nihilism in her work, and instead as she grew older became more moral (his movie injects Christian themes into the text explicitly). He did not think Austen meant to repudiate her. He said how hard it was to make a period movie; you need and he had “very good people,” but he was limited by costs.

His talk on the whole had been about his own response to Austen, how she fitted into his life, and when I got back to the room I noticed there had been a talk that day (by Lisa Tyler) on “how Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Kate Boyle [an artist who painted], Virginia Woolf, Thornton Wilder and Ezra Pound perceived and acknowledged Austen’s influence.” All of these people were artists of the 1920s, pre- and just post-WW1. Austen is not usually thought of as important to this “Modernist” generation, though she was to Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster (who hated the Austen who emerges he felt from the letters). Those comments on Austen by these people I’ve read suggest they see the aesthetic value of her novelistic art (anticipating Mary Lascelles’s early book on Austen’s art), assume she was the spinster JEAL projected (and thus made her disliked by someone like DHLawrence). Wharton is more than an admirer; she imitates at a distance some of them. Austen is clearly important personally to Stillman, and that’s why he has made three genuine movies (Last Days of Disco has scenes imitative of Emma, and the two heroines are like Elinor and Marianne, a doppelganger).

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Isobel Bishop (1902-88), An Image of Austen or woman writer of the 18th century

I thought I’d end this second blog not with a poem but a brief commentary from Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen on post-Austen matters connected to the above talks: plays and films made after, about, in imitation of Austen. She was the keynote speaker the next day. In Looser’s chapter on early dramatizations of Austen (among others by Rosina Filippi), Looser argues they show the heroines in the novels as strong, assertive women, and argues they were popular because of this. They present Austen’s novels as centering on the interactions between women, she goes on to analyze several plays written in the 1930s derived from Pride and Prejudice.

What is interesting, Looser says, is how these scenes and playlets anticipate critical and popular outlooks on Austen since then. Among other things, what she shows is that a play by Mary Keith Medbery (Mrs Steele) Mackay began an emphasis on Darcy and changing of his character from the one we find in Austen which has taken over since then. MacKay’s Darcy is a kind of Heathcliffian or Bronte-like realization of Darcy. The best known of these is by Helen Jerome, partly because it was popular and then influential on the 1940 movie by Stromberg, featuring Laurence Olivier as Darcy, Greer Garson as Elizabeth: this movie aslo altered Austen’s emphasis on the book as Elizabeth’s story so that it begins to become Darcy’s story, says Looser. I own a copy of this play and read it in the light of what Looser writes. Yes, scenes are invented to make Darcy’s distant and arrogant character more likeable, and like Davies, Jerome fills in the absent time in the novel when we are to assume he changed his mind about Elizabeth with scenes of him working on behalf of Lydia.

Colin Firth as Darcy writing his letter of explanation to Elizabeth (1995 P&P, scripted Andrew Davies)

Several other aspects of Jerome are worth noting. In P&P there is hardly a scene between Jane and Bingley: Jerome writes several (Davies does his best to present pantomime scenes between Jane and Bingley) “to fill out this gap.” Looser suggests that Jerome identified with Lydia and Lydia becomes a more central character, not the fool she is in Austen, and Wickham a sexualized false cheating hypocrite who allures her by how he apes romantic males of the era in books and movie (Jerome endured a parallel relationship in her life). Jerome sentimentalizes Elizabeth (and she cries more than once), and most striking of all, Elizabeth apologizes to Darcy and he has the last word in the play. ritual apologies and humiliations are common for women in many many movies.

In a play called Dear Jane,written by Eleanor Holmes Hinkley, and directed and produced by Eva LeGallienne and her lover-companion or partner, Josephine Hutchinson, we are returned to woman-centered book, and lesbian reading of Jane and Cassandra’s relationship (I add it anticipates part of Miss Austen Regrets with Olivia Williams and Greta Scacchi in the roles). It does much more than this but this is the main thrust. It apparently failed very badly in the theaters, was understood by some critics and mocked. Looser says both this and the previous accompany new attitudes towards Austen which seek to end the view of her as a asexual (or frigid) spinster, give her a sexual life and independent character fit for a career characteristic of mid-20th century women.

From Miss Austen Regrets Olivia Williams as Jane and Greta Scacchi as Cassandra in one of their many intense scenes together (2009, scripted Gweneth Hughes)

All these plays increasingly present Mr and Mrs Bennet as happily married by the end – I was struck how in the 2005 Wright Pride and Prejudice, Wright made them into a sexually satisfied couple. Looser is much taken with knock-about comedy and face and she discusses a script that was never produced but intended for an Austen movie after the Stromberg film that turned P&P into farce, but wanted to include Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier to play Mr and Mrs Bennet in happy old age together.

Looser has a very long chapter on the production of the 1940s film. Many scripts, many endless changes, most of which show that until Huxley and Jane Murfin (the final screenplay writers) came on board, the last thing that interested MGM was to be faithful to Austen. They were very dubious about any popularity such books could have –- over in the UK there was more sense that these books did have a following (maybe since Speaking of Austen by Kaye-Smith and Stern a book discussed in the conference in the last Saturday afternoon session). The movie was in fact not the popular hit that was longed for (in the way of Wuthering Heights, Rebecca and Mrs Miniver at the time) and there was no commercial movie of Austen in the cinemas until the 1990s.

As I wrote last time, Looser refuses to evaluate this material and clearly from the quotations some of it is drek. We do see what stage play and movie makers assumed were popular responses to the Austen, and how they turned her round to reflect their own lives (like Stillman). Even more telling to me is how Looser is showing the slow growth of popular celebrity for Austen and how this celebrity has nothing to do with the actual content, tone or nature of her books (often acid, anti-society, showing family life as internecine, unsentimental, not heterosexual), which seems in fact to be anathema to any wide readership.

On Janeites the other day Nancy Mayer wrote of how the sequels often have little feel for Austen’s texts. At the JASNA dinner I sat at a table where three of the people has read no Austen; two had seen a lot of the movies. At the front of the room was the familiar silhouette that has become a tiny symbol for Austen –yet there is no evidence for thinking it’s a portrait of Austen. It was found in a book connected to her. To my eyes the outline of the face does not look like Austen particularly. The emptiness of a celebrity image was my thought as I sat there.

Now, writing this blog, I remember how Gillian Dow mourned Austen’s early death, asking all to recall that she was cut off from she might have written had she lived. Q.D.Leavis was accurate in pointing to the similarities and repetitive patterns in the six published novels. They were after all in their final state written within 7 years. Would she have developed in a new direction?

Ellen

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JASNA 2017: at a Huntington Beach hotel: the sky & ocean; costumes and art; a play & a poem

The one image of Jane by Cassandra that we have

From the shop: the theme this year was Austen’s “afterimage” and there were a number of talks on sequels, and many for sale

Dear friends and readers,

As those who go to the annual general meetings of the Jane Austen Society know, the conference “proper” (as I call this time) begins on Friday around 1’o’clock when the first of three “keynote” lectures is given to the whole assembly; depending on your definition, it ends late Saturday afternoon when the last of the sessions of papers is given, or sometime before noon on Sunday, when around 10 or so a sumptuous brunch is served and the last keynote lecture is given, usually home-y, with the accent on Jane Austen’s “countryside,” tales of what happened to the houses she lived in or visited, by those who have themselves lived in or written about the place, often a relation of Austen herself. Quite a number of people seem to come just a slice of time within this Friday and Sunday noon; others last from Monday to Monday.

Those who stay all week (imagine the stamina it must take) go to the increasing spread of “special” lectures or events (amateur plays), concerts, teas (with a lecture), which are increasingly Austen-related, plus several different tours to famous or historical or museum places in the vicinity. These begin on Tuesday morning and end the following Monday evening. Sometimes these “special” lectures or events named after the food or drink served, are as good or far better than the content of papers at the sessions. It used to be that the Fanny Burney society (whose members often belong to JASNA too) met on the Wednesday and into the Thursday and even Friday morning of JASNA’s week because nothing content-rich was going on at the same time — making a hat workshops, silhouette workshops, fun things with ribbons making up many of the “events” on Thursday and Friday morning. But now that the pre-conference time is becoming more serious, the Burney bunch experience serious conflicts. This year they linked themselves to the Aphra Behn Society and are meeting in November.

One of the pool areas

I thought I’d begin this year’s description of the JASNA at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach hotel with the pre-conference events and non-conference experiences Izzy and I went to or had. We arrived by plane, pacific time near 4:00 pm, on Tuesday night, had an early supper with a friend, and settled into, or got used to the hotel. We quickly saw we didn’t need two rooms and separate beds were available in one, so we cancelled one of our rooms and stayed together for the conference, cutting our cost in half immediately. The hotel was a large (vast) opulent place (we were given two different large maps), comfortable but everything beyond the room separately charged and expensive. Several pools, several eating places, alcoholic drinks flowing. Spas in several places, each one charging hugely for each activity you might want to do. Two very expensive restaurants. Another small place where you could buy small meals to take back to the room (breakfasts, lunches) and an Italian pizzeria where central staples for most people.

At the Bowers Museum

We went on the all-day tour on Wednesday to the Bowers Museum in the morning, and after a group lunch together, to the Heritage Museum where we were taken on a walking tour of a 19th century house built by Hiram Clay Kellogg. The Bowers Museum appeared to pride itself on the couple of rooms of native American art (much cruelty could not be hidden) and early white colonialist painting designed to delude people into coming west to experience a sort of “paradise.” One socialist realist painting of the hard working lives of hispanic people in the 1930s. Then there were modern rooms of eclectic art (from tribal communities around the globe). The most interesting exhibit in the museum was made up of real photographs and films of the (in)famous Shackleton expedition to Antartica where terrific suffering was endured by a group of men, to no purpose, but the satisfaction of grandiosely deluded man. The animals taken along were shot and eaten. We were conducted through the Kellogg house by a witty instructor who succeeded in giving us a feel of what life was like in that house for the very wealthy family and its household of servants who lived there at the turn of the century. Much of the older domestic technology catches one’s attention. I recognized things that were still around in the 1950s. Izzy and I did enjoy the museum and house tours and bought souvenirs to remember the day by, me a book of poems about cats and she a stuffed penguin.

Kellogg House

I might as well tell the other non-conference activities here we fitted in On Friday and Saturday afternoons too, I went swimming in a beautiful warm water pool twice, drank lots of whiskey and ginger ale and had two meals poolside; Izzy came once. There was a lavish breakfast on a terrace on Saturday morning. There was a wedding going on in one part of the hotel on Saturday night, and also a lavish costume dinner with a very loud band playing modern rock to late at night. The staff were so abjectly polite and so eager to serve us I wondered if they were whipped at night. More likely, they are badly underpaid since everywhere were signs reminding you the gratuity was not included in the bill. From the hotel (inside so artificial & ornate) the horizon at a distance was beautiful. Step outside concretely and you found yourself in a non-sidewalk world, malls far away from one another.

Over the evenings I also observed private parties of Janeites going on from the high terraces of some of the rooms. Quietly too other kinds of meetings of sub-groups of people, different hierarchies. I did meet at the sessions some new fellow lovers of Austen and we shared some reading experiences, renewed acquaintances on the Net and with people I hadn’t seen since the AGM at Portland. Myself I think that is central to why people go to conferences: to meet with others of their own “tribe.”

Arnie Perlstein, Diane Birchall and myself

I felt I was seeing a good deal of the Santa Ana while the bus was on the road and also in the one restaurant we went to — the literal landscape seemed to me flat, the houses architecturally dull, high commercialization and ugly. Huge amounts of slow-moving traffic on all the roads; the world a maze or labyrinth of such roads with cheap malls far apart. The place suffers from a lack of public transportation. Izzy and I took a long walk on the beach Thursday morning and looked at the other hotels, at communities of people in trailers and vans, fisherman, people surfing.

Izzy and I at the beach

On Wednesday and Thursday there were also three lectures, and Diana Birchall’s quietly charming two person play, “You are passionate, Jane.” The first potentially valuable lecture was given on Wednesday evening, 7 to 9, by a professor from Cal Tech, James Ashley.

The problem with this one was he was at once too abstract and too eager to be accessible. So if you wanted to learn about how to calculate longitude at sea (his topic) and how finally the problem was solved, you’d have done much better to read Dava Sobel’s little book. Using a power-point presentation, he showed us the oceans and the constellations invented by people using stars and said how we could all go out and determine latitude by using arms, fists, and the pole star. He didn’t connect his discourse to Austen, which was disappointing. I expected he might have said something about her brothers’ lives aboard their ships, the travels using older methods, how they were educated but no. There was no serious research on Austen, no attempt to explain for real what he was talking about. The imagined audience might be high schoolers/undergraduates, suitable for many conferences. The weather was lovely and a few people followed him out the door.

Muslin dress

During or just after a mass tea and cake event in a ballroom, two museum women gave excellent talks on costume and art on Thursday afternoon. clarissa M. Esguerra from the LA County Museum gave a detailed account of the changes in fashion from the 1770s to the 1830s for men and women. She seemed to have dozens of slides, attached each of the fashions to some ideal in the other arts at the time (say what passed for Greek and Roman dress), new political norms (egalitarism, following more natural or body-fitting fashions in lieu of a stiff formality) but showed also that quickly extremes emerged in which individuals were clearly trying to show their wealth, status, sexuality or masculine or feminine attractiveness (as these were seen). She went over the kinds of materials used, all the layers of clothes, undergarments, shoes, hats, hairstyles, bags carried. I had not realized how male styles evolved in a similar trajectory. In each era there were fossilized holdovers. Men’s styles by the 1830s begin to resemble the way men dress today. Bridal outfits hark back to this era for both genders. Towards the end of her lecture she connected what she had described to characters in Austen’s books, how they dress and how Austen expects us to judge and evaluate them. This part was all too brief.

An image by just one of the many artists Zohn described: Ana Teresa Barboza

Kristin Miller Zohn provided a fascinating series of images demonstrating (she felt) that very contemporary art today has its roots in Regency fashion. What was most intriguing were close parallels between pictures and statues, plates, decorative arts, cooking equipment, hunting implements, jewelry, silhouettes, facial masks, china, pottery, of the later 18th century and post-1990 post-modern art. Like just about everyone who publicly speaks at these conferences she made no critical statement whatsoever about the celebrity culture she said began to flourish in the later 18th century, and its analogues in exotic esoteric imagery today. Greed is in, with only the very occasional contemporary artist (Kara Walker) providing some intelligent humane remembering or critique of some of the sources and workers providing allusions (to slavery, to massacres in the highlands and colonies outside England). There were grieving figures, and some moving narrations accompanied some of what she showed us. I took down names of artists and works but as my sten is so weak I will not try to transcribe as I would make errors. She sped through some 30 artists at least inside 45 minutes or so. I was impressed by how many women and non-European, non-white artists she included. She didn’t neglect the development of photography. It connected to Austen’s world because the modern artists sharply exposed the underbelly of her capitalist military establishment but there was little directly connected to her.

You did have to pay extra for the three lectures.

Diana as Charlotte, Syrie as Jane

I’ll conclude on Diana’s play, which I read years ago and probably have a pdf of somewhere in my computer files, but an hour’s search defeated me. Syrie James played Jane Austen already in heaven, and Diana was Charlotte Bronte. The conceit is that a select group of appropriate people, apparently mostly novelists, who have just died, have to answer a series of questions Miss Austen puts to them to her satisfaction before they too can pass by the gate. Syrie must have some acting in her background because she delivered the wry lines very well: Austen came out as very full of herself, set in her ways, and aware of how Bronte had written of her to Southey. Bronte is longing to join her two sisters and is the more emotional role. Allusions to other women authors connected to these two were amusing: Jane has read “Mrs Gaskell’s” Life of Charlotte Bronte, and is in the know in ways Charlotte cannot yet be. There was good feeling towards the end as the two grew together despite their (supposed) characteristic personalities.

I doubt I chose the best papers to listen to in the next day and a half and I know I missed a number I would have liked to hear. I did hear a few very worth while papers, found two of the key lectures fascinating, and will try to give the gist of the lectures in the next two blogs. The thing to keep your eye on will be how little connects us to what Austen was herself. She was lost in the aftermath of her reputation and how it’s used. (Next time, for us Williamsburg, Va., and “Northanger Abbey after 200 years,” I will try to go for more “close reading” lectures if I can be sure they are that.)

For me going to this was accompanying my daughter who loves the Austen books, writes fan-fiction herself. I was glad most people smiled at me, a few talked to me (one interesting one with an author of a sequel I’ll review soon, Kathleen Flynn’s The Jane Austen Project, another with a scholar I’ve long admired), but would have been saddened by the end, but that I love the dancing on the last evening. I was so glad Izzy finally danced for a couple of hours too — this is her third JASNA AGM.

For now I end on a poem, one I’ve never read before or shared on this blog:

Rereading Jane Austen’s Novels

This time round, they didn’t seem so comic.
Mama is foolish, dim or dead. Papa’s
a sort of genial, pampered lunatic.
No one thinks of anything but class.

Talk about rural idiocy! Imagine
a life of teas with Mrs. and Miss Bates,
of fancywork and Mr. Elton’s sermons!
No wonder lively girls get into states —

No school! no friends! A man might dash to town
just to have his hair cut in the fashion,
while she can’t walk five miles on her own.
Past twenty, she conceives a modest crush on

some local stuffed shirt in a riding cloak
who’s twice her age and maybe half as bright.
At least he’s got some land and gets a joke —
but will her jokes survive the wedding night?

The happy end ends all. Beneath the blotter
the author slides her page, and shakes her head,
and goes to supper — Sunday’s joint warmed over,
followed by whist, and family prayers, and bed.

— Katha Pollitt

Ellen

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JASNA at DC Hotel: Emma at 200 (3)

Shefali (the Harriet character in Aisha, Amrita Puri)

“Jane Fairfax has feeling,” said Mr. Knightley. — “I do not accuse her of want of feeling. Her sensibilities, I suspect, are strong – and her temper excellent in its power of forbearance, patience, self-controul; but it wants openness. She is reserved, more reserved, I think, than she used to be — And I love an open temper.”

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

Friends and readers,

It’s now way overdue for me to share those few papers and talks the set-up of the recent JASNA conference allowed any particular participant. A friend who is a long-time attendee of these JASNA conferences urged me to think of the meeting as a sort of sorority party cum-conference. Topics include Emma and sexual assault; a history of the book illustrations, and recent adaptations of Austen’s Emma strongly influenced by (deriving from) Heckerling’s Clueless. So, what one was permitted to reach on the mornings and afternoons allotted (I did not return for the mid-morning light lecture on Sunday):

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Johnny Lee Miller as Mr Knightley, doing the bills, trying to get through to Emma (2009 BBC Emma, scripted Sandy Welch, where Mr Knightley is the over-voice)

On Friday, after the plenary speech (began at 1:00 pm), there were two break-out sessions, each of which had nine different papers and discussions going on at one time. Eighteen altogether of which any particular participant could get to hear/see only two. It was impossible to choose with any one over another. I chose for the 2:45 time slot, Jessica Richard’s “What Emma Knew: Modes of Education in Emma, because I had heard papers given by Jessica in other venues and knew she would be clear. Jessica’s argument was Emma is (another?) novel by Austen about education. She surveyed educational theories in the period, especially through a contrast between Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education and Rousseua’s Emile. Austen herself had little formal education. Her presentation of Mrs Goddard’s boarding school in Highbury is an element in a plot-design intended to question how female autonomy is experienced in pre-marriage young women. The novel itself suggests that Mr Knightley has had little influence on Emma’s education, and that Mr Knightley like Mrs Weston, fails to control her. He is motivated by jealousy of Frank Churchill. What Emma does right comes from her own self-correction which is somehow finally innate. Jessica asked the group, what lessons has Emma learned?

To sum up, Jessica was suggesting that Mr Knightly not the great teacher — as he says himself. Here the audience soon went off-topic to gossip about the characters. (For my part, I thought Emma had learned no lesson that truly punctured her sense of herself as overwhelmingly important, her values in themselves as impeccable. Yes she had made mistakes, but obviously her world’s order was not at all disquieted (about say how Jane Fairfax had almost gone down the tubes or Harriet ended up a desperate spinster at Mrs Goddard’s).

Olivia Williams as Jane Fairfax realizing how she is being teased with the alphabets on a picnic (1996 Emma, scripted Andrew Davies)

That there was only one hour each for the two sessions was felt as severe limitation in the second session I went to — at least the speaker kept hurrying us and herself along to be sure to end “on time.” I found I chose Celia Easton’s “The Encouragement I Received: Emma and the Language of Sexual Assault” for reasons similar to most in the audience. Her topic was felt as electrifyingly relevant since just the day before or so, the video and tape of Donald Trump, soon to be President of the US, showed Trump to be a boaster of grossly aggressive sexually predatory behavior to any woman he deems attractive; the Trump language of sexual assault includes “grabbing her pussy;” and far from ashamed, when accused he either mocked the women as not attractive enough to lure him (thus liars), or didn’t literally tell the truth (he sued 12 women who came forward after two decades of nightmares and anguish and loss of possible jobs and a thriving career). Since then when he won the election, we have learned that 60 million Americans did not think his typical behavior or many sexual assaults and actual court accusations of rape disqualified him from the presidency. Obviously this is an important topic. She brought up this immediate context frankly. So what did she have to say? that the experience of 18th century women is analogous to that of 20th and 21st century women, with the job market then for genteel women functioning as a metaphor (like today) for how the male patriarchy (to use a supposedly out-of-date term) works.

Celia said she put her proposal in a year ago so the immediate relevance was unintended but its deep-seated one all the more there. Celia felt that for many women readers rape stories make women into victims or opportunistic liars. In courts rapists attacked women’s credibility (as they do today), as showing her moral failure; people still credited the idea that if a woman became pregnant, she had willingly complied; except among the highest in rank, such cases were virtually impossible to prosecute. It’s sometimes surprising the people who raped women: George Cheyne was found guilty of raping a young girl. Writers used rape as a literary device, once in a while showing the depravity of the rapist (when victim had relatives high in UK gov’t). As most of us know Fielding’s Shamela is a burlesque of Pamela, accusing women of manipulating men’s desires to lead them to rape so they may be entrapped somehow or other. In his late last novel, Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson can still be found shoring up ideas that women lie about rape, seek to entrap men through sexual desire. While there is no overt rape in Emma, there are many instances where female characters feel themselves under a kind of direct assault.

In Emma we learn what language is used, what realities individual words testify to matters. Austen’s first scene of sexual assault occurs in the carriage between Emma and Mr Elton on their way home from Mrs Weston’s Christmas get-together. Celia suggested most readers today do not find the scene funny; they feel Mr Elton has been more sexually aggressive than he or the text he’s embedded in admits. In Emma Mr Elton learns to hate Emma. It’s not only her disdainful rejection of him in the carriage, but the whole of her behavior before and after he sees as arrogant, cold, manipulative (when she is just naive, dense, obtuse). In Austen’s Emma, fear of attack by gypsies as the destitute become brutal, and the real attempted assault on Emma’s friend Harriet may be seen as damning these desperate people without trial. Harriet is scared, she clings to Frank Churchill: we see how little contact she has had with people who have no income (like herself in that). In Jane Fairfax’s case, Mrs Elton is trying to imprison her in a humiliating job. Jane specifically forbids Mrs Elton to look for or push her into a governess post, but Mrs Elton won’t listen. (For my part I think Mrs Elton is intensely resentful of Jane’s subtlety, high culture, and wants to degrade her as well as show off her power over such a cultured woman. It’s a form of sexual dominance which is so deeply painful to Jane who feels much of her life afterward would not be so different from a chattel slave. We may say this is an over-reaction but if we look at the exploitation and destruction of Fanny Price’s vulnerability and self-esteem and how in Mansfield Park the parallel is made with slavery, perhaps Jane is voicing how Austen sees what job market there is for genteel women.

In effect Celia had covered the psychological assault on Jane Fairfax. The audience response was intense and for once stayed on topic. The popular readership in fan cults hardly ever talk on line, but unlike academics they will talk in sessions about what they feel about a favorite book or author. There was or would have been much questioning and raw discussion after the talk, but the clock (and hotel) were relentless and all was over at 4:45 so discussions were closed down before any points could be much explored. I get the feeling these people long to discuss Austen and their views and hardly ever get a chance to do it. I wouldn’t be surprised if social mores prohibit real talk in their small book clubs. Well they had less this year than previous ones.

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A watercolor by Humphrey Repton from the Red Book he made for Stoneleigh Abbey (owned by the Leighs, where Austen and her mother had a flying visit, perhaps a model for scenes in Austen’s fiction)

Susan Allen Ford’s keynote speech was the high point of the conference for both myself and my daughter. She began with the idea that Emma is about reading just as surely as Northanger Abbey (whose extent text may be regarded as worked on directly after Emma). Emma’s list of books she means to read and will never get round to, what we do hear and see quoted as reading matter in Highbury, the likening of Mrs Weston to the Baroness of d’Almane and Emma to her daughter-pupil, Adele or Adelaide in Mme de Genlis’s Adele et Theodore (Englished as Adelaide and Theodore), and how we see everyone behave in these contexts, if explored, offer us ways of understanding what Austen wants us to take away from her novel.

We can get to know the kind of mind each character has through their reading and reading lists; the books and texts cited and and alluded to across the novel also capture a cultural moment among Austen’s class. I cite just one of the several groups of texts Susan went into. Harriet Smith’s is a jumble of compliance and imitative cant. She prods Mr Martin into genuinely trying to obtain Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest, and Regina Maria Roche’s Children of the Abbey, though for his serious mind (as Austen sees this) much more meaningful and useful are the Agricultural Reports (serious farming and economic news and treatises). He likes poetry well enough and reads extracts from a popular anthology of the era, Elegant Extracts by Vicesmus Knox.

If we explore these books, we discover that Knox intends his volume to be read aloud, to provide elocution lessons, teach poise. The Vicar is a story of a family on the edge of destitution, a fragile situation sexually, where much misery is experienced until near its close. Prevost rewrote it as enormously popular Le Doyen de Killerine (almost immediately Englished) The two romances have no imaginative hold on Harriet as she cannot apply what she reads, but Austen knows we can see what they are: Radcliffe’s is a gothic novel with a male predator at the center; male tyrannies also dominate the sentimental romance in Roche’s book. Both give us glimpses into the interior life of genteel women at the turn of this century. Emma looks upon Mr Martin as clownish, gross, vulgar and disconcerted by the strength, concision and authenticity of his letter proposing marriage to Harriet, Emma has to resort to attributing it to his sisters — at first. But it is Mr Elton who attempts (mild) predation, and Frank Churchill a clandestine engagement whose seriousness for Jane he does not seem to take into account.

The whole subplot shows how entrenched is Emma’s prejudice, how little she understands how to use what she reads — beyond the unexamined pleasure she seems to get out of vicarious matching. We are asked to believe that at the end of the book she has been cured of her delusionary match-making. Her real virtues (as seen in this conservative reading) are those she begins with the book with: loyalty and care for her father, family, intuitive concern for vulnerable people when class and other issues do not blind her.

Susan’s talk was thorough and took up most of the time allotted. We then again had two sessions, nine papers and discussions going on at once, so eighteen altogether of which any one participant could attend only two.

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Michael Gambon as the aging Mr Woodhouse (2009 Emma, scripted Sandy Welch)

I decided to go to “Where Health is at Stake:” Fictive Ills, Invalids, and Healers in Highbury” because the degrees of two of the three presenters suggested a real knowledge of medicine in the era. Drs Cheryl Kinney and Theresa Kenney had that but I didn’t realize they were giving three separate presentations and since they had only an hour altogether, and wanted to give some time for discussion, there simply was not enough time to say discuss gynecology which was in the description said to be her specialty (which I perhaps foolishly hoped for a serious outline about). She was very general about Marianne, Jane Bennet and Louisa Musgrove, and seemed unwilling to say anything untoward about any of the characters, so Mr Woodhouse’s “cognitive impairment” showed us how good a daughter Emma was. Nothing much about the realities of old age. Despite the implicit feminism of the titles of Theresa Kenney’s books she produced a set of upright moral lessons (she quoted Kant’s Doctrine on Moral Virtue) exemplified by the very kindly treatment of various ailments in the novel.

Liz Cooper pointed out that we never see the one physician (actually an apothecary) in Highbury, Mr Perry, whom she likened to (and seemed to think was based on) a well-known physician in Bath, a Dr Caleb-Hillier Parry (1755-1822). She first quoted Austen’s caustic remarks about this man in her letters (showing Austen was aware of this man). She then presented a positive portrait of his discoveries (in autopsy, in clinical work, about angina pain in the human heart); the work he did in a Royal Mineral Water Hospital, his friendly relationship with Edward Jenner; Liz saw Parry as unfairly ignored by the medical establishment. She did not want to end by saying how unfair Austen had been if she aimed her character at this hard-working doctor, so like the two previous speakers she ended on how much a model of daughterly forbearance Emma is. It seemed to me in all this the tone of Austen’s novels, the thrust was lost, and the often embittered desperate commentary (and walking) of her time in Bath as a spinster in her letters.

Isobel had gone to Deborah Barnum’s talk, “Illustrating Emma,” and enjoyed looking at the many illustrations Deborah discussed. Deborah (according to Izzy) discussed book illustration in the early 19th century and Victorian period, the technology of print-making, engraving and then she surveyed editions of novels from Bentley’s 1833 through the nineteenth and twentieth century up to the recent Marvel comic book renditions, Manga Classics, and fine art depictions of an imprint like the Folio society. Questions discussed included which scenes or characters would people have liked to illustrate, how strictly to keep to the text, should they comment on and foreshadow the story. Does an illustration that seems to go against your interpretation of the book “ruin” it for you (analogous to a movie). She offered a good bibliography of secondary studies.

One of Empress Josephine’s dresses (in a Paris museum), presumably an aspirational costume ideal in Austen’s era

The second and last session, which ended at 2:30 (so the rest of the afternoon there was nothing) had a number of topics I longed to have listened to (e.g, Catherine Ingrassia on “Slavery and Cultures of Captivity in Emma“). But since I have published so much on film adaptation on Austen, once dreamed of publishing a book on the film adaptations of Sense and Sensibility (“A Place of Refuge” — I’ve five finished chapters), and still keep up and love them, I chose Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield’s “Multimedia Emma: Three Recent Adaptations.” They often give a witty and informative lecture which explicates Austen’s texts too and did so this time. They began with what they argued for was the centrality of Amy Heckerling’s Clueless as an influence on Emma films, and then proceeded to show interconnections between the recent Emma films apart from their debt to Clueless.

Their first, the 2009 Emma (scripted Sandy Welch, BBC mini-series for TV) was a reaction against Clueless, which nonetheless picked up on the thorough build-up of a past, lost mother, child-like Emma (in Romola Garai’s performance) and took Miss Bates seriously. They dwelt on how toys are emphasized in various scenes and how Emma seems to be dependent on Mr Knightley as much as her father is on her. Everyone but Mr Knightley (and perhaps Mr Martin) seems to react to occupations in life as so much passing time with toys. The point that Emma is made childish until near the end of the film is important: the Emma in the book would be off-putting with her cool cruelties to Jane and stupidity over Harriet and Elton so Welch makes her child-like (naive) to enable us to tolerate here.

It has been noticed that Aisha, an Anil Kapoor film (2010) is modeled on Clueless (see my blog on Aisha as a redo of Clueless for example): the point in Clueless and Aisha is to make Emma contemporary. Again there is a seriousness about poverty; this time the Harriet character, Shefali upbraids Emma for using her, for looking down on her as a toy (again dressing up enters into this). It’s interesting that both Clueless and Aisha pick up on how paradoxically place does not matter in Emma: though the atmosphere and claustrophobia (ennui) of Austen’s book is central to our experience of it, central paradigms can be transported in place and time. In 2016 as we watch, we feel the pursuit of fun has been relentless, is punishing, in all three films there is flamboyance in the costumes, the parties, which is cheerless (seen also in Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride and Prejudice). Everyone working so hard at being happy by the end they are exhausted and the Austen heroine accused of being unfeeling.

The third “film,” Emma Approved influenced by Clueless they took up is a 2014 digital multimedia interactive blog. This seems to consistent of many videos, webpages which you can spend huge amounts of time clicking through. Now Emma wants to document her lifestyle on-line to show how excellent it really is. As with Clueless, each of the Austen characters has its 21st century type (teenager or college student) equivalent. Knightley (no Mr) is again the somber character who is out of sympathy with the frivolity of all the convivial, conformist fun. The triumph in this universe is to have and keep a boyfriend or girlfriend. It is much influenced (of course) by the Lizzie Bennet Diaries (also a series of blogs made by the people playing the roles). Again the parallels are made contemporary (email is used, a wedding for the Dixons — would not want to be without a wedding). Linda and Sayre discussed how vlogs are made. The overall effect is to celebrate materialism, its bright, hard and technologically impressive: they gave examples from the characters’ behavior. Emma is a good girl and what she approves of is good. Lifestyle choices replace morality, but still above all one must marry to be regarded as successful in life.

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I found this anonymous (as far as I can tell) depiction on-line presented as “the ideal Jane Austen world”

And so the sessions and panels of the conference ended. 36 papers set up in such a way as to permit someone to listen to and join in a brief discussion of 4. Think about it. Watch what people do, not what they say to grasp what they value. 36 papers divided into nine sessions could be comfortably got in for mornings and afternoons over two and a half days. Who is that does not value the sessions? not the generality of the members. Since the actual get-together starts on Tuesday for some, Wednesday for many (thus effectively at conflict with the Burney conference), there would be plenty of time for tours, private (now we reach where the sorority party metaphor fits) meals or get-togethers elsewhere, evening events (public and private) and networking for publication, teaching events …

I’ve been working on a paper for a coming conference on Jane Austen and the Arts, have after a week and a half reread for an umpteeth time Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and am now well into Mansfield Park. I’ve been delving into contemporary works on the picturesque, Maud Batey’s beautifully packaged and illustrated study, Jane Austen and the English Landscape (heavy art paper, gorgeously colored reproductions), Duckworth’s old but still invaluable The Improvement of the Estate, and wonder to myself with Austen’s tones and tastes strong in my head what she would think of this set-up, and those papers I’ve described, which she’d have liked, been amused by, or recognized herself in.

“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.” — Maria Bertram, showing off Sotherton, Mansfield Park

My day’s journey has been pleasanter in every respect than I expected. I have been very little crowded and by no means unhappy. — Jane Austen, Letters (24 Oct 1798)

Ellen

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JASNA, Montreal: Mansfield Park: Fanny Wars, Lurid News & Gossip; Films, Houses & Noise (1)

Fanny’s first sight of Mansfield Park (1983 BBC MP)

Scenes must be beautiful which daily viewed
Please daily, and whose novelty survives
Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years:
Praise justly due to those that I describe.
— Wm Cowper as quoted in the 1983 MP

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been more than a month since I attended the yearly JASNA AGM at Montreal, which this year focused on Mansfield Park as 200 years ago it was first published. I’ve blogged on my and Yvette’s experience of the conference itself, and the Burney conference and its papers; I’ve yet to offer some summaries and comments on the lectures and papers I heard on Austen and MP. As with my reports on the Burney papers, I will be in most cases offering the gist of what was said.

Rozema substitutes the narrator of the Juvenilia as Fanny (Francis O’Connor dreaming over satiric writing in 1990 Rozema MP)

For Yvette and I this part of the conference began on Thursday at 9 pm when Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield offered some thoughts on the “Fanny Wars:” this phrase is understood to refer to an assumed hostility to Fanny Price which flared up on the Internet when Austen-l was founded after the airing of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice which exponentially expanded the membership of this, other listservs and eventually blog-rings as well as JASNA itself. They and all others from here on in are hampered because the archives from Austen-l from the years 1994-1998 have vanished due to technological obsolence. I once told the history of those years (on a Burney page where I tell of how a group of us fared trying to read and discuss Cecilia), but of course what one wants is to read the actual postings. Surprisingly (to me they found a dislike of Fanny Price as a character, type, or personality (hard to say which) goes back to the earliest comments on the novel (gathered by Austen herself) at the same time as voiced admiration for the character (Whateley, 1821). Basically they offered a brief survey of criticism of Mansfield Park. I was disappointed because they did not bring out how Speaking About Jane Austen was the first published criticism to bring out into the discussably open how the average non-professional and woman fan reacted to Austen’s books: it’s here you find the first vehement rhetoric rejecting any identification with Fanny Price. Unsurprisingly (but registering this discomfort with this character and also book) they found radio and film productions have been influenced by the perceived popular dislike of this heroine.

At 1:30 pm on Friday the AGM proper began with the opening plenary lecture: Robert Miles, “Mansfield Park and the News.” Prof Miles is known for his admirable and ground-breaking work on Ann Radcliffe and the gothic. Prof Miles began by defining news as including gossip, particularly of the type found in lurid newspaper stories of the era. His talk consisted of regaling the assembly with stories of violence (executions and deaths from all sorts of causes), hanging of women for infanticide and men for sodomy, melodramatic elopements, heroic and disruptive incidents at sea and during wear and other catastrophes, gambling, executions for and the murdering of slaves (this enabled him to include stories of Antigua), local squalid internecine family preying on one another. His point seemed to be that this is the background crowding into Mansfield Park.

Gillray’s typical caricature propaganda: Slippy Weather outside a print shop

I did get up and objected. First, I praised his book on Ann Radcliffe, but then suggested there were two problems in his talk: the first, he took the stories he told at face value: told them as if this reporting was of what really occurred when quite a number seemed to be exaggerated re-tellings of what was supposed to be the truth (it’s been shown that the accusation of infanticide was often deeply unjust); second, if this is the feel of much of this material, we cannot know how Austen felt about what she read in such newspapers, which in any case are kept at the margins of the novel, whether it be vague references on the part of Tom Bertram asking Grant what he thinks about the trouble in the US, or Fanny asking a question we never hear nor its answer, or Mr Price reading about the Rushworth-Crawford scandal at Portsmouth. It is true that some of this material seeps into Austen’s letters where she is gleeful about scandals she occasionally glimpses in the appearance of people at assemblies, but Prof Miles made no reference to those places in Austen’s writing where we can try to glean what was her attitude through the jeering satire. In fact he turned away and didn’t answer my objections. Arnie Perlstein also spoke: it was to support Prof Miles and say all this material was deeply relevant to the subtext of Mansfield Park. I can’t remember a third person talking.

There were then two break-out sessions. Maria Sorbo’s talk on the Mansfield Park heritage films (she excluded any consideration of Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan) was of real interest to me as I have been working on a book and written extensively on the Jane Austen film canon. She approached the 3 films from the point of view of how the film-makers “read” Austen’s novel which she regards as a “rich, intricate and provocative” book treating courtship and love ironically. She argued that the 1983 BBC MP often described as “faithful” is deeply unfaithful (because of the serious earnestness with which the film invests the book’s themes); the 2007 MP has a miscast central star (Billie Piper whom she described as “sullen”), which while it shows how Fanny is marginalized and makes Mary Crawford a witty heroine remains inert. Her talk was designed to show that Rozema’s 1999 MP came closest to replicating Austen’s distruptive (of sentimentality), playful and quizzical tones; the lens is that of the confident and assertive Juvenilia. Prof Sorbo’s analysis of the ironic and sceptical outlook of the book brought out why it is so relevant today.

Rozema’s comical close of self-absorbed characters who by chance end up the way they do, with the happy rewarded couple walking off to their parsonage (1990 MP)

While I felt she made a strong case for the brilliance and subtlety of the use of film by Rozema, as in the incident of the release of the doves, the unadmitted to (by her) departures from Austen in the whole of the Portsmouth sequence, nevertheless she was unfair to the 1983 film when she suggested that its Fanny was silent. I spoke and protested that the over-voice throughout was Sylvestre le Tousel’s, that it made a genuine attempt to capture the epistolary and subjective consciousness of the novel, and that filmically the 2007 MP became a work of art (however truncated) in its own right against artifice. (She didn’t appreciate this at all, and snubbed me in the elevator; she wanted no criticism but vague praise and didn’t mind stupidity as when one person pointed out that Sylvestre Le Tousel is so pretty.)

What was most ironic telling in the experience, and happened in a number of the break-out sessions I attended was the audience reaction to all she said and her clips. These were mainly from the 1999 Rozema film, including the sequence showing Maria and Crawford caught in bed by Edmund, and the painfully vile sexual exploitation of women slaves in the drawings by Tom of what he saw in Antigua. It was as if she had not spoken at all. She might as well not have stood there. I saw this in other sessions where the presenter really did talk of MP (many people did not) in insightful and unconventional ways. The majority of Sorbo’s audience (no more scholars of film than literary texts) remained adamant in their dislike of Rozema’s film. There was an utter disjunction between this scholar’s approach to Austen and film and the fan understanding (I sensed they hated especially those she chose, the sexualized clips from Rozema’s MP). Sorbo’s published book, Irony and Idyll: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park on screen uses the same criteria as her talk offers an informed history of a selection of the film adaptations of these films (for P&P she does only the 1940, 1980, 1995 and 2005 films) while looking to see how her and other scholar’s reading of Austen’s 2 books is captured in these chosen films. She actually avoids all appropriations and anything not a heritage film.

Kentchurch at Deer Park

For the second break-out session I attended Sarah Parry’s “‘Did you not hear me ask him about the slave trade last night: Looking for Clues in Real Houses Which Point to the Wealth and and Lifestyle of the Pictorial Mansfield Park.” Ms Parry took the audience through a journey of slides showing us a series of great country houses in England whose size, lifestyle, and source of wealth make them good surrogates for the house at the center of Austen’s book. When the owning family’s source of wealth for house after house is examined she found war profiteering, slavery, corrupt politicking, enclosures (whole villages erased or moved), Nabob and Barbados colonialist practices (including the occasional massacre) as what “made it all possible.” I couldn’t begin to take down the caterpillar (her word at one point) details. I assume (hope) the ironical information and pictures she provided will be published in the coming Persuasions on the conference. I find especially entertaining those passages she quoted which showed that what today is seen as “timeless elegance” in a mansion and landscape was in Austen’s time seen as vulgar, pretentious (a family trying to make up for not having a long upper class genealogy). She mentioned how when websites on line about such houses try to tell the truth about their pasts, some tourists protest. This reminded me of what I saw in the self-repression of the MOOC I watched on the Literature of the Country House. Afterward she was at the Chawton Library table (she is a member of their staff) and I congratulated her on the nature of her talk and mentioned how a course on country houses never mentioned the source of these houses’ wealth, their actual economic basis and working. She said such sites when they told such truths got vociferous mail demanding such truths not to be told as it “spoilt” the enjoyment. At Winterthur Museum similarly no one tells important truths or even admits what is the nature of the Downton Abbey exhibit or some of their others.

It was then 5:30 and the sessions for the day were unfortunately over. There had been no less than 8 sessions on at one time during this 2 hours and 15 minute period — an absurdity for those who would have liked to hear more of what was seriously on offer at the conference. (I am far from alone in this frustration.) The morning had been given over to tours, a dance workshop (for those few lucky enough to get in); since I had been at the Burney conference I had had to miss Marcia Folsom’s Teaching Mansfield Park. At around 6 I and Izzy filled with period called ” dinner on your own” with an enjoyable meal with a friend and the people who had judged the essay contest (though the restaurant like so many nowadays was so noisy we could hardly hear ourselves speak). At 8 there was the one-hour play, A Dangerous Intimacy: Behind the Scenes at Mansfield Park, by Diana Birchall and Syrie James and then for a second hour the glee singing (which I have described as lovely in my account of the social activities of the conference).

Saturday though was the one full day of the conference and I include the second plenary talk of the conference which occurred from 9-10:20 am, Lynn Festa’s “The Noise in Mansfield Park” here, so as to keep this report of the conference talks to two blogs (my next will cover 4 break-out sessions plus an account of what Izzy remembered of what she had heard and enjoyed).

Quiet star-gazing by Billie Piper as Fanny and Blake Ritson as Edmund (2007 MP, scripted Maggie Wadey)

Prof Festa’s lecture was a rich and stimulating display of an post-colonial, feminist and subtle psychological reading performed by a an intelligent mind engaging with the text at a close reading level. She began by saying it may seem perverse to discuss MP featuring a quiet unobtrusive heroine in terms of noise: Fanny is a quiet, gentle, timid character whose sharp observant mind throbs with emotion, and Mansfield Park quiet and peaceful [under the governance of Sir Thomas] though Mrs Norris, Lovers’ Vows and Portsmouth provide dissonance. Prof Festa suggested Austen wants us to listen to the kinds of noise we hear: soft fretful tones of Lady Bertram, strident cadences from Mrs Norris; Maria does not want to hear the noise of the cottage or church bells (everyone has her taste in noise); slamming doors and hallooing in Mrs Price’s hallways and stairs shows how power is seen when someone can control noise (Fanny is grateful when Sir Thomas stops Mrs Norris from discussing Henry’s proposal to her) and for those can speak freely (no Austen heroine has the right to speak freely). Mansfield Park lacks a language in which to discuss issues among themselves and listening itself is underrated: Fanny looks upon the voices of the Crawford as what she wants not to hear; her silence ignored by most but to some she speaks volumes with it. the rewards and punishments of the novel measure the characters: Mary is not evil but flawed because she does not control what she says and her understanding of what she is told and her wit superficial (so she ends up frustrated but at peace with her widowed sister); a harsh condemnatory language is used by Fanny of her mother; she speaks out of embittered disappointment and escapes back to Mansfield Park whose oppressions she never acknowledges. That hole in Fanny’s heart was put there when she was brought to MP and brought up displaced and marginalized and abused which Henry Crawford does recognize. Prof Festa seemed to have heard and been using Prof McMaster’s talk when she mentioned that Fanny was a proxy child for Mrs Norris, and suggested the terror Fanny feels at the approach of Sir Thomas’s footsteps an index of the brutality Fanny fears from powerful people.

Aubrey Rouget (Fanny, Carolyn Farina) and Tom Townsend (Edmund, Edward Clemens) discussing Trilling’s dislike of MP (1990 Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan)

The blurb about the conference apologized for Mansfield Park as a book a lot of readers of Austen don’t like. If this is true, all 5 talks thoroughly countered this dislike by demonstrating that the speakers’ at least found it in all the insight, drama, fraught trauma and comedy and satire, and depiction of levels of society and attached exploited worlds found in any great Victorian novel.

Ellen

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