A week
ago, after reading Juliette Wells’ recent Persuasions
Online article about authorship of the 1817 Biographical Notice of Jane
Austen, which served as preface to the 1818 first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, I wrote a blog post… [“On
Jane Austen’s 242nd birthday, a vindication of her passionate
“Scarlets Letter” complaint” https://tinyurl.com/yb3sqzc5 ]
...in which I was the first to ever speculate that the author of the 1817
Notice was not brother Henry Austen, as has long been universally believed, but
instead was nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. In that post, I argued that JEAL
wished to exculpate Mr. and Mrs. Leigh-Perrot from blame for hastening Jane
Austen’s death via the shock of disinheritance only a few months earlier.
Instead, JEAL seized the moment, and deliberately left the cause of his aunt’s
complaint unstated and therefore unknown to strangers unaware of the true
cause.
Three days ago, another
essay appeared online… https://sarahemsley.com/2017/12/22/henry-austens-biographical-notice-of-the-author/ …in which Peter Sabor disagreed with Wells, and
claimed that Henry Austen was indeed the sole author of the 1817 Notice, based
on what Henry wrote to Bentley in a letter dated October 4, 1832 letter which
is currently held by the British Library, but the text of it was shown in full
in Deirdre Le Faye’s “Jane Austen: New Biographical Comments,” Notes and Queries 39.2 (1992), 162-63). Sabor
wrote: “The letter clearly reveals Henry’s authorship of both the Biographical
Notice and the revised memoir.” However, when Peter, at my request earlier today, graciously
found time during this holiday to shoot me back a pdf of Le Faye’s article, I read
Henry’s very short 1832 letter to Bentley, and the only excerpt which was
relevant to the question of authorship of the 1817 version was this description
of Henry’s 1832 version: "A
biographical sketch of the Authoress, which is to supersede that already
publishd." It does not say, “already publishd by myself”.
This seems to me to be Henry Austen playing
very coy indeed with Bentley about who wrote the 1817 version which Henry was superseding.
This ambiguity seems intentional on Henry's part, so that Bentley would assume
it was Henry who also wrote the 1817 version. Why? So that Bentley wouldn’t
contact JEAL and get his input before
publishing Henry’s revision! However, Henry also would’ve wished to avoid an
outright lie to Bentley, which might’ve been embarrassing not long after, when
JEAL read Henry’s published revision. If JEAL ever contacted Bentley--
especially given that Henry had both coopted and edited down JEAL’s original,
without JEAL’s even being told by his uncle – at least Bentley could plead
ignorance, as Henry could plead inadvertent unclarity on his own part. As I
said, very coy.
But that is all
background to my main point today. Sabor’s post had also reminded me that I had
left a big loose end dangling from my first post, because I hadn’t checked the
1832 revision of the 1817 Notice. What specifically had been altered, I
wondered, from the 1817 Notice, and for what possible reason?
That led me to the 1997
print Persuasions article, “Henry Austen's Memoir of Miss
Austen”, by David Gilson, which is readable online here: http://www.jasna.org/assets/Persuasions/No.-19/gilson.pdf
Gilson very helpfully provided the full text of the 1832 revision, and I
urge you to read it when you have a chance, although you don’t need to, in
order to follow the rest of my argument.
First, Gilson reconfirmed
what both Wells and Sabor agree on, which is that it is 100% certain (from that
October 1832 cover letter that Henry Austen wrote to Bentley) that Henry was indeed
the author of the 1832 revision. Which would make it all the more interesting
if the 1817 Notice had not been written
by Henry, but by his and Jane’s young nephew, JEAL. Then we’d potentially have
a case of “dueling biographers”, with Henry having waited 15 years to supersede
his nephew’s version of Jane’s life, and then JEAL waiting nearly 40 years after
that, when none of Jane Austen’s
siblings remained alive, to reclaim, on a permanent basis, the role of
definitive family biographer of Jane Austen.
But was there anything
in the changes made by the 1832 revision by Henry, and then by the 1870 Memoir
by JEAL, that fingers JEAL as the original 1817 author? After comparing the
1817 and 1832 versions, there are various changes and additions which are
worthy of notice, such as the insertion of a great deal of special pleading in
the 1832 revision about Jane Austen’s Christianity (which surely can be
explained by the protean Henry’s having by then fully morphed from the worldly London
banker/socialite married to his and Jane’s enigmatic cousin Eliza, into a zealous
Evangelical clergyman during the reign of George IV). As Sabor aptly put it: “Like all biographers, Henry Austen
had an agenda…he devotes the final paragraph of his piece entirely to spiritual
matters and is evidently writing as a parson here. Jane Austen was ‘thoroughly
religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God, and incapable of
feeling it towards any fellow creature.’ Although everything we know of
Austen’s acerbic wit from her novels and letters belies these words, Henry
presses on to a strange conclusion: “her opinions,” he declares, “accorded
strictly with those of our Established Church.” The word “strictly” is
especially jarring: Austen’s opinions, of course, were her own.”
However, I soon discerned
something else of even greater significance to the authorship enigma: two excerpts from the 1817 Notice were omitted in
the 1832 revision, but then, both intriguingly popped up again in slightly
altered form….in JEAL’s 1870 Memoir! That on-off-on pattern, I suggest,
constitutes persuasive circumstantial evidence that JEAL was the anonymous
author of the 1817 Notice!
Here is
the first such excerpt as it appears in the 1817 Notice: “[Jane Austen’s] favourite moral writers were
Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse. It is difficult to say at what age she
was not intimately acquainted with the merits and defects of the best essays
and novels in the English language. Richardson's power of creating, and
preserving the consistency of his characters, as particularly exemplified in Sir Charles Grandison, gratified the
natural discrimination of her mind, whilst her taste secured her from the
errors of his prolix style and tedious narrative. She did not rank any work of
Fielding quite so high.”
Other
than the swipe at Fielding (which, as I suggested in my post last weekend, was clearly
false – Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, and
Shamela were, collectively, notable
allusive sources for Pride and Prejudice and
Emma, at a minimum), these are hardly
controversial claims of Jane Austen’s particular interest in Richardson,
Cowper, and Johnson. Nonetheless, in the 1832 revision, there is no reference
whatsoever to Johnson, Cowper, Richardson,
or Fielding! This omission is all the more striking, because the 1832 revision
otherwise includes, mostly verbatim, substantially
all of the other verbiage from the 1817 Notice; and, it also includes
Henry’s addition of that completely new, long and final passage which frantically
asserts that sister Jane was the epitome of an orthodoxly Christian writer (a
claim which, by the way, I took issue with at some length yesterday here: http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2017/12/on-comet-on-cupid-on-blunder-and-dixon.html)
However
--- and here’s the key---in the 1870 Memoir, which indubitably was written by
JEAL, we read what is essentially an expansion of the above quoted passage from
the 1817 Notice about Richardson, Cowper, and Johnson as touchstones for Jane
Austen, a passage which (it bears repeating) was omitted entirely by Henry Austen
in 1832!: “Her knowledge of Richardson's
works was such as no one is likely again to acquire, now that the multitude and
the merits of our light literature have called off the attention of readers
from that great master. Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the cedar
parlour, was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were
as well remembered as if they had been living friends. Amongst her favourite
writers, Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse, and Cowper in both, stood
high. It is well that the native good
taste of herself and of those with whom she lived, saved her from the snare
into which a sister novelist had fallen, of imitating the grandiloquent style of
Johnson.”
To
those who would argue that Henry Austen was the author of the 1817 Notice, how
do you explain why he would decide in 1832 to single out for deletion his own
summary of his sister’s most important literary influences? It makes no sense,
especially in light of his nephew’s reinstating, substantially, those very same
claims of literary influence. But if JEAL wrote the 1817 Notice, there’d be no
strangeness at all about Henry’s amending JEAL’s original, but then JEAL, in
1870, reinstating his own original version.
The
same pattern applies to the other on-off-on excerpt, which appears as follows
in the 1817 version:
“From
this place [Chawton Cottage] she sent into the world those novels, which by
many have been placed on the same shelf as the works of a D'Arblay and an Edgeworth.”
In the 1832
revision, there is not a word about either Burney or Edgeworth, but then,
again, in the 1870 Memoir, we find that same idea reinserted in so many words: “Sometimes a friend or neighbour, who chanced to know of our connection
with the author, would condescend to speak with moderate approbation of Sense and Sensibility, or Pride and Prejudice; but if they had
known that we, in our secret thoughts, classed her with Madame D'Arblay or Miss
Edgeworth, or even with some other novel writers of the day whose names are now
scarcely remembered, they would have considered it an amusing instance of
family conceit.”
In the
totally ambiguous circumstance established by the actual words of Henry’s
letter to Bentley, the preponderance of this circumstantial evidence favors my
claim that JEAL, at the precocious age of 19, was the actual author of the 1817
Notice. It avoids having to twist the on-off-on pattern into a pretzel in order
to try to come up with an equally plausible explanation for why Henry Austen
would, on a point of the highest importance in a literary biographical notice---
the identity of the author’s most significant literary influences and favorites
--- delete his own crucial report in that regard provided within months after
his sister’s death, in a revision 14 years later; only to have his nephew, 40
years still further on, reinsert the substance of claims which his uncle
seemingly deemed unworthy of reiteration?
No, the
simplest, most direct explanation is what I’ve written above, which I see as
both a validation of Juliette Wells’s scholarly thoroughness in checking to
verify Henry’s authorship of the 1817 Notice, and also of the right direction
of her hunch that another Austen family hand, Cassandra’s, had held the pen, at
least some of the time, in 1817. I am merely walking through the door Wells
cracked open, by comparing the 1832 revision with both the 1817 Notice and the
1870 Memoir, and thereby revealing the telltale pattern I’ve outlined above.
In
fairness to prior scholars (such as Bharat Tandon, who in his 2004 book about
Austen briefly noted that the 1817 Notice and the 1870 Memoir contain similar
references to Johnson, Richardson, and Cowper), there was no reason for anybody
to even think about authorship, when the entire Janeite world, including
myself, believed Henry’s authorship of the 1817 Notice a settled fact. Not
until Wells’s diligent show-me fact-checking did this first become a plausible
line of inquiry.
And if
I’m right, then at least two important questions occur to me.
First,
what exactly was going on in late 1817 that resulted in the 19 year old JEAL
being tasked with writing the first version of the Biographical Notice? Henry,
after all, was Jane’s literary executor, as well as a mature adult who’d had a
much longer and closer relationship with her than JEAL, and who surely knew her novels much better as well. Perhaps this
was an early recognition of a profound shift that had just occurred in Austen
family politics, due to the event which, as I claimed in my post last weekend, had motivated
JEAL to quote from his aunt’s letter about being “too complaining” – the death
of James Leigh-Perrot. At that transitional moment, the eldest Austen sibling, James
Austen was (as I recall) already too ill to attend his sister’s funeral, and died
only a year or so later. Therefore, pursuant to the Leigh-Perrot Will, it was
clear to all that JEAL would one day be The One; upon great-aunt Leigh-Perrot’s
death, he would inherit Scarlets and all their other wealth. As we all know Jane
Austen knew better than anyone, money talks.
So
perhaps the honor of writing the 1817 Notice, even anonymously, was a plum that
Jane’s mother, sister, and two eldest brothers agreed should be awarded to the
literarily ambitious JEAL, with whom they all wished to curry favor. In particular,
remember Jane’s 1817 “two inches of ivory” letter, which is filled with what I
believe is totally insincere flattery of JEAL, for that exact same reason. Money
talks.
If that
all is so, then it seems plausible that Henry Austen could have jealous and resentful
of this family decision; and therefore, when opportunity knocked in the form of
Bentley’s reaching out to him, after 14 long years, Henry let opportunity in,
and chose to pick up the pen and reshape the world’s opinion about his writing
sister as he saw her; primarily to conform to his own religious agenda, but
also perhaps to find something –anything--in his usurping nephew’s 1817 version
to undo. We’ve all seen this happen in American politics in 2017. The politics
of undoing on a national scale, but maybe also on the micro scale in the Austen
family as well.
This
could account for why Henry chose to delete both of JEAL’s most literarily
significant claims –the authors Jane loved most, and the authors with whose writing
Jane’s was most worthy of favorable comparison. It’s just improbable that
Henry really disagreed with JEAL’s original literary judgments; nor can these
deletions have been the result of a shortage of writing space—because, as
already noted, Henry inserted a much longer paragraph about Jane’s
Christianity.
We’ll
probably never know for sure what motivated this strange on-off-on pattern, but
I want to close this post by setting the stage for a third post of mine on this
rich vein of ore opened up by Wells’s article. To wit: it was while writing
this post that I realized that Jane Austen, who was the sharpest elf of all,
actually laid a trap for JEAL in the lines she wrote that appear in the 1817
Notice, the 1832 revision, and the 1870 Memoir:
“'But I am getting too near complaint. It has been the appointment of
God, however secondary causes may have operated.”
I’ve
already suggested that JEAL chose that quote from her late letter, because his
aunt’s words seemed to give the Leigh-Perrots, as well as JEAL and his parents,
a “Get out of jail free” card from guilt and blame for having accelerated Jane
Austen’s decline. But can you spot the “virus” that she hid in plain sight in
those seemingly exculpatory words, which actually points a finger of blame
right at that same group, but most of all at JEAL’s mother, Mary Lloyd Austen?
I’ll be
back by the end of tomorrow with that third installment, in which I’ll make
that case, till then, I’ll call John Knightley over to the keyboard, so he can
add his two pence:
“MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD
NIGHT!”
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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