Online Jane Austen and the 18th century: virtual meetings, conferences, a review

Admiral Crofts (John Woodvine) amused at the picture he describes to Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) in the window shop (1995 BBC Persuasion, scripted by Nick Dear)

Dear friends and readers,

Literally for months now the talks I’ve heard online in zoom lectures and conferences have been mounting up. My spirit quails before the hard and probably impossible and nowadays redundant work of transcribing my notes. Why hard or impossible: my stenography is no longer up to true accuracy and specific details. I’ve let them go for a while so while I have the Jane Austen talks in one place, the Anne Radcliffe in another, the “rest” of the 18th century in a third, they are not in the order I heard them and not always clearly distinguished. Why redundant: nowadays many of these (as in my own case) are recorded, and put online videos on various appropriate sites, ending up on YouTube (and elsewhere, like vimeo). Sometimes these videos are (as in my own case) accompanied by the text that was read aloud or a fuller longer corrected text. The days of my performing a useful service for those who couldn’t get to the conference are over.

Still I was not transcribing and or generally describing what I had heard just for others. I did it for myself. Once transcribed, the search engines of these word press blogs enabled me to find a text, and sometimes I’d copy and paste them into an appropriate file, if the particular blog-essay or summary meant a lot. This has been especially true of my original reviews of Austen films, of the two Poldark series, of Outlander, and historical romance and fiction and films.

Tonight I’m finally facing a decision I should have made earlier because I do have on hand as just published a review I wrote of Art and Artifact in Austen, ed. Anna Battigelli (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2020. 267 pp. ISBN 978-1-64453-175-4), the book that emerged from a conference in Plattsburgh, SUNY, NYC that I was supposed to go to and worked hard on a paper for (see the paper itself on academia.edu), including writing a few blogs here on ekphrasis in Austen and the picturesque in Austen. It’s now published in the 18th Century Intelligencer (EC/ASECS Newsletter NS, 35:1 [March 2021]. I still want to link this kind of thing into my blog to tell others who might be interested.

So I’ve decided each time I put a published review up, I would take the opportunity also to simply list the talks I’d recently heard and taken reasonable notes on and confide the names and titles here

So to begin, here is my thorough review, which I’ve put it on academia.edu and link in here

A Review of Art and Artifact, ed Anna Battigelli

Tonight I am also (with this review)

1) listing the talks on Jane Austen I’ve attended (that’s the verb I’ve used) in JASNA meetings — about 5 such meetings altogether. If anyone is interested, and finds he or she cannot locate the content or video of the talk here on the Net, let me know and I will write out the gist (a summary).

2) listing the talks on the 18th century I heard at the recent (April 7-11) and made good enough notes and would be interested in going back to. Again, if anyone is interested ….

3) briefly describing the nature of what I observed in a few lectures and conversations I observed at last week’s Renaissance Society of America conference.

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Joshua Reynolds, Tysoe Saul Hancock (completely idealized [he was fat & sick], Philadelphia Austen, Eliza Hancock, & Clarinda, their Indian maid — Paula Byrne made a great play with this picture (see below), hitherto thought to be George Clive & his family

Jane Austen:

Tim Erwin gave a talk on “Seeing and Being Seen in Northanger Abbey” (mostly about the art of caricature).

Elaine Bander gave a talk on the relationship of Austen’s Catherine, or the Bower, and Charlotte Smith’s novels, particular Emmeline; or the Orphan of the Castle, and then for two weeks led a reading and discussion of this, Charlotte Smith’s first published original novel.

Gillian Dow gave a talk “Why we should not trust our authoress on her knowledge of language[s, especially French]” (she argued the animus and distrust the people of Jane Austen’s milieu manifested towards France and French novels would make Austen leary of admitting her fluency and extensive reading in French novels and literature of the era).

Paula Byrne gave a talk on Eliza de Feuillide (Warren Hasting’s biological daughter by Philadelphia Austen, Jane’s paternal aunt) and two of Austen’s characters: Mary Crawford and Elizabeth Bennett (she felt these characters are modelled on this woman who made such a favorable impression on the young Jane and who was her friend in later life).

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ASECS 18th century virtual (for these– date, panel, other papers, see the CFP online at the ASECS site): These are placed in the order I attended the panels, or saw the play. Of course there was much more to see and hear and I hope that the videos stay up past May. This list, together with the CFP, will enable me to go back to my steno pads (I still do use stenography partly) and retrieve something of what was said. It was a stunning achievement. So many participated (950); there were sessions on how to proceed from here: should we alternative and every other year become virtual.

Ragazza che legge: A Girl Reading by Jean Raoux

Presidential Address: a plenary lecture given by Jeffrey Ravel, On the playing cards of Citizen Dulac in the Year II

Rachel Gevlin, Monmouth College, “Horrifying Sex: Paranoia and Male Chastity in The Mysteries of Udolpho”

Phineas Dowling, Auburn University, “‘Gentlemen, I Shall Detain You No Longer’: Performance, Spectacle, and the Execution of the Jacobite Lords

Greg Clingham, Bucknell University, “‘St. Quintin and St. Aubin’: Making and Memory in the Manuscript Book of Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard (1750-1825)”

G. David Beasley, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, “A Heroine Educated by Warrington: The Romance of the Forest and Dissenting Education”

Jan Blaschak, Wayne State University, “Extending the Hand, and the Power of Friendship: How Women’s Friendship Networks Extended the Reach of Warrington and the
Bluestockings”

Yoojung Choi, Seoul National University, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Cultural Images of a Celebrity Female Traveler

Elizabeth Porter, Hostos, CUNY, “From Correspondence to the Conduct Book: Women’s Travels in Text” [Mary Granville]

Kathleen Hudson, Anne Arundel Community College, “A Heroine’s Journey: Female Travel, Transition, and Self- Realization in Eighteenth-Century Gothic”

Joseph Gagne, University of Windsor, “Spies, Lies, and Sassy Nuns: Women Resisting Conquest at Québec in 1759-1760

Katharine Jensen, Louisiana State University, “Moral Writer to the Rescue: Madame de Genlis Takes on Madame de Lafayette

Ellen Moody, Oscher Institutes of Lifelong Learning, American University and George Mason University, “Vases, Wheelchairs, Pictures and Manuscripts: Inspiring, Authenticating and Fulfilling the Ends of Historical Romance and History”

Tom Hothem, University of California, Merced, “Seeing through the Claude Glass”

William Warner, University of California, Santa Barbara, The Enlightenment’s Invention of Free Speech was Vigorously Productive, but Can We Still Use It?

Jason S. Farr, Marquette University, “Samuel Johnson and the Rise of Deaf Education in Britain”

Teri Fickling, University of Texas, Austin, “‘Difficulties vanished at his touch’: Samuel Johnson’s Ableist Vision of Milton’s Misogyny”

Berna Artan, Fordham University, “Frances Burney, Camilla and Disability”

Jeffrey Shrader, University of Colorado, Denver, “Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Depiction of His Deafness”

Martha F. Bowen, Kennesaw State University, “Finding Fabular Structures in Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia and Old City Manners”

Susan Carlile, California State University, Long Beach, commenting on all the papers of the panel and Lennox

Susannah Centlivre, A Bickerstaff’s Burying, produced by Deborah Payne

Sara Luly, Kansas State University, “German Gothic as Post-War Trauma Narratives: The Works of Caroline de la Motte Fouqué”

Katherine Ellison, Illinois State University, “Daniel Defoe’s Mediations of Trauma through the Subjunctive Mood”

Geremy Carnes, Lindenwood University, “The Eighteenth-Century Gothic and Catholic Trauma”

Kristin Distel, Ohio University. “‘She Owes Me Her Consent’: Trauma, Shame, and Internalized Misogyny in Richardson’s Clarissa

Deborah Kennedy, St. Mary’s University, “Frances Burney’s Adventure at Ilfracombe

Rebecca A. Crisafulli, Saint Anselm College, “Revisiting Miller and Kamuf: A Pragmatic Approach to Balancing Biography and Textual Analysis”

Annika Mann, Arizona State University, “Reading Stillness: Biography and Charlotte Smith’s Late Work” (I missed from Panel 99, Annika Mann, Arizona State University, “Heart[s] Still Too Sensibly Alive to Misery’: Immobility and Charlotte Smith’s ‘Beachy Head’”

Lise Gaston, University of British Columbia, “Inviting Conflict: Charlotte Smith’s Biographical Aesthetic

Dario Galvao, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and University of São Paulo, “The Animal as Mirror of Human Nature and the Enlightenment (Animal Consciousness)

Donna Landry, University of Kent, “‘In one red burial blent’: Humans, Equines and the Ecological at Waterloo

Jane Spencer, University of Exeter, “Animal Representation and Human Rights in the Late Eighteenth Century

George Morland, A Cat Drinking (one of the earliest accurate depictions of a cat in painting)

And from a Digital Seminar in the 18th century series: Madeline Pelling, Women Archealogists in the 18th century

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Rachel Ruysch

As for the Renaissance Society of America, I did watch a couple of videos of talks about paintings, and listened in on a couple of conversations on the Sidneys. Some of these were done from Italy or places where the pictures or artifacts concerned are. It was far more of an expensive conference, the attitude of mind more narrowly high culture, elite, and necessarily archival oriented. At the ASECS everyone was recorded, all sessions by ASECS itself. (Wow.) At RSA, only those people who recorded themselves or the panels where this was decided for the group, were there recordings. Other than that you could read summaries or what was said. There were podcasts. So it was not online in the same way, but persistent browsing could you give a good feel for what was happening or had happened, and I watched a couple of marvelous videos on paintings.

The last time I went was in the 1990s when I had a nervous breakdown from trying – I knew no one, had no one to talk to for hours. Was so lost, felt so isolated. Years later (mid-2000s when we first had much more money), Jim proposed we both go to Florence, where they were having a conference, and foolishly, still mortified before myself over what had happened, I demurred. Now how I wish I had gone: I simply should have asked him to join; he would not be refused; there is probably a cheap rate for a spouse. But I didn’t know that then. Since then I have been going to conferences for 15 years and understand them so much better. He would so have enjoyed it — seen Italy the right way, with wonderful talks led by people who know about the history of the place in places of real interest. Too late — I learned much later or over the course of a decade how to do these things (even if hard I can and now find I can do them alone).

Well it was very nice to see the way the Renaissance scholars talk today, the contemporary discourse and attitudes — which are very like those of ASECS. I did not see anything of my particular interests beyond the session on the Sidneys (I was looking for Renaissance Italian women poets, perhaps Marguerite de Navarre), but I was heartened to be able to take part. I won’t take notes on most of what I hear (as I did not for the whole conferences), but I have another month to watch some more videos and listen in on the RSA too. And if I do take notes on something I discover connects to my own interests, I’ll come back and put the titles here so I can keep track — and offer commentary to anyone coming here interested. I doubt there will be anyone, gentle reader — they can contact the speaker through the information on the CFP (nowadays there is a cornucopia of names, titles, email addresses &c).

For someone like me these virtual conferences, lectures, social get-togethers, are a silver lining in this pandemic. No ordeal of travel (I am very bad at liminality); no discomfort, danger, mistreatment on planes, no anonymous (to me) given the state of most of the world tasteless hotel, no hours alone (especially the JASNAs where there are either at most one paper or when there are more, too many hours inbetween with nothing for me to do, some of this from my inability to go anywhere without [usually] getting lost), no large expense. I do miss the very occasional lunch with a friend or occasional meaningful private talk with someone. These usually go unrecorded — except perhaps my autobiographical blog. OTOH, I’ve become sort of friendly with people during these zooms, and have gotten to know new pleasant and interesting acquaintances I’d never have talked to much before. This is also true for my Trollope excursions (so to speak), which I write about on Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two.

Ellen

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Devoney Looser, The Making of Jane Austen

Dear friends and readers,

Since I summarized Devoney Looser’s daring key-note address to the JASNA meeting held this past fall (2017) on this blog, “After Jane Austen,” I thought I’d add as appropriate my review of her book (upon or from which her speech was elaborated):

This review has been published in The Eighteenth Century Intelligencer, Newsletter of EC/ASECS, NS, 32:1 (2018):37-41, and I had thought to leave only a copy at academia.edu;  but since that site has been reconfigured so that unless you pay for a premium subscription, it comes with interrupting ads, I transfer it here. For the same reason (interrupting ads) I will be placing other short papers, reviews, and proposals having to do with Jane Austen or the 18th century from that site to this blog over the next couple of months.

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)

Looser, Devoney. The Making of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2017. pp. 291. ISBN 1421422824 (hardcover). 978214222831 (electronic).

Devoney Looser’s latest full-scale contribution to Austen studies is an original, important and well-written book. It is valuable for the highly unusual areas she studies, for information about and clear descriptions of texts probably unknown to many Austen scholars and/or Janeites alike (this is a feat), for the critical intelligence and close reading she applies to some of these; and, for her tales of poignant lives of a few people who ought to be remembered with respect for the significant contribution they made to the ways many people read Austen’s texts today. For example, George Pellew, who wrote the first dissertation on Jane Austen, was a sensitive depressive man unable to support himself or navigate the fiercely competitive commercial world which appropriated his book. He allowed himself to be drawn into debates with parapsychologists, and a half-mocking suggestion he seems to have argued weakly against that he might return from the dead then enabled an unscrupulous fraudulent spiritual medium to claim to bring him regularly back from the dead for the amusement of audiences which in order to make a profit from such material since a respectable celebrity had begun to attach itself to anyone who could be attached to the name Jane Austen (Chapter Ten, 185-96).

Unlike some reviewers, e.g., Amy Bloom, John Sutherland and Ruth Bernard Yeasley (see “Which Jane Austen,” New York Review of Books, 44:14 [2017];63-65), I will not against Looser’s “doggedly populist stance” (Yearsley’s phrase) fall into the trap of taking her or others to task for her many refusals to evaluate evidence and assertions about Austen. I will, though, take exception to her blaming repeatedly as culprits the world of scholarship presented as a monolith elite, irredeemably “haughty, highbrow” (Looser’s words) snobs, dense in our relentless determination to erase or ignore the powerless fan, malign the popular funny film, published sequel, widely-attended-to blog or YouTube, or mock as hopeless those inventing fantasy Austens in order say to appease schoolboards. In Austen’s famous sentence, let us not desert one another, we are an injured body: de- or unfunded, derided, part of humanities departments “swept away” with the “useless rubbish of past centuries” (I quote the Reverend Obadiah Slope interviewing Mr Harding in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers). We are made instruments of privately-supported corporations, and, when kept, most of us by no means overpaid or over-benefited. Devoney Looser is herself a privileged member. The strength of her book derives from following the standards of hard research into primary documents, paying meticulous attention to minute detail, using empirical methodology, closely reading accurately and researching into how a particular text, image or event came about. She honors a humane politically liberal, feminist, progressive (pro-LBGTQ) agenda, evidence for which she a tad too cheerfully (“Stone-throwing Jane Austen”) finds among force-fed and imprisoned suffragettes and in early stage plays which anticipate late 20th century film adaptations and some Austen sequels.

Indeed the more popularly-aimed (non-academic) reviews, e.g., Jane Smiley’s (“The Austen Legacy: Why and How We Love Her, and What She Loved,” New York Times Book Review, for July 11, 2017, on-line https://tinyurl.com/ycvw2ab5), pass over the first half of Looser’s book, as academic di rigueur, which “plod forward in their necessary way.” Looser begins with the three initiating (“first wave”) framing books (“Introduction,” “Part One”). Sliding over James-Edward Austen-Leigh’s sentimentalized A Memoir of Jane Austen, and Edward, Lord Brabourne’s edition of carefully selected, rearranged letters by Austen, she moves to dwell with praise on Constance and Ellen Hill’s time-traveling idyllic fantasy, Jane Austen: Her Home and Friends for its invention a magical “Austenland,” where the Hills repeatedly find nothing but safety, kindness, and relics suggesting contented activities. Looser dismisses as not influential Margaret Oliphant’s acid reaction to this kind of thing (8). I suggest Virginia Woolf’s demonstration of how the Hills’ pseudo-biographies “license mendacity” should not be dismissed, even if we cannot be sure how many people were influenced by The [First] Common Reader (it does contain the often-quoted essay, “Jane Austen”).

This picturesque legacy gives way to book illustrations done in a darker mood, much less well-drawn than Ellen Hill’s and poorly printed. The unfortunate Ferdinand Pickering (another depressive drawn to Austen, himself coping with an impoverished violent family) chose and drew solemn, serious, melodramatic linchpin moments in the six stories, often the same ones that serve as hinge-points in contemporary filmed dramatic romance mini-series and cinema hits (Chapter One). From a welter of other hitherto ignored or undiscussed images unearthed by Looser, we can see how Hugh Thomson’s at the time innovatively comic drawings achieved prominence: in debt, and professionally known in other areas of life, Thomson was hired to draw many more illustrations per volume than had been done before; and, in comparison to most of went before (in whatever mood), his are filled with alert life-feeling energy. These volumes sold and other competent illustrators imitated his (Chapter Three, 50-62). Unfortunately, Looser’s identification and innovative close readings of other particular illustrators’ lives and pictures is undermined by a paucity of reprints. She wants us to believe in the special loveliness and period romanticism of A. F. Lydon’s landscapes for Mansfield Park, but we are given only one (Chapter Two, 39-47), not enough to judge. David Gilson in the Cambridge Jane Austen in Context (ed. Janet Todd [2005], provides two more (137, 139-42).

J.F. Lydon, Mansfield Park

Anonymous, Mansfield Park (in the same tradition)

In all this Looser is doing what scholars have done for a long while: in areas of conventional scholarship most people recognize, describing accurately what she has chosen for mapping her Austen tradition. In the dense chapters on “Austen, Dramatized” (Part Two), she again identifies new texts, fearlessly corrects false information and wrong conclusions. She congratulates herself: “we can now identify” the “connection” another recent critic has seen between the MGM Pride and Prejudice and Thomson’s illustrations” (131), and sometimes extrapolates on thin evidence, as when she claims pervasive influence for Rosina Filippi’s Austen-derived dialogues for expensive English and American girls’ schools and private colleges (83-88). In these all-strong-girl scenes, Looser finds early woman-centered proto-feminist scenes similar to those in professionally staged plays by, for example, Mary Keith Medbury McKaye and Margaret McNamara, a feminist-socialist-pacificist (Elizabeth Refuses is still in print). She even turns up two lesbian stage plays. We learn of how Eva Le Gallienne played Jane to her partner-actress, Josephine Hutchinson’s Cassandra; Eleanor Holmes Hinkley (who, we are told, attended Radcliffe) called her “gender-bending” biographical play, Dear Jane, which, while it may have “veered sharply away from … the perfectly pious Christian heroine,” also included the hilarity of the inane. Hinckley is said to have enlisted her cousin, T. S. Eliot to play the valetudinarian Mr Woodhouse” in a “stand-alone dialogue” (Chapters Four through Six, 83-96, 113-23). Some intriguing histories of actors and playwrights’ lives, are followed by a full-scale book history-type and film study of the famous (though not initially commercially successful) 1940 MGM Pride and Prejudice and a never realized (seriously lamented by Looser) 1970s screenplay for a satiric Pride and Prejudice that seems a blend of burlesque, TV situation comedy, and crudities in the vein of the recent Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016). A deleted scene from one of the many draft MGM scripts, would have had Laurence Olivier, already associated with Heathcliff, act out some “Bronte-brutal” (136), complete with metaphoric rape (Chapter Seven).

Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton in the 1935 Tale of Two Cities

Since frankness and personal reaction are the order of the day, I’d like to emphasize, as Looser does not, how many women she names as centrally active in different phases of these appropriations of Austen (passim). Read any history of 1930s and 40s “classic” films and plays, illustrations for the 1860s, or early TV, it is just about all men all the time. Not here. Still, Looser does fall into Darcymania (Chapter Five). Her question often is: does a given actor or scene or plot-design emphasize Darcy or anticipate a gothicized Olivier, who is said to anticipate the “swoon-worthy” Colin Firth of Andrew Davies’s super-best known sociological event of a mini-series (the 1995 A&E Pride and Prejudice). I read differently one critic’s “extreme disappointment” (100-2) with a beloved stage actor’s Darcy because he “incomprehensibly” resembled another actor playing Sydney Carton. I suggest for Firth’s archetype one would do better to look at how Ronald Colman performed Carton as “somber dignified” “costumed romance and melodrama.” Colin Firth comes out of that kind of gentlemanly masculinity in melodrama; and after him so too Matthew MacFayden (Joe Wright’s 2004 Pride and Prejudice), and most recently Matthew Rhys (Juliette Towhidi’s 2013 Death Comes to Pemberley). These are part of the Austen tradition too. By contrast, Looser has little use for Greer Garson (“affected, silly” 137) and we hear nothing of the tradition of Elizabeth Garvie, a favorite for Elizabeth Bennet (from the 1979 BBC Fay Weldon Pride and Prejudice).

Elizabeth Garvie and Moray Watson playing Elizabeth and Mr Bennet playing backgammon together (1979 P&P, scripted Fay Weldon)

The material reviewers have been most attracted to, and where Looser does her best to regale us with what she finds “amusing,” includes the later and most problematic parts of her book, “Jane Austen, Politicized (Part Three, Chapters Eight and Nine”) and “Jane Austen, Schooled” (Part Four, Chapter Eleven). Her central contention that Jane Austen has been framed from a political viewpoint and used in political debates almost since she was first written about and discussed is incontestable. As she says, how one defines politics matters, and as long as we don’t define the word narrowly (unrealistically), and include art which “comments on the exercise of power, status, and authority,” and in Austen’s case, “particularly in regard to families, economics and gender roles,” Austen is a political writer. Nonetheless, in these chapters what she goes about to demonstrate is we can find Austen discussed politically and used in political discussion in the British parliament in 1872 (141-42) and in” tony private men’s clubs” when it’s a question of an image or name in banners and posters (which she insists were taken seriously) in suffragette marches and feminist pageants. She cites critics and authors overtly political in the narrower and broader senses who defend or attack Austen and differ considerably in their philosophical and other views, among the better known, G. K. Chesterton, a political reactionary, William Dean Howells, a socialist (151-52, 161-63) and among women, Annie Gladstone (159-61) and Cicely Hamilton, once an important writer (169-74). Looser studies widely-distributed schooltexts since the mid-19th century for readings, handbooks for tests, abridged (gouged-out) Austens and discovers they “reinforce social structures at the time, especially in terms of class, taste, and culture” (199). That’s still true (220-21). Jane Austen is made to stand for whatever is the mainstream view, and her texts explicated to support these in the blandest ways, e.g., Emma needs to learn “each of us has his own life to live; we cannot make ourselves dictators of the lives of others” (206).

The trouble is Looser says more than once it doesn’t matter if none of these purveyors of Austen or her books ever read about her for real or in decent unabridged texts. What are we endorsing, “celebrating” or “studying [for] historical nuance and cultural scope,” if ignorance and misunderstanding are its basis and these texts produce opposed and contradictory readings or responses (221)? When she says Samuel French handles “an astonishing 332 Austen-inspired school and community theater productions from 2012 to 2017” I don’t see how she can conclude a “performed Austen” is globally prevalent (220). She enters earnestly into imbecilic abuse (a reprint of a menu depiction of a clueless maid in tattered uniform peering guiltily at the broken bits of a bust of Austen for a rich men’s club, 154-56), and ill-natured anti-intellectualism (a National Lampoon mock-ad featuring as simpletons an earnest male supermarket employee and smiling leisured housewife, 212-14) in the same spirit as she complains that a non-condescending non-exploitative educational engagement with Austen’s texts by Josephine Woodbury Heerman (a 1908 edition of Pride and Prejudice for Macmillan Pocket Classic, 203) has not been as distributed or valued as Chapman’s 1924 first scholarly texts based on a study of the first printed editions and (where they exist) manuscripts.

This is a book mostly about social, political, and economic behaviors, personal lives, book and film and stage history, all of which can be connected back to a group of texts written by a woman named Jane Austen. In her “Coda” Looser pleads with her reader to “recognize” “please” that Austen’s “critical and popular legacies” move happily in tandem (217-18), that “popularity” (celebrity might be better word) is “not killing” Austen (219). She has apparently written this book to deny that Jane Austen or her texts (she does not distinguish between the biography and the texts) are being made “ridiculous,” and ends on the confession that she is “part of the problem” (222). Why? Because she is an Austen scholar who is also a professional roller-derby skater “under the name of Stone-Cold Austen” and because a number of her significant life events happened and continue to happen (e.g., an “Austen-scholar husband” and this book) as the result of an early and continuing personal engagement with Austen’s novels. To combine such experiences is “preposterous” (222). I confess I find her to be boasting and wrestling with a non-existent bugbear and mortification (if she is mortified). Powerful and high status members of societies have always used and will continue to use exclusion and stigmatized descriptions to control and marginalize and keep from less powerful people not just genuinely subversive and transgressive texts and pictures but anything they value unless they own some version of the object or experience they can conspicuously consume. Because this is so is no reason to stigmatize the academic profession (let us now remember Johnson’s couplet, “There mark what Ills the Scholar’s Life assail/Toil, Envy, Want, the Patron and the Jail,” Vanity of Human Wishes, lines 158-59) nor, in this year, explicitly undervalue the difference between knowledge and illusion, credible evidence and lies.

Ellen Moody
Independent Scholar

Isobel Bishop (1902-88) imagined image of Jane Austen laboring over a manuscript of a book

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