In
Janeites and Austen-L, during our
endless group read of JA’s letters (we have been at it for over 2 years, and now have just about a year
to go), Diana Birchall commented about the following passage in Letter 96 dated
Nov. 1813:
“Since
I wrote last, my 2nd edit. has stared me in the face. Mary tells me that Eliza
means to buy it. I wish she may. It can hardly depend upon any more Fyfield
Estates. I cannot help hoping that many will feel themselves obliged
to buy it. I shall not mind imagining it a disagreeable duty to them, so as
they do it. Mary heard before she left home that it was very much admired at
Cheltenham, and that it was given to Miss Hamilton. It is pleasant to have such
a respectable writer named. I cannot tire you, I am sure, on this
subject, or I would apologise.” END QUOTE
Diana:
“Jane's talk about the book is rather tart…a little more bitter than most of
Jane's usual jocularity; is she disappointed
that her books are not bringing in more money, not making more of a
splash? For this is far
from the ecstacy of "I have got my own darling child." Instead it stares her in the face. She has seen it before.”
I
responded as follows:
True,
she is not rhapsodizing as she was about the “delivery” of P&P 9 months
earlier, after a 15 year “pregnancy”, but then, it’s not surprising, when you
think about it. The second edition of a novel is not a
“delivery” of a “child”—it’s much more like in one of my favorite movies, Multiplicity --it’s a “clone” of the
firstborn child—yeah, it’s a kind of birthday, but it’s not a BIRTH day!
And I
think that’s relevant, as she anthropomorphizes S&S, giving it the capacity
to stare her in the face, as if the book really were a two-year old child. At
this point, S&S did not fulfill her “expectations” for it, it
did not create the buzz amongst the literati that its younger, much more
attractive sister, P&P, achieved in a much shorter time period. And so, JA,
with her droll sense of humor, inevitably falls right into satire, assuming
the role of the unfeeling mother whose eldest is not her favorite.
And,
as her novels are filled with parents who think about their children in
monetary terms (as Auden famously wrote), she plays up the conceit of thinking
about S&S merely as a source of income to her as well, as if she had sent
S&S off to the workhouse at age 2 to earn her keep. JA writes, i.e., as if she were John &
Fanny Dashwood, or Sir Thomas Bertram—clink, clink, show me the money,
baby! ;)
And
speaking of the mercenary Sir Thomas….
Diana:
“Lady Elizabeth Hatton and Annamaria's visit is evidently the dullest of all
dull visits: "I do not think I can
say anything more about them. They came & they sat & they went."
I
know it’s not my imagination that that last line distinctly and intentionally
echoed Caesar’s famous report from a victorious battlefield in what is now
Turkey: “I came, I saw, I conquered”. How do I know?
Because
JA, only a half dozen short paragraphs earlier, took note of the momentous news
of the victory by the English “Julius Caesar”, Wellington, in another part of
the ancient Roman empire, going by the
modern name Spain. That just can’t be a coincidence—and anyway, that’s exactly
how her mind worked, her vast knowledge in dozens of fields was all
interconnected in her imagination, and allusions poured out of her in a
torrent, spontaneously.
But…what’s
even more important about JA’s report about Lady Elizabeth Hatton and her
daughter is that they are they are the (illegitimate) niece and grand-niece of
Lord Mansfield, as recently summarized here (Lady Elizabeth is the white girl on
the right in the famous portrait):
I was
writing about this very point in 2006. JA was getting Mansfield Park ready to be published as she wrote Letter 96. You
can be darned sure that JA used her encounters with this real life “Lady
Bertram” and her very quiet daughter (more like Fanny Price than Julia or
Maria) to gather material for MP! In the end, JA was the “victor”, as JA came,
& sat, and…..wrote (and then laughed a lot!) ;)
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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