At
first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything significant going on in
the first sentence of the very short Letter 123 from Jane Austen to her 10-year old niece, Caroline
(of course, the much younger of brother James’s two daughters):
"I have not yet felt quite equal to taking up your
Manuscript, but think I shall soon, & I hope my detaining it so long
will be no inconvenience.-
But upon closer
examination of the context, subtle subtexts emerge from between the lines. And
these subtexts have significant implications which, amazingly enough, relate to
a very significant theme in Persuasion,
which I’ve hinted at in my Subject Line, and which I’ve written about
previously. Let me explain.
Diana
Birchall wrote the following in Janeites & Austen L: “Jane Austen writes from Henry's house at Hans Place, to James's younger
daughter Caroline, age ten….Henry is still severely ill, though just beginning to
be considered out of the gravest danger.”
Reading
the first part of Letter 123, my first thought was to wonder, in the midst of
all the family angst over Henry’s life-threatening illness, about the toll
Henry’s suddenly dangerous illness has taken, to little fanfare, on Jane Austen herself,
over the preceding few weeks! In particular, I find the following discreetly
worded lines…
“I have not YET FELT QUITE EQUAL to taking up
your Manuscript…”
…highly
suggestive. JA seems to be reporting, albeit in code graspable only by adult
eyes at Chawton like sister Cassandra's, that JA is feeling more than a little overwhelmed emotionally
and logistically by the stressful demands of caretaking for Henry. And wouldn’t
that be just typical of the way the Austen family operated? When it was a
brother who was ill or in trouble, Mrs. Austen and everyone else was on full
alert, the family troops were mobilized, and frequent concerned bulletins were
sent in every direction until the crisis eased.
But
it’s been a persistent theme of JA’s letters, to say nothing of her novels,
that female illness, worries, and concerns—especially those of unmarried
younger females like JA--- rarely receive anything remotely resembling that
sort of mobilized and proactive response---the quintessential example of this
being JA, during her final illness, having to sit on three chairs placed
together to simulate a sofa, so that her mother could have the actual sofa.
So I
read this line as JA’s faint cry for help, or at least recognition, of what she
was going through at that time. Here she is awaiting publication of Emma, her crowning literary achievement,
and yet, as we will shortly read in Letter 124, that publication is on hold
while JA tends to Henry.
But
that’s all only the half of it. Upon further consideration of the full context,
it occurred to me that, under that emotional stress, JA may well have even
taken physically ill herself. The word “yet” is very pregnant, it suggests that
in the previous letter to Chawton re Henry’s dangerous illness, as to the subject
matter of which Caroline would have been informed to some appropriate extent,
JA had also reported some symptoms of physical illness from which JA needed to
recover, somehow, while tending to Henry’s recovery.
And if I’m correctly reading JA
between the lines, and JA is recovering from physical illness in some way as
she writes Letter 123, my further inference would be that the malady was very
likely a “weakness” in her eyes.
Why? You’ll recall that JA did write
about that eye weakness explicitly in a few of her letters, and, I argued in a
recent series of seven posts in late August and early September of this year,
beginning here…..
…and ending here…..
….that JA also wrote about her
vision impairment indirectly but pervasively in Persuasion, the very same novel which JA had already begun writing
as she wrote Letter 123, by covertly depicting Anne Elliot as having a serious “weakness”
in her eyes!
But back to Letter 123 and JA’s
eye weakness. Isn’t it a truism that each of us has particular areas of medical
vulnerability, the “weak links” in our bodies which tend to betray us when our
immune system is lowered? And I think JA’s weak link was her vision, and this
would also fit perfectly with the duty which JA was delicately apologizing for to
Caroline for failure to perform—reading Caroline’s
manuscript!
And this also dovetails perfectly with
one other biographical detail. It now seems likely to me that JA’s
communications (by letter, and also no doubt in person) to 10-year old niece
Caroline about JA’s persistent eye “weakness” left quite a profound and lasting
deposit in Caroline’s memory banks. Why? Because it was Caroline Austen
herself, who wrote the following words more than a half century later in her
memoir about JA, My Aunt Jane Austen:
“She found
a resource sometimes in that simple game [cup and ball] when she suffered from
weak eyes and could not work or read for long together"
This
is pretty much the only detail that Caroline reports about her aunt’s health in
that brief Memoir, so it speaks to the strong impression that was made on
Caroline about JA’s eyes, an impression which first became particularly strong
during those few weeks in October, 1815.
So, in
conclusion, upon such examination, informed by a grasp of JA’s subtextual code,
we can see that what might have appeared at first to be a little white lie, told
by a considerate aunt to a sensitive 10 year old niece to excuse a negligent
failure to inspect that niece’s first literary efforts, was actually a deep
glimpse into, and further validation of, the subtextual code which permeated
all of JA’s writings, both imaginary & novelistic and realistic & epistolary.
We
need no longer be blind to the Jane Austen Code.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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