...... SHARP ELVES SOCIETY ...... Jane Austen's Shadow Stories

Baby Swapping in Mansfield Park

2012-01-31T21:53:00.003-05:00

Anielka Briggs wrote a very interesting and significant post in Austen L & Janeites today:

http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1201e&L=austen-l&T=0&F=&S=&P=1401

I first responded as follows:

Anielka,

I begin by acknowledging that you are clearly the first person to do the math you have laid out in your post. I haven't tried to follow all of your inferences yet, but will do so in the near future, and I go on the assumption that you would not be bringing it forward if it did not "work".

Working on that assumption, what I can say is that, somehow, what you have discerned via that mathematical analysis, _must_ dovetail in some way with _two_ discoveries of my own dating back to the summer of 2006:

FIRST: The following brief outline, which I wrote to several of my Janeite friends in November 2006 (at the same time I submitted to Persuasions Online a draft of an article, discussing same at much greater length, which was rejected), and which I forwarded to Anielka on October 23, 2007:

"As you will recall, I already had my smoking gun from before in terms of the complex allusion to Swift and his life in Mansfield Park, but yesterday I got my full copy of the 1757 article from The Gentleman's Magazine by the mysterious anonymous author of "Anecdotes of Dean Swift and Miss Johnson", and was thrilled to find another one, one that points strongly toward the illegitimacy themes of Mansfield Park which I have uncovered, from so many different sources: In MP Ch. 44, Edmund writes about Mary to Fanny: “I cannot give her up, Fanny. She is "the only woman in the world whom I could ever think of as a wife..." and then Fanny, half a page later, thinks to herself "'The only woman in the world whom he could ever think of as a wife.’ I firmly believe it. It is an attachment to govern his whole life. Accepted or refused, his heart is wedded to her for ever.” Secondarily, we also have, elsewhere in the novel, the following passage:"As to Mr Crawford, she hoped it might give him a knowledge of his own disposition, convince him that "he was not capable of being steadily attached to any one woman in the world,and shame him from persisting any longer in addressing herself." Now, consider those passages, especially those in Chapter 44, in relation to the following memorable turn of phrase in the Gentleman's Magazine article:“....the only woman in the world, who could make him happy as a wife, was the only woman in the world, who could not be that wife.” This is the passage where the writer is defending Swift's failure
to marry his lifelong love, Stella (which it is debatable whether he really did it secretly or not), arguing that it was when Swift, no longer young, was told, on the verge of marrying Stella, that she and her were half-siblings, i.e., both illegitimate offspring of the same father, Sir William Temple, that he realized he could not have children with her. Hence, the only woman who could not be his wife. Added to all the other evidence, the joint theme of incest and illegitimacy in the
novel takes on stronger and stronger reality." END QUOTE

The significance of my above-quoted analysis is that this covert allusion by JA in MP to the life of Jonathan Swift (the above is only the tip of that particular allusion) strongly suggests to the reader who recognizes the Swift allusion (Swift's relationship with Stella was a matter of common knowledge among the English literati during JA's lifetime) that Fanny and _Edmund_ actually _share_ at least one
biological parent, who might just be Sir Thomas Bertram.

SECOND: As I also wrote in _another_ article draft I submitted to Persuasions Online in November 2006 (which was _also_ rejected), and as I also emailed Anielka on October 24, 2007:

"Yes, indeed, the Crawfords are biracial and illegitimate, and Elton is biracial and illegitimate. Those are the ones I am certain were biracial illegitimate Creoles"

Responding to my hints, you were quick on the draw to pick up on the very same textual clues as to facial skin color that had initially started me thinking along those lines, that point in this direction, but I have other reasons as well. My sense since July 2006, which I have occasionally mentioned in passing in the usual online places, has remained that, in some way, either or both of Henry and Mary are
biological offspring of the Bertram family arising in some fashion out of the Bertram family's Antigua estate (where Patricia Rozema had already, in 1999, suggested that Sir Thomas leads a horrible double life there).

If you reveal it, I will be curious to see if your apparent discovery of a chronological and numerical anomaly in the number and ages of the Price children fits in some way with my above two observations, as I would imagine they must, because you and I both know that JA was not a slovenly artist, and her apparent errors can safely be assumed not to be errors at all, but clues to alternative interpretation.

And then I followed up a few moments ago as follows:

Here is a hit list of followup points to my first comments earlier today, after I carefully read through Anielka's analysis of the chronology of births in the Price family, and also refreshed my memory about certain key aspects of my own previous research. There are many points of synergy between Anielka's findings, and mine:

1. Anielka's math seems to me to be in order as best I can tell, there does indeed seem to be a missing child born to Mrs Price. All kudos to Anielka for that very significant discovery. Unless someone can poke a hole in her analysis, I think it is exactly the sort of "broad hem" that JA always hid in plain sight in her novels, to corroborate what the rest of the text suggests in a dozen subliminal ways.

2. That discovery is a wonderful confirmatory textual clue for the belief I have held since 2006, i.e., that when the narrator tells us in Chapter 1 of MP that "there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them", it is code for telling us that there is only _one_ large-fortuned Sir Thomas, but _three_ pretty Ward (Weird) sisters, and therefore he has "magnanimously" shared his wonderfulness at different times with all three of them, resulting in children born to all three of those "deserving" sisters---deserving, as in, they each get their just _deserts_ (i.e., they are all "in for it!", courtesy of Sir Thomas) for foolishly trusting a man like him. Maria Bertram is not the only young lady to fall prey to a smooth talking villain. History repeats itself.

3. So now, with Anielka's Price baby-counting discovery as a signpost, I would now guess that Mrs. Price's unmentioned child (sired by Sir Thomas) is _Julia_, the youngest of the four (nominal) Bertram children, and the next eldest in age to William Price. That would fit with the still-single Frances Ward becoming pregnant and thereby triggering the crisis that led to Mrs. Price _blackmailing_ Sir Thomas and resulting in Fanny's being sent to MP.

4. I have been of the belief since 2006 that Maria is Mrs. Norris's love child (sired by Sir Thomas).

5. I have no idea how to decide who is the mother of Tom and who is the mother of Edmund--each one could be the child of any of the Ward sisters, but there would be a certain Austenian irony if all of this "change of heirs" has come to pass because Lady Bertram, the most beautiful of the three, turned out to be _sterile_, and therefore incapable of "putting on heirs", so to speak, for her husband. But I
still cling to the notion that Lady Bertram did have at least one biological child, and that was _Fanny_, which is why Fanny is selected to be brought to Mansfield Park. Look again at how Fanny is selected---Mrs. Norris suggests that it be Fanny, and Lady Bertram instantly approves of the choice--sounds to me like the two sisters were a tag team.

6. Now _why_ would Fanny have been sent away from Mansfield Park if she was Lady Bertram's daughter? Because, I suspect, the father was _not_ Sir Thomas! Note that Fanny is much smaller than the Bertram children, and Sir Thomas is tall and handsome--which suggests to me that Fanny's biological father was a short man. So if you see a short man wandering around Mansfield Park, he's your man!

7. A year ago Friday, I posted the following....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/01/tete-tetes-between-policy-makers-early.html

...in which I noted the unmistakable parallelism among scenes early in all the novels except NA, in which a tete a tete is held outside the knowledge of the heroine, discussing, in cryptic terms, the relocation of a heroine. So, if you read that linked blog post of mine, you'll see that the idea of babies moving around like so many chess pieces is one that JA played with in all the novels, and it fits perfectly with Anielka's baby-counting game.

8. Speaking of the pun on "heirs" and "airs" that Anielka mentioned, it is indeed an excellent catch by her in MP, as, to me, it clearly has the punny meaning she ascribes to it in Chapter 1 of MP. However, what Anielka might or might not remember is that I posted the following...

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/04/jane-eyreairheireyerausten.html
(and some other followup posts)

.....last April, in which I noted that same pun on "heir" and "air" being played with by Charlotte Bronte, with the additional puns on her heroine's surname "Eyre", who turns out to be an "heir"-ess, and also is an "eyer" of the actions of others. But I did not pick up on that same pun in MP, as Anielka did, even though, ironically, I had long ago noted that the references to "air" in MP were oblique references to the liberating "air" of England that Lord Mansfield famously opined about, as being intolerant of slavery within the realm of England. So "air" in MP is a double pun, carrying both of those meanings!

9. I just did some quick checking, and it turns out that the phrase "change of air" appears one other place in JA's published novels, and it is exactly the place I'd expect to find it, given my discovery of Jane Fairfax's shadow pregnancy in early 2005:

"[Jane's] care and attention could not be questioned; they were, in fact, only too great. He very much feared that Miss Fairfax derived more evil than good from them. Emma listened with the warmest concern; grieved for her more and more, and looked around eager to discover some way of being useful. To take her -- be it only an hour or two -- from her aunt, to give her CHANGE OF AIR*//*and scene, and quiet rational
conversation, even for an hour or two, might do her good; and the following morning she wrote again to say, in the most feeling language she could command, that she would call for her in the carriage at any hour that Jane would name -- mentioning that she had Mr. Perry's decided opinion, in favour of such exercise for his patient. The answer was only in this short note: "Miss Fairfax's compliments and thanks, but is quite unequal to any exercise." "

This is _precisely_ the climactic moment in the action of the shadow story of _Emma_ when Jane Fairfax is giving birth to her illegitimate child and then reluctantly agreeing to a "change of HEIR", i.e., she tearfully gives up her baby to Mrs. Weston. I had previously found a cluster of puns and word clues that pointed to her labor and delivery, and now I can add to that cluster this particularly interesting pun.

10. Which brings me to my last observation, which is that the odds that the only two usages of this phrase "change of air" in _all_ of JA's published novels should appear in two passages both _saturated_ in the subliminal aroma of baby swapping, is far, far, _far_ beyond the realm of coincidence.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Occupy Wall Street, Tahrir Square, and Jane Austen's Attitude Toward King George III's (Dra)GOONS

2012-01-30T13:31:00.005-05:00

Diane Reynolds initiated an interesting thread in Austen L and Janeites:

[Diane] "Is there a term to describe the kind of family Austen grew up in?"

"Dysfunctional" and "sexist" are the first two that come to my mind. (joking, and yet not joking at all)

[Diane]: "While technically "nuclear" in that only two generations, parents and children, lived together, it seems different from the kind of small, intensely individualized nuclear family we have today and that I think of as beginning in the Victorian era. The Austen family functioned, as far as I can tell, more like a business unit, especially in the sense that the needs of individual children were apparently subordinated to the overall needs of the family--I am thinking particularly of the young Jane and C being sent off to boarding school apparently to make room for more students. We can infer Ja being "punished" later in life for her refusal to marry and hence contribute to the finances and status of the family unit as a whole."

That is a brilliant insight on your part, Diane, you prompted me to think back to a joking, and yet not joking, post that I wrote a few months ago:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/11/occupy-godmershampemberley-library.html

What your metaphor of family as economic collective (which is another way of conceptualizing what you're saying, if i am not mistaken) made me realize was how uncannily similar the dynamics of JA's family are to the current political debate going on in various parts of the world, but most visibly in the 2012 US presidential campaign. I.e., issues of fairness as to how the costs and burdens of achieving collective well-being are shared by different categories of members of the collective.

I am certain that JA viewed the Austen family/collective the way many people from the Occupy Wall Street/left end of the public spectrum (including myself) view the United States today, which is why the following famous epistolary statement by JA, describing the Pillaging of Steventon by James and Mary Austen.....

"The whole World is in a conspiracy to enrich one part of our family at the expence of another"

...could effortlessly be adapted into a slogan for the bottom line of the Occupy Wall Street political stance:

"The whole World is in a conspiracy to enrich the 1% at the expence of the 99%".

In many ways the Presidential race will be a referendum on whether a majority of Americans believe that to be the case or not.

I've written variations on that theme of unfairness and exploitation in the Austen family from JA's point of view on many occasions, most notably this one:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/10/whole-world-is-in-conspiracy-to-enrich.html

So, to answer your question, we might very well see an analogy to the banishment to genteel urban poverty in Southampton inflicted on JA (and by a notion of collective punishment, on the other two females in the Austen nuclear family, CEA and Mrs. Austen as well) in JA's fiction with Fanny's banishment to not so genteel urban poverty in Portsmouth, and in modern American politics in the aggressive reactions against Occupy Wall Street protesters by some governmental authorities, or even to union-busting and other governmental tactics designed to keep the less powerful members of the collective in line.

Which leads organically to the question of Jane Austen's attitude toward various analogous uprisings against oppression of the 99% by the 1% in her world, as to which I conclude in pretty much every instance that JA was firmly (but veiledly) on the side of the 99%. This is too large a topic to cover in this post, other than to list the most significant of the many areas where this applies:

Resistance to the enclosure movement under which the 1% destroyed much of the rural commons that the 99% had previously enjoyed for centuries;

Resistance to horrific conditions in the British naval, which boiled to the surface in mutinies at Spithead and elsewhere during JA's early adult years;

Resistance to colonial slavery by African slaves;

etc etc.

And it occurs to me that just as the famous rant by Henry Tilney about Catherine's gothic horror imaginings about General Tilney was really meant to be read ironically as a validation of Catherine's imaginings about the horrors inflicted by the ordinary English husband, so too we are meant to read the following equally clueless rant by Henry Tilney, this one against his sister Eleanor, as Jane Austen's veiled admiration for the ordinary English folk who rose up but were brutally suppressed in the following passage:

"My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain. The confusion there is scandalous. Miss Morland has been talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duodecimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in each, with a frontispiece to the first, of two tombstones and a lantern—do you understand? And you, Miss Morland—my stupid sister has mistaken all your clearest expressions. You talked of expected horrors in London—and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library, she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George's Fields, the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the Twelfth Light Dragoons (the hopes of the nation) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents, and the gallant Captain Frederick Tilney, in the moment of charging at the head of his troop, knocked off his horse by a brickbat from an upper window. Forgive her stupidity. The fears of the sister have added to the weakness of the woman; but she is by no means a simpleton in general."

"The Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the street of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the Twelfth Light Dragoons..."---is this not a chilling description of Tahrir Square during the final stages of the Egyptian Revolution?

And does anyone seriously believe that Jane Austen really was thinking kind thoughts about "the gallant Captain Frederick Tilney" in that moment? Of course not! Her heart was with the poor suckers being beaten to a pulp by the Kings' GOONS (aka Dragoons), just as the world's heart went out to the Egyptians attacked by Mubarak's mounted thugs!

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

A SECOND Allusion to a Very Famous Biblical Passage Hidden in Plain Sight in the Judgment of Mr. Bennet

2012-01-30T11:47:00.002-05:00

I've given some more thought to my discovery a few days ago.....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/lopping-and-cropping-part-two-king.html

(see also my two comments in which I added additional angles)

.....that Mr. Bennet channels the famous Judgment of Solomon in 1 Kings 3:16-28 about the two putative mothers claiming one living baby, when he renders _his_ judgment on Lizzy having to choose between two parents in Chapter 20 of P&P, and concludes:

"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do /not/ marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you /do/."

I've also paid close attention to the synergy (which I wrote about shortly after I made that discovery)......

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/mr-bennets-judgments-and-king-solomon.html

....between my above discovery and Anielka Briggs's earlier excellent analysis of issues of judgment and forgiveness in JA's novels, and the subliminal aura of the Bible inherent in same. As a result, I have now been rewarded with a great deal of additional insight into the wondrously complex and yet elegantly simple ways that Jane Austen engaged with both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible in this one short but memorable episode in P&P. As I see it, JA dealt with them both separately and in combination, as she formulated her own seamless integration and extension of all parts of the Bible, with special focus on these same slippery issues of judgment and forgiveness, and, as I have frequently claimed, always always with a special focus on women's issues.

Although I've generated a great deal of fresh material about JA's amazing virtuosity and insight during these past few days, too much to attempt to summarize within the constraints of posting in these groups, I do want to bring forward one major additional highlight among my latest findings, which is that the Judgment of Solomon is _not_ the only famous Biblical story that Jane Austen covertly burlesques in the Judgment of Mr. Bennet on Two Parents!

Amazing as it is that a burlesque of one such famous Biblical story was deftly hidden in plain sight by Jane Austen in the Judgment of Mr. Bennet, and has not previously been detected, it is ten times more amazing, I argue, that Jane Austen managed to hide a burlesque of a _second_ equally famous Biblical story in that same memorable comic vignette in Chapter 20 of P&P, as well. Can you guess which other famous Biblical story it is?

I will give my answer below, but here are five hints, which point to strong parallelism between these two Biblical burlesques by JA:

Hint #1: As you might have guessed from my introductory comments, above, the second burlesque is from the Christian Bible--specifically, one of the Gospels.

As in JA's burlesque of the Judgment of Solomon in the Hebrew Bible, in JA's other Biblical burlesque source we also have:

Hint #2: Mr. Bennet once more cast as a "wise king".

Hint #3: Mrs. Bennet once more cast as a "bad guy".

Hint #4: Elizabeth Bennet once more cast as a woman who has transgressed marital norms.

Hint #5: The judgment of Mr. Bennet once more provides justice, and a fresh start, to Elizabeth Bennet.

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And my answer is---the following extremely famous passage inJohn 8:3-11:

"Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say?” This they said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear. So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” "

Here's how I schematize it. In JA's burlesque:

1. Mrs. Bennet stands in for the Pharisees who seek to punish a woman who has transgressed against "the law" (in Mrs. Bennet's mind, Thou Shalt Accept Any Proposal by A Man With Money is the unwritten Eleventh Commandment!);

2. Elizabeth Bennet is of course the transgressive woman; and

3. Mr. Bennet is Jesus, who, like Solomon, seems to be caught in a juridical Catch 22, but eludes same by thinking outside the box and changing the rules of the game (sorta like Captain Kirk dealing with the Kobayashi Meru unpassable test at the Starfleet Academy).

Here are two particularly spicy aspects of this allusion, I am sure there are more:

1. The Pharisees have as their primary agenda the discrediting of Jesus, and the stoning of the adultress, while an end in itself for such rigid-thinking sexist hypocrites, is more a means to their primary end. It's interesting to think about Mrs. Bennet's agenda vis a vis Mr. Bennet in this regard. Yes, it's clear to all of us that Mrs. Bennet's Eleventh Commandment is a huge priority for her, independently of her feelings about Mr. Bennet. And yet, I now believe JA meant for those readers who perceived her burlesque of John 8:3-11 to also reflect on a deeper motivation that Mrs. Bennet had, which she might not even have been consciously aware of herself. I.e., at that crucial moment in the history of the Bennet family, Mrs. Bennet believes herself to be in a position to force Mr. Bennet to stop indulging his darling Lizzy, and to make Lizzy do something she does not want to do.

Think about it. Mr. Bennet has been making fun of Mrs. Bennet for 23 years, and has, in her jealous eyes, been spoiling Lizzy for many of those years. We receive evidence of this dynamic at the very beginning of the novel, when Mr. & Mrs. Bennet have the following pointed exchange:

[Mr. B] "....I dare say Mr. Bingley will be very glad to see you; and I will send a few lines by you to assure him of my hearty consent to his marrying whichever he chooses of the girls; though I must throw in a good word for my little Lizzy."

[Mrs. B] "I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the others; and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so good-humoured as Lydia. But you are always giving /her/ the preference."

And so on a subconscious level, I can see Mrs. Bennet in Chapter 20 in full "carpe diem" mode, thinking that finally the wheel of karma has turned to a very favorable position, in which she, Mrs. Bennet, suddenly has an opportunity to use Mr. Bennet as a mallet with which to batter poor Lizzy into submission, and to take jealous revenge on her husband for loving Lizzy much more than he loves his own wife!

But, just as Jesus deftly ducks out of the trap set for him by the Pharisees, so too does Mr. Bennet, using his wit and humor so as to not directly contradict Mrs. Bennet's demand that he crush Lizzy's resistance to Mr. Bennet, and yet get that exact message across nonetheless. Just like Jesus, he refuses to accept the mantle of abusive authority that others wish to force on him, and instead frames the issue as "an unhappy choice" to be made by Lizzy, not by himself.

2. The final wink of JA's eye as to her burlesque of Jesus and the Adultress in John 8:3-11 comes in the following passage three chapters after Lizzy refuses Collins, in Chapter 23, after Charlotte Lucas has snatched Mr. Collins in marriage:

" Mrs. Bennet was in fact too much overpowered to say a great deal while Sir William remained; but no sooner had he left them than her feelings found a rapid vent. In the first place, she persisted in disbelieving the whole of the matter; secondly, she was very sure that Mr. Collins had been taken in; thirdly, she trusted that they would never be happy together; and fourthly, that the match might be broken off. Two inferences, however, were plainly deduced from the whole: one, that ELIZABETH WAS THE REAL CAUSE OF THE MISCHIEF; and the other that she herself had been barbarously misused by them all; and on these two points she principally dwelt during the rest of the day. Nothing could console and nothing could appease her. Nor did that day wear out her resentment. A week elapsed before she could see Elizabeth without scolding her, a month passed away before she could speak to Sir William or Lady Lucas without being rude, and MANY MONTHS WERE GONE BEFORE SHE COULD AT ALL FORGIVE THEIR DAUGHTER/*. */"

What a wonderful irony, that JA deliberately leaves it ambiguous as to _whose_ daughter Mrs. Bennet could not forgive for many months! My guess would be that many Janeites over the years have read that last clause as referring to Charlotte Lucas, because it is immediately preceded in that same sentence by a report that Mrs. Bennet waited a month before speaking amicably to Sir William and Lady Lucas. And certainly Mrs. Bennet feels entitled to be angry at Charlotte for "taking in" Mr. Collins and taking Mr. Collins away from one of her daughters. But....I also surmise that many Janeites whose eyes are caught by "Elizabeth was the _real_ cause of the mischief" will then infer that the most difficult "sin" for Mrs. Bennet to forgive will be the one that was at the root of the miscarriage of justice that Mrs. Bennet perceives.

And that latter reading, with Mrs. Bennet taking forever to forgive _Lizzy_, functions perfectly as a veiled burlesque of John 8:3-11. Why? Because Jesus's brilliant strategy brings about instant awakening of conscience in the Pharisees who've gathered to accuse the adultress, but Mrs. Bennet, being a tough nut to crack, takes months before she moves on, and one would infer that this moving on occurs merely due to the sheer passage of time, rather than any awakening of conscience.

And, in closing, it occurs to me that it makes _perfect_ psychological sense that Mrs. Bennet would be _particularly_ unable to forgive Lizzy for the "sin" of refusing to marry a foolish spouse. You see where I am going with this, I am sure. On some subconscious level, Mrs. Bennet would realize that Mr. Bennet is refusing to order Lizzy to make the exact same mistake he made, a mistake that has one ironic benefit for Mr. Bennet, i.e., giving him Lizzy as a daughter!

I'm amazed Mrs. Bennet _ever_ forgave Lizzy, given the enormous "freight" and "baggage" with which her refusal to marry Mr. Collins is loaded!

Now, to conclude with a series of implications of the above for other aspects of Austen (and Biblical) studies:

1. The burlesque of John 8:3-11 is in total synch with what I wrote last year about the universal misunderstanding by Austen scholars of the famous passage in Letter 36 when JA writes: "...I have a good eye at an Adultress..." .....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/07/jane-austens-letter-36-two-more-scenes.html

...in that it reinforces my claim that JA, in Letter 36, was mocking the "Pharisees" of her own world who judged adultresses so harshly.

2. The burlesque of 1 Kings 3:16-28 is also in total synch with what I wrote last year about Jane Austen's covert allusion to the tale of Sempronius, Chloe & Caelia in Sarah Fielding's The Governess.....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/sempronius-in-sarah-fieldings-governess.html (and several other posts before and after)

...in that I now believe that Jane Austen would've picked up on Fielding's veiled allusion to the Judgment of Solomon in the way that Sempronius chooses his wife based on how they respond to the Solomonesque moral test that he sneakily subjects them to, and emulated Fielding in her own burlesque of same in P&P (and in MP, with Fanny Price's Judgment on the Knives).

3. From a JA biographical perspective, all of the above only reinforces my previous conviction that Jane Austen was put under enormous pressure by various members of her family, but particularly her mother, to marry Harris Bigg-Wither in 1802, and that she never forgot, and perhaps also never forgave, this trauma inflicted on her, which is why she kept revisiting the trauma, with heroines like Lizzy and also Fanny Price, being subjected to such pressures. And perhaps (as was deftly portrayed in Miss Austen Regrets), perhaps JA was repeatedly reminded of her refusal of Bigg-Wither by family members such as her mother, for years and years after 1802.

4. Last but certainly not least, I note one additional major point only in passing---my sense is that Jane Austen, by doubling up these Biblical burlesques in the same passage in P&P, has not only pulled off a massive tour de force of authorial ingenuity, she has also implicitly conveyed her deep insight into the relationship _between_ these two Biblical passages! I.e., I assert that this doubling of burlesques is itself thematically significant--it is a coded message to readers who see both burlesques that JA realized that Jesus (and the author of John 8:3-11) knew 1 Kings 3: 16-28 very well, and had the tale of Solomon's Judgment firmly in mind during the action (and writing) of John 8:3-11. And in my sleuthing out all of the above, she has also taught me to notice this Biblical parallelism.

A quick Internet search has confirmed to me that some relationship between these two "Kobayashi Maru"-like Biblical passages _has_ been detected previously by a few Biblical scholars, and I believe it would be a very fertile area for investigation and analysis. Whether a Biblical scholar believes that the parallels are a reflection of Jesus as a worthy emulator of Solomon, or are a reflection of Jesus as "Solomon 2.0", or some variant on either of those positions, it is a question well worth investigating.

For today, I am content to take this as yet one more example of Jane Austen as an amazingly profound literary scholar, who so deeply understood the texts she read and alluded to, and spotted connections that eluded most other readers, even the most famous (and mostly male) scholars of her day. And was so self assured that she would not explain herself explicitly, but instead left it for the reader to find it out, and struggle to understand its meaning. That was her way.

But JA, even though she was a poker player who did not reveal what cards she held in hand, did take pains to bring her best insights, like these, to her reader's special attention. The way she did this was brilliant--I've come to realize that JA often embedded her most learned and intricate allusive insights into her most memorable scenes, precisely so as to make sure that her readers all read (and reread) those passages, and would therefore be more likely to spot the deeper meanings concealed within them. That's playing fair with the reader!

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Mr. Bennet's Judgments and King Solomon

2012-01-27T15:49:00.003-05:00

As a followup to my immediately previous post:

I just checked online in the usual places and did not find any indication of any Austen scholar detecting Jane Austen's burlesque of King Solomon's life and death judgment in Mr. Bennet's comic (and yet, beneath it, also serious) judgment on Lizzy's response to Mr. Collins's proposal of marriage.

I also checked in the archives of Austen L and Janeites, and while I found nothing directly on point, I _did_ find comments by Anielka on Mr. Bennet rendering judgment on Mr. Collins in _other_ passages in P&P, as well as a passing reference to Solomon in relation to the "courtship" charade in Emma, which I think you'll agree, are remarkably complementary with my
arguments. I.e., the likelihood that we are _each_ correct in our own arguments is greatly increased alike by the congruence of our arguments.
Let's see if you agree, here is the most relevant part of what Anielka wrote, but actually a great deal of the rest of what she wrote is also connected to the big picture on Jane Austen's Biblical allusions:

"We know Austen is notoriously difficult to interpret. We can't easily pin-down JA's beliefs, likes and dislikes or political and spiritual judgements from what we read in the novels. Sometimes the satire is so subtle that the very text that we feel an empathy for proves on closer inspection to be a veiled criticism. It's possible to catch oneself in the conceit of empathising with Austen one moment and then read to the end of
the chapter only to be horrified the next moment as you realise the very phrase that you empathised with is being gently condemned.

One such example is a quote from Mr. Bennet: which, when used out of context and incomplete, lures us into laughing with Mr. Bennet and agreeing to his proposition: "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours...?" (P&P, chapter 57)

Which seems mildly amusing but if we read the whole quote: " For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, AND LAUGH AT THEM IN OUR TURN?"

It is clear that the intention is less gentle and less kind. Yet this quote is in the mouth of Mr. Bennet who has just pronounced on Mr. Collins' Christianity in the previous sentence: "You ought certainly to forgive them, as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing." -- That is his notion of Christian forgiveness!"

Whilst our first instinct is to agree wholeheartedly we may also see that Mr. Bennet is JUDGING Mr. Collins for judging Lydia and Wickham. Two wrongs don't make a right and chapter 7 of Matthew makes it clear that judging others is not a Christian act. More amusingly Mr. Bennet goes on to use his immortal phrase "For what do we live, but to make sport for our
neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?" which is clearly about judging one's neighbours actions as derisible and then being judged similarly by those same neighbours.
....So Mr. Bennet has judged Mr. Collins for judging then suggested the purpose of existence is to judge others and be judged. It's easy to laugh along with him and to fail to see the irony of a Christian minister of the church caught in the act of misapplying the tenets of his own faith.

Back with Austen's charade. One valid solution to lines one and two is the Old Testament (contains the book of Kings) and a further solution to lines three and four is the New Testament (reference to Jesus walking on water on the Sea of Galilee)

My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings, (book of Kings in the Old Testament)
Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease. (Reference to Solomon)

...Austen's humour is subtle: the only way you can laugh at other people's faults and still obey this commandment is to laugh at your own faults. It seems JA often had the humility to laugh at self, loved friends and family and to understand that this love should be extended to everyone as everyone is our neighbour when he shows mercy. Laughing at your own faults
exposes the faults of others in the gentlest possible way and calls them to self-correct. The priest and the Levite showed no compassion for the man who fell amongst thieves but Austen would have known that the Samaritan, a supposedly reviled race, showed kindness and mercy and hence qualified as a neighbour in Jesus' parable (Luke chapter 10). Austen found a way to blend judgement with non-judgement in satire making it impossible
for us to judge her fictional characters and situations without judging ourselves." END QUOTE

When you put Anielka's insights into two of Mr. Bennet's judgments alongside my insight into a third judgment by Mr. Bennet, it can only inspire awe at the depth of genius, hiding in plain sight, in the writings of Jane Austen.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Lopping and Cropping, Part Two: King Solomon and Mr. Bennet & Their Hopeless Business

2012-01-27T14:05:00.002-05:00

As I began writing my previous post.....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/lopping-and-cropping-part-one-jane.html

...I already had a strong feeling that JA had the Biblical tale of Solomon (and his outside the box solution to the Catch 22 of the two mothers fighting over one child in 1 Kings 3:16-28) in mind as she wrote Letter 79, and that she savored the irony that in the instance of her editing of _her_ darling child, P&P, she had the wisdom of a literary Solomon, and realized that paradox was the order of the day, such that lopping and cropping was exactly what her darling child needed in order to emerge light, bright and sparkling into the world, a world which that darling child has come to rule as no other novel ever written.

But then as I wrote all of the above, I suddenly realized that Jane Austen's Mr Bennet had read his Bible, and was channeling Solomon in his witty way, when he stood 1 Kings 3:16-28 on its head, by depicting, in burlesque, one child having the Catch 22 of picking between two parents, in exact reverse of two putative parents fighting over one child!:

Mr. Bennet raised his eyes from his book as she entered, and fixed them on her face with a calm unconcern which was not in the least altered by her communication.
"I have not the pleasure of understanding you," said he, when she had finished her speech. "Of what are you talking?"
"Of Mr. Collins and Lizzy. Lizzy declares she will not have Mr. Collins, and Mr. Collins begins to say that he will not have Lizzy."
"And what am I to do on the occasion? It seems an hopeless business."
"Speak to Lizzy about it yourself. Tell her that you insist upon her marrying him."
"Let her be called down. She shall hear my opinion."
Mrs. Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to the library.
"Come here, child," cried her father as she appeared. "I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?" Elizabeth replied that it was. "Very well—and this offer of marriage you have refused?"
"I have, sir."
"Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?"
"Yes, or I will never see her again."
"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."
Elizabeth could not but smile at such a conclusion of such a beginning....." END QUOTE

"She shall hear my _opinion_.....an hopeless business...an unhappy alternative..." A group summoned to an inner sanctum of the "king" to hear a definite judgment on a life-determining decision for a child. This really is nothing less than Jane Austen burlesquing the Bible, and making Mr. Bennet nothing less than a Regency Era King Solomon!

And, to come full circle, I claim it is no coincidence that JA wrote about her "darling child" in Letter 79--she was _deliberately_ pointing to Pride and Prejudice as she conjured the spirit of King Solomon with that reference to a "baby" being born, a baby which _had_ been lopt and cropt, surgery which did not kill it, but made it the greatest love story ever written, a true prose "Song of Solomon".

Cheers, ARNIE
sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Lopping and Cropping, Part One: Jane Austen, her Darling Child & King Solomon

2012-01-27T14:00:00.003-05:00

It occurred to me this morning for the first time to do an analysis which I have never seen in print during all my research, so _perhaps_ I am the first to do it. I will present it to you in the form of a logical progression of heretofore apparently unconnected facts, from which I believe the inferences I make emerge organically. You may think that crunching numbers will not lead to insight into the mysteries of Jane Austen's creative process, but I beg to differ, sometimes numbers are revealing about art, and I invite you to read on to see if you agree with me in this case.

To begin....many Janeites are familiar with the following thrilling words which we read in Letter 79 dated 01/29/13, at the precise moment of publication of Pride & Prejudice, as Jane waxes eloquent to Cassandra:

"I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London....The 2d vol. is shorter than I cd wish--but the difference is not so much in reality as in look, there being a larger proportion of Narrative in that part. I have lopt & cropt so successfully however that I imagine it must be rather shorter than S&S altogether..."

It occurred to me that a little bit of cutting and pasting using the Project Gutenberg versions of all six novels would yield some interesting data that would let us know how accurate JA's guesses were, as to (a) the relative lengths of P&P and S&S, and (b) the relative length of Vol. 2 of P&P, vis a vis the other two Volumes of P&P.

The relative lengths of the six novels are as follows:

Title #Words #Chapters Words/Chapter Pages(12 font)

NA 77325......31........2494............137
Pers. 83361......24........3473............143

S&S 119593......50........2392............220
P&P 121889......61........1998............240

MP 159915......48........3332............269
Emma 160460......55........2990............287

And here is a further breakdown of the three volumes of P&P:

Vol 1 37745......21........1799.............76
Vol 2 37278......21........1775.............75
Vol 3 46857......20........2343.............89

Here are my inferences, but I hope and believe that others will derive further insights from considering the above:

1. JA was almost correct in her estimate that the lopt and cropt final version of P&P was very close in length to S&S--actually, P&P remained trivially ( 1 Â½ %) longer than S&S.

2. JA was correct that the Vol. 2 of P&P was not in fact shorter than Vol. 1, actually she was uncannily correct, because Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 are virtually identical in length (differing by only 467 words (about 1/2 %).

3. I realize from the cross-novel stats that I have for the past 5 years been under a profound misapprehension about the length of P&P and of S&S as well. I have up till today divided the novels into two groups by length: the shorter novels (NA, Persuasion, & P&P) and the longer novels (S&S, MP, and Emma).

Now I see that there are actually _three_ categories, by length: the little bears (NA & Persuasion), the middle bears (S&S and P&P) and the big bears (MP and Emma).

Within two of those three groupings, it is uncanny how close the novels are in length. I.e., Emma is virtually identical in length to MP (it is less than 1/3 % longer than MP!), P&P and S&S are very close to each other in length (P&P is 1 1/2 % longer).

As for the relatively greater difference in length between Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (Persuasion is nearly 9% longer than NA), the explanation has also, amazingly, been provided to us by JA, and it is not merely because these two shortest novels were both published posthumously (actually, simultaneously), so that JA was not there, obviously, to participate in the reading of proofs, etc.)

No, the explanation, I assert, for why Persuasion is over 6,000 words longer than NA is that JA altered the final chapters of Persuasion, and when she did (as we know from the actual manuscript of the cancelled chapters), she added nearly 9,000 words!

This tells me that she was willing to override her usual punctilious sense of proportion and length in her novels in Persuasion, because she realized that the rewritten climax of Persuasion (You pierce my soul)was infinitely superior to her earlier version, and so proportion must this one time give way to passion!;)

4. It is also fascinating to look at average chapter length in the six novels. I have recognized for a long while now that the chapters in P&P are much shorter than in all the other 5 novels. My data shows this to be dramatically so. But, now we can zero in on precisely where JA did her lopping and cropping in P&P, because the average length of chapters in Volume _Three_ is almost exactly the same as that in S&S, whereas the average chapter length of chapters in P&P Vols. 1 & 2 is much shorter than in Vol. 3, or for that matter in any of her other novels!

What I believe can be fairly inferred, then, is that JA lopt and cropt in Volumes 1 & 2, but not in Volume 3, which (in parallel to what I wrote about the climax of Persuasion, above) suggests that JA was ready to sacrifice proportion and symmetry for passion in the climactic moments of two of the three JA novels which have true romantic climaxes (P&P and Persuasion are joined by Emma in this regard, whereas NA races past romance at the end, and MP and S&S are decidedly and notorious unromantic in their endings).

And my final observation as to chapter length is that if we discount the long average chapter lengths of Persuasion as being heavily skewed to JA's huge expansion of the romantic climax, that leaves MP standing apart from the other novels in its much greater average chapter length, with Emma a distant second. Why would this be? I think, because my guess is that MP is the least dramatized of all the novels, and that would be because Fanny Price is JA's most interior heroine, the only most likely to be thinking many deep thoughts, but rarely expressing them to anyone else. That makes for a narrative-heavy novel!

If anyone has additional observations to make about the above, or would like to take issue with my inferences, I would be most interested to hear it.

I finish by noting an irony of the words I quoted from Letter 79, in which JA refers to P&P as her darling child, and then speaks of lopping and cropping it. The metaphor of giving a young child his first haircut, or giving a garden its first serious pruning, would be fitting to the radical editorial shortening that JA achieved so brilliantly in P&P.

However, the strange juxtaposition of a darling child with lopping and cropping also brought to my Monty Pythonesque imagination the idea of the most famous story in Western literature about the "lopping and cropping" of a "darling child", which we find in 1 Kings 3:16-28:

Now two prostitutes came to the king and stood before him. One of them said, Pardon me, my lord. This woman and I live in the same house, and I had a baby while she was there with me. The third day after my child was born, this woman also had a baby. We were alone; there was no one in the house but the two of us. During the night this woman's son died because she lay on him. So she got up in the middle of the night and took my son from my side while I your servant was asleep. She put him by her breast and put her dead son by my breast. The next morning, I got up to nurse my son and he was dead! But when I looked at him closely in the morning light, I saw that it wasn't the son I had borne.
The other woman said, No! The living one is my son; the dead one is yours. But the first one insisted, No! The dead one is yours; the living one is mine. And so they argued before the king. The king said, This one says, My son is alive and your son is dead, while that one says, No! Your son is dead and mine is alive.
Then the king said, Bring me a sword. So they brought a sword for the king. He then gave an order: Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other. The woman whose son was alive was deeply moved out of love for her son and said to the king, Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don't kill him! But the other said, Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!
Then the king gave his ruling: Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother. When all Israel heard the verdict the king had given, they held the king in awe, because they saw that he had wisdom from God to administer justice.

I had a strong feeling that JA had this Biblical tale in mind as she wrote Letter 79, and that she savored the irony that in the instance of her editing of _her_ darling child, P&P, she had the wisdom of a literary Solomon, and realized that paradox was the order of the day, such that lopping and cropping was exactly what her darling child needed in order to emerge light, bright and sparkling into the world, a world which that darling child has come to rule as no other novel ever written.

But then, as I was getting ready to sign off on this post, I realized something else, something _so_ amazing that Jane Austen did, that I felt it deserved its own post, because it will show, I promise you, something amazing about a passage in P&P which is as famous among Janeites as the story of King Solomon is among readers of the Bible, but which has an additional layer of allusive meaning that has never been understood before. A passage whose Biblical allusiveness has been hiding in the plainest sight possible for 199 years!

To read the _rest_ of that story, go here, to Part Two:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/lopping-and-cropping-part-two-king.html

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Rick Santorum would have been the worst person in the world to Jane Austen too!

2012-01-26T13:31:00.005-05:00

Apropos Rick Santorum proving himself the worst person in the world in terms of female reproductive rights, if Jane Austen were alive today, she'd be writing stuff about him in her novels and letters every bit as angry and sarcastic as any feminist living today 2 centuries after her death! She was a staunch enemy of men controlling women's bodies--but in her era women did not have the luxury of any reproductive rights whatsoever, so that most married gentlewomen of her era were turned into breeding cows, and were replaced by younger wives when they died (as they did all too often) in childbirth!

Start here in my blog...

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/byrne-portrait-two-abbeys-their-awful.html

and then free free to browse about 40 other posts at this blog on this general theme-just search "pregnancy" and "childbirth".

Here's how much confidence Jane Austen had in the Anglican Church, the English government and the average English husband:

""If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"

This passage has been misunderstood by most Janeites for 2 centuries---Jane Austen's point really is that horrible things like serial pregnancy and death in childbirth were so "normal" in her day that nobody lifted a finger to stop it!

In the novel, Catherine Morland, at age 18, is shamed out of her suspicions about male oppression of women. How horrible that 2 centuries later, women still need to defend their reproductive rights against men like Rick Santorum.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Mr. Fitzhugh, Corinna & St. Swithin: Stone Deafness in its many forms

2012-01-25T14:30:00.003-05:00

I've also been engaged in an ongoing dialogue with Christy Somer in Janeites and Austen L, about my three posts earlier this week about Jane Austen's cryptic allusion in Letter 63 to Germaine de Stael's novel Corinna and its symbolic cannon blasts:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/letter-63-crowning-of-most-celebrated.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/letter-63-jane-austen-as-corinna.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/letter-63-i-recommend-him-to-read.html

Christy picked up on my stating the following.....

"if Mr. Fitzhugh could not hear a cannon in the real world, at least he would be able to "hear" a cannon blast described in a novel!"

...and Christy then replied:

"To clarify, I interpret this 'Corinna' interchange with Mr. Fitzhugh as _only_ being an 'absurdist burlesque' -when she relays the moment to Cassandra. I do not sense that JA is secretly jesting to his deafness and letting him discover it later. That would imply more intimacy than existed between them. And certainly would be considered vulgar and inappropriate to use a disability for the seat of an inside joke."

I just responded thusly:

You're preaching to the choir, Christy! Of course I was _not_ saying that JA was mocking Mr. Fitzhugh's disability! Read back to my earlier posts about JA's satirical reference to Corinna for further verification in that regard. Not in a million years would JA do such a thing, nor would I suggest it.

In addition to the sheer, self-justifying, self-contained pleasure of an absurdist joke, there _is_ a definite satire of deafness here by JA, but it has _nothing_ to do with the physical deafness of poor old Mr. Fitzhugh--no, as I will now briefly explain, Mr. Fitzhugh's deafness is only significant as a symbol---the biting satire is of De Stael's writing style, and the way certain readers read JA and read De Stael as if they were in the same writing universe, when actually, they were the furthest thing from it!

What Jane Austen was mocking was the overblown symbolism of Corinna--while Jane Austen, like Corinna, did yearn for artistic immortality, the contrast between the endless, bloated sausage of ultra-pathos in Corinna's dying poem, on the one hand, and Jane Austen's nimble, absurdist, enigmatic, and disturbing mini-fable of a vengeant St. Swithin, all beneath a seemingly innocent surface, on the other, could not be greater.

What Jane Austen is saying, in so many words, is that De Stael's writing style was like the cannon blasts De Stael includes in her novel--blasts which unwitttingly reveal De Stael's own self indulgent, crudely obvious uber-Romantic excess. Whereas JA's preferred mode of expression was diametrically opposite---the wink, the whisper, the almost subliminal tickling of the reader's imagination.

And it is in carrying that metaphor to its logical conclusion that the deafness comes in---Mr. Fitzhugh stands in as a symbol of all those who read JA as if they were reading De Stael, expecting that what is on the surface is meant to be taken at face value. All that such readers will ever "hear" are the blasts that JA uses to conceal the whispers in her writing. So in that sense, readers who don't understand this core principle of JA's writing are as stone deaf to what JA is really saying as Mr. Fitzhugh was to words (and cannons) sounded in his presence.

P&P, Ch 54 -Teaching What is not Worth Knowing: What is the Sound of One Story Teaching?

2012-01-25T14:24:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, in one of my extended dialogues with Christy Somer in Austen L and Janietes, I wrote the following:

"So it would not surprise me at all to learn that she was aware of, and even perhaps familiar with, the basics of Eastern spiritual thought. In particular, as I have noted before, the following statement by Elizabeth Bennet is wonderfully Zen its rich sense of paradox: "We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing." The Buddha himself would have smiled at that one.

Christy replied to me as follows: ".....So I tend to interpret this `bon mot' of Lizzy's as nothing more than a clever play with words which basically espouse a well understood Christian tenet. "

And that led me to respond to her as follows:

So, who will call the newspapers, you or I? Because we disagree completely.... again! ;)

Christy: "Human nature often brings many to set themselves up as teachers of one thing or another -just like Mr. Bennet, Lizzy, Darcy, Wickham, Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins. Yet, very often, what they are actually teaching are their very worst habits and inclinations coming from pride, vanity, and prejudice."

Yes, that is very true, and those examples you gave are part of the evidence that Jane Austen was very much aware of those pitfalls. Indeed, that is precisely my point about Mr Bennet and Lizzy. He was a narcissist who got his naches (parental pride) from having his favorite daughter emulate him, which in his mind felt like a very positive reflection back on him. His love of her, in short, was 80% love of himself in disguise.

But, to get back to the Zen-like aphoristic paradox of Chapter 54, I claim (a) that Jane Austen, as an author and as a person, _did_ have her pride under good regulation, and (b) that JA was aware of the formidable difficulties that she faced, as a feminist novelist with didactic (as well as aesthetic) goals---she had read heavy handed moralizing tripe like Hannah More's _Coelebs_, and she understood perfectly that this sort of "veiled sermon" was not going to be helpful to the female audience she so desperately wished to inspire and awaken. Sermons rarely change attitudes and behavior.

So instead, she followed her own infallible dramatic and psychological instincts, and she devised a strategy to provide to her readers with a fictional simulation of real life--hence the intensely realistic feel of her novels, in which the characters really do feel like people we know intimately---in which her female readers would be presented with the same confusions and ambiguities that faced, and endangered, real women in real life in her world, and she would in this way _show_ (rather than _tell_) them how a woman can go wrong as a studier of character, especially when dealing with men. So, to take one example out of a hundred, when we first read Emma, she shows us how a narcissistic precocious young woman can misread romantic cues from men in a nearly infinite variety of ways. The didactic payoff comes when the first time reader, who has so identified with Emma that she has joined in all of Emma's expectations, experiences a deflation similar to Emma's and then reflects on this, perhaps, and realizes that this has happened to _her_ in real life sometime, and is not just part of a novel.

And since it was crucial to JA's didactic goals that her female readers should _reread_ JA's novels enough so as to eventually begin to register all the ambiguities, and to realize that there was more than one way to understand what they had read, she realized that she could kill many birds with one stone--by making her novels such satisfyingly intelligent, believable, _and_ romantic love stories, she would not only reap financial and prestige benefits, she would also assure that her readers would return to reread them again and again (take that out to 30 or 40 "agains" for many Janeites), and would also talk about them with their friends, and eventually some things _very_ worth knowing---about how to survive in a sexist world--would eventually dawn on many of those same female readers.

And the kind of learning that would occur by this indirect process would be a way of transcending the paradox of Lizzy's Zen-like paradox---you can teach....but only by not teaching! That is the sound of one story teaching (thank you Anthony Burgess!).

"And yes, there is some eastern thought existing within the pure essence of Christianity. Some theologians hypothesize that Christ spent some of his `missing' years in the east. And there are ancient teachings within Tibetan Buddhism and the Hindu religion where this idea seems to find a supportive place. "

And I had a feeling that would resonate with you, Christy, I really do believe that it was something Jane Austen herself became aware of, sometime during her all too short lifetime. It would only have deepened her personal form of Christianity, which, again, I understand to be one of dedication of one's self to providing comfort and guidance to those most in need of same.

And so I thank you, Christy, because it is by your probing and skeptical questioning of my claims that I am led to clarify my thoughts further and further, and I hope you derive some comparable value from our exchanges as well.

Cheers, ARNIE

Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen

2012-01-25T13:03:00.003-05:00

I have written on numerous previous occasions about Mary Wollstonecraft's huge influence on Jane Austen:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/11/jane-austen-was-haunted-by-ghost-of.html

(as only one example among many)

Today I have the pleasure of providing a link to a blog by a Wollstonecraft maven, Roberta Wedge, who has done me the honor of including a very generous appraisal of my Austenian heresies on her blog here:

http://avindicationoftherightsofmary.blogspot.com/

Read all five parts of her Austen-Wollstonecraft panorama, including mine (which is fourth).

And the Austen-Wollstonecraft connection takes on twice greater and richer significance when one sees how both Austen and Wollstonecraft were inspired by the pioneering feminist perspectives of Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay, as I have recently and extensively written:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/long-ps-to-jane-austens-letter-61-miss.html

(for starters)

Cheers, ARNIE

Jane Austen's Letter 63: Miss Murden as Miss Bates

2012-01-25T12:46:00.000-05:00

Responding to several of Diane Reynolds's interesting comments:

"The letters have yielded riches about JA's life and perceptions, at least on a superficial levels. As I have mentioned before, I have enjoyed this exercise more than I thought I would. My struggle is having more to say than will even fit in a long post. "

Amen, sister---I am frequently thinking of that jackass EM Forster referring to these letters as the whinnying of harpies--apparently he was far too dull and jealous an elf to grasp/acknowledge what a treasure these letters really are.

" In this letter, we will see a novelistic unfolding of the narrative about Miss Murden. "First impressions" can be wrong!"

Diane, I am so glad you brought Miss Murden forward for consideration, I just tracked her sporadic cameo appearances in JA's letters, from JA's cryptic ironic condolence with Miss M. "losses" in Letter 1 way back in 1796 (what that could mean, we'll never know for sure, but I suggested a year ago that JA's broadly ironic tone reminded me of JA's faux concern for Mrs. Knight's "accident") to Miss Murden's final cameo in Letter 82 in Feb. 1813. She seems very much of a Miss Bates marginalized, dependent, ageing, sad single woman, which is, I am sure why you took special notice of her.

Indeed, you are 100% correct, JA's insight into Miss Murden's character dramatically alters as she gets to know her, moving from this....

" Our evening party on Thursday produced nothing more remarkable than Miss Murden's coming too, though she had declined it absolutely in the morning, and sitting very ungracious and very silent with us from seven o'clock till half after eleven, for so late was it, owing to the chairmen, before we got rid of them."

to this....

"Miss Murden was quite a different creature this last evening from what she had been before, owing to her having with Martha's help found a situation in the morning, which bids very fair for comfort. When she leaves Steventon, she comes to board and lodge with Mrs. Hookey, the chemist-for there is no Mr. Hookey. I cannot say that I am in any hurry for the conclusion of her present visit, but I was truly glad to see her comfortable in mind and spirits; at her age, perhaps, one may be as friendless oneself, and in similar circumstances quite as captious."

If anyone was in doubt about JA's empathy for the Mrs. Smiths and Miss Bateses of her world (which to some extent included herself and CEA), the empathy JA demonstrates in that latter passage lays that doubt entirely to rest.

By the time we reach Letter 65 written three weeks after Letter 63, Miss Murden has made a couple of gifts to JA (first a basket, then a volume of sermons--little realizing that JA despised the sermons of her cousin Edward Cooper).

And then the following curious passage about Miss Murden later in Letter 65?:

"Miss Murden has been sitting with us this morng-as yet she seems very well pleased with her situation. The worst part of her being in Southampton will be the necessity of our walking with her now and then, for she talks so loud that one is quite ashamed, but our Dining hours are luckily very different, which we shall take all reasonable advantage of."

Apparently Miss Murden, like Miss Bates, talks too loud in public--but who is "one", I wonder? Who is "us"? I get the feeling that this is Mrs. Austen who "is quite ashamed" to be seen (or rather, heard) in public with Miss Murden. I don't believe this is JA feeling shame, as everything else she writes about Miss Murden demonstrates real empathy for the plight of this poor lonely woman. I think it's Mrs. Austen.

And then, in Letter 67 twelve days later still, this disturbing news about Miss Murden, and JA's sober assessment of the rapid sinking of Miss Murden's quality of life that must now ensue:

"Miss Murden is gone--called away by the critical state of Mrs. Pottinger, who has had another severe stroke, & is without Sense or Speech. Miss Murden wishes to return to Southampton if circumstances suit, but it must be very doubtful."

How fragile the brief window of a stable living arrangement (with access to intelligent and caring acquaintances like JA) was for a woman like Miss Murden in her precariously vulnerable circumstances. I don't understand who Mrs. Pottinger was to Miss Murden, such that the burden of caring for this desperately ill older woman fell upon poor Miss Murden.

And finally, in the two 1812 letters to Martha Lloyd which survive, JA writes empathetically but also candidly about Miss Murden, demonstrating that JA never allowed her heart to blind her eye to reality.

And finally, Diane, I also suspect that when you referred to "First Impressions", at least a piece of what was in your mind, Diane, was the parallelism between Miss Murden "sitting very ungracious and very silent" and Mr. Darcy, first at the Meryton Assembly...

"...his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud; to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend."

...and then again at Lucas Lodge:

"Mr. Darcy stood near them in silent indignation at such a mode of passing the evening, to the exclusion of all conversation...."

Thanks again for bringing Miss Murden forward for her well deserved day in the cyber-sun, 200 years later!

Cheers, ARNIE

The True Art of Letter Writing, Jane Austen-style, is Burlesque: A Noble "Profession"!

2012-01-25T12:04:00.001-05:00

Ellen Moody wrote the following about a passage in Jane Austen's Letter 29 dated January 3-5, 1801:

"I'll maintain Austen's letters are not superficial but are unsatisfying. They are wholly aimed at their recipient and speaking (as she said) out of the heart as the words came to her pen:
"I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter..."
Her heart was unsentimental."

I replied to Ellen as follows:

Ellen, you've once again read JA literally and unironically, and you've thereby entirely missed her wonderful absurdist wit in the above quoted passage in Letter 29.

First of all, JA is mocking the books of her era which counseled ladies as to the proper way to write letters---these were a form of conduct book, with a special focus on the conduct of writing letters suitable for a young proper lady to write. Here is a sample of the advice given in one such book, _The polite lady: or, A course of female education, in a series of letters_ By Polite Lady (1761):

"...it is as great a shame for a young lady not to be able to tell a story with ease and fluency, or to write an elegant and genteel letter, as not /to /know how to dance a minuet. Indeed, this elegance of taste and propriety of language will be best learned, by reading a collection of familiar epistles. But of this kind, I am sorry to say it, we have none in English, that are proper for the perusal of a young lady. The letters of Pope and Fitz-Osbourne, and Pliny's epistles translated by Melmoth, are, no doubt, excellent in their kind; but then, they are rather too learned and laboured for one of your sex and age. You may read them, however, with great safety, profit, and pleasure: they will, at least, improve your taste and language in general; though, perhaps, they will not teach you that easy, free, and familiar stile, which is peculiarly adapted for female epistolary writing."

If you think JA took such advice as anything other than a rich mine of nonsense suitable for extensive mockery, then I have a bridge I want to sell you for $10......These were not books written in order to encourage artistic, creative expression in words, to encourage written " performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. " No, these were precisely the kind of books with which Mr. Collins would have lined his library shelves, the kind that were designed to channel women's expression into safe, acceptable, unthreatening trivialities, the epistolary equivalent of the kind of empty "accomplishments" that Caroline Bingley touts.

So, then, is it not clear from this that JA is in full blown mockery mode as she writes the above quoted passage, mimicking the sententious, earnest tone of the Polite Lady giving this truly horrid advice?

And so it is no surprise that in the second part of that long sentence, properly construed from a topsy-turvy perspective to the typical reading, we see that JA has actually landed one of her patented satirical zingers. The encouragement to ladies to "express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth" is uncannily in synch with the Polite Lady's regret that young ladies were not smart enough to understand letters of _male_ genius such as Pope's or Pliny's. I.e., those young ladies ought to stick to subjects that just pop into your head--in the shallow, superficial, spontaneous way that Bingley boasts of writing his letters--and at all costs _don't_ get too learned or laboured. God forbid! Instead, aspire to "that easy, free, and familiar style, adapted for female epistolary writing."

Does anyone imagine that JA would have given such advice even a millisecond of serious consideration? Of course not!

And so she burlesques the Polite Lady, in exactly the same way JA burlesqued a hundred pious or trite (and, properly understood, suppressive) conventions or truisms in her Juvenilia, by making the Polite Lady's advice absurdly concrete, the way Lewis Carroll or Eugene Ionesco might. If the goal was to write as if one were speaking aloud, well, then, one must write very very very _fast_, taking the advice in an absurd way, so as not to be late for a very important date! ;)

Which, by the way, is _exactly_ the same sort of absurdist burlesque that I just wrote about within the past week, which JA deployed in her advice in Letter 63, for the stone deaf gentleman to read _Corinna_ --if Mr. Fitzhugh could not hear a cannon in the real world, at least he would be able to "hear" a cannon blast described in a novel! What delight Lewis Carroll would have derived from reading both of these passages in Letters 29 & 63!

So, this is yet another example of how it is that JA's letters could be so utterly misunderstood by so many for so long--so few Janeites seem to realize that JA was "on" pretty much all the time, ready at the drop of hat to insert a burlesque, an irony, a satire, and almost always _without_ explicitly saying that was what she was doing. Even though, she repeatedly hints at doing exactly this in all her writings, especially in the following two very famous passages:

"...I have had the pleasure of your acquaintance long enough to know that you find great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which in fact are not your own."

and

"Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat." Edmund again felt grave, and only replied, "It is a noble profession."

To understand Jane Austen's sense of humor, you have to realize that Edmund's apparently grave response to Mary was intended by JA to be understood by readers in synch with her wicked sense of humor as a pun on the double meaning of the word "profession".

That is the true art of "letter-writing" (in the broader sense of "letters" as literature, as in "a man of letters"), Jane-Austen style, and her satirical stance was, in both senses of the word, a "noble profession"!

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S. re Always Under Good Regulation? Not Always..

2012-01-23T10:22:00.001-05:00

I received an extremely interesting private comment about my response to Christy a short while ago under the above Subject Line....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/always-under-good-regulation-not-always.html

....in which I was asked why I changed Man ( humanity) to Woman when telling Christy that I disagreed with her about Jane Austen's pride in her own artistic career.

That excellent question prompts me to clarify myself as follows. The reason why I reframe pretty much all comments about Jane Austen as an author in terms of Jane Austen as a _feminist_ is that I believe these were two fundamental aspects of her identity which were inseparable, i.e., were two sides of the same coin.

I.e., I perceive in Jane Austen's writings, both her fiction and even more so in her letters, an unwavering and intensely proud unwillingness to submit to the tyranny of those members of her family who did not approve of her feminist message--those who wished she would not be such a sharp poker, such a keen and fearless observer of the hypocrisies of her world.

My private commenter then went on to point out to me that Christy's summary of Anglican theology was the traditional interpretation of part of the purpose of religion based on the belief in original sin, and that Christy didn't say that Austen tamely submitted to male authorities in her family.

And my reply is to post what has become my favorite Austen quotation, when Henry Tilney rants at Catherine Morland:

"...If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"

As I have argued in a dozen different ways, this passage is at the very core of Jane Austen's feminist, ironic critique of the domination and oppression of gentlewomen by gentlemen in the England she lived in. And the part that is relevant to my private commenter's excellent question is "....we are _Christians_..." I have repeatedly claimed that JA was by this reference including the Anglican church among the "villains" who all not only turned a blind eye to such oppression of women, but actually actively promoted that oppression, and indeed, attempted to give it the stamp of approval of God.

And so that the fact that Anglican theology purported to be gender-neutral, and to impose exactly the same moral constraints upon both male and female, was to beg the most important question! The devastating irony of the above passage is sexism _was_ an atrocity which was invisible to men, precisely because all the social and literary intercourse of the day was insisting it was so, so men could in all sincerity say "I am doing what God, the Church, the King, and the Chief Justice _all_ want me to do"!

That is why I find so deeply absurd the notion that JA endorsed and embraced such a benighted ideology, and that she struggled to quell her resistance to it, as a dutiful Christian daughter and sister should.

And so I thank my private commenter for prompting me to give this further explanation. As attuned to wordplay as I strive to me, I had missed the irony of "under good regulation", which is in the end what Christy and I disagree about so fundamentally--I do assert that JA never accepted the "good regulation" of her family, when it came to her speaking her mind about sexist injustice in the Austen family circle, and when it came to her speaking her mind through her novels about sexist injustice in the wider society.

Cheers, ARNIE

Always Under Good Regulation? Not Always....

2012-01-23T09:34:00.003-05:00

My recent posting about Jane Austen's yearnings for artistic immortality....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/letter-63-jane-austen-as-corinna.html

...triggered an interesting challenge from my friendly adversary in Austen interpretation, Christy Somer, in which she focused on my quotation of the following famous utterance by Mr. Darcy in Pride & Prejudice, and suggested that I was wrong to attribute Darcy's hubris to Jane Austen, personally:

"...where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation." [Ch 11 P&P]

Christy: "This moment occurs just in the beginning of the story. And both Darcy and Elizabeth are so full of themselves -in both pride and prejudice, that the irony just oozes out."

Christy, the key word in that sentence (for me, and, as I will now argue, for Jane Austen as well) is "always". I am so glad you've made this comment, because this point goes to the heart of Jane Austen's artistry, and I will try to explain why I see it that way.

In my opinion, where Darcy goes too far is not in the reasonable assertion that a gifted person's pride can be regulated, but in the Raskolnikov-like, hubristic assertion that a person of superior intellect cannot _ever_ be led astray by feelings of pride, because, somehow, by some miraculous capacity of the gifted human mind, such pride is _automatically_ regulated.

Jane Austen was an excellent and intensely pragmatic psychologist, and understood very well that Darcy's hubris was absurd and very dangerous. She knew better than anyone that pride was a feeling that was extremely difficult to regulate--but, I also am of the opinion that Jane Austen believed that if a highly gifted person such as herself was _aware_ of her own natural feelings of pride, and of their dangerous power, and exercised steady vigilance with respect to same over one's entire lifetime, then these feelings of pride _could_ be effectively regulated.

No good psychologist (or Buddhist] would suggest that the only way to regulate pride is to squash it into nothingness by a rigid puritanical, self-effacement. I recall reading something the Dalai Lama said about this very topic--to the effect that people had the false impression about him that he was such a rarefied being that he never felt any negative emotions, such as anger or pride. Quite to the contrary, he explained that Buddhism aspired to a healthy respect for one's own negative emotions, which were an inevitable part of being human, and therefore he had spent his lifetime working hard to minimize their negative impacts on his own life, and on those around him. I found that explanation compelling, and I assert that Jane Austen understood that fundamental principle very well.

Which is why I clarified my post (to which you were responding) by adding the following crucial caveat to Darcy's pronouncement:

"And I think that JA was a connoisseur of the very fine line that divided the weakness of vanity from the strength of well regulated pride, because she lived on that razor's edge herself."

Jane Austen recognized that with uniquely special gifts came uniquely special challenges, and one of the biggest challenges in her own life was learning how to regulate and channel her own astonishing gifts, and to apply them in the world for the benefit of herself, her loved ones, and the world at large. My speculation is that she recognized that she needed to strike a balance between, on the one hand, the pride and ambition that a great creative artist needs in order to be confident enough to send her creations out into the world, and, on the other hand, the awareness of the great risk that such pride and ambition would become poisonous and take over her mind entirely.

One of the many wonders of P&P is how well JA depicts these infinitely subtle inner processes of regulation of pride inside the mind of _Lizzy_. Lizzy repeatedly and _unwittingly_ gives the reader a constant flow of evidence that she does _not_ have any clue as to how to regulate her own pride, and JA also shows us how this came about in the first place. Lizzy's father, who is a hardened narcissist, has indulged _Lizzy's_ pride from a young age, and has nurtured it into a great vanity where Elizabeth believes herself superior to every one of her sisters, and of course to her mother, as well as to Charlotte, as well as to the true buffoons like Mr. Collins. And so, at age 21, Lizzy has never learned how to effectively regulate her pride in her _own_ superiority of mind.

Therefore, she (like Emma) remains extremely vulnerable both to intimidation _and_ to flattery throughout the entire novel. JA has written P&P so that one entirely plausible interpretation of it, is that Lizzy does not _ever_ learn to regulate her pride after absorbing Darcy's post-proposal letter. Instead, she can plausibly be read as instead veering all the way to the other side of the spectrum, and goes straight from unregulated vanity to abject submission without passing Go along the way. And, although she jokes about it, Lizzy never really does understand that a significant part of what motivates her to this complete flip of personality is that she has become mistress of Pemberley, which to her feels like collecting a _lot_ of "rent" in Monopoly! Her feelings of _gratitude_ are unregulated, and therefore are as dangerous as unregulated pride.

But let's return to Jane Austen herself. JA was the psychologist who could depict the infinitely subtle processes of regulation of pride (and other potentially distortive emotions) in the human mind as well as she did, especially in her depiction of unregulated narcissism---think not just Mr. Bennet, but also Sir Walter Elliot, Mr. Woodhouse, Sir Thomas Bertram (i.e., nearly all the heroines's fathers), as well as Mrs. Elton & Lady Catherine, etc.---was a person who clearly understood the importance of such regulation, and was not operating in a Darcy-like cocky self-assurance that anything she did was ok.

Your idea of a Jane Austen who humbly submitted herself to the will of the male authorities in her family is utterly alien to the one I read on every page of her fiction and of her letters.

You write:

"The stoical brand of Anglicanism she was born into, and lived with everyday, accepted that man needed religion to control and guide his earth-bound, naturally tainted inclinations. "

And I completely disagree, and claim that JA's Christianity was not about squelching the healthy pride and ambition of a gifted woman, but was instead about the burden of the gifted woman to use her gifts to better the lives of other women not so gifted---all the Miss Bateses and Mrs. Tilneys of her world.

You write:

"Imo, JA and her family, would see egregious folly in truly believing, living, speaking from such elevations of ‘self-realized’ and ‘individualized’ thinking -putting oneself beyond ones own family, and most everyone else. "

And I completely disagree with your mantra of JA as being only one part of a large family, rather than an intensely individual artist and personality, who would never allow herself to be submerged to the (mostly male) power in her family in the way you claim she was.

Rather, like Lizzy Bennet, she could truthfully say:

"There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me."

But _unlike_ Lizzy, JA found a way to avoid submission, but also not to ever allow this healthy and useful stubbornness to morph into a narcissism that could bear no reasonable regulation from her own conscience, heart, and intellect.

And, coming full circle to the clever veiled allusion to Corinna that prompted this thread, I claim that JA making clever allusive jokes about her desire for artistic immortality is part of that healthy approach to life that I see in Jane Austen. Her yearning for artistic immortality was entirely normal, entirely admirable, entirely useful, given the extraordinary gifts with which she was endowed, and which she so diligently cultivated in herself.

Cheers, ARNIE

Letter 63: "I recommend him to read Corinna"" (Margaret Kirkham was there first in 1982)

2012-01-21T16:50:00.004-05:00

In further followup to my two previous posts of the past day about Jane Austen's cryptic comment in Letter 63: "I recommended him to read _Corinna_", Google Books has now revealed to me that precedence on outside-the-box interpretations of that cryptic comment belongs to the brilliant pioneer of feminist analysis of Jane Austen's life and writings, Margaret Kirkham, way back in 1982, in her seminal _JA, Feminism and Fiction_, which I have often cited favorably in the past on a variety of points. I can do no better than to quote (with editing for length) the key points that Kirkham made in this regard on ppg. 166-69:

"We may, I think, be sure that, whatever this means, it does not mean that JA actually recommended the poor gentleman to read _Corinne_, for, even if her knowledge of finger-language were equal to such a recommendation, it is inconceivable that she should have teased the old man in such a way. The allusion was clearly designed to convey some sort of joke to her sister, and it is not too difficult to see what it was. In Book the fifteenth, chapter VII, Corinne, in Venice with her lover Lord Oswald Nevil, receives a premonition of her parting from him, and perhaps from this world altogether, when she hears a cannon fire thrice across the lagoon. A gondolier explains to her that the firing of the cannon signifies [those two events]. JA, we need not doubt, conveyed to Mr. Fitzhugh only such things as kindness and compassion, limited by the difficulty of communicating with him at all, made proper. To CEA, however, she allows herself to make a joke about _Corinne_, evidently knowing that her sister will connect Mr. Fitzhugh's inability to hear 'a cannon fired close to him' with a passage in Madame de Stael which it seems likely had provoked irreverent laughter in both sisters.

On this evidence alone, and there is no other, it is clear that the idea that JA admired Madame de Stael is baseless, and it is hard not to convict Henry Austen of a little sleight-of-hand in using his sister's refusal to meet her as confirmation of her retiring, feminine character... The unfounded belief that JA admired Madame de Stael (MdS), yet refused to meet her, has proved misleading in more ways than one. It helped to lend substance to the idea of Austen as exceptionally retiring; it obscured her active interest in an important literary conflict of her own time; and it made it more difficult to understand the estrangement of the mid century women novelists, particularly Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, from her work. To a generation which admired MdS and saw her as the predecessor of George Sand, JA's pointed avoidance of "genius", both in her presentation of herself as narrator and in her heroines, could not be sympathetic ...Henry Austen's 1833 treatment of his sister's declining to meet MdS, together with his unplaced, and therefore misleading, quotation of the "little bit of ivory" letter, can only have added to the alienation of the later English women novelists from the predecessor to whom, despite their coolness about her, they owed much...." END QUOTE

As I read Kirkham's analysis, I find myself agreeing with most of it, except....as I have previously written....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/04/jane-eyreairheireyerausten.html

(one post of mine among many about Charlotte Bronte's covert admiration of JA)

......I don't believe Charlotte Bronte was misled by Henry Austen, I assert that CB only pretended to buy into Henry's Bowdlerizing whitewash of his sister Jane and her writing. But that is only a peripheral quibble in relation to Kirkham's otherwise excellent analysis. In 1982, she was, along with Allison Sulloway, pretty much the only Austen scholar reading JA's letters and fictions from that perspective and with deep insight into JA's infinite allusiveness.

I also wonder what Kirkham would think about my claim that JA was in some ironic yet sincere way drawing a parallel between herself as a great English female artist in some sort of exile, and Corinna, with a special emphasis on JA's enormous ambition for the immortality of her writing, an ambition that, thankfully, has finally reached its full fruition in our modern era of Austenmania. I'd like to think Kirkham would be sympathetic to it.

So, if JA was, as I suggest, playing with the conceit of herself as a Corinna who yearned for artistic immortality, maybe it's time for the British Royals to fire three cannon shots in honor of JA's writing sometime soon--say, perhaps, on the 200th anniversary of the publication of P&P early next year--wouldn't that be a perfect occasion for it? And, to add a nice tip of the hat to JA's little joke in Letter 63, there ought to be an empty chair at the ceremony, with the name "Mr. Fitzhugh" written on it in prominent and bright neon colors, so that the kindly old gentleman's ghost will have a front row seat top watch (and listen to) the festivities!

Cheers, ARNIE

Letter 63: Jane Austen as Corinna

2012-01-21T13:21:00.002-05:00

In my previous post....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/letter-63-crowning-of-most-celebrated.html

...I posted about a curious passage in Letter 63....

"...our curiosity was gratified by the sight of their fellow-inmates, Mrs. Drew and Miss Hook, Mr. Wynne and Mr. Fitzhugh; the latter is brother to Mrs. Lance, and very much the gentleman. He has lived in that house more than twenty years, and, poor man! is so totally deaf that they say he could not hear a cannon, were it fired close to him; having no cannon at
hand to make the experiment, I took it for granted, and talked to him a little with my fingers, which was funny enough. I recommended him to read Corinna."

....as to which I suggested that Jane Austen combined a joke about a deaf gentleman of her acquaintance vis a vis cannons firing in Madame De Stael's novel _Corinna_ with a veiled speculation about the future of her own literary career:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/letter-63-crowning-of-most-celebrated.html

Today, in followup, I found two comments on _Corinna_ from contemporary English critical reviews, which bear pointedly on my claim that JA was, in this seemingly offhand, joking reference to cannons firing in _Corinna_, also engaging in veiled speculations about her own artistic future, looking ahead at age 33 in late 1808.

First this excerpt, from an 1820 essay in The British Review, which takes on special meaning when read in the light of Jane Austen's last poem.....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/07/when-once-we-are-buried-you-think-we.html

....written in the last days her life 8 1/2 years after she wrote Letter 63:

"In the Capitol, in her letters, on arms, on arts, on nothing, Corinna must harangue. She sports even with death itself, by bidding a poetical farewel to the citizens of Home assembled to behold their sun before it had entirely sunk in the west. And as she is introduced to us with drums beating and colours flying, so she marches off the stage when 'a dreadful wind began to howl through the houses, when the rain beat violently
against the window sashes, and thunder heard in the middle of January aggravated the unpleasant spectacle of bad weather, by a sentiment of horror.' Such is the day on which Corinna, accompanied by Lucilia, entered a crowded hall, TO SPOUT HER OWN VERSES ON HER OWN DEATH; or, what is more voluptuous yet, to hear them chaunted by a young damsel adorned with wreaths of flowers." END QUOTE

And second, this quote, from an 1807 essay in The Critical Review, which summarizes Corinna's deep secret, which is that although she seemed to be Italian, she actually was "an Englishwoman" who "was unable to endure the monotony of an English country life":

"It is after having ascended Mount Vesuvius with Oswald, and taken a near view of the torrents of burning lava, that Corinna puts into the hands of Lord Nelvil, the packet, in which she has written her history. Never was there a more fatal concurrence of circumstances. Corinna is an Englishwoman, and was unable to endure the monotony of an English country life. Corinna was intended from infancy for the wife of Oswald himself;
and the father of the latter, alarmed at the vivacity displayed at an early period in her tastes and ideas, had turned his thoughts to Lucilia, the younger sister of Corinna. Thus Oswald is wounded in his feelings both as an Englishman and as a son. He is hurt in what affects him most profoundly, in what is more deeply rooted in his breast than love itself."

And finally, I was curious to take a look at the verses that Corinna writes as she lies dying, to see if there might be anything in them that reminds me of JA's last poem. What I found as I read it was that even though Corinna's poem is extremely long and consists almost entirely (to my mind) of extremely overblown, melodramatic doggerel, with no trace of
irony or humor, it was striking to read the following stanza just before the end of Corinna's poem:

I dream of immortality!
No more of that which man can give;
Once in the future did I live,
The present seemed too old for me.
All I now ask of Him on high,
Is, that my heart may never die!
Father! the offering and the shrine
A mortal spurns; with grace divine,
Deign to receive, —'tis thine! — 'tis thine!

What was striking to me was the parallelism to the following passage in JA's last poem:

Oh Venta depraved
When once we are buried you think we are gone
But behold me immortal!
By vice you're enslaved
You have sinned and must suffer...

So, was JA remembering Corinna (and Mr. Fitzhugh's cannon-proof deafness) as she lay dying? I think so!

Cheers, ARNIE

Letter 63: The Crowning of the Most Celebrated Female in....England!

2012-01-21T12:22:00.002-05:00

Letter 63: "....Wednesday.-Yesterday must have been a day of sad remembrance at Gm. I am glad it is over. We spent Friday evening with our friends at the boarding-house, and our curiosity was gratified by the sight of their fellow-inmates, Mrs. Drew and Miss Hook, Mr. Wynne and Mr. Fitzhugh; the latter is brother to Mrs. Lance, and very much the gentleman. He has lived in that house more than twenty years, and, poor man! is so totally deaf that they say he could not hear a cannon, were
it fired close to him; having no cannon at hand to make the experiment, I took it for granted, and talked to him a little with my fingers, which was funny enough. I recommended him to read Corinna."

Four and a half years ago, I wrote the following in an email about the above passage in Jane Austen's Letter 63:

"...what if there is something in _Corinna_ that in some way has to do with cannons or deafness! That would mean that what has always been read as a recommendation of that novel by de Stael, was actually a sick joke about a deaf man!"

I eventually found the following confirmation of my hunch in one of the 1807 English translations of _Corinna_ that JA had clearly read by the time she was writing Letter 63:

Book 2, Chapter 1: "Oswald awoke in Rome. The dazzling sun of Italy met his first gaze, and his soul was penetrated with sensations of love and gratitude for that heaven, which seemed to smile on him in these glorious beams. He heard the bells of numerous churches ringing, discharges of CANNON from various distances, as if announcing some high solemnity. He enquired the cause, and was informed that the most celebrated female in Italy was about that morning to be crowned at the Capitol, — Corinne, the poet and improvisatrice, one of the loveliest
women of Rome. He asked some questions respecting this ceremony, hallowed by the names of Petrarch and of Tasso: every reply he received warmly excited his curiosity......At the foot of the steps leading to the Capitol the car stopped, and all her friends rushed to offer their hands: she took that of Prince Castel Forte, the nobleman most esteemed in Rome for his talents and character. Every one approved her choice.
She ascended to the Capitol, whose imposing majesty seemed graciously to welcome the light footsteps of woman. The instruments sounded with fresh vigour, the cannon shook the air, and the all-conquering Sibyl entered the palace prepared for her reception."

Book 15, Chapter 7: "Corinne, who was a believer in presentiments, and now made presages of every thing, said to Nevil, — " Is not the melancholy that I feel on entering this place a proof that some great misfortune will befall me here?" As she said this, she heard three reports of CANNON, from one of the isles of the Lagune — she started, and enquired the cause of a gondolier. — " It is a woman taking the veil," he said, /"/at one of those convents in the midst of the sea. The
custom here is, that the moment such vow is uttered, the female throws the flowers she wore during the ceremony behind her, as a sign of her resigning the world, and the firing you have just heard announces this event." Corinne shuddered. Oswald felt her hand grow cold in his, and saw a death-like pallor overspread her face. —" My life!" he cried, "why give this importance to so simple a chance ?" — " It is not simple," she replied. "I, too, have thrown the flowers of youth behind me." —/" /How!
'when I love thee more than ever? when my whole soul is thine ?"—" The thunders of war," she continued, "elsewhere devoted to victory or death, here celebrate the obscure sacrifice of a maiden — an innocent employment for the arms that shake the world with terror: — a solemn message from a resigned woman to those of her sisters who still contend with fate."

I just checked the Janeites archives, and I see that Christy Somer independently flashed on the same joke last year (on my birthday):

"Apparently, in Corinna there is a scene involving the firing of a cannon...So here again, JA is responding in that irreverently wicked and creatively-alluding humor -almost as if she was quite used to this type of `communication' to someone disabled -and as this gentleman was."

So if both Christy and I are in substantial agreement about an
interpretation, that is both surprising and supportive of the validity of same, as we so rarely agree on such things!

What I would add today is that this is precisely the subtle absurdist humor of the Juvenilia---if Mr. Fitzhugh is so stone deaf that he cannot even hear a cannon, then obviously the only hope for him to hear anything is to have him _read_ about the sound of loud cannons, and in his imagination, he will hear those cannon reports!

But, as is usually the case with JA, it's not just a joke. The cannon reports in these two passages in Corinna are not trivial details. In the first instance, the cannon discharges announce the crowning of the most celebrated female in Italy, in the latter case, the three cannon reports (like the Masonic repetitions of the three chords in The Magic Flute) are symbolic of a woman taking the veil at a convent.

I assert that it is not an accident that this little joke about Mr. Fitzhugh and his deafness is also Jane Austen thinking out loud, wondering whether the imminent relocation to Chawton Cottage is a harbinger of JA being on the verge of becoming the most celebrated female in _England_, or whether it will turn out instead to be her resignation from the world. In late 1808, JA really did not know how it would play out!

Two centuries later, we may safely say that the answer was (thankfully) the former rather than the latter! (and in our era of global Austenmania, I would not be surprised to learn that Jane Austen, in 2012, was among, say, the top 20 most celebrated females in _Italy_ as well!)

Cheers, ARNIE

Blurting out unseemly 'truths' then and now: From the Mouth of Babes

2012-01-19T19:11:00.000-05:00

Christy Somer in Austen L:

"I also do not have a problem with what I speculated and wrote of letter 29’s -Coulson Wallop: “He also seems to have been unfortunately afflicted as his older brother, John-Charles Wallop, 3rd Earl of Portsmouth. I can imagine Mr. Wallop provided many a 'wallop' of a private chuckle during the Austen sisters attendance to several of their 'Balls'. An individual afflicted by this kind of simple-mindedness might often blurt out unseemly 'truths' -for lack of any real impulse control. After all, 'in for it' is just another way of depicting a future of frequent 'laying ins'.” My source for this little conjectured moment regarding his ‘simple-mindedness’ was ‘Wikipedia’."

Well done on that factoid, Christy, it did not occur to me to check to see if Coulson Wallop had a Wikipedia entry (the reach of Wikipedia really has become staggering). I checked its footnote, and found that it is based on the following apparently reliable source:

http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/wallop-hon-coulson-1774-1807

Here is the Biography of Coulson Wallop provided there: "As soon as he was of age, Wallop was returned for Andover on his father’s interest. He was not present at his election and made no mark in the House. As expected of him, he supported Pitt’s administration, voting for the assessed taxes, 4 Jan. 1798. But like his eldest brother, who became 3rd Earl in 1797, he was fatally flawed: John King reported to Pitt, 5 Aug. 1800, that Wallop was "little better than an idiot, in addition to which he has spent all his money, and his mother does not think him a proper person to continue to represent [Andover]. At the same time she is anxious to obtain some provision for him (to the extent of about £400 per annum) and provided I can be the means of effecting this, I am to be considered as the family Member." King left this matter to Pitt’s determination and it appears that Pitt decided against, as Wallop remained in the House until the dissolution, when he was replaced by his brother Newton. Wallop proceeded to France in 1802 and became one of Buonaparte’s /détenus/. He died a captive at Verdun, 31 Aug. 1807.PRO, Dacres Adams mss 3/58; /Gent. Mag./ (1807), ii. 980. "

But Coulson Wallop did not live entirely for naught, thanks to Jane Austen! And I much prefer the spin that this factoid puts on our discussion of Coulson Wallop's famous bon mot, which is indicated by my revised Subject Line, and which leads to a remarkable conclusion which I will reach very shortly, if you read to the end of this post!

At first, it seems too good to be true, i.e., the irony that the only adult male in all of England during Jane Austen's lifetime who would openly tell it like it was, in terms of the dangers faced by pregnant Englishwomen, was a man who had the mind of a child. It seems as if it belongs instead in a fairy tale---as in Hans C. Andersen's story of the Emperor's New Clothes, in which only a child would blare out unseemly (and horrid) truths, because only a child is free from the rationalizations, societal pressures, moral cowardice, and hypocrisies that disable the vision and conscience of all the adults in the room.

Christy: "Also, I did not mean to intimate that Mr. Wallop was jesting specifically about Lady Bridges -more likely, this may have been a habit of his when the subject came up conversation. "

But then, as I was preparing to answer your above comment, Christy, I had a small epiphany, and suddenly realized that Wallop's comment _was_ too good to be true! I.e., I suddenly flashed on the fact that I had seen JA doing this before! I realized that JA, as she so often did in her letters, had deliberately ascribed to a person a statement which that person had not actually made, or if it had been made, it had not been made in the particular context JA was using!

Nearly two years ago, I wrote the following in precisely that same vein, without any conscious awareness of a connection to Coulson Wallop:

"What I have found repeatedly to be the case is that JA, in her letters, used her mother (or Martha Lloyd or some other close female acquaintance) as a kind of "straw woman" for put-on messages--here are two instances where JA used the phrase "My mother wants to know...." which I find quite suspicious:
P. 31: "My mother wants to know whether Edward has ever made the Hen House which they planned together"
P. 35: "Pray mention the name of Maria Montresor's Lover when you write next, my Mother wants to know it, & I have not courage to look back into your letters to find it out."
I am skeptical that JA's mother really wanted to know either or both of those facts, partly because they seem rather silly, but partly also because JA gave us all a clue to this sort of playful practice, when, in P&P, she put the following words into Darcy's mouth, describing her favorite heroine Elizabeth Bennet's delight in put-ons:
"....I have had the pleasure of your acquaintance long enough to know, that you find great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which in fact are not your own...."
What I am claiming is that JA herself found equal enjoyment in occasionally ATTRIBUTING to others opinions which in fact WERE her own!
So, back to the above passage in Letter 57, I see this reference to her mother's mourning clothes in exactly the same put-on light. I also start from the opinion I have sincerely held for some time, based on all the facts we know about the Austen family history, which is that after the 1805 death of Revd. Austen, the Austen women were condemned to live in a kind of limbo of totally inadequate housing--and the one person who was in the best position to take them from limbo to paradise was Edward Austen Knight-yet he failed to provide them with the keys to Chawton Cottage for FOUR LONG YEARS. " END QUOTE

Now I realize that even though Coulson Wallop perhaps was very fond of proclaiming, at the drop of a hat, that people around him were "in for it now", I now am virtually certain that he never uttered those words in referring to a pregnant woman--I believe that contextualization was _entirely_ JA's invention!

In other words, I now claim that JA, in writing Letter 35, was intentionally invoking the same old folk tale that Hans C. Andersen tapped into in his famous 1837 story, and was deliberately quoting Coulson Wallop _out_ of context of the usual prompts that led him to respond with his "trademark phrase", so as to say to CEA, in code, "Lady Bridges is in for _it_ (it being serious illness or death), as even a mentally challenged person like poor Coulson Wallop could tell you!"

It is in exactly the same spirit as my topsy-turvy, ironic reading of Henry Tilney's rant which reduces Catherine to tears, by asking her how it could be that the very best of English civilization--its courts, its government, its clergy, its devoted husbands--could tolerate horrid abuse of English wives. In Letter 35, JA is sketching the other side of that parodic coin---yes, all those respected institutions _could_ fail to spot a holocaust of abuse of English wives, but Coulson Wallop could see it all, and tell it like it was!

So Coulson Wallop came to JA's mind as she was writing Letter 35, as the perfect person to ascribe such a quotation to vis a vis poor Lady Bridges, for exactly the reasons I have just described.

And the tragic irony of JA's choice of Coulson Wallop as unwitting prophet of Lady Bridges's death in childbirth, is that both Coulson and Lady Bridges died in their thirties within a year of each other, each after 5-6 years of continuous "confinement"----Wallop by the French, and Lady Bridges by serial pregnancies! And JA lived to learn of both of their deaths in this way, before any of her novels, but especially Northanger Abbey, were published--which is one of many reasons why this theme was so important to her.

And there is also the further final chilling irony that at least a million women must have died or become seriously ill as a result of serial pregnancy and death in childbirth in Europe between 1600-1850, whereas during only ten months in 1916, close to a million young French and German soldiers died in Verdun, the very place where poor Coulson Wallop died in captivity over a century earlier. Both of them horrid holocausts of avoidable injury and death, one in slow motion, one in a rush.

So thanks again, Christy, however inadvertently, you've made my argument so much stronger and compelling than I initially made it myself! ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

Letter 62's Lady of Bath....is Letter 44's Aunt Leigh Perrot!

2012-01-19T13:07:00.002-05:00

Letter 62 curious passage:

"I have but one thing more to tell you. Mrs. Hill called on my Mother yesterday while we were gone to Chiswell-& in the course of the visit asked her whether she knew anything of a Clergyman's family of the name of Alford who had resided in our part of Hampshire.-Mrs. Hill had been applied to, as likely to give some information of them on account of their probable vicinity to Dr. Hill's Living-by a Lady, or for a Lady, who had known Mrs. & the two Miss Alfords in Bath, whither they had
removed it seems from Hampshire-& who now wishes to convey to the Miss Alfords some work, or trimming, which she has been doing for them-but the Mother & Daughters have left Bath, & the Lady cannot learn where they are gone to.-While my Mother gave us the account, the probability of its being ourselves, occurred to us, and it had previously struck herself ((Two lines cut out)) likely-& even indispensably to be us, is
that she mentioned Mr. Hammond as now having the Living or Curacy, which the Father had had.-I cannot think who our kind Lady can be-but I dare say we shall not like the work...."

To briefly recap, my central claim (as detailed by me over a series of posts during the past few days) is that this passage about the Lady in Bath is an elaborate, coded fable about the callous and hypocritical indifference of Aunt Leigh Perrot to the plight of the Austen women in the aftermath of the Exile from Steventon, and the concomitant and grotesque favoritism shown to James Austen. I claim that the snipping out was of verbiage that CEA thought too negative about Aunt Leigh Perrot to allow it to survive. By snipping out those two lines, CEA preserved only the subtler coded clues, and left the reference to Aunt Leigh Perrot sufficiently opaque that it would not be readily discernible, without reading all of JA's letters and noticing this oft repeated motif.

JEAL, of course, in his 1870 Memoir, continued this dubious "family tradition" of sucking up to a prospective donor by submerging negative comments by JA about Aunt Leigh Perrot at the time of Uncle Leigh Perrot's death.....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/01/news-that-really-made-jane-austen.html

[that is the first of several posts by me on this subject]

.....not surprising given that JEAL was the ultimate beneficiary of his great-aunt's favoritism, because his father, James Austen, predeceased Aunt LP.

And there's still more. Here is _another_ example of a passage (this one in Letter 44) in which JA mocks her Aunt Leigh Perrot's "generous" gift-giving:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/letter-44-highlights-unwelcome-mrs.html

Here is the crux of that earlier post by me a year ago, which I wrote without _any_ awareness at the time about the above passage in Letter 62:

Letter 44: “…on my head I wore my crape & flowers, but I do not think it looked particularly well.-My Aunt is in a great hurry to pay me for my Cap, but cannot find in her heart to give me good money. "If I have any intention of going to the Grand Sydney-Garden Breakfast, if there is any party I wish to join, Perrot will take out a ticket for me." Such an offer I shall of course decline; & all the service she will render me therefore, is to put it out of my power to go at all, whatever may occur
to make it desirable.- “

Here is the usual Austenian sarcasm reserved for another of her favorite familial hypocrites, Aunt Leigh Perrot—JA’s mocking quotation of her Aunt’s talking the talk when it comes to generosity, but not walking the walk in any way that really matters—Aunt Leigh Perrot was rather like Aunt Norris, wasn’t she? What I hear here is that it sticks in JA’s craw to accept _any_ of her (secretly) detested Aunt’s “generous” offers of
trivial gifts, even to the point of losing out on an event that JA might well wish to attend. The Aunt must have made a big show of fake generosity about trivial things, even while leaving the Austen women to twist slowly in the wind for nearly 4 years after the death of Revd. Austen. Oh, how JA must have hated that heartless debased piece of work who happened, alas, to be her Aunt!" END QUOTE FROM MY 2011 POST

The above analysis of that passage in Letter 44 fits perfectly with the above-quoted fable of the Lady of Bath in Letter 62. They are both strikingly similar in describing an action of purported generosity by a Lady to the Austen women, fake generosity which is declined by Jane Austen, because it is inadequate and because it is not sincere generosity.

Cheers, ARNIE

Letter 62: The Curious Case of the Miss Alfords....and Jane Austen's Trim Street Blues!

2012-01-18T16:20:00.002-05:00

Letter 62: "-I have but one thing more to tell you. Mrs. Hill called on my Mother yesterday while we were gone to Chiswell-& in the course of the visit asked her whether she knew anything of a Clergyman's family of the name of Alford who had resided in our part of Hampshire.-Mrs. Hill had been applied to, as likely to give some information of them on account of their probable vicinity to Dr. Hill's Living-by a Lady, or for a Lady, who had known Mrs. & the two Miss Alfords in Bath, whither they had removed it seems from Hampshire-& who now wishes to convey to the Miss Alfords some work, or trimming, which she has been doing for them-but the Mother & Daughters have left Bath, & the Lady cannot learn where they are gone to.-While my Mother gave us the account, the probability of its being ourselves, occurred to us, and it had previously struck herself ((Two lines cut out)) likely-& even indispensably to be us, is that she mentioned Mr. Hammond as now having the Living or Curacy, which the Father had had.-I cannot think who our kind Lady can be-but I dare say we shall not like the work...."

Christy Somer: "This closing portion of letter 62 has certainly brought some interesting responses -when lines have been cut from the letters, the 'gap' cannot help but usually create a little bit of mystery, or a place for conjecture."

I understand you wish to minimize the mystery, Christy, but what you wrote, above, is very misleading. As I detailed in my previous two posts, the excision of two lines is only one of _four_ suspicious aspects of this passage--for one short paragraph to contain four suspicious aspects is synergistic, I claim, because the odds that so much smoke should be swirling around the same short passage means that the degree of coincidence of four such points is exponentially more unlikely to occur randomly than each one individually.

Christy: "However, after reading the letter a few times -and the various postings on it, I also do not interpret this communication as a fictional mock-up involving her aunt Leigh-Perrot's 'relationship' with them."

It is not surprising, after a hundred examples scattered over 62 letters, that you and I both remain consistent in our opposite reactions to this sort of passage in JA's letters--you always deny what I always claim. ;)

Christy: "Yes, JA writes of 'trimming' work which was obviously done for them by this lady, and I see that the reality (and mention)of their having lived on Trim street is just too wonderful for our resident puzzle/pun enthusiast to leave-off; and so, must assign a tag to this 'mention' as being a Freudian-slip."

I would like to be clearer on this point, and also to add some more substance:

First, I only ascribed a Freudian slip to Ellen because she did not give the slightest sign in her detailed account of the above passage that she had noticed the pun on "Trim Street" in "trimming". If she did notice it, she has only to say so, and I will then _gladly_ retract my suggestion of her not being conscious of the wordplay. However, even given the connection of the above passage to Trim Street that she pointed out, and that I agree is there, it's important to also note that Ellen and I nonetheless interpret the passage very differently from each other.

And in all events, I was very clear before, and am happy to reiterate, that I give Ellen credit, regardless, for pointing out what I consider to be the important thematic connection between Trim Street and the above passage. I missed it, and, according to the kinds of things I look for in JA's letters, I should have found it. Why? Because, I should have found it six months ago, when we read Letter 29, which included therein the very passage about prospective living situations in Bath that included a negative reference to Trim Street, and which, I strongly suspect, Ellen had in mind when she wrote her comments about Letter 62 earlier today:

Letter 29, 1/3-5/01: “There are three parts of Bath which we have thought of as likely to have Houses in them.-Westgate Buildings, Charles Street, & some of the short streets leading from Laura Place or Pulteney St: Westgate Buildings, tho' quite in the lower part of the Town are not badly situated themselves; the street is broad, & has rather a good appearance. Charles Street however I think is preferable; the buildings are new, & it's nearness to Kingsmead fields would be a pleasant circumstance.-Perhaps you may remember, or perhaps you may forget that Charles Street leads from the Queen Square Chapel to the two Green park-Streets.-The Houses in the streets near Laura Place I should expect to be above our price.-Gay Street would be too high, except only the lower house on the left hand side as you ascend; towards that my Mother has no disinclination;-it used to be lower rented than any other house in the row, from some inferiority in the apartments. But above all other's, her wishes are at present fixed on the corner house in Chapel row, which opens into Prince's Street. Her knowledge of it however is confined only to the outside, & therefore she is equally uncertain of it's being really desirable as of its being to be had.-In the meantime she assures you that she will do everything in her power TO AVOID TRIM ST. altho' you have not expressed the fearful presentiment of it, which was rather expected.-We know that MRS. PERROT will want to get us into AXFORD Buildings, but we all unite in particular dislike of that part of the Town, & therefore hope to escape. Upon all these different situations, You and Edward may confer together, & your opinion of each will be expected with eagerness.”

If I had focused on the implications of that very negative assessment of Trim Street in Letter 29, I'd have searched the word "trim" in JA's other letters, knowing her penchant for coded wordplay, and such a word search would have brought me straight to the curious passage in Letter 62 that I brought to everyone's attention yesterday. And then I would _also_ have taken note of that last sentence, in which Aunt LP wished to relegate the Austens to _Axford_ (a name which is only one letter removed from _Alford_ !) Buildings, which, JA's comments make clear, was as undesirable a choice as Trim Street! So I now add that Leigh-Perrot Axford-Alford wordplay connection as a _fifth_ suspicious aspect of the Letter 62 passage! I.e., JA knew that CEA would see the name "Alford" and would have readily associated it with "Axford", and that would have made even clearer the covert pointing to Aunt Leigh Perrot.

But I did _not_ pick up on that passage six months ago, and so I am indebted to Ellen for having alerted me to pay attention to the word "trim"!

And now I will add a _sixth_ suspicious factor as well, which is based on the post I wrote less than a month ago about _another_ passage in that same Letter 29, and which I just realized:

"As you have by this time received my last letter, it is fit that I should begin another; & I begin with the hope, which is at present uppermost in my mind, that you often wore a white gown in the morning, at the time of all the gay party's being with you....".

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/12/cinderellas-presuming-to-wear-magical.html

In that earlier post, I made the argument that JA was saying to CEA, in code, that JA hoped that CEA, in wearing a "white gown", was treated with proper respect by the snobbish Godmersham set, and was not treated as a poor relation who should be content with second-rate status.

Now I see that JA's aversions to Trim Street and Axford Buildings are part and parcel of that _same_ sensitivity to upperclass snobbery (just think Emma Woodhouse vis a vis Miss Bates or even the Coles and Mr. Elton). And it comes as no surprise to me that when JA writes about "trimming" in two of her later letters (#87 and #98), she refers to it in direct relation to wearing _white_ gowns!

So this all pulls together the wordplay on the word "trim", as it pertains to higher or lower class status, _both_ in terms of residential neighbourhood (Trim Street) and also in terms of women's couture (trimming associated with white gowns). Whether it's the rich snobs of Godmersham, or the rich snob Aunt Leigh Perrot, it's always the same story--the Austen women being treated as second class citizens.

And so, in terms of the big picture, the connections of that passage in Letter 62 to the two passages in Letter 29 I just described make it even more certain that Aunt Leigh Perrot is indeed the unnamed mystery Lady of the passage in Letter 62!

Christy: "I still continue to see most of these 'puns' or 'connections' as naturally forming occurances which may carry varieties of meanings, and always existing within the flow of language and communication -not usually done in full consciousness, yet in hindsight, free-floating and speculatively synchronizing enough to find themselves as futeristic fodder for all manner of conjecture and theory. "

Yes, we are indeed polar opposites, Christy, but the difference between us is that you refer to my analysis as "conjecture and theory", as if your interpretations are not _also_ every bit as much conjecture and theory as mine! We are all theoreticians on this bus, and I claim that my theory fits the actual textual facts better than yours does!

Cheers, ARNIE

Letter 62: The Curious Case of the Miss Alfords

2012-01-17T21:59:00.001-05:00

The following, curious passage, which comes at the very end of Letter 62 , is not one that has _ever_ attracted any particular attention in print, at least as far as I can discern after diligent online searching. However, I think that at least some of you will agree that this passage has been unjustly ignored, as it is virtually unique in all of JA's letters, in a very curious and interesting way. Without further ado, here it is:

"I have but one thing more to tell you. Mrs. Hill called on my Mother yesterday while we were gone to Chiswell-& in the course of the visit asked her whether she knew anything of a Clergyman's family of the name of Alford who had resided in our part of Hampshire.-Mrs. Hill had been applied to, as likely to give some information of them on account of their probable vicinity to Dr. Hill's Living-by a Lady, or for a Lady, who had known Mrs. & the two Miss Alfords in Bath, whither they had removed it seems from Hampshire-& who now wishes to convey to the Miss Alfords some work, or trimming, which she has been doing for them-but the Mother & Daughters have left Bath, & the Lady cannot learn where they are gone to.-While my Mother gave us the account, the probability of its being ourselves, occurred to us, and it had previously struck herself ((Two lines cut out)) likely-& even indispensably to be us, is that she mentioned Mr. Hammond as now having the Living or Curacy, which the Father had had.-I cannot think who our kind Lady can be-but I dare say we shall not like the work....."

Le Faye's sole footnote for this passage reads as follows: "Mrs. Hill: Not Catherine Bigg, but the wife of Dr. Hill, Rector of Holy Rood, Southampton, and also of Church Oakley near Deane."

I find this passage curious for several reasons, but I begin with this one:

1. There is no Biographical Index entry for either of the two Miss Alfords from Hampshire. Now those of you who took my introductory comments seriously and actually read the above passage without skimming too fast, already know exactly _why_ there is no such entry--Le Faye does not attempt to explain who the Miss Alfords were, because JA already has, when she speculates that the "Miss Alfords" must actually be none other than the Miss _Austens_! The factoid which seals that deal is that Mrs. Hill "mentioned Mr. Hammond as now having the Living or Curacy, which the Father had had", and Le Faye's entry for "Mr. Hammond" confirms that the curacy he took over in 1806 was that of Deane, which of course was once the living that Revd. Austen had, and gave to James Austen.

The most important thing I've learned during the past year of this group read of JA's letters is that it's most definitely _not_ Le Faye's m.o. to include a sentence in her footnote to the effect of the following:

"It is very difficult to tell how much of the story JA tells about Mrs. Hill and Mr. Austen and the mysterious Lady in Bath is a true account, and how much, if not all, of it, has been fabricated by JA out of whole cloth (or trimming) in one of her satirical moods."

No, Le Faye does not want Janeites to start wondering about JA engaging in _implicit_ satire and fantasy of this kind in her letters, because this is a Pandora's Box Le Faye wishes to remain firmly closed in the minds of Janeites. Why? Because (to deploy another metaphor), it's a slippery slope which leads straight to the kind of wordplay I identified in Letter 61, in which JA referred to the "amiability" of a wife who died in childbirth after being continuously pregnant for the entire length of her married life, in relation to the "amiability" of that dead wife's younger sister, who has just entered into matrimony with that dead sister's brother. If readers have to be on constant irony alert, who know where it will end?

2. Now, here are several reasons why I suspect that JA's report to CEA about the mysterious Lady of Bath is not a straightforward report of an event which actually happened, but instead some sort of coded allegory about some actual, but very sensitive, subject, which JA did not wish to write about in a straightforward way (and which Le Faye did not wish to invite speculation about):

a. By the time JA was writing Letter 62, in December, 1808, the Austens had not lived in Bath for over three _years_. So, it would be absurd for the mysterious Lady to have suddenly realized in December 1808 that the "Miss Alfords" and their mother were no longer in Bath--that's the kind of absurd sequence of events we find in JA's juvenilia! The only way this can be a truthful report is if the Miss Austens and Mrs. Austen spent some extended time in Bath on a visit long _after_ Mr. Hammond assumed the curacy of Deane in 1806, and, realistically, no earlier than the Fall of 1808. And I am unaware of any such trip by the Austen women to Bath anytime in 1808. Quite to the contrary, in Letter 55, written by JA to CEA in June, 1808, JA writes "It will be two years tomorrow since we left Bath for Clifton, with what happy feelings of Escape!" Doesn't sound to me like an excursion to Bath occurred during the ensuing months thereafter.

b. For some reason, either CEA or Fanny Knight Knatchbull found something sufficiently unladylike (or worse) in JA's description of her mother's supposed speculations about the Alford-Austen naming error, that it warranted cutting out _two_ lines of text! My guess is that JA wrote something that was not entirely respectful to her mother and/or the Lady, or both!

c. Why in the world would Mrs. Hill conceal the identity of the Lady in the first place? Why create mystery in the minds of Mrs. Austen and JA? It makes no sense for a donor of a nice gift to operate in this cloak-and-dagger way. Again, only in the juvenilia do we read such crazy stuff.

d. And last but not least, JA supposedly has no clue as to who the Lady is, and yet she dares to say that she and CEA "shall not like the work".

A heap of absurdities, as Mr. Weston put it. And yet, those two deleted lines suggest that these are not light, trivial, good-natured absurdities, they must instead be disturbing in some way. Because CEA does not take out the scissors very often in these surviving letters, and she surely would not do so to conceal some trivial point. I have a hunch that somehow, some way, the mysterious Lady is code for Aunt Leigh Perrot, who of course lived in Bath, and as to whom the Austen women, especially Mrs. Austen, lived in a permanent state of suspense as to whether Aunt Leigh Perrot would ever make the Austen women's life easy by means of a substantial gift. Any verbal stink bomb tossed by JA in the direction of their imperious Aunt would be exactly the sort of snip-worthy passage that CEA gave the heigh-ho to.

And so, to me, what is _most_ absurd is that neither Le Faye nor any other biographer has ever seen fit to engage in even the elementary sort of analysis that I have set forth above. It's the same old same old, that "deep sixing by normalization" strategy that I've detected Le Faye engaging in whenever this sort of alarming passage pops up in JA's letters. Le Faye implicitly acknowledges that she read this passage carefully enough to register that the Miss Alfords were not strangers--she does not even bother to include an entry that says "mistaken surname for CEA and JA". Rather, Le Faye provides a footnote for Mrs. Hill, as if this were a humdrum bit of gossip.

And so, for the last 17 years, readers of her 3rd (and now her 4th) edition have breezed right by this passage without noticing it, and it makes you wonder, what is the point of someone editing the letters of a great person, if the editor is going to consistently engage in this sort of editorial decision-making, forcing readers to don their deerskin caps and figure out, on our own, what the heck is going on in a curious passage like the above?

Food for thought.

Cheers,
ARNIE

As Mr. Woodhouse might have said at the end of _Emma_, Emma is IN FOR IT NOW!

2012-01-13T16:26:00.001-05:00

As a quick followup to my post a few hours ago about Edward Bridges as a prospective Bluebeard….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/letter-61-edward-bridgesand-jas.html

…I would like to add a speculative followup, suggesting that Jane Austen remembered the Foote-Bridges pattern of marriage of multiple siblings between families in _Emma_. Here are the key elements of that allusion as I preliminarily imagine it:

ONE: Just as there were two Bridges brothers married to two Foote sisters, so too, there are two Knightley brothers (eventually) married to two Woodhouse sisters.

TWO: Just as the elder Bridges brother was the owner of the family country estate, Goodnestone, so too the elder brother George Knightley is the owner of the family country estate, Donwell Abbey.

THREE: In both the real life and fictional stories, the earlier of the two marriages results in a litter of young children during the first 6 years of marriage, all prior to the marriage of the other siblings taking place.

FOUR:Recalling that Jane Austen acidly predicts that Harriet Foote will be as “amiable” as her deceased elder sister Eleanor was, in her docile willingness to bear many children in a short time period, and also recalling JA’s repeated references to Harrriet Foote’s hypochondria, Isabella Knightley is referred to in the following passage which points to _both_ of those themes:

“Mrs. John Knightley was a pretty, elegant little woman, of gentle, quiet manners, and a disposition remarkably AMIABLE and affectionate; wrapt up in her family; a devoted wife, a doating mother, and so tenderly attached to her father and sister that, but for these higher ties, a warmer love might have seemed impossible. She could never see a fault in any of them. She was not a woman of strong understanding or any quickness; and with this resemblance of her father, she inherited also much of his constitution; was delicate in her own health, over-careful of that of her children*/, /*had many FEARS and many NERVES, and was as fond of her own Mr. Wingfield in town as her father could be of Mr. Perry.“

FIVE: In JA’s Letter 90 dated9/25/1813, we read: "…this morning we had Edwd Bridges unexpectedly to breakfast with us, in his way from Ramsgate where is his wife, to Lenham where is his Church…” Edward Bridges was the vicar of Lenham, and I think that this is one of the reasons why we read the reference to Langham in the following passage in _Emma_:

"True, true," cried Mr. Knightley, with most ready interposition—"very true. That's a consideration indeed.—But John, as to what I was telling you of my idea of moving the path to LANGHAM, of turning it more to the right that it may not cut through the home meadows, I cannot conceive any difficulty. I should not attempt it, if it were to be the means of inconvenience to the Highbury people, but if you call to mind exactly the present line of the path.... The only way of proving it, however, will be to turn to our maps. I shall see you at the Abbey to-morrow morning I hope, and then we will look them over, and you shall give me your opinion."

And of course the path that Mr. Knightley refers to is a “foot” (or Foote) path!

SIX: I am sure that the irony was not lost on JA, in writing that Foote Bridges passage in Letter 61, that Edward Bridges was a brother of Edward Austen Knight's wife, and therefore, had JA, and not Harriet Foote, married Edward Bridges, there’d have been a _different_ double sibling marital connection, but this one between the Austens and the Bridgeses, instead of the one that actually occurred between the Bridgeses and the Footes!

SEVEN Given that I claim that, in _Emma_, Jane Fairfax and John Knightley have had an affair, and that Isabella Knightley has become aware of same and is (not surprisingly) extremely jealous, it is interesting to transpose that shadowy matrix over into real life, and to speculate that Harriet Foote Bridges may well have been extremely jealous of her husband Edward Bridges, in particular jealous of his evident longstanding fondness for Jane Austen!

But, attuned to irony as JA was, even I don’t claim that she foresaw the totally serendipitous irony of Olivia Williams playing Jane Fairfax in Davies’s _Emma_, and then a decade later playing Jane Austen in _Miss Austen Regrets_!

EIGHT: Last but not least, my Subject Line derives from what I believe JA was leading her readers to imagine Emma _Knightley’s_ life would be like _after marrying Mr. Knightley. Given that Eleanor Foote was overwhelmed with serial pregnancies for the entire six year duration of her marriage to Brook Bridges, before she died at age 28, and given that JA, in Letter 61, fatalistically predicted that Harriet Foote’s being “amiable” once married to Edward Bridges was likely to earn for her the same outcome as sister Eleanor achieved, I believe JA modeled Emma Woodhouse in some ways on Harriet Foote (and what rich irony in the character of Emma Woodhouse being based in any way on a real life person named “Harriet”!). And so, when I speculate as to what Mr. Woodhouse’s reaction would have been after Emma married Knightley, I imagine that this great enemy of matrimony would have echoed Coulson Wallop and would have moaned piteously, saying something like “Poor Emma is IN FOR IT NOW!”

Cheers, ARNIE

R.I.P. Reginald Hill (author of "Poor Emma")

2012-01-13T15:06:00.000-05:00

An alert Janeite friend just brought to my attention the death of Reginald Hill:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/9014238/Reginald-Hill.html

The above linked obituary/article at the Telegraph failed to note that Reginald Hill, a lifelong ardent Janeite, had two other strong connections to Jane Austen beyond the following comment in the obituary:

"Sometimes Hill chose one writer or one oeuvre to use as a central organising element of a given novel, so that one book was a pastiche of Jane Austen, while another featured elements of classical Greek myth."

In addition to the above, he wrote a short Foreword to Susannah Fullerton's excellent little book Jane Austen And Crime, and he also wrote a "postquel" to _Emma_ , a short story that has been mentioned in previous discussions, entitled "Poor Emma", in which Hill shows real insight into the shadows of _Emma_ in his (not very positive, to put it mildly) portrayal of Mr. Knightley post-wedding to Emma.

However, from my perspective, beyond his grasp of the darker side of Mr. Knightley, Hill never really "got" what was going on in the shadows of _Emma_, which explains how he could write the following about _Emma_ in his Foreword to Fullerton's book:

"To suggest as some historians of the crime novel have done that _Emma_ belongs to their party without knowing it is a piece of special pleading I cannot subscribe to. But I would acknowledge that it does contain many of the elements of the classic Golden Age detective story..."

As successful and creative a crime story writer as Hill was, he apparently could not wrap his brain around the idea that Jane Austen had actually and intentionally written, in _Emma_ a better detective story than any written since 1816--better because the deepest mystery is _not_ debriefed at the end of the novel, but is left for the reader to first identify and then gradually discover the solution to---which is exactly what Agatha Christie understood when she wrote _her_ final Miss Marple novel, _Nemesis_, and her most difficult case, in which "Aunt Jane" Marple first has to figure out what the mystery before she can set about solving it!

Cheers, ARNIE

Letter 61: Edward Bridges...and JA's meditations on the banality of evil in the ordinary English marriage

2012-01-13T11:26:00.000-05:00

"Your news of Edw: Bridges was quite news, for I have had no letter from Wrotham. - I wish him happy with all my heart, & hope his choice may turn out according to his own expectations, & beyond those of his Family-And I dare say it will. Marriage is a great Improver-& in a similar situation Harriet may be as amiable as Eleanor.- ....This Match will certainly set John & Lucy going."---Jane Austen, in Letter 61

In my previous post earlier this week about the above passage under Subject Line "The Foote Bridges Low in JA's Estimation?", I wrote the following:

"What Le Faye does not conceal, but does not give emphasis to, however, was the grim side of this game of Foote-Bridges marital chairs---Sir Brook Bridges IV was a kind of "protege" of Samuel Morland (whom I mentioned the other day as the uber-source for General Tilney in Northanger Abbey), in that Sir Brook IV had that (sadly not so rare) distinction of being the conjugal Bluebeard for not one but _two_ wives during his marital career, via death in childbirth. You'd think that after the first one, a guy might think one "murdered" wife was enough for one man's lifetime. Whatever other negative things I might think about Edward Austen Knight, at least he made the decision not to take down a second wife in this fashion."

Yesterday, I realized something very significant about the above passage, i.e., not only that one of those wives whom Sir Brook Bridges IV "murdered" was Eleanor Foote (i.e., Harriet Foote's elder sister), but also that JA was punning like crazy about this very point, in what seem to be JA's positive endorsement of yet another marriage between a Bridges brother and a Foote sister, but is actually the sharpest satire imaginable, using wordplay on death in childbirth!

That's exactly why JA writes that she hopes Edward's "choice may turn out according to his own _expectations_" (wink, wink, as in "expectations" of multiple babies), and that "Marriage is a great _Improver_" (punning on "improvement" of an estate by adding a new section to the mansion, as a metaphor for the expansion of a woman's body due to pregnancy), and then "in a similar situation Harriet may be as _amiable_ as Eleanor"--sharpest irony of all, meaning that Harriet may go to her death in childbirth as "amiably", i.e., as docilely and passively, as her sister Eleanor did only 2 years earlier, like farm animals being led to their slaughter!

And the "coda" of this satirical little Bluebeardian fantasy is looking at the next "victim" patiently waiting her turn in line---Lucy Foote! And there is more than a whiff of sexual behavior in the idea of "setting John & Lucy going"--rather like a rancher putting a bull and a cow in a pen and leaving them some privacy!

And by the way, JA's worries for Harriet turned out to be for naught, because Le Faye advises us that Harriet Foote Bridges survived the gauntlet of bringing "great expectations" into the world for "sire" Edward Bridges, but as for Lucy Foote, we know from Letters 95 & 96 that Lucy was still unmarried 5 years after JA wrote Letter 61, in 1813, but beyond that date, I cannot find any info about her on the Net (so far). I hope she made it to a long lifespan as well.

And last night I recollected that I _had_ written _twice_ about Harriet Foote Bridges in the past, first back in 2008 in Janeites ......

"And Harriet Foote, [Edward Bridges's] Mary Musgrovian wife, had only two children with him (born between 1814 and 1818, so perhaps Edward Bridges and she did not spend a lot of intimate marital time between their marriage in 1809 and those late 1813 visits to JA at Godmersham). And despite all her hypochondria, she, unlike Mrs. Churchill, did not die unexpectedly, but lived to a ripe old age and died in 1864."

.....and then again in February 2011 (long after I discovered the death-in-childbirth theme in Northanger Abbey in early 2009) about Mrs. Bennet and Mary Musgrove in Janeites, in connection with Henry Tilney's famous rant that leaves Catherine Morland in tears:

"And JA was also pointing out that English laws _did_ connive at these atrocities, by stripping wives of all their property, by allowing husbands total control over their sex lives (unless, like Mrs. Bennet, Mary Musgrove, or Lady Bertram, they contrived to have a permanent "headache")..."

And when I recollected those two earlier points last night, I put them together, and I also realized that they were _both_ directly connected to the above passage in Letter 61! They all came together as follows. In writing about Harriet Foote Bridges's persistent hypochondria during her marriage to Edward Bridges (there are several excerpts scattered across JA's later letters, one of them referring to Harriet as a "poor Honey", strikingly reminiscent of calling niece Anna a "poor animal"!), and in painting the portraits of her two fictional wifely hypochondriacs, JA was hinting her suspicions that the real life Harriet Foote Bridges was being very clever indeed, by always complaining about her health, and thereby avoiding being serially pregnant.

And here's something very curious in that regard----despite Le Faye's naked statement in her Bio Index that Harriet and Edward had "many" children, she only listed two, and I can find only those same _two_ children listed in the genealogical sources available on the Internet-all of which suggests to me that unless Le Faye has other information about additional children born of that marriage, I believe that Harriet Foote Bridges was very successful in avoiding serial pregnancy!

And...perhaps Harriet Foote Bridges's persistent "headaches", involving frequent visits to health spas and the like, begin to account for Edward Bridges's persistent interest in Jane Austen during his marriage (a strong, romantic interest which is depicted in _Miss Austen Regrets_), because he was not finding a satisfying sexual outlet in his own marriage, because his "malingering" wife had found a better solution than separate beds to the problem that afflicted poor Mrs. Tilson!

But, perhaps some amongst you will now rebut, that is just one more example of me taking stuff out of context and spinning my own fantasy about JA's alleged feminist agenda against the holocaust of serial pregnancy and death in childbirth that afflicted English gentlewomen during her lifetime? I.e., where is the hard evidentiary context to support the notion that JA saw any of the Foote sisters as victims of serial pregnancy?

Well....... how about _this_ for some whopping strong context:

One of the most (in)famous statements by JA on the subject of the horrors of serial pregnancy and death in childbirth appears in Chapter 29, as I detailed nearly a year ago here:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/06/jane-austens-letter-29-so-lady-bridges.html

In that above linked blog post, I quoted the relevant passage in Letter 29, and then opined on it, as follows:

"So, Lady Bridges in the delicate language of Coulson Wallop is IN FOR IT! " Le Faye's footnote advises the reader that Lady Bridges was pregnant, but what you have to work to find out is that Lady Bridges was the new bride of (and, at 22, eleven years younger than) the eldest Bridges son, Brook-William, and she wound up bearing him 4 children before she really _was_ "in for it", and died after giving birth to a baby girl. But then, Brook-William was not fazed, he remarried within three years, and since his "blue beard" was perhaps by then tinged with more than a touch of "grey", it took him seven years to murder his second wife in childbirth, when it only took him five years to finish off the first Lady Bridges! So Jane Austen had this guy pegged a mile off. Add this vignette to the long list of Jane Austen's complaints about dutiful English wives being made serially pregnant by their proper English husbands until they either died or were overwhelmed with childcare." END QUOTE

Now, in case you haven't figured it out by now, that "Lady Bridges" who was "IN FOR IT" was none other than _Eleanor_ Foote Bridges! And how awful that JA was spot-on in her Cassandra-like prediction, because Eleanor Foote Bridges did in fact die in childbirth in 1806, i.e., when "IT" did her in!

So, by my unconventional methods, I have managed to provide a powerfully web of densely interwoven context for what JA wrote in Letter 61 in November 1808 in what JA wrote in Letter 29 in January 1801, nearly eight _years_ earlier!

And there's still more. You know how JA had such total command over her novels, that you can find very subtle connections between passages separated by dozens of chapters, which, until 20 years ago only a reader with a photographic memory could spot, but which today a reader armed with a search engine can find in seconds? I have found hundreds of those long-distance connections in the texts of all her novels. Well, now you should realize that JA viewed the collective corpus of all her letters as a kind of "seventh novel", and that "context" within that very long "novel" could stretch back decades!

And last but by no means least, I also have a powerful rebuttal to the suggestion that JA liked and admired Edward Bridges personally, and therefore JA would not have depicted him as a wife-murderer. Actually, I also believe that JA though Edward Bridges was a nice guy, but that does not in the slightest bit undermine my claims--in fact, when analyzed properly, it is an enormous validation of my claims! How?

That's where the anti-parody of Northanger Abbey comes in, in which we realize that Henry Tilney's ranting tongue-lashing of Catherine Morland is meant by JA to be read topsy-turvy, i.e., that the true horror of England during JA's lifetime was that it was so completely normal, so banal, that English gentlewomen wives were so routinely made serially pregnant, and many died in childbirth. And nobody, not the church, not the government, not the courts, and most of all, not the _husbands_, thought there was anything wrong with this picture! The evil of _ordinary_ English marriage, where the husband used "poison" taken from his own body to "murder" his wife, did not depend upon those husbands cruelly or intentionally wishing to harm his wife--since it was "normal", most husbands did it, most wives, like Stepford Wives, did not complain (despite many of them living in perpetual fear), and many of these husbands really _were_ "nice guys" who were cultured, kind in their daily interactions with the world, patriotic citizens, etc etc.

I have borrowed Hannah Arendt's famous phrase "the banality of evil" not to suggest that the Edward Bridgeses of JA's world were just like the Adolph Eichmanns who did Hitler's bidding, even though they knew better----but to point out that even a distant parallelism between the two is bad enough, when "nice guys" do bad things because in their world, nobody is saying that the emperor is naked, and that a horrible wrong is being done on a society-wide scale.

And I am certain that had JA lived long enough to have seen Northanger Abbey be published and become very popular, she would one day have dropped a bombshell and announced the "code" that would enable a nation of devoted female readers to understand its deeper meaning. And maybe, then, some future Eleanor Foote Bridges might have taken heed, and taken steps to prevent their joining the ranks of the dead Mrs. Tilneys.

Cheers, ARNIE

P.S.: One final sidebar about context in JA's writing. "There are six Bedchambers at Chawton" is the very _next_ sentence in JA's endless epistolary staccato of abrupt changes of subject--and that illustrates that even though JA abruptly changed the subject every few sentences in her letters, she often found a way to create a subliminal segue between two completely unrelated news tidbits--and in this case, the fact that Chawton would have six Bedchambers was JA's "lead" for her turn to that new subject, precisely because her previous news flash about Edward Bridges and his new bride Harriet was predicting that within a half dozen years, the Bridgeses would need six Bedchambers just to house the children born of their marriage! Call it "the hidden Segue"!

A Long P.S. to Jane Austen's Letter 61: "....Miss SAWBRIDGE is married...": The Hidden Feminist Bombshell

2012-01-11T15:14:00.002-05:00

I realized upon rereading what I wrote yesterday about my discovery of heretofore unrecognized personal connections between the great feminist historian Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay (later Graham) (1731-1791) [hereafter "CSM"] and both (i) the "Miss Sawbridge" whose recent marriage Jane Austen discussed in Letter 61, and also (ii) Jane Austen's family itself…..

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/letter-61-miss-sawbridge-is-married.html

....that in my desire to end an already-long post, I had been far too terse in describing those connections.

I will now remedy that over-terseness, with what turns out to be a good deal of clarifying amplification, which will, I believe, make it much clearer to you as to why I am so excited about the connections between CSM and JA that I sketched in my previous post.

THE CATHERINE SAWBRIDGE MACAULAY --- MISS STRAWBRIDGE CONNECTION

First, as to the relationship of CSM to Jane Austen's "Miss Sawbridge":

Yesterday I wrote: "The Miss Sawbridge in JA's letter from 1808 was CSM's niece (the daughter of CSM's eldest brother John), was in her early to mid thirties when she married Mr. Maxwell, and was an heiress of a good fortune. CSM grew up on her father’s estate in Kent that was practically a stone’s throw from Godmersham!"

I now amplify as follows:

First, for the verification that this was indeed the Miss Sawbridge who married Mr. Maxwell, as described in Letter 61, I give you the following citation from The Gentleman's Magazine, 1808:

"At Speen, the Rev.. P. Maxwell, to Miss Sawbridge, daughter of the late John S. esq. of Olantigh, in Kent."

And, for anyone who cares, some further checking told me that her husband's name was Peter Maxwell.

But what matters to me is that this Miss Sawbridge was Elizabeth-Ann Sawbridge, the third child (but the only daughter) of John Sawbridge, the eldest brother of CSM. John Sawbridge was in his heyday not only the squire of Olantigh, the estate located a stone' s throw from Godmersham, but also the Lord Mayor of London. He died in 1795. That means that JA's "Miss Sawbridge" was CSM's niece, and was born some time between 1770-1780 (making her a contemporary of JA). And, being the eldest daughter of an eldest son who owned a great estate, she really was an heiress, as JA’s Letter 61 jocularly notes.

She also was probably a teenager when her famous great-aunt CSM died, and it must therefore be the case that Miss Sawbridge, as a young girl, knew her aunt personally, at the least until 1778. But then, in 1778, CSM endured a huge scandal and notoriety due to her marrying a much younger man, Mr. Graham. Here is a brief summary of that scandal from an article about CSM by Devoney Looser (yes, by coincidence, the very same, strongly feminist Austen scholar/JASNA member/ author who just sent, in Austen L, that call for participants in her upcoming Austen seminar!):

"...What most injured Macaulay’s reputation, however, was her second marriage, at age 47 [in 1778], to William Graham, a 21-year-old surgeon’s mate whose famous brother, James Graham, had been her quack doctor. Before Macaulay was cruelly ridiculed for this May-December marriage, she had changed the landscape for women and history writing. Her reception was built upon her status as « the female historian »."

As I write, I am eagerly waiting to receive from the InterLibraryLoan service _the_ definitive bio of CSM, written some years back by Bridget Hill, with the wonderful subtitle _The Republican Virago_. I hope it will provide lots of details I have not yet seen on the Internet as to CSM's relationship with her Olantigh family (including Miss Sawbridge) during her last years (1778-1791).

Given what Looser described, as quoted above, it might occur to some of you reading along here that CSM's Olantigh family--a wealthy landowning "race", as JA might have called them--might have shunned her, in disapproval of her politics and/or her personal life.

Well, surprisingly, I have very good reason to hope that exactly the _opposite_ was actually the case. And as Exhibit A in support of that hope, read the following description [from the 1917 _Life of John Wilkes_, the famous political radical during JA’s youth] of CSM's brother, John Sawbridge (i.e., Miss Sawbridge's father), who was owner of Olantigh during that entire time period from 1778-1791 when CSM died:

“A group of new friends, more useful and zealous than any political associates of former years, had [by 1769] gathered around [Wilkes]. Some of them came to sup or dine with him in his luxurious cell at frequent intervals. John Home, the maccaroni parson with one eye, who had reserved the two best inns at Brentford in Wilkes's interest during the first Middlesex election at his own expense, continued to be one of the most strenuous supporters of the popular cause. In a lordly, patronising way Alderman William Beckford, the West India plutocrat, also allied himself with the combative little band, affording valuable assistance financially, and assisting in the battle in Parliament in his bluff, ostentatious style….”

So far so good as background, but now comes the part about John Sawbridge:

“… A person of rather more culture and refinement, though inordinately ugly and an alderman too, John Sawbridge by name, was at this period perhaps the most enthusiastic among Wilkes's lieutenants. Sprung from an old county family living at Olantighe in Kent, he was supposed to have learnt his political philosophy from his sister, Mrs. Catherine Macaulay, who was the authoress of an imaginative work in praise of republican principles under the title of a History of England. Rich, honest, and indefatigable, he was a most valuable ally, though Wilkes, finding him much less pliable than he had hoped, soon came to the conclusion that he had "more mulishness than understanding."

So, the owner of Olantigh from 1778-1791 was a prominent political radical who had apparently learned his radicalism from his famous and controversial precocious younger sister, CSM! He was therefore probably the _last_ person in the world who would have cut off ties with his sister when she horrified the entire sexist, patriarchal power structure of England by her“scandalous” choice to live out her post-menopausal life as what we today call a “cougar”-and this in a society where men twice or even three times the age of their young wives were not questioned (by men) in the slightest.

And, by the way, doesn’t that ring a bell to what I wrote just the other day, about JA’s Letter 60, when JA casts a skeptical eye on the marriage of the much older Revd. Herbert Hill to her old friend Catherine Bigg? But just think of the vivid contrast between that situation, where a young woman (also a thirtyish never married spinser) marries a much older man for “prudential” reasons, and thereby submits herself to be turned into a breeding cow for a decade, versus CSM’s marriage to a much younger man, which was apparently a match of intellectual soul mates (from what I have read), without any “colonization” of the body of one for the benefit of the other!

_That’s_ why I even go so far as to hold out hope to find out that CSM _was_ a frequent and welcome visitor to Olantigh (located very close to Godmersham, as I stated yesterday) during all those years, and therefore would have known her niece Miss Sawbridge very well indeed!

Now, hold that last thought, while you allow your mind to roam for a moment to 1808, seventeen years after the death of CSM, when JA is writing Letter 61, and ask yourself whether you think JA knew that Miss Sawbridge was the niece of CSM, and what’s more, ask yourself whether JA ever took the opportunity to chat with Miss Sawbridge about her famous aunt during JA’s visit to Godmersham only four _months_ previously!

Of course you know my answer is “Yes!” And, in support of that answer, I not only cite everything I have just written, above, which by itself would, I think, support my claim. But fortunately for me, that brings me to part _two_ of this long p.s., where I will make the case that there was even _more_ reason to think that JA was very familiar with CSM!:

THE CATHERINE SAWBRIDGE MACAULAY --- AUSTEN FAMILY CONNECTION

As to the relationship between CSM's Olantigh family and the Austen family, here is what I wrote yesterday:

"CSM's paternal uncle Jacob Sawbridge (younger brother of her father, who was the eldest son) married Thomas Knight's sister (who was therefore a quasi-great aunt of Edward Austen!), and THEIR offspring included a daughter who married Mr. Heron at Chilham Castle, which JA described visiting in her letters. "

I just sketched a little family tree to help me better visualize the relationships, and it helped me to see how I could explain that connection more clearly, in a few steps:

First, many Janeite knows that Edward Austen was adopted (practically if not legally) by Thomas Knight, owner of Godmersham, and his wife, Catherine (nee Knatchbull), when Edward was 16, in 1783, although that was the culmination of a gradual process that had actually begun a few years earlier.

Second, some Janeites know that Thomas Knight (who died in 1794, leaving Mrs. Knight to survive as his widow for another two decades) was the son and sole residuary heir of Thomas Knight (who had been born Broadnax and took on the names May and then Knight, at each stage of his inheriting more property). Le Faye refers to the elder Thomas Knight as TBMK in her Chronology, because the names can be so damned confusing, as between the father, with his multiple name changes, and his son.

Now, how this relates to CSM is that it was the sister of that _elder_ Thomas Knight (TBMK), Anne Broadnax, who married Jacob Sawbridge, who was the younger brother of CSM's father John, and therefore was CSM's uncle!

What this means on the ground is that there must have been an extremely close and ongoing (on a multigenerational time frame) social and familial relationship between the Sawbridges of Olantigh, on the one hand, and the Knights of Godmersham, on the other:

First, the elder Thomas Knight (TBMK) (who died in 1780);

Second, the younger Thomas Knight (who died in 1794);

Third, with Mrs. Knight during the remainder of her tenure at Godmersham; and then

Fourth and last but not least, with Edward Austen Knight from the late 1790's when he became the squire of Godmersham, onward through well beyond JA's death in 1817.

And so, it makes perfect sense that JA would be writing to CEA in 1808 about the marriage of Miss Sawbridge, because both JA and CEA must have known the Sawbridge family very well indeed, for upwards of 20 years! These were not remote acquaintances, these Sawbridges of Olantigh were _family_ to the Austens via Edward's adoption by the Knights!

All of which bolsters my firm belief that JA's 1791 History of England (which, as Upfal has demonstrated, is saturated with a covert Austen family subtext) also owed a great deal of inspiration to CSM's very famous and much earlier History of England.

THE FEMINIST BOMBSHELL

And it is those two pillars of evidence upon which I rest my claim to have discovered a bombshell, which is that all of this evidence strongly suggests that JA was personally connected, in several different ways I am still discerning and clarifying, to _THE_ greatest most famous and influential feminist of her lifetime, the "mother", if you will, of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, among others!

I find myself imagining the steady social intercourse between the Sawbridges and the Knights, but perhaps some of you are wondering whether the Knights approved of their radical neighbors?

Well, I can’t as yet give a great deal of evidence in that regard, but there is one tidbit which I find very intriguing, indicating good relations between the two intermarried families:

Look here at a summary I found last night of the Last Will and Testament of Thomas Brodnax-May-Knight (yes, that same TBMK I described in Part One, above, i.e., the elder Thomas Knight, he of the ever changing surname):

“November 8, 1779 Monday Godmersham: Mr Thomas Brodnax-May-Knight makes his Will: refers to two previous ... Some legacy to his friend Catherine, wife of Thomas [indecipherable]; £100 to his nephew James Sawbridge; £100 to Revd John Hinton, rector of chawton; L500 to john knight hinton, son of revd john hinton and godson of tbmk; all remainder to son thomas knight.”

So, it can hardly be the case that there was a total estrangement in 1779 (a year after CSM married Mr. Graham) between the elder Mr. Knight and his sister’s brother in law, John Sawbridge, if he was leaving a bequest to James Sawbridge, who was a nephew by blood to both John Sawbridge and CSM, and a nephew by marriage to the elder Thomas Knight.

But, even more important than that, in terms of modern Austen studies, I wonder if you can guess _where_ I found the above description of the elder Thomas Knight’s Will?

It was in _LeFaye_’s Chronology (at P. 76), published only a few years ago! Why does that matter? Because, if you think about it for a second, you quickly realize that Deirdre Le Faye could not have written the above entry in her Chronology without being thereby made aware, if she was not aware previously, that the nephew of the elder Thomas Knight went by the surname “Sawbridge”! And so, isn’t it strange that when Le Faye was working on the 4th edition of the JA Letters, not very long after completing her mammoth Chronology, she made absolutely no change to her speculation in the 3rd edition that “Miss Sawbridge” and “Mr Maxwell” were two people utterly unconnected to any of the Sawbridges of Olantigh near Godmersham?

It strains _my_ credulity to try to imagine that Le Faye missed that one, how about you? In light of all the implications of what I have set forth above, suggesting a powerful connection between Jane Austen and the most radical feminist of her youth, is it not at least possible that Le Faye has known about this connection, and at least some of those implications, for at least a few years, but possibly for a much longer time, but nonetheless chose to perpetuate, in that 4th edition, clearly incorrect speculations about the identity of both “Miss Sawbridge” and “Mr. Maxwell”?

Again, whichever is the case, it ain’t good, in terms of the reliability of Le Faye’s information and inferences about Jane Austen’s life and works.

In any event, my gut tells me that CSM, during those last years of her life, very well might have mingled with the Knights of Godmersham, and therefore might have met Edward Austen subsequent to his adoption by the Knights (see below) but prior to his going on the Grand Tour, and (oh, Holy Grail!) might even have crossed paths with the precocious teenaged Jane Austen! If CSM did come to Olantigh during the late 1780's, it is not far fetched at all to imagine that JA, at age 14-15 already the author of some very accomplished feministically wild juvenilia, and a voracious reader, would have known exactly who CSM was, and would have wished to meet her. JA might have been of the party along with her parents and elder brothers during one or more family visits to Kent during the late 1780's, visits that surely would have included seeing Edward's adoptive parents, the Knights, and members of their social circle, such as the Sawbridges.

Anyway, one way or another, whether that meeting ever did happen or not, I am nonetheless certain that JA was familiar with CSM's History of England and also her very famous Letters on Education, prior to JA's writing her own History of England in 1791, which (I don't believe coincidentally) was very very very soon after CSM died.

ALLUSIONS TO CATHERINE SAWBRIDGE MACAULAY IN JA’S WRITINGS

In addition to the allusion to CSM’s History of England in JA’s own History of England, which I very briefly pointed to in my previous post, I now also begin to wonder whether Lady _Catherine_ de Bourgh owes her only good qualities to the real life _Catherine_ Sawbridge Macaulay Graham, in particular when Lady C opines:

""Your father's estate is entailed on Mr. Collins, I think. For your sake," turning to Charlotte, "I am glad of it; but otherwise I see no occasion for entailing estates from the female line. It was not thought necessary in Sir Lewis de Bourgh's family."

And finally, apropos CSM having married the much younger Mr. Graham, I have to wonder about the following interjection by Emma when things start to get tense between Mr. Woodhouse and John _Knight_ley:

"I did not thoroughly understand what you were telling your brother," cried Emma, "about your friend Mr. _Graham's_ intending to have a bailiff from Scotland, to look after his new estate. What will it answer? Will not the old prejudice be too strong?"

As I wrote the other day, this does appear on the surface to pertain to English prejudice against the Scots. But might it also refer to a much more ancient and much stronger prejudice, i.e., male sexist prejudice against women?

All food for thought!

Cheers, ARNIE

Letter 61: Stoneleigh Abbey Ruminations

2012-01-10T13:52:00.005-05:00

In Letter 61, JA writes the following in relation to Stoneleigh Abbey:

"Yes, the Stoneleigh business is concluded, but it was not till yesterday that my Mother was regularly informed of it, tho' the news had reached us on Monday Eveng* by way of Steventon. My Aunt says as little as may be on the subject by way of information, & nothing at all by way of satisfaction. She reflects on Mr. T. Leigh's dilatoriness, & looks about with great diligence & success for Inconvenience & Evil-among which she ingeniously places the danger of her new Housemaids catching cold on the outside of the Coach, when she goes down to Bath-for a carriage makes her sick.-John Binns has been offered their place, but declines it-as she supposes, because he will not wear a Livery.-Whatever be the cause, I like the effect.-In spite of all my Mother's long and intimate knowledge of the Writer, she was not up to the expectation of such a Letter as this; the discontentedness of it shocked & surprised
her-but I see nothing in it out of Nature-tho' a sad nature. She does not forget to wish for Chambers, you may be sure.-No particulars are given, not a word of arrears mentioned-tho' in her letter to James they were in a general way spoken of. The amount of them is a matter of conjecture, & to my Mother a most interesting one; she cannot fix any time for their beginning, with any satisfaction to herself, but Mrs. Leigh's death-& Henry's two Thousand pounds neither agrees with that period nor any other.-I did not like to own, our previous information of
what was intended last July-& have therefore only said that if we could see Henry we might hear many particulars, as I had understood that some confidential conversation had passed between him & Mr. T. L. at Stoneleigh." END QUOTE

I would imagine that the financial aspects of that passage would be Greek to most Janeites reading it, so let me assist in orienting you.

Previously, I've written about Stoneleigh Abbey as follows:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/09/sotherton-other-stoneleigh-abbey.h\tml

[JA's veiled representation of Stoneleigh Abbey as Sotherton in MP]

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/09/ps-re-delaford-as-representation-o\f.html

[JA's veiled representation of Stoneleigh Abbey as Delaford in S&S]

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/12/two-disinheritances-of-jane-austen\.html

[My demystification of the actual and the would-have-been disinheritances of the Austen women vis a vis Stoneleigh Abbey]

With all of that as background (and by the way you will find absolutely no assistance whatsoever in any of Le Faye's indices or footnotes to help you figure out what that was all about), the above passage in Letter 61 becomes intelligible in terms of Austen family _economics_ (at least, I _think_ I understand what is being described obliquely) and even more interesting in terms of Austen family _psychodynamics_.

Apparently Aunt Leigh-Perrot (her husband, Uncle James Leigh-Perrot, is not mentioned at all--apparently Mrs. Austen has received a letter from her sister in law) is playing it very close to the vest, i.e., has not disclosed to the ultra-curious Mrs. Austen any details of the final financial settlements between Uncle Leigh Perrot (who, per the third of my above linked posts, had previously agreed to take a lump sum of 20,000 pounds in exchange for his waiver of all his rights against Stoneleigh Abbey itself). The discussion of "arrears", I am guessing, relates to the question of how much was owed to Uncle Leigh Perrot as _interest_ which had accrued on his 20,000 pounds since 1806 upon the death of Mary Leigh. Apparently Henry Austen, the Austen with the most financial knowledge, apparently, has guessed 2,000 pounds, which sounds
right to me, as it would be about 5% per annum for a period of 2 years, on a principal amount of 20,000 pounds.

I gather that Mrs. Austen's extreme curiosity, and the guesswork by Henry, is motivated by the belief that at some point after Uncle Leigh Perrot received his 20,000, plus 2,000 +-, then there was hoped to follow some healthy "trickle down" of at least some of that new infusion of wealth from the childless Leigh-Perrots in the general direction of the Austens. Certainly Mrs. Austen takes a very lively interest in that subject, and it is in _that_ context that we get the above litany of Aunt Leigh Perrot's Aunt-Norris-like phantom complaints about housemaids catching cold on the outside of a coach, a male servant not wanting to wear a livery, etc. That's what is so frustrating to Mrs. Austen, and which gives no information and less satisfaction, as JA drolly puts it.
Mrs. Austen wants to know pounds and shillings, and dates, and instead all she gets in the letter is a bunch of b.s. about housemaids and servants--sorta like Dogberry giving his "reports" to Leonato in which he talks about everything else _except_ to the point of interest.

JA, ever the "studier of human nature", is, however, not surprised. She describes Aunt Leigh-Perrot with the same sort of scientific clinically detached lingo that Darwin deployed in describing minute differences in traits in Galapagos finches, but with characteristic Austenian irony mixed in:

"Whatever be the cause, I like the effect"--meaning, I gather, that JA, like Mr. Bennet, enjoys the droll entertainment unwittingly provided by Aunt Leigh's selfish stupid complaints. If Rome is going to burn, JA is going to enjoy watching the flames.

"...the discontentedness of it shock & surprised [Mrs. Austen]--but I see nothing in it out of Nature--tho a sad nature. She does not forget to wish for Chambers..."---meaning that, unlike Mrs. Austen, who , JA (beside whom Joyce was as innocent as grass, as Auden told us) had no illusions about her Aunt's true character, this idiotic, frustrating performance by her Aunt is entirely _in_ character.

All of which--from JA's fictional representations of Stoneleigh Abbey, to JA's representations of Aunt Leigh Perrot in JA's novels (Mrs. Norris, Lady Catherine, Mrs. Churchill)--gives the lie, for the thousandth time, to HTA's and JEAL's assertions that JA did not write about real life people in her novels. The reality was actually the reverse, i.e., the more one knows JA's biographical details, the harder it becomes to find any character in her novels who is _not_ a representation of at least one real life person!

Cheers, ARNIE

Letter 61: "...Miss Sawbridge is Married...": The Hidden Bombshell

2012-01-10T13:38:00.004-05:00

In Letter 61, Jane Austen wrote the following:

"Before I can tell you of it, you will have heard that Miss Sawbridge is married. It took place I beleive on Thursday, Mrs. Fowle has for some time been in the secret, but the Neighbourhood in general were quite unsuspicious. Mr. Maxwell was tutor to the young Gregorys-consequently they must be one of the happiest Couples in the World, & either of them worthy of Envy-for she must be excessively in love, and he mounts from
nothing, to a comfortable Home.-Martha has heard him very highly spoken of.-They continue for the present at Speen Hill."

Le Faye's footnote to that passage pertains only to JA's deleting the word "probably" which she initially wrote after "he mounts from" and before "nothing", and her Biographical Index entries for Miss Sawbridge and Mr. Maxwell read as follows:

"Miss Sawbridge: Perhaps Elizabeth-Jane, sister of Revd. Henry Sawbridge, rector of Welford near Welbury, Berks."

"Mr. Maxwell: Perhaps James Maxwell, of Lewes, Sussex, who entered Trinity College, Cambridge, 1804 aged 18; ordained 1811 and went to a Norfolk living."

I would imagine that a small but significant percentage of all the Janeites who've ever actually read the above passage in Letter 61 have been prompted by curiosity (piqued by JA's characteristic ironic, cynical speculations about the relative importance of money and love in courtship) to read Le Faye's footnote and Biographical Index entries. But I'd also imagine that those readers were disappointed by the absence of interesting information, and then returned to Letter 61 with a sigh, in search of other avenues of insight into Jane Austen's life.

I also cannot find any evidence of any Austen scholar besides Le Faye who has even commented on the above passage, beyond Halperin's brief mention in the same vein as my above parenthetical. Based on the dry data provided by Le Faye, above (actually, _speculation_ as Le Faye’s “perhapses” admit she doesn’t know who these people really were), perhaps it is not surprising that this passage has never been examined more
closely.

But..those of you who know my M.O. have by now suspected that I had some special reason to focus on this passage--and your suspicions were entirely correct, because, as I will lay out for you, below, I claim this is actually an extraordinarily interesting passage for Austen scholars, in ways that could not be imagined from the face of the above passage or from Le Faye's speculations thereon.

I found what I found Because I am someone who picks up on surnames and wonders about possible connections, and am also someone who is never stopped or discouraged from checking on a speculated connection by a thought such as "Le Faye must have checked that already, I don't need to".

If my posts during the past year about these letters have any common denominator, it is that Le Faye either has not checked, or has checked but has chosen not to reveal the whole truth about, a _hundred_ different possible connections raised in JA's letters!

And this one might just be the _most_ significant one of them all.

Before I go further, if you want to play Sherlock Holmes yourself, stop before reading the following link, reread what I've written, above, and see if you can spot what I spotted, and see if it leads you where I was led.

For everybody else, though, just scroll down.....

....keep scrolling.....

.....keep scrolling.....

...and now, read this:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/12/quick-answers-to-my-post-christmas-quiz.html

Surely you now see what I am driving at. Although I did not mention the above-quoted passage in Letter 61 in my answers to my Quiz, it does not require a degree in puzzleology to take note that Catherine Macaulay's maiden name was Sawbridge, which just happens to be the maiden name of Jane Austen's "Miss Sawbridge" who married Mr. Maxwell. And _YES_, to answer the obvious next question, I did check into this possible
connection on my own, and I quickly found out that these two ladies _were_ closely related! And what's more, as I will outline, below, I also found out that the Sawbridge family actually was very closely connected to the Austen family as well!

But before I briefly outline the genealogical data that links "Miss Sawbridge" to Catherine Sawbridge, and that also links the Austen and Sawbridge families, I want to emphasize the Big Picture in all of this, i.e., why you should care at all about any of these connections. It's not just about our ability to interpret the above passage in Letter 61, it's about much more than that.

Rather, the bottom line for Austen studies, as I see it, is that these family connections---and, in that context, JA's very personal and familiar remarks about Miss Sawbridge's recent marriage to the upwardly mobile Mr. Maxwell---show that JA had every personal reason to know all about the life _and_ _writings_ of Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay.

In my posting of the quick answers to my quiz, I briefly referred to the complex but covert allusions that JA made to Macaulay's extraordinarily--even uniquely- influential _feminist_ writings. I also stated that any detailed explanation of those allusions was beyond the scope of these blog posts, but would be front and center in my book about
Jane Austen the radical feminist.

For starters, we have the complex allusion (heretofore _not_ definitively recognized by any Austen or Macaulay scholar) by the 16 year old Jane Austen, in writing her satirical History of England, to the hugely famous multivolume work of the same title written by Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay! But as I said, that allusion is very complex and takes a long time to explain properly.

Feminist scholars have been aware for the longest time that Macaulay was a huge influence on some of the most influential advocates for women's rights during JA's lifetime who followed in Macaulay's huge footsteps: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays and many others. But now I suggest that to that "list of fame" must be added one other name--Jane Austen!Just as I have previously argued elsewhere that JA was wired into Charlotte Smith, the most overtly feminist female novelist who preceded her, I will show that JA also paid her deepest homages to Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay.

For anyone wishing to get a quick sense of who Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay (hereafter CSM) was, the Wikipedia entry under the name "Catherine Macaulay" is extensive, and you will quickly understand why JA's being connected to her is a very big deal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharine_Macaulay

And what I want to emphasize is that I discovered the true identity of Letter 61's "Miss Sawbridge" _after_ I had already independently realized the importance of CSM's writings in forming JA's own authorial feminism! I actually searched the name "Sawbridge" in Le Faye's letters a month ago, and was brought to that passage in Letter 61.

That was why I immediately set about to discover the family connections I will now briefly summarize:

Relationship of CSM to Jane Austen's "Miss Sawbridge": The Miss Sawbridge in JA's letter from 1808 was CSM's niece (the daughter of CSM's eldest brother John), was in her early to mid thirties when she married Mr. Maxwell, and was an heiress of a good fortune. CSM grew up on her father’s estate in Kent that was practically a stone’s throw from Godmersham!

Relationship between CSM's family and the Austen family: CSM's paternal uncle Jacob Sawbridge (younger brother of her father,. who was the eldest son) married Thomas Knight's sister (who was therefore a quasi-great aunt of Edward Austen!), and THEIR offspring included a daughter who married Mr. Heron at Chilham Castle, which JA described visiting in her letters.

Now, again, what should a Janeite make of Le Faye's failure to note _any_ of the above? Did/does Le Faye have any idea what sort of mega-star notoriety Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay enjoyed in that era, such that she might have been made particularly curious to find out if the famous "Catherine _Sawbridge_ Macaulay" was related to Letter 61's "Miss
Sawbridge"? Hard to imagine that she didn't, as she seems to otherwise enjoy a great familiarity with many aspects of English social, cultural, and political history during Jane Austen's lifetime.

Harder still to imagine that Le Faye was unfamiliar with the surname Sawbridge as being one of the small circle of prominent families that lived in very close proximity to Godmersham. Plus, there is another hint hidden in JA's above passage in Letter 61---JA (reminiscent of the way the news of Mr. Elton's engagement to Miss Hawkins spreads rapidly in Highbury) jokes to CEA that CEA "will have heard about" the marriage of Miss Sawbridge with Mr. Maxwell before JA reports on it to CEA.

JA has heard about it from Mrs. Fowle from Berkshire, but JA’s point is that JA is reporting “old news” because of the distance the news had to travel to get to JA, whereas CEA would have heard it sooner from Godmersham sources.

In short, either Le Faye missed something obvious and significant that a competent biographer who’s spent a lifetime working on this body of data should never have missed, OR... perhaps she was so convinced that JA would never have had any interest in the writings or life of CSM,that she felt justified in avoiding providing information leading directly from Jane Austen to the great feminist historian.

Either way—and I have no idea which one applies, it ain’t good.

Cheers, ARNIE

Deirdre Le Faye & Me: "I am a scholar, she is a scholar: so far we are equal"

2012-01-09T15:30:00.003-05:00

In response to my recent post....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/amongst-ladies-le-fayes-subject-index.html

...Christy Somer wrote the following in Austen L:

"At least, Lord Brabourne did respect the whole integrity of the letters - enough, so as not to mark them up with cross-outs. Even as he chose to exclude certain lines in his first edition of the letters, the original letter 32 remains completely intact, and with the underline under ‘Accident’ very clearly there -I’m viewing this from Modert’s facsimile."

At first I did not understand what you meant, Christy, and then I did--yes, thank god he did not presume to that sort of physical desecration of the letters entrusted to him---whether that was the result of his respect for the whole integrity of the letters, or an arrogant presumption on his part that no strangers's eyes would ever gaze at a facsimile of the originals, we will never know--but I certainly don't look that gift horse in the mouth either way!

Christy then went on to ask the following:

"And Arnie, this continual and antagonistic focus on DLF’s ‘motives’ -especially now with this new edition out, causes me to ‘also’ wonder about your own personal and professional motives. Is it possible that you truly wish for some type of ‘public’ confrontation with Deirdre Le Faye?"

Here is my definitive response to this sort of question:

You've can't be serious, Christy. I mean, really, who is the conspiracy theorist now? ;)

I have been making negative comments about Le Faye's editorial practices, and also about her harsh and sometimes vindictive criticisms of other Austen scholars who've dared to challenge her edicts, for _years_. And I am not the only one who has written negatively about her. And I know from direct personal experience that there are many many Janeites who feel something similar to what I feel, but who don't say it publicly. Some people apparently fear her, but many are just plain tired of her.

You should have been there at Chawton House in July 2009 so you could see all the eyes rolling, and all the groaning being choked back, every time she got up and hogged the spotlight and casually derogated some opinion or another that did not please her, and just would not stop.

For just one example of harm she has done to others, that I can only interpret as intentional. Here is the link I provided just this morning:

http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol30no2/upfal-alexander.html

Do you know that Le Faye went out of her way to slam the lovely and important little book that Annette and her mentor, Christine Alexander, put out about The History of England? It was appalling to see. So Le Faye is hardly a shrinking violet, being subjected to unwarranted attacks. She gives much more than she gets, believe me.

The only reason there has been an increase in my postings about her should be obvious from the circumstances. We're smack in the middle of a two _year_ group read of JA's letters! It has become clearer and clearer to me how to properly make my argument, as more and more of the "Big Picture" of the letters has come into focus for me during this massive group read. And I am not shy about expressing what I believe to be the case.

Just as you, Ellen, Diane, Diana and others have all benefited enormously from the discipline of reading these letters week by week as a group, with our very widely varying viewpoints, so have I. I had studied the letters before, but in a haphazard way.

I think that what we've done, collectively, in these groups during the past years is _historic_, it never was done before--or if anything like it ever was, no trace remains that is visible on the Internet or through scholarly databases. And there has been a rich harvest of insight in a number of ways, from my perspective--I have confirmed what I always felt, which is that JA's letters function in relation to her novels very much the way Shakespeare's sonnets function vis a vis his plays--as a kind of subliminal metacommentary, with a great deal of mutual interaction.

And after reading a few hundred of Le Faye's footnotes very minutely, in the context of interpretation of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs in the letters, it has become ever clearer to me how pervasively Le Faye's influence has prevented generations of Janeites from seeing what is really there in these letters. I have accumulated over a hundred examples where her footnotes are either inadequate or nonexistent, in relation to something significant in one or more of JA's letters. And that accumulation continues week by week, with rarely a pause.

Whatever her goals may be-whether she believes she is the great protectress of Jane Austen from evil intrusion, or is just clueless about many things, or has some less savory motivation, or some complicated combination of all three, the bottom line is that no one has ever systematically challenged her the way I have, and that is the only way to really make a dent in her stranglehold on interpretation of JA's biography.

I feel genuine outrage every time I come across another example of where Le Faye has been part of the problem instead of part of the solution, in terms of making all relevant _facts_ accessible to _all_ Janeites, whether they agree with my own interpretations or not. She has every right to hold and express whatever opinions she wishes about Jane Austen--but she has no moral right to obstruct others who disagree with her, from being able to reach our own conclusions.

Doing my part to break her de facto monopoly on Jane Austen's biography and letters is a worthy goal in my eyes, and I will continue to pursue it to the best of my ability. Let a half dozen different viewpoints flourish in the aftermath.

But again, to get back to your conspiracy theory-----it is beyond the realm of possibility that Le Faye would ever wish to debate me about any of this, and, in reverse, it certainly is not my goal, I have better (and harder) things to aspire to. Just as she doesn't believe a word of what I say, I don't believe a word of what she says. As Elizabeth Bennet says when standing up to Lady Catherine: " so far we are equal." ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

Anthony Trollope, Sir Walter Scott, Tom Lefroy, Irish Linen, Persian Carpets....and the "Overton Scotchman" !

2012-01-09T12:55:00.001-05:00

It occurred to me today to check in Jane Austen's letters, to see if Jane Austen might have made some passing comment therein relation to Scotland or its people, and I found one, in Letter 12 dated 11/25/1798:

“The Overton Scotchman has been kind enough to RID ME OF some of my money, in exchange for six shifts and four pair of stockings. The Irish is not so fine as I should like it; but as I gave as much money for it as I intended, I have no reason to complain. It cost me 3s. 6d. per yard”

As I will lay out, below, this was only the start of an interesting excursus through several varied, but connected, Austen-related topics.

First, I analyzed the above quoted passage as follows. With her characteristic ironic hyperbole and oxymoron, I saw JA daring to cavort around the edges of "the old prejudice" (the euphemism that the Knightley brothers use while discussing a Scottish bailiff), by briefly conjuring a subliminal image of Scots as monetary predators feasting on hard working English folk.

Reading that passage in Letter 12 made me wonder, though, about the identity of "the Overton Scotchman"--was there an actual Scotsman, some sort of itinerant seller of clothes, or perhaps even an actual shop which went by the trade name "The Overton Scotchman"?

My first stop was in Le Faye's footnotes to Letter 12, where I read, in her 3rd edition, apparent confirmation of that latter guess:

"A 'scotchman' (not necessarily Scottish), was a pedlar carrying fabrics and drapery goods round the countryside for doorstep sales.", to which, in her 4th edition, she added "to keep accounts with an illiterate clientele, he 'scotched' (cut notches in) tally sticks."

An interesting and plausible-sounding explanation, but I also got the feeling that Le Faye was protesting too much with that additional sentence, as if she did not want anyone to wonder about "the old prejudice". I also wondered if there might be more to this little passage than that, because I recalled that Letter 11, written a week earlier than Letter 12, was the letter in which we hear about JA's 1796 Irish flirtation partner, Tom Lefroy, and his _last_ visit to his aunt and uncle at Ashe--the visit during which he _didn't_ see fit to say "hi" to JA before he returned to his law studies and also to get married to an Anglo-Irish heiress.

And I also found quite curious JA's references to not one but _two_ Gaelic names, i.e., "the Overton _Scotch_man" and "the _Irish_" in that short passage, in the temporal context that only a month _earlier_, the great Irish Rebellion of 1798 had been brutally crushed by England, and only a few months _later_, the newly married Henry Austen left England to performed military service in Ireland.

So, those whiffs of "smoke" of Scotland and Ireland were enough for me to look behind Le Faye's footnote to see what else might be found via my old friend Google, which led me first to the following passage in an article entitled "A Scotchman at Overton" that appeared in the 1987 issue of Persuasions, which was all about the town of Overton:

"Of course, Jane did not only come to Overton to visit her family. She came, we know, to shop. And now, at last, I will reveal why my title is “A Scotchman at Overton.” Jane wrote to her sister, Cassandra: “The Overton Scotchman has been kind enough to rid me of some of my money, in exchange for six shifts and four pair of stockings. The Irish is not so fine as I should like it; but as I gave as much money for it as I intended, I have no reason to complain. It cost me 3s. 6d. per yard” (/Letters/, p. 32). The building occupied by the Scotchman was pulled down only recently and we witnessed its departure under protest, and its replacement with a structure of facile modernity. I am sure you all share our regret that another real link with Jane has gone."

So, apparently, there really _was_ a shop of that name "The Overton Scotchman" in Overton as early as 1798 which had a tenure there of about 2 centuries or more.

And that brings me to the reason for my mentioning Anthony Trollope in my Subject Line----i.e., surprisingly (to me, at least), that is the name of the author of that 1987 Persuasions article! So, purely as a matter of Austen trivia, it seems that the modern Anthony Trollope (who was at the time of writing that article the Honorary Secretary of the Jane Austen Society in England) was, like his very famous 19th century kinsman, a Janeite, and was also someone who lived in proximity to Steventon!

But even though there apparently was (if we can rely on Trollope's assertions in that article) an actual shop in Overton which dated back to 1798, I kept on looking for _more_ intriguing connections, and I was quickly rewarded by what I found in Sir Walter Scott's publication (right around that same time as JA was writing Letter 12) of a book Scott entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, in which he wrote the following footnote at page lvii:

"....we may add the following curious extracts from Mercurius Politicus/, /a newspaper, published during the usurpation. "Thursday, November 11, 1662. Edinburgh.—The Scotts and moss-troopers have again revived their old custom, of robbing and murthering the English, whether soldiers or other, upon all opportunities, within these three weeks. We have had notice of several robberies and murders, committed by them. Among the rest, a lieutenant, and one other of Col. Overton's regiment, returning from England, were robbed not far from Dunbarr. A lieutenant, lately master of the customs at Kirkcudbright, was killed about twenty miles from this place; and four foot soldiers of Colonel Overton's were killed, going to their quarters, by some mossers, who, after they had given them quarter, tied their hands behind them, and then threw them down a steep hill, or rock, as it was related by a Scotchman, who was with them, but escaped."

Several robberies of Englishmen by Scotts and moss-troopers. That sounds disturbingly and exactly like accounts of the early stages of the rebellion in Ireland earlier in 1798, alleged atrocities against Anglo-Irish (like those recounted by Madam Lefroy in her letters) which had prompted England to crush the Irish rebellion.

Just a coincidence of violent rebellions against England by its British Isles possessions, both associated with the names "Overton" and "Scotchmen"? Maybe....but that sort of coincidence would be just the sort of thing JA, with her love of double meanings, would immediately pick up on, a dark, veiled subtext that JA relished for her miniature flights of fancy in her letters and novels.

And it would actually perfectly fit the situation of JA shopping in Overton. I.e., JA was passing along to Cassandra a droll double entendre about the irony of an English gentlewoman buying _Irish_ linen from a _Scotch_ seller in Overton, while mass violence and political upheaval was going on, including a beloved brother, during that same time frame, in distant portions of the non-English parts of the British Isles. Exactly as an American or a Brit might feel today, shopping at a Middle Eastern shop in NYC, while buying a Persian carpet.

Food (or clothing) for thought.

Cheers, ARNIE

"Amongst ladies....." : Le Faye's Subject Index in her new 4th Edition

2012-01-09T01:00:00.001-05:00

As I believe I mentioned last month, I bought a copy of Le Faye's brand new 4th edition of Jane Austen's Letters a few weeks ago, and I was particularly curious to see what changes she made to the footnotes to the letters, as a result of whatever might have crossed Le Faye's desk or desktop since she edited the 3rd edition. After about 30 minutes thumbing through the footnotes to both the 3rd and 4th editions, side by side, I was quickly disappointed, but really not surprised, to see almost _no_ alterations in those footnotes. That's why I put the completion of that little review project aside until a day when nothing else was happening of an intriguing nature, and I would then force myself to complete my double checking, in the interest of being thorough, and not assuming that there were no significant alterations in the remainder of the footnotes.

This evening, in the aftermath of my recent postings about Le Faye's footnoting of passages in Letters 59 & 60 about Catherine Bigg's impending wedding to Revd. Herbert Hill, I decided to check Le Faye's much heralded new Subject Index, to begin to get a handle on her approach to what struck me as inevitably being a very subjective editorial decision--deciding what major categories to use for organization, deciding which ones were not needed, etc etc. Different competent editors could make very different decisions in this regard.

As I began that browsing, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Le Faye had included as a major Subject Heading, "Pregnancy, Childbirth". How about that! Given that so many of JA's overt and veiled allusions to pregnancy and childbirth in her letters range from negative to very negative in tone to outright scandalous, I was not sure how Le Faye was going to deal with that very sensitive subject. And I sat up in my chair, wondering what I'd find.

And that's when my eye was caught by a subtopic entry in the "Pregnancy, Childbirth" category for "an accident"---which I immediately knew was referring the reader to JA's bon mot about Edward Austen Knight's 47-year old widowed "adoptive" mother, Mrs. Knight, in Letter 32, written when JA was herself 25:

"I am happy to hear of Mrs. Knight's amendment, whatever might be her complaint. I cannot think so ill of her however, in spite of your insinuations, as to suspect her of having lain-in -- I do not think she would be betrayed beyond an accident at the utmost."

Now, I distinctly recalled (and then quickly reconfirmed) that Le Faye's 3rd edition contained no footnote whatsoever about this piquant passage, even though (1) this passage was noteworthy enough for Lord Brabourne to Bowdlerize out everything in it after the word "complaint", and (2) this passage, and Lord Brabourne's radical editorial amputation of same had previously been commented on by a couple of brave Austen scholars over the years (beginning with Queenie Leavis's ultra-discreet comment about it without actually telling her readers which letter it was in, or what it said exactly!).

So, if any passage in all of JA's surviving letters would have merited some sort of explanatory footnote---some words to the wise about JA's extremely wicked sense of humor at the expense of brother Edward's benefactress and quasi-adoptive aunt, who at 47, was hardly going to be the subject of sincere speculations by anyone, let alone the prim and proper Cassandra, of an accidental pregnancy, especially as the lady was unmarried at the time--it would be this passage. If nothing else, Le Faye might have informed her readers of how both Chapman and she had honored their editorial obligations to their readers by _not_ following Brabourne's editorial surgical practice.

Pretty important stuff to know, if you were a Janeite reading these letters for the first time and wishing to have as true and complete a picture of Jane Austen the person as she had left behind in her letters. And, apparently, since that entry in the Subject Entry gave P. 388 as the location of the footnote pertaining to same, Le Faye had apparently decided to alter her reticence on this point in the 3rd edition, and finally give this passage some emphasis, to actually bring this passage to a reader's attention. I sat up even straighter in my chair--this really was surprising, especially given that there were practically no alterations in the footnotes to the first few dozen letters. Maybe Le Faye would make up in the quality and significance of her footnote alterations, what might be lacking in the quantity of same.

So....I turned to p. 388 of the 4th edition with bated breath to see exactly how Le Faye had decided to word this auspicious footnote, and look at what I read:

"Amongst ladies, the euphemism 'accident' was used to denote a miscarriage."

That's it. Nothing about Mrs. Knight being the subject of that passage. Nothing about her being 47 and unmarried when Letter 32 was written. Nothing about Brabourne's Bowdlerization, only the above explanation and nothing else.

Now, I am wondering what an intelligent reader of Letter 32, without any prior background in JA's biography, would make of JA's passage about Mrs. Knight, _after_ reading Le Faye's new footnote. Frankly, I haven't a clue. It makes absolutely no sense to me. Why would the unmarried, 47 year old Mrs. Knight having a miscarriage be any less of an insinuation by Cassandra than the unmarried, 47 year old Mrs. Knight actually bearing a live baby? The insinuation (which, again, was obviously never made by Cassandra in the first place, this had to be JA's invention from the get-go) is equally scandalous in both cases, because the scandal arises from the idea of Mrs. Knight finding herself "in for it" at all!

Now, this time around, I will not state my own personal inferences and speculations about what was in Le Faye's mind when she made this key editorial decision, because I think her editorial actions speak much louder than my words about her actions ever would. The key test, again, I suggest, is whether the reader is better informed about what matters in that passage after reading that footnote than (s)he was before reading it. I think the answer to that key question is crystal clear.

And now I can see that it's going to be a _very_ interesting experience poring through Le Faye's Subject Index to see how other sensitive passages in JA's letters are handled in Le Faye's Subject Index. Because I have a strong hunch that there are at least a half dozen more of such interesting alterations which I have not yet detected.

Cheers, ARNIE

Mary Crawford the "Harp-y"

2012-01-08T09:46:00.002-05:00

This morning, Diane Reynolds wrote the following in Austen L and Janeites:

"Since I have interested myself recently in trying to evaluate Mary Crawford's skill at the harp, I searched "harp" in MP and discovered that Mary is indeed damned by faint praise. There's no sense that Mary is more than a passable harpist. But as I was searching harp, I made a sudden connection to harpy. Given JA's love of wordplay and punning, it seemed obvious--yes, of course, Mary's harp points to her role as harpy. A quick glance at Wikipedia on harpies produced the following:
"In Greek mythology, a harpy ("snatcher", from Latin: harpeia, originating in Greek: ἅρπυια, harpūia) was one of the winged spirits best known for constantly stealing all food from Phineas. The literal meaning of the word seems to be "that which snatches" as it comes from the ancient Greek word harpazein (ἁρπάζειν), which means "to snatch".
A harpy was the mother by the West Wind Zephyros of the horses of Achilles.[1] In this context Jane Ellen Harrison adduced the notion in Virgil's Georgics (iii.274) that mares became gravid by the wind alone..[2]
Hesiod[3] calls them two "lovely-haired" creatures, and pottery art depicting the harpies featured beautiful women with wings. Harpies as ugly winged bird-women, e.g. in Aeschylus' The Eumenides (line 50) are a late development, due to a confusion with the Sirens. Roman and Byzantine writers detailed their ugliness.[4]"
Harpies were initially beautiful woman who swooped in and snatched things from others ... clearly this fits Fanny's perception of Mary vis-a-vis Edmund."

Yes, indeed, Diane, that fits perfectly with the following excerpt from this post....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/09/heathen-heroes-of-mansfield-park.html

"But, back to JA, it is curious, that it is only in MP among all of JA's novels that we have an explicit allusion to a Roman emperor. [Mary Crawford, again in her role as teller of truths that others would wish to conceal, pointing out that Maria, in marrying Rushworth, is, in part, sacrificing herself on the altar of her father's relentless ambition for power and wealth] "Don't be affronted," said she, laughing, "but it does put me in mind of some of the old heathen heroes, who, after performing great exploits in a foreign land, offered sacrifices to the gods on their safe return."
[Edmund and Fanny star gazing]: “I like to hear your enthusiasm, Fanny. It is a lovely night, and they are much to be pitied who have not been taught to feel, in some degree, as you do; who have not, at least, been given a taste for Nature in early life. They lose a great deal.” “You taught me to think and feel on the subject, cousin.” “I had a very apt scholar. There’s Arcturus looking very bright.” “Yes, and the Bear. I wish I could see Cassiopeia.” “We must go out on the lawn for that. Should you be afraid?” “Not in the least. It is a great while since we have had any star–gazing.”
And of course Cassiopeia is the mythological queen who tried, in HER lust for power, to sacrifice her daughter Andromeda.
No coincidence in any of this, in a novel written 1800 years after the peak of ancient Rome, to describe ANOTHER great empire also ruled by a man named "Augustus"!

...and even more so with the following excerpt from this post as well:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/search?q=siren

"These four usages of the word "orders" in a master-servant situation, scattered across MP, with no apparent connection, are actually intimately connected. MP is the ONLY JA novel with such usages in relations to servants, and they all serve to subliminally echo Mary's persistent attempts to dissuade Edmund from taking clerical orders--in effect, Mary is saying to him, there's nothing masculine or romantic about a clergyman, all you are is a kind of glorified servant, taking orders from a hypocritical church elite, which is rife with corruption from the sins of greed and concupiscence. Mary is, in effect, telling Edmund to "man up", and thereby win the heart of a "real woman". It begins to explain the power of Mary's siren song, because it is a subtler argument than is often realized--Edmund has felt his pulse race while riding horses with Mary, he has felt his passions stirred as he has listened to her _harp_---her _siren_ song is the siren song of secular culture, and that secular culture has many genuine allures, not so easily dismissed. A REAL temptation. Mary never makes her own case by attempting to shoot Fanny down--it would never work with Edmund anyway, and it would also be a much inferior case in any event. Much better to acknowledge the positives about Fanny, but, even in doing so, to force Edmund to realize that the heart is a mysterious master, a master whose "orders" are often cryptic, conflicted, and confusing. Love is a great mystery, and Mary is exploiting the mystery for all it's worth."

So, I think it is absolutely valid toalso pick up on harp/harpy as you did, Diane, in the above context of Greek mythological saturation that we find in MP in particular. Whether she's a siren or a harpy, Mary is playing a tune on her harp that has Edmund firmly under her spell for 90% of the novel, turning him into a grunting boar lusting after her.

And the following factoid from that Wikipedia entry is also relevant to Mary:

"They [the Harpies] were usually seen as the personifications of the destructive nature of wind."

There are numerous references to the wind in MP, much more than in any of the other Austen novels, and we in particular have the following passage in which the wind--particularly the direction of the wind---and Mary's harp playing are in extremely close proximity:

"Another quarter of an hour," said Miss Crawford, "and we shall see how [the weather] will be. Do not run away the first moment of its holding up. Those clouds look alarming." "But they are passed over," said Fanny. "I have been watching them. This weather is all from the south." "South or north, I know a black cloud when I see it; and you must not set forward while it is so threatening. And besides, I want to play something more to you—a very pretty piece—and your cousin Edmund's prime favourite. You must stay and hear your cousin's favourite."

And in the back of JA's mind, as well, were the mythological underpinnings of _Hamlet_, when Hamlet (as I quoted just the other day while talking about her directional pun on "WESTminster" in "NORTHanger") utters this:

"I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw."

The trick in all of the above, I suggest, is to use these mythological and literary allusions in order to peer behind the baize curtain of Mansfield Park, and to discern the action that is _not_ explicitly described by the teasing narrator.

Cheers, ARNIE
sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com

P.S.: And don't forget this infamous "Trojan Horse Moment" by EM Forster, in his sexist, clueless dismissal of JA's letters as being unworthy of study:

"She can write, for instance, and write it as a jolly joke, that "Mrs. Hall of Sherborne was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband," Did Cassandra laugh? Probably, but all that we catch at this distance is the whinneying of harpies.*/"/*

But I don't believe Forster understood the "harp"/"harpy" connection in MP that you snagged, Diane!

P.P.S.: I did some quick Googling, and found the following earlier sightings of this allusion by JA:

My friend Jenny Allen, 2004, on the Mansfield Park board at Republic of Pemberley:

"Fanny is quite the poet, is she not? And edmund is sadly dim, seduced away from star-gazing by that HARPie Mary Crawford and her Siren Song."

And in March, 2009, in response to Laurel Ann Nattress's post about Mary Crawford and her harp....

http://austenprose.com/2009/03/26/mansfield-park-mary-crawford-that-peculiarly-becoming-temptress-with-a-harp/

...Sylwia (formerly active in Janeites) replied: "Lauren Ann, you chose a picture of a lady standing beside a harp, but if you took one with her sitting with the instrument between her legs it’d be clear where the allure of it lays. ;) Edmund might have heard it elsewhere. After all he used to visit friends while Fanny never moved outside the park. The sad thing though is that not even a better woman would help. Mary had to show her real harpy feathers for him to see clearly, and that nearly didn’t happen at all. I always thought Fanny is too good for him."

P.P.S. on Poor Catherine: Wedding Cake, Anyone?

2012-01-07T19:40:00.001-05:00

Christy: "Arnie, In letter 57, DLF notes that Catherine Bigg is “soon to become Mrs. Hill”. "

Christy, I can only bow to you in honor of another bit of superior and very meaningful followup sleuthing on your part, making the picture complete. Here is the passage from Letter 57 to which the above was Le Faye's footnote:

"Do you recollect whether the Manydown family send about their Wedding Cake?-Mrs. Dundas has set her heart upon having a peice from her friend Catherine, & Martha who knows what importance she attaches to the sort of thing, is anxious for the sake of both that there shd not be a disappointment."

Now, I am not sure, Christy, because you are so sly, whether you realize that you've made my argument about Le Faye stronger, and not weaker? How so? Because Le Faye knew that including a footnote (about the impending wedding) to the above passage in Letter 57 causes no ripple of disturbance whatsoever in the mind of an unsuspicious Janeite, because, on the surface, the above passage seems utterly benign. At first glance, it seems no more than a silly bit of mock-serious banter about making sure that Mrs. Dundas [who was herself a young woman who got married only 6 months earlier] gets her "peice" of wedding cake.

And because that's an apparently plain vanilla passage in Letter 57---no subtextual critique of English marriage visible at first glance---nobody blinks an eye when reading Le Faye's footnote--including me when I skimmed through Letter 57 a few weeks ago--in fact, I did not even find any reason to read the footnote in the first place.

And...because reading letters is _not_ like reading a novel, where a reader is automatically keeps in mind what has been read in a previous chapter, in order to follow the story line, there was absolutely no reason for any reader of Letter 60, upon reading the two-word footnote "Catherine: Bigg", to look elsewhere for the answer. So Le Faye cannot, with a straight face, argue that it was unnecessary for her to refer to Catherine Bigg's impending wedding in that footnote to Letter 60, because she had just done so for the footnote in Letter 57. All Le Faye needed to do, if she did not wish to repeat her Letter 57 footnote, was to write the following after "Catherine: Bigg" : "See Letter 57 note 14". Needless to say, she did neither.

And she did neither, I suggest to you, because connecting these passages in Letter 57 and Letter 60 is exactly what Le Faye did _not_ want her readers to do! She was banking on there being practically no readers of "poor Catherine" in Letter 60 who were going to be that meticulous and dogged so as to check around via the Index to find other mentions of Catherine Bigg. And forget about there being _any_ readers who actually would have read Letters 57 through 60 at one sitting, so as to have the possibility of connecting the dots, by memory, between those two passages, without an assist from footnotes.

And.....lest someone reply, that's all well and good in theory, but Le Faye should not have to clutter all her footnotes with lots of cross references to other footnotes, like the one I argued she should have included between Letters 57 and 60. After all, wouldn't the footnotes then become hopelessly cluttered. Well, if Le Faye had been Calvinistic in avoiding cross references in her footnotes, perhaps I'd have to back down, but it just so happens that Le Faye in fact includes cross references _all_ _over_ _the_ _place_ in her footnotes!!! I just found ten of them with a single word search, plus some more via quick skimming of some of the early letters, and so I know there must be several dozen at a minimum scattered through all the letters. Not a Calvinist at all, in fact rather liberal and free in cross referencing .....when there is nothing disturbing involved, that is!

No, this appears to be a conscious editorial decision _not_ to give the slightest bit of assistance to a reader to connect all the dots that I and Christy have connected today, only because Christy and I are both meticulous and dogged, especially when working as a tag team! ;)

But.....I have not even gotten to the best part of this post, which I recognized the minute I read the above-quoted passage in Letter 57--and which would _almost_ make me wonder why Christy chose to only quote the footnote, and not also the Letter excerpt itself.

I invite anyone who read my previous post about the "poor Catherine" passage in Letter 60 to reread what I wrote about that passage and then _carefully _ read the above passage about Mrs. Dundas and Catherine and Martha, and tell me if something _else_ does not jog in your memory banks, from _Emma_, in addition to the echo of Letter 60 in Mr. Woodhouse's _nine_ "poor Miss Taylor" exclamations????

Isn't it interesting first of all that we hear about a piece of wedding cake from the impending wedding?

Does it perhaps remind us of something _else_ that Mr. Woodhouse says about weddings and marriage?

How about this post I wrote 22 months ago?:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/03/sometimes-strange-rumours-point-to.html

For those who don't want to savor the whole argument I made in that much earlier post--even though it's pretty funny, I promise you--suffice to say that I now claim it is now light years beyond the realm of coincidence that there should be two passages about Catherine Bigg's impending wedding in Letters 57 and 60, respectively, which independently correspond in two extraordinarily memorable ways to utterances by Mr. Woodhouse about Mrs. Weston's wedding! Which means, to me, that even in Letter 57, in what initially appeared as an innocuous bit of banter about wedding cake, JA is already laying the groundwork for her explicit expression of negativity toward Catherine Bigg's impending marriage to the much older Revd. Herbert Hill.

Wild stuff!

Cheers, ARNIE

P.S. re Letter 60: "Poor Catherine".....or "Poor Miss Taylor"?

2012-01-07T15:28:00.002-05:00

My favorite Devil's Advocate Christy Somer made some very interesting comments on my last post:

Christy: "Arnie, My comments on DLF were attached to my post on the ‘Un-attributed Poem’ - not to her note on Catherine Bigg’s coming marriage in L 60."

Yes, Christy, I understood that, it was I who was linking the two interpretations -- I have of course found many examples of Le Faye's editorial skullduggery before, but it's a rare and serendipitous treat for me to find two such salient examples within only a few days. I keep wondering, when will I _stop_ finding them? Will I ever? She has had a half century to try to hide a lot of things,and it's a lot easier to hide stuff than it is to discover that hidden stuff, I have found. ;)

Christy: " Obviously, you are convinced of DLF being devious and hiding the truth...I am not. I see her as just being stubbornly convinced of her own ‘rightness’ regarding these matters on how she perceives the totality of JA’s world."

When stubbornness rises to the level of blinding a person to obvious inconsistencies of this magnitude, and making them deaf to refutations by others (as we saw in the Byrne BBC video, when Byrne nailed Le Faye on some point Le Faye had just made), then it may as well be intentional, because there's no way to tell the difference at that point. What matters is that she is _never_ to be trusted on any sensitive interpretive issue, or on her bringing forward all relevant evidence, regarding Jane Austen.

"She knows she owns (and she most likely believes she’s earned it) a certain amount of power -and she will use it."

It amazes me how you write that with such equanimity, as if this was okay, as if it was morally justified in some way. I am reminded of the climactic scene from the great Paul Newman vehicle, The Verdict, when the nurse (played so powerfully by Lindsay Crouse) who has been cruelly drummed out of nursing by cynical, self-protective, arrogant doctors and the lawyers representing them, finally gets to tell the truth in a court of law, after years of pent-up fury at the horrible wrong done to her:

"After, after the operation, when that poor girl, she went in a coma. Dr. Towler called me in. He told me he had five difficult deliveries in a row and he was tired, and he never looked at the admittance form. (beat) And he told me to change the form. He told me to change the one to a nine. (beat) Or else, or else, he said... (beat; starts to cry) He said he'd fire me. He said I'd never work again... Who were these men...? Who were these men...? I wanted to be a nurse..."

So I say to you, Christy, who is this woman, Deirdre Le Faye, who decided it was the right thing that she should abuse her power in Austen studies by spending a half century doing her level best to prevent the truth about Jane Austen from coming out? For me, she has zero moral authority on that score.

And what an awful irony that the truth about Jane Austen that Le Faye--a woman--has been most intent on suppressing is that Jane Austen was a woman who was outraged at women being silenced about wrongdoing by men against women! Jane Austen was in exactly the same circumstance as that nurse in The Verdict, but she never got a chance to tell her truth freely and openly, she died before she had achieved a position of sufficient prominence to dare to be overt. Anticipating my reply, below, to your second point, JA made the "sensible" choice to veil her radical feminism
beneath a mask of apparent acquiescence in the status quo.

That's why it's so important to me to do my best to reveal openly what she was forced to say covertly.

Christy: "And as to these two moments JA gives to Catherine Bigg: “...and to-morrow we must think of poor Catherine...I am glad you mentioned where Catherine goes to-day; it is a good plan, but sensible people may generally be trusted to form such...” For me, these words tend to form a mixed reaction -JA seems to be sorry to lose her friend (they are the same age) to a marriage with a much older man. Yet, she will also allow that for Miss Bigg, perhaps, this might just be a sensible choice -at least, this is how I read it."

Good catch to connect those two dots, Christy, which I, in my rush to write about the first one, did not look to see if there was a second one--even under your interpretation of the second Letter 60 reference to Catherine Bigg (and it must be her in both, I agree), which I gather is that JA is approving of Catherine leaving _"today"_ to go get married to Revd. Hill _"tomorrow", JA's calling the marriage "sensible" does not in any way undercut her pity for Catherine to have been pressured into marrying this much older man in the first place. I.e., JA was enough of a radical to be appalled at the narrow choices presented to women, but was also enough of a pragmatist to support whatever choice a woman made under such a unfair
and unjust social reality, and not to expect every woman to choose the apparent martyrdom that Fanny Price chose, which was to accept banishment to "hell" for her refusal to bow to such pressure.

And I think it's clear from P&P that JA does not blame Charlotte Lucas for _her_ pact with the devil either. What JA dreamt of was a world in which women did not face such Catch 22's everywhere they turned. But she herself, as I noted above, made the "sensible" choice as an author, by not risking being sent to authorial (and personal) hell.

Cheers, ARNIE

Letter 60: "Poor Catherine".....or "Poor Miss Taylor"?

2012-01-07T10:51:00.001-05:00

Lately I seem to be finding examples of what Le Faye _doesn't_ say--but _should_ say, as the editor of JA's letters, everywhere I turn. Today it's in Letter 60, in the following passage in Letter 60, dated Oct. 24, 1808, and it's a real lulu:

"To-morrow I hope to hear from you, and to-morrow we must think of poor Catherine."

Le Faye's footnote to that sentence consists of two words:

"Catherine: Bigg"

Now, from that terse footnote, a reader would reasonably infer that Le Faye, having identified Catherine _Bigg_ as the object of JA's apparent pity, had at least made some effort to find out what JA meant by "poor Catherine", but could not find anything.

Because I long ago learned to operate on the assumption that Le Faye deliberately conceals what she considers to be unpleasant and unseemly implications of JA's writings, I did not hesitate to check to find out what JA might have meant. And it took me exactly one minute to figure out what it was, in two steps.

First step, in Le Faye's Biographical Index entry for the Bigg family:

"...Catherine married 1808 Revd. Herbert Hill..."

And you can guess the second step, in Le Faye's Biographical Index entry for Revd. Herbert Hill:

"....married 25 October 1808 Catherine Bigg..."

So let's put this all together.....Letter 60 written October 24, 1808....Catherine Bigg marries Revd. Hill October 25, 1808....."_tomorrow_ we must think of poor Catherine".

If you did not already realize it, now you understand why I included an allusion in my Subject Line to the following _nine_ passages in Emma:

"Poor Miss Taylor!—I wish she were here again. What a pity it is that Mr. Weston ever thought of her!.....I am sure she will be an excellent servant; and it will be a great comfort to poor Miss Taylor to have somebody about her that she is used to see.....Ah! poor Miss Taylor! 'Tis a sad business .......But, Mr. Knightley, she is really very sorry to lose poor Miss Taylor, and I am sure she will miss her more than she thinks for.....Ah, poor Miss Taylor! She would be very glad to stay.....Ah, my dear...poor Miss Taylor—It is a grievous business....I do not like strange voices; and nobody speaks like you and poor Miss Taylor...It ought to be a first object, as I am sure poor Miss Taylor's always was with me. You know, my dear, she is going to be to this new lady what Miss Taylor was to us..... She was reminded, more than once, of having always said she would never marry, and assured that it would be a great deal better for her to remain single; and told of poor Isabella, and poor Miss Taylor."

I included all of these nine quotations of Mr. Woodhouse's pity for Miss Taylor to underscore for you all that this is perhaps the most memorable and often repeated dialogue motif in all of JA's novels. Every Janeite is familiar with it! And yet, Le Faye, who does not hesitate to present herself not only as the editor of JA's letters, and her biographer, but _also_ as an interpreter of JA's _fiction_, chooses _not_ to say anything about the obvious and intentional parallelism by JA between Letter 60 and _Emma_.

And, even worse, Le Faye only gives the full date of Catherine Bigg's marriage in _his_ entry, not in Catherine's.

That is what I find most objectionable, which is that Le Faye has very craftily worded these various entries so as to give the appearance of completeness, and so as to lull the unsuspicious reader to sleep, thinking that all relevant information has been highlighted.

Christy wrote yesterday, responding to my critical comments about Le Faye's article about the 1801 poem to young Anna:

"And Arnie, considering the amount of years and effort DLF has given to this
gargantuan endeavor, she is bound to make mistakes, or make remarks that are off center, limiting, and perhaps, not very politically correct."

No, Christy, I don't buy it, not a chance, and I can't believe you buy it, either. What Le Faye did with "Poor Catherine" is totally bogus and indefensible. Her own Indices show that she knew all the relevant facts, and it is impossible not to infer that Le Faye deliberately chose to smudge things so that nobody would notice the echo.

And the worst of it is that it is so significant a point, thematically! This is not some trivial detail of JA's biography, or some bit of unnoticed background in her novels. I.e., the black humor of JA's expression of pity for Catherine Bigg is that it reveals that JA really was pitying her _33_ year old friend who was marrying a _59_ year old man! Exactly the kind of feminist satirical commentary on Regency Era sexism that Le Faye _relentlessly_ suppresses in JA's writing every chance Le Faye gets!

And...there is a mirror-reflection back from this sentence in Letter 60 into those 9 exclamations by Mr. Woodhouse about poor Miss Taylor, which is also anathema to Le Faye's sanitized dogma about Jane Austen. Why? Because beneath the surface caricature of Mr. Woodhouse as paranoid about marriage, the reflection back from Letter 60 allows us to hear the voice of Jane Austen herself speaking through Mr. Woodhouse, pitying women who marry for reasons other than true love. And in the case of "poor Catherine" Bigg, women in their thirties who marry men twice their age so as not to sink into dreadful spinsterhood.

And perhaps worst of all, from Le Faye's perspective, in this Pandora's Box of feminist subtext, is the irony that Catherine Bigg just happened to be the sister of Harris Bigg-Wither, the very man as to whom JA resisted what must have been fierce family and friend pressure to marry 6 years prior to her writing Letter 60. I have seen it suggested that the Bigg sisters were among those who pressured JA in 1802, and perhaps she was. Either way, her marrying a man twice her age six years later is an irony that did not escape JA's notice.

No wonder Le Faye tried to put the kibosh on all of this, and no wonder why I feel such a sense of outrage at her trying to do this, and such a sense of satisfaction at proclaiming the truth now!

Cheers, ARNIE

Addendum re: Jane Austen's Stealth Poem to the 8-year old Anna Austen

2012-01-06T13:46:00.001-05:00

A week ago I posted about what I call a "stealth poem" covertly delivered by Jane Austen to her niece Anna Austen upon the very sad occasion of Jane Austen being separated geographically from Anna for the first time in the 8-year old girl's life, due to Jane Austen being exiled to Bath along with her parents and sister:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/12/jane-austens-stealth-poem-to-8-year-old.html

I have now read a copy of an article by Deirdre Le Faye in which she first quotes that entire poem and reveals that it is written in the inside of the cover of Mentoria. Le Faye then makes the following astounding (and _not_ in a good way) comments about the poem:

"These verses present something of a puzzle: could they be a serious attempt on Jane's part to offer them to Cassandra following the death in the West Indies in 1797 of the latter's fiance Tom Fowle?--the tone of them seems to suggest so; and yet, would Jane then have given away to a niece a book which bore the traces of a sorrow personal to Cassandra? Or was Jane merely experimenting with sentimental verse for her own amusement?"

To paraphrase Mr. Bennet, an unhappy alternative is before those who claim Le Faye is a worthy interpreter of Jane Austen's life and works, is someone whose opinion is worth hearing about hot questions such as whether the Byrne portrait is actually a portrait of Jane Austen.

From this day supporters of Le Faye must be a stranger to that claim. Why? Because, having spotted, and then explicitly stated, the key question---which is, "Why did JA send this book with this poem to her 8 year old niece Anna?", either:

1. Le Faye is so clueless that it never even occurs to her as a possibility that the poem was written _to_ Anna herself--a possibility which, if examined, leads effortlessly to the interpretation I made in my previous blog post; or

2. Le Fay is not clueless at all, but treats it as her job to put the kibosh on any interpretation of Jane Austen which raises disturbing questions about how Jane Austen felt about Mary Lloyd Austen as a stepmother to young Anna, to the extent that JA would have sent Anna this poignant pep talk to help Anna survive not having JA around any more in the neighborhood to try to make Anna's life a little better, something JA clearly had no confidence her brother James would do to take care of his daughter in JA's absence.

My gut feeling is that she really does believe her own propaganda. But either way, it ain't good--my rule of thumb is, if Le Faye is in dispute with another Austen scholar about a point of interpretation, it's very likely that Le Faye is the one in the wrong! ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

The Byrne portrait: Two Abbeys & Their Awful Memorials, & Miss Ashton Dennis

2012-01-05T16:55:00.003-05:00

Today in Austen L and Janeites, Christy wrote: More updates on the Byrne Portrait from austenonly:

http://austenonly.com/2012/01/05/more-news-on-the-portrait-debate/

I responded as follows:

Christy,

austenonly (Julie Wakefield, or JW) may be pretty solid on uncontroversial and straightforward questions about Jane Austen, but is far from gospel for me as a source of creative interpretations of more subtle Austenian questions like this, and my comments, below, are a good example of why.

First, as to Eliza Chute as portraitist, JW read the same Tweet I did that Paula Byrne sent out yesterday afternoon about Byrne possibly backing off on Eliza Chute as the portraitist. Byrne has not Tweeted at all in the nearly 24 hours since then (and one day is an eternity, in the accelerated timeframe of Twitter "instantaneity"), and I can't find anything via Google that provides any update from that Tweet, so I wonder if Byrne is waiting for more definitive information about the markings on the back of the portrait that JW mentioned, (that supposedly suggest a "hack" portraitist), before giving an official update.

In the interim, I am NOT so quick to dismiss Eliza Chute as a candidate, and my best hunch is that perhaps there is going to be a plausible explanation, consistent with all the facts as they are developed, that would include _both_ Chute, the amateur, and _also_ a hack, in some combination of actions, that produced the final product, i.e., this portrait. Everything I know about Jane Austen tells me that Eliza Chute was a key player in this drama.

And....as for the following further comments by Wakefield at austenonly....

"If I interpret her tweets correctly, it would seem that Dr Byrne is now appearing to pursue the argument that the inclusion of Westminster Abbey in the drawing may be due to the fact that Jane Austen’s brother, Frank, was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1815, something she thinks is missed by most Austen biographers. In Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers( 1905), which was of course written by Frank’s grandson, John Henry Hubback and his daughter, Edith Charlotte Hubback, the award is clearly mentioned......So, if I interpret that correctly, there would not have been any ceremony for the family to attend at the Abbey,and the association with that particular place would surely be lessened? I also think we do have to concede that the connection with Westminster Abbey is Frank’s and not his sisters. Would a reference to the Abbey really have been inserted into a portrait of Jane Austen? And why, if this was the connection, was only the corner of Westminster Abbey’s west front shown (together with the tower of St Margaret’s) in the drawing? "

....I agree _and_ (probably) disagree with JW!

I agree with JW that an alleged Frank Austen connection to that portrait of JA is completely offbase. After all, this portrait is of Jane Austen, not Frank Austen! The idea that a portrait of Jane would be made as part of celebration of Frank's achievement would be part and parcel of the same silliness that suggests that the Austen women lived in the shadows of the Austen men, and that achievements of Austen _sons_ were "picturesque" (or, as Seinfeld might say, "portrait-worthy") but that achievement of Austen _daughters_ were not. I am really surprised that Byrne, who has shown real understanding of JA's feminism, would concoct such a decidedly un-feminist rationale.

Part of Byrne's problem, as I see it, is that she is so desperately trying to connect the dots to a date for the portrait in 1815 or thereabouts. In my considered opinion---and for reasons I will be writing about when the time is right in the near future----I believe the date was several years _before_ 1815!

But, where I suspect JW would disagree with me re Westminster Abbey's presence in the portrait is that I don't consider the ruling out of a "Frank Austen celebration" as being in any way a weakness in Byrne's claim that the portrait is of our Jane Austen. Why?

THREE REASONS WHY WESTMINSTER ABBEY WOULD BE INCLUDED IN A PORTRAIT HONORING JANE AUSTEN'S WRITING CAREER:

Because (as you heard me speak at the Portland AGM in October, 2009, Christy), in my talk then I gave not one but THREE _compelling_ reasons why Westminster Abbey would have been a _perfect_ symbol for a portraitist of Jane Austen to include in a portrait celebrating JA's success as an author:

First, I realized early in 2009 that the name NORTHanger Abbey was a clever play on the name WESTminster Abbey, especially as I also claimed that Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ was a very significant but totally veiled allusive source for Northanger Abbey. And as anyone familiar with _Hamlet_ would know, the little word game I claim JA engaged in with names of geographical directions ("north" and "west") in names of Abbey (and don't forget _Soth_ erton in that regard as well!) is an unmistakable echo of the following rather famous speech by Hamlet, which has also served as the basis of the title of a rather famous _movie_ by Alfred Hitchcock:

"I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw."

So we have north (twice) and west together in that one marvelous compound word. PLUS.....two other wonderful parts of JA's elaborate little word game:

(a) a synonym for "mad" is "angry", as in North _anger_ Abbey; and

(b) JA's famous April Fool's Day, 1809 letter to Crosby demanding the return of the manuscript of _Susan_ (later, of course, retitled Northanger Abbey!) was signed by JA under the pseudonym "Mrs. Ashton Dennis" which is abbreviated as M.A.D.----as in JA being, like a forerunner of Howard Beale, "_mad_ as hell and not going to take it any more (!) " in terms of a publisher sitting on that manuscript for nearly a decade without publishing it!

Think I'm being too clever by half, and projecting my own overactive paranomosiac imagination in a "direction" JA herself never intended or imagined, in claiming that Northanger Abbey stands for Westminster Abbey?

Well, then consider next my _second_ reason, which is that, as Terry Robinson pointed out in a 2009 article, _Henry_ VIII and three of his six queens who had Christian names which were variants on _Catherine_ , were very likely sources for the names of Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland, and these real life regal personages were, as we all know, all rather closely associated with Westminster Abbey!

But my third reason which I disclosed in Portland is my personal favorite---I came across a remarkable factoid in 2009, which is that in Westminster Abbey there are two memorials hanging side by side on the wall in a rarely viewed nave in the Abbey, which were erected there by a grieving middle aged husband who had "murdered" not one but "two" much younger wives, via death in childbirth. And these "awful memorials".....

["...With all the chances against her of house, hall, place, park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an abbey, and she was to be its inhabitant. Its long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun...."]

.....were, I claim viewed by Jane Austen herself during a visit to Westminster Abbey. And the reason I am so certain of this is that the gentleman involved was a very famous fellow in his day (the latter part of the 17th century), and his name just happened to be Samuel _Morland_! And these memorials were intentionally echoed by JA when she described General Tilney's great grief over the death of Mrs. Tilney, whom I have argued is the symbol of all the English wives who died in childbirth.

And you've probably figured out that the images of those memorials are what you see at the top of this post!

And so I believe I've made a pretty good case that I am not "mad", but have demonstrated that a portraitist celebrating JA's career as an author would have had these three very good reasons, at the very least, to include a view of Westminster Abbey in the background.

Cheers, ARNIE

Jane Austen & SEX

2012-01-05T10:29:00.002-05:00

In Austen L today, Nancy Mayer disagreed with an interpretation of mine, and said that HER Jane Austen "wasn't that into salacious subjects. That she could be bawdy is evidenced by Mrs. Jennings. No intelligent female who grew up in a parsonage could be ignorant about the many ways in which men and women could sin. She also read French novels . We do not know exactly what else she read though some have offered suggestions of enough books to equal EveryMan's library or the Great Books courses. However, we do know that she had access to more books than most gently bred ladies could claim, That doesn't mean she was salacious. Just because I don't think Austen wasn't salacious or obsessed with sex, doesn't mean I consider her just sweet tea drinking Aunt Jane. The two are not always linked."

I responded as follows:

Nancy, while I completely disagree with your opinions, I believe I understand your position perfectly well. However, over the years and our countless online exchanges on this delicate topic of Jane Austen and sex, you have repeatedly shown that you make the same unjustified assumptions about my position, and that you don't really understand mine. I know you do this in good faith, and with no ill intent whatsoever, and I imagine that you speak for many who read my comments about this topic. So I will make this post just about clarifying the essence of my position about Jane Austen& sex, to the best of my ability, so that there will be no further confusion between us.

I have _never_ said, or suggested, that Jane Austen was "salacious" or "obsessed with sex". That is your characterization. What I have said, repeatedly, however, is that the thematic core of her shadow stories is female _sexuality_--i.e., Jane Austen was deeply appalled that female sexuality was handled by society in the following very important ways:

1. single gentlewomen were under constant threat of sexual predation, particularly when women were denied the kind of sexual education that would enable them to recognize predators, but also to recognize their own vulnerability to a man who would manipulate her so as to use her heart to get to her body;

2. married gentlewomen ran a perpetual gauntlet of serial pregnancy and childbirth;

3. cynical marriage customs, practices, and laws that exerted enormous pressure on gentlewomen to marry without love, in desperate search of a secure home where they would at least not be subject to predation or living in poverty;

4. there was a grotesquely hypocritical and one-sided gender double standard vis a vis sexual behavior, where a woman's sexual reputation was incredibly fragile, subject to permanent ruin at the drop of a petticoat, while a man's was made of Teflon, always winked away;

5. the literary reputation of a male author (like Shakespeare) who frequently indulged in veiled sexual innuendo was not in any way damaged thereby, whereas when a woman author (like Jane Austen) who frequently indulged in veiled sexual innuendo, raised all sorts of horrified eyebrows;

6. where alternative sexualities such as gay or lesbian orientations were treated barbarically with a primitive Taliban-like ferocity; and

The female body was, therefore, the battleground of a war of the sexes that, from the female point of view, was not very "merry" at all, because women were forced to fight it with both hands tied behind their backs!

Therefore, I claim that Jane Austen, in embedding an enormous quantity of subliminal sexual content in her novels, was demonstrating her acute feminist consciousness, and also her extraordinarily witty and profound sense of humor. Because a crucial part of her message was _also_ a meta-message---i.e., that the first act in the direction toward leveling the playing field was to assert the right of women to engage in sexual wittiness--to write sexually suggestive material like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cleland, or Sheridan--which was both serious and funny at the same time, and not be treated as a pariah for it.

For JA to have written a dull, solemn sermon bewailing all of the above six great wrongs I outlined above would have been utterly contrary to JA's own witty, clever, profound, metaphorically rich play of mind. She was a jokester and a punster by nature, but she also was a crusader, in her own subliminal way.

So, for example, having Jane Fairfax say "It must be born(e) some time or other, and it may as well be now", with the double entendre of "borne" with "born", is the masterful production of a genius of deliberately ambiguous and tactful expression. JA would never be so obvious or vulgar, as to be explicit in pointing to Jane's imminent childbirth.

And having Mary Crawford wink about "rears and vices" is not about salaciousness--Mary is JA's mouthpiece, where JA went to the very edge of what she could get away with, in terms of exposing male hypocrisy about sexuality. Mary is not just making a random joke about anal sex in the British Navy, she is giving Fanny a hint that Fanny does not take--which is to warn Fanny that Henry's interest in William Price's promotion has its "price", and that is the _sexual_ price that William, a man from the lower social class, must pay to Henry, a man of privilege, in order to advance in the Navy.

And the following are a few examples of posts at my blog where I explore the intricacies of JA's sexual innuendoes, and show them to be intensely thematic and intellectually challenging, as well as very witty and funny:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2009/08/rears-and-vices-redux.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/11/jane-austens-great-chasms-and-dirty.html

There is no salaciousness or obsession in any of this--this is JA the Audenesque social observer, objectively depicting the enormous and pervasive influence of sex on every aspect of life in her superficially and hypocritically prim world.

I hope that helps to clarify why I write so often about Jane Austen's sexual innuendoes.

Cheers, ARNIE

My review of Paula Byrne's BBC program "Jane Austen: The Unseen Portrait"

2012-01-03T13:54:00.003-05:00

At YouTube, the full program! (at least for now):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeV_4PthLtc

Short answer: WATCH IT!

My longer take:

The show repeatedly makes a very big deal about knowing what Jane Austen's face really looked like, which is not surprising in a show written to be shown to a wide, mostly non-Janeite audience. It was distracting, but not a problem, because there was a great deal of substance presented in a lucid flow of information.

The details of the investigation are spell-binding to watch.

I 1000% agree with Byrne, Claudia Johnson, and others quoted in the program, that JA was intensely proud of her own status as an author, and she would have wanted to have herself portrayed in this way. It's amazing that this is even a question, but then 200 years of deliberately misleading propaganda is hard to defeat--I hope this portrait will pave the way for that process to accelerate.

Byrne makes the same point I've made many times about JA at the time she was getting Emma published--how it never entered her head that she'd be dead within 2 years. This portrait was made at a moment when JA felt she had climbed within sight of the top of the literary mountain.

I didn't know that "Chute" was pronounced "CHOOT", I thought it was pronounced "SHOOT", as in "Chutes and Ladders".

I just read a tweet by Paula Byrne in which she hopes she has received a lead as to the provenance of the portrait via the name "Helen Carruthers", a governess. I think that is going to go somewhere interesting very quickly.

Whoever said that Deirdre Le Faye was misrepresented in the program is way offbase. Le Faye is definitively herself in the program--completely wrong, completely stubborn in holding to her negative response. I saw her say the same kind of thing a dozen times at the Chawton House Conference. Huge kudos to Sutherland, Johnson and Byrne that they did not in any way accede to Le Faye's ostrichism, but stuck to their guns, and pointed out the absurdity of Le Faye's lame criticisms---just watch for yourselves, you will see this happening.

It still doesn't prove that the portrait is actually one done of Jane Austen by Eliza Chute, but there's a LOT of smoke in the air, and I have hopes that the fire will be discovered soon.

Cheers, ARNIE

The CODE'S "The Thing" in Analyze This....and in Jane Austen!

2012-01-03T11:51:00.001-05:00

Nancy Mayer wrote the following skeptical comment about claims by myself and others about the coded meaning of the word "beau" as used by Nancy Steele in Sense & Sensibility:

"As usual, assumptions made and presented as absolutes irritate me. We need at least some proof that anyone used the word beau at that time to mean a homosexual. No one would have thought it meant a person was gay. Wellington was also called Beau. The famous ones were Beau Nash of bath, Beau Brummell, and Wellington. The title didn't gain common usage because of other qualities of Wellington. No such definition of Beau is given in the Dictionary of the Vulgar tongue. Can you find references to show that someone Austen would have been acquainted with used the word beau to mean a homosexual? I don't much beleive in authors writing in a code only understood by one or two people. I admit that I generally don't go along with all the supposedly sexual connotations given to Austen's words. Not sure I would like an author with such a mind. There is something wrong with such an obsession with scatological details. However, that is just part of my dissatisfaction with some of the wide claims being made. One has to show that such a use was in circulation in large enough circles so that more than 2 people would be in on the joke."

Nancy, I was thinking about what you wrote, above, last night, and I realized that there was a much more important point about Jane Austen's writing, than whether or not there was a Regency Era subcultural slang usage of "beau" to refer to a gay or bisexual man. In fact, I will argue the opposite, i.e., that for Nancy Steele to have used a term for a gay man that was universally recognized would have defeated her (and Jane Austen's) purpose!

My Subject Line is the clue, as I begin with the following memorably hilarious dialog from the film Analyze This:

BEN [Billy Crystal's character]: ...As [the mob boss, Robert De Niro's character's] consigliere, I'm intimately involved in all aspects of the family business and I'm prepared to speak for Mr. Vitti on all matters.
SINDONE: Okay, Doctor, then let's get down to business. Everybody knows there's been this thing between me and Paul Vitti for a long time.
BEN: Which thing are you talking about? The first thing or the second thing?
SINDONE: What second thing? I only know one thing.
BEN: Well, I don't see how we can discuss the first thing without bringing up the second thing. Didn't you talk to the guy? (He tugs meaningfully on his earlobe)
SINDONE: What guy?
BEN: The guy with the thing.
SINDONE: What thing? What the ____ are you talking about?
BEN: How should I know? You brought it up. (gestures helplessly to the others) This is the whole problem. You can't have an intelligent conversation with the man.

The joke in this passage is a variation on a cliche of modern Mafia movies and TV shows, from The Godfather to Goodfellas to The Sopranos, where the Mafiosi, who know they are being wiretapped or otherwise overheard by the FBI, speak in code, using some innocuous word to describe some criminal act or another--Analyze This is a very clever parody of such genre, and the above-excerpted _shtick_ (as they used to say in the Catskills) sends up that cliche.

And my point in all of this is that JA was exploiting this very same convention, to great but covert effect, in many passages in her novels, where characters are substituting one word or theme as code for another. I have mentioned some of these in the past, such as the conversation among Wentworth, Louisa and Henrietta when they talk about ships overtly, but are talking about women's bodies covertly...

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/05/dear-old-aspgo-to-bottom-together.html

...and that is a very relevant example for the usage of "beau" in S&S, because the code word used in substitution is metaphorically related to the concealed word. In the former case, ships have always been referred to as female, as in "thar she blows!", etc. And I suggest that what Nancy Steele is doing in her perseverations on "beau" is in exactly that same vein. What better code word for a gay man than a word that is associated with fastidious dressing, sexually active, _straight_ men? When delivered with appropriate nonverbals, such as significant smiles and winks, it conveys the intended meaning to those who are aware that we are in "code mode", while remaining safely unrecognized by those who are not aware.

And so it's clear to me that Nancy Steele is making a very big deal about the sexual orientation of various men in S&S, in ways that quite intriguing, but that are beyond the scope of this post.

I conclude this post with three other passages in JA's fiction, all from _Emma_, which came to my mind as soon as I started writing this post, and thought of bringing forward the above excerpt about "the thing", "the first thing", and "the second thing", from the screenplay of Analyze This:

First we have Mr. Woodhouse expressing his grave concerns about dancing with open windows:

"The doors of the two rooms were just opposite each other. "Might not they use both rooms, and dance across the passage?" It seemed the best scheme; and yet it was not so good but that many of them wanted a better. Emma said it would be awkward; Mrs. Weston was in distress about the supper; and Mr. Woodhouse opposed it earnestly, on the score of health. It made him so very unhappy, indeed, that it could not be persevered in. "Oh! no," said he; "it would be the extreme of imprudence. I could not bear it for Emma!—Emma is not strong. She would catch a dreadful cold. So would poor little Harriet. So you would all. Mrs. Weston, you would be quite laid up; do not let them talk of such A WILD THING. Pray do not let them talk of it. That young man (speaking lower) is very thoughtless. Do not tell his father, but that young man is not quite THE THING. He has been opening the doors very often this evening, and keeping them open very inconsiderately. He does not think of the draught. I do not mean to set you against him, but indeed he is not quite THE THING!" "

Second, we have Mrs. Elton expressing her grave concerns about Jane retrieving her mail all by herself:

" "You are extremely kind," said Jane; "but I cannot give up my early walk. I am advised to be out of doors as much as I can, I must walk somewhere, and the post-office is an object; and upon my word, I have scarcely ever had a bad morning before."
[Mrs. Elton] "My dear Jane, say no more about it. THE THING is determined, that is (laughing affectedly) as far as I can presume to determine any thing without the concurrence of my lord and master. You know, Mrs. Weston, you and I must be cautious how we express ourselves. But I do flatter myself, my dear Jane, that my influence is not entirely worn out. If I meet with no insuperable difficulties therefore, consider that point as settled." "

And third and last, we have Mrs. Elton again, expressing her decided opinions about coming on donkeys (so to speak) in al fresco outings:

""I wish we had a donkey. THE THING would be for us all to come on donkeys, Jane, Miss Bates, and me—and my caro sposo walking by. I really must talk to him about purchasing a donkey. In a country life I conceive it to be a sort of necessary; for, let a woman have ever so many resources, it is not possible for her to be always shut up at home;—and very long walks, you know—in summer there is dust, and in winter there is dirt.""

In each of these cases, I suggest we have hinting and suggestion of some unspoken (or unspeakable) subject coded generically as "the thing".

And that's (only a small part of) why I entitled my subject line, "the _code's_ the thing not only in Analyze This but also in Jane Austen's writing!

Cheers, ARNIE

Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style: Jane Austen's Indirect Boasting in Pride & Prejudice and in her famous epigram about it

2012-01-02T12:24:00.002-05:00

Apropos Diane Reynolds' having brought forward D.A. Miller's book on JA's writing style, and our focus on the word "beau" in S&S, it was suggested in another online Austen venue that the word "beau" was not understood by everyone in JA's era to be code for "gay". I responded as follows:

Why does it have to be been either universally understood to mean gay, or universally understood to mean something else? That sort of sharp dichotomy might be a necessity in computer programming, where clarity is paramount, but in human language, _especially_ slang, and even more especially, _sexual_ slang, what we find instead is a great of fluidity and ambiguity of meaning in words. And so, in such a chaotic linguistic environment, at any given moment during the Regency Era, I would guess that a linguist would have found that there was a whole spectrum of response to the word "beau", ranging from people who were certain it only meant "gay", to other people equally certain it only meant "fastidious in dress", to others who had never heard the word, to others (which last group clearly included JA herself) who understood that the word meant different things to different people in different contexts. And I suggest that JA was exactly the kind of writer who reveled in that zone of ambiguity, and seized the opportunity it presented, because it allowed her to convey multiple meanings using a single word, and it allowed her to replicate the ambiguity of actual moment-to-moment lived experience in society. And she had become, by her mid thirties, a master of this technique, in full command of the possibilities, an imaginist drunk on words, and yet--wonderful paradox of her genius!-- sober enough to control them.

The reason "first impressions" can be so misleading, is that so much of what we see in the world of people is ambiguous--not just the definitions of words, but also the motivations and intentions that people conceal from each other, and even from themselves. Life is ambiguous in every way, as philosophers, moralists, and authors have all long known.

And the key point with the word "beau" in S&S is how often it is repeated by Nancy Steele. Yes, we can understand that as JA creating a comic effect, by a stupid character engaging in a stupid repetition of a pet word. But in DA Miller's framework, there is something rather crude about that kind of humor, it does seem beneath a consummate, tasteful artist like JA to go for such a cheap laugh. That repetition becomes much more interesting, though, when we think about it as a way JA makes certain that her readers will not glide by this particular word "beau" without noticing its prominence in the text. This is a species of authorial economy that would do Mrs. Norris proud, squeezing maximum literary benefit out of the fewest words.

Which is partly why the world of P&P seems so incredibly complex and mutifarious, despite the fact that it is a _much_ shorter novel than "the Big Three"---S&S, MP & Emma. When JA talked about lopping and cropping P&P, she was, I think, playfully yet seriously making an indirect boast---she knew she had performed a miracle of condensation and compression in her editing of P&P to that much shorter length, and she was justly proud of her achievement. And the key to that complexity is the ambiguity---which is why JA added this famous caveat to that indirect boast:

"...a 'said he' or a 'said she' would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear--but 'I do not write for such dull Elves As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.'"

So, to apply the above dictum to S&S, she is saying that she could have clarified that she meant "beaux" to refer to fastidious but hetero dressers, or to gay men, but she preferred _not_ to "make the Dialogue more immediately clear", because she was writing for readers who would enjoy exercising some ingenuity in sorting out what that ambiguity might mean.

And, now that I think about it, I think JA was also playing with this very same indirect boast in the following passage where she allows Darcy to define.....an indirect boast, and which, I suggest to you, not only works in the wonderful repartee of the ensemble of characters gathered in the Netherfield salon, but also works as a sly meditation by JA on her own authorial artistry!:

[Caroline] "...But do you always write such charming long letters to [Georgiana], Mr. Darcy?"

[Translation: "long letters" is a nice metaphor for a novel!]

[Darcy] "They are generally long; but whether always charming it is not for me to determine."

[Translation: JA playfully not wishing to claim that her novels--her "darling children"--are charming, realizing that this determination is for her readers]

[Caroline] "It is a rule with me, that a person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill."

[Translation: Very sly self-compliment, especially given that P&P is _not_ as long a "letter" as it was before she lopped and cropped.]

[Bingley] "That will not do for a compliment to Darcy, Caroline," cried her brother, "because he does /not/ write with ease. He studies too much for words of four syllables. Do not you, Darcy?"

[Translation: Just as some of her early readers complained about JA's ambiguous pronomial references, I am certain that others were intimidated by her amazingly diverse vocabulary, which, as all Janeites know, included _many_ words of four syllables!]

[Darcy] "My style of writing is very different from yours."

[Translation: Notice that we are now _explicitly_ into D.A. Miller's zone of inquiry, that of writing _style_!]

"Oh!" cried Miss Bingley, "Charles writes in the most careless way imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the rest."

[Translation: And here is a description of the careless writer---and I am reminded by this of the readiness so many Janeites show to be willing to dismiss anomalous passages in JA's novels as the result of carelessness!]

"My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them—by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."

[Translation: This is the very antithesis of JA as a writer--she found a way to channel her abundant flow of ideas, so that they always conveyed a wealth of ideas to her readers!]

"Your humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."

"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."

"And which of the two do you call /my/ little recent piece of modesty?"

"The indirect boast; for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting. The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.

[Translation: As I said at the start of my quoting of this passage, I think this is JA making a very indirect boast about the perfection of her own performance in intentionally leaving many apparent defects in her writing, which must be understood by the reader to be intentional, in order to realize that they are clues to alternative meanings which are "highly interesting"!]

Cheers, ARNIE

================================================================
Austen-l Archives: http://list2.mcgill.ca/archives/austen-l.html

Part 1.2
Subject:
JA, or the Secret of Style: JA's Indirect Boasting in P&P and in her famous epigram about it
From:
Arnie Perlstein
Date:
Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:23:53 -0500
To:
AUSTEN-L

Apropos Diane's having brought forward D.A. Miller's book on JA's writing style, and our focus on the word "beau" in S&S, it was suggested in another online Austen venue that the word "beau" was not understood by everyone in JA's era to be code for "gay". I responded as follows:

Why does it have to be been either universally understood to mean gay, or universally understood to mean something else? That sort of sharp dichotomy might be a necessity in computer programming, where clarity is paramount, but in human language, _especially_ slang, and even more especially, _sexual_ slang, what we find instead is a great of fluidity and ambiguity of meaning in words. And so, in such a chaotic linguistic environment, at any given moment during the Regency Era, I would guess that a linguist would have found that there was a whole spectrum of response to the word "beau", ranging from people who were certain it only meant "gay", to other people equally certain it only meant "fastidious in dress", to others who had never heard the word, to others (which last group clearly included JA herself) who understood that the word meant different things to different people in different contexts. And I suggest that JA was exactly the kind of writer who reveled in that zone of ambiguity, and seized the opportunity it presented, because it allowed her to convey multiple meanings using a single word, and it allowed her to replicate the ambiguity of actual moment-to-moment lived experience in society. And she had become, by her mid thirties, a master of this technique, in full command of the possibilities, an imaginist drunk on words, and yet--wonderful paradox of her genius!-- sober enough to control them.

The reason "first impressions" can be so misleading, is that so much of what we see in the world of people is ambiguous--not just the definitions of words, but also the motivations and intentions that people conceal from each other, and even from themselves. Life is ambiguous in every way, as philosophers, moralists, and authors have all long known.

And the key point with the word "beau" in S&S is how often it is repeated by Nancy Steele. Yes, we can understand that as JA creating a comic effect, by a stupid character engaging in a stupid repetition of a pet word. But in DA Miller's framework, there is something rather crude about that kind of humor, it does seem beneath a consummate, tasteful artist like JA to go for such a cheap laugh. That repetition becomes much more interesting, though, when we think about it as a way JA makes certain that her readers will not glide by this particular word "beau" without noticing its prominence in the text. This is a species of authorial economy that would do Mrs. Norris proud, squeezing maximum literary benefit out of the fewest words.

Which is partly why the world of P&P seems so incredibly complex and mutifarious, despite the fact that it is a _much_ shorter novel than "the Big Three"---S&S, MP & Emma. When JA talked about lopping and cropping P&P, she was, I think, playfully yet seriously making an indirect boast---she knew she had performed a miracle of condensation and compression in her editing of P&P to that much shorter length, and she was justly proud of her achievement. And the key to that complexity is the ambiguity---which is why JA added this famous caveat to that indirect boast:

"...a 'said he' or a 'said she' would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear--but 'I do not write for such dull Elves As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.'"

So, to apply the above dictum to S&S, she is saying that she could have clarified that she meant "beaux" to refer to fastidious but hetero dressers, or to gay men, but she preferred _not_ to "make the Dialogue more immediately clear", because she was writing for readers who would enjoy exercising some ingenuity in sorting out what that ambiguity might mean.

And, now that I think about it, I think JA was also playing with this very same indirect boast in the following passage where she allows Darcy to define.....an indirect boast, and which, I suggest to you, not only works in the wonderful repartee of the ensemble of characters gathered in the Netherfield salon, but also works as a sly meditation by JA on her own authorial artistry!:

[Caroline] "...But do you always write such charming long letters to [Georgiana], Mr. Darcy?"

[Translation: "long letters" is a nice metaphor for a novel!]

[Darcy] "They are generally long; but whether always charming it is not for me to determine."

[Translation: JA playfully not wishing to claim that her novels--her "darling children"--are charming, realizing that this determination is for her readers]

[Caroline] "It is a rule with me, that a person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill."

[Translation: Very sly self-compliment, especially given that P&P is _not_ as long a "letter" as it was before she lopped and cropped.]

[Bingley] "That will not do for a compliment to Darcy, Caroline," cried her brother, "because he does /not/ write with ease. He studies too much for words of four syllables. Do not you, Darcy?"

[Translation: Just as some of her early readers complained about JA's ambiguous pronomial references, I am certain that others were intimidated by her amazingly diverse vocabulary, which, as all Janeites know, included _many_ words of four syllables!]

[Darcy] "My style of writing is very different from yours."

[Translation: Notice that we are now _explicitly_ into D.A. Miller's zone of inquiry, that of writing _style_!]

"Oh!" cried Miss Bingley, "Charles writes in the most careless way imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the rest."

[Translation: And here is a description of the careless writer---and I am reminded by this of the readiness so many Janeites show to be willing to dismiss anomalous passages in JA's novels as the result of carelessness!]

"My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them—by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."

[Translation: This is the very antithesis of JA as a writer--she found a way to channel her abundant flow of ideas, so that they always conveyed a wealth of ideas to her readers!]

"Your humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."

"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."

"And which of the two do you call /my/ little recent piece of modesty?"

"The indirect boast; for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting. The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.

[Translation: As I said at the start of my quoting of this passage, I think this is JA making a very indirect boast about the perfection of her own performance in intentionally leaving many apparent defects in her writing, which must be understood by the reader to be intentional, in order to realize that they are clues to alternative meanings which are "highly interesting"!]

Cheers, ARNIE

Lucy Ferrars (Lucifer) Uses The Devil's Toothpick

2012-01-02T06:51:00.002-05:00

Diane Reynolds wrote the following in Austen L and Janeites yesterday, about the passage in D.A. Miller's 2003 book about Jane Austen's writing style, fittingly entitled The Secret of Style, when Miller interprets Robert Ferrars's fastidious shopping for toothpick cases in a London shop as code for his being gay:

"Miller brought my attention to two places in the Robert Ferrars "saga:" in the first, Miller emphasizes that Robert Ferrars bestows on Elinor and Marianne "three or four very broad stares." Miller interprets this as angering Elinor by reducing her to insignificance in merely staring at her and offering no other notice. However, I began to wonder why he would bestow as many as "three or four" stares. The three don't, at this point , know each other--why would RF look at the women so many times? Is there a suggestion that they are familiar to him? And if so, how? Miller also reads the astonishment at Lucy marrying RF as more than simply Elinor's surprise that Lucy had not married Edward. This lends credence to the idea that JA was knowingly painting RF as gay--not only does Elinor consider the match "one of the most extraordinary and unaccountable circumstances she has ever heard" and "beyond her comprehension to make out," but "unceasing and reasonable wonder" is the general consensus. Of course, these statements can all be read on several levels--the unceasing and reasonable wonder might just be at how someone of Lucy's status nabbed RF--but Miller makes a compelling case for an alternative reading. The above are some scattered thoughts--I am wondering if Jill H-S dealt with RF's sexuality at all? " END QUOTE

Diane, here is what Jill Heydt-Stevenson wrote at P. 53 on this very topic--despite her occasional lapses into turgid academic jargon, she gets to the point, and explores it, pretty well:

"...[Nancy Steele's] comment divulges that such 'beaux,' like the Elizas in the novel, seem to be cropping up everywhere. Miss Steele herself appears rather 'nasty' when she exclaims that married men cannot be 'beaux' because 'they have something else to do." This statement humiliates Lucy, since it introduces the salacious question of what that 'something else" might be, especially since, immediately following this, Mrs. Jennings and Sir John Middleton make 'countless jokes' about the letter "f". (125).
Austen further parodies both [Steele] sisters: for the man-hungry Miss Steele to be preoccupied with beaux is nonsensical since they were associated with effeminacy, and effeminacy with homosexuality. Lucy ironically, though she believes triumphantly, propels herself into a marriage with a fop: her future husband, Robert Ferrars, is the beau who takes 'a quarter of an hour" "examining and debating....over every toothpick case in the shop" (220). Obvious of everyone in the shop, he 'seemed rather to demand than express admiration." (221). Austen's tone takes on a campy nuance in describing Robert's theatricality: ventriloquizing through his shopping that this is "the last day on which his existence could be continued without the possession of the toothpick case" (221), "the puppyism of his manner" (221) impedes his ability to 'decid[e] on all the different horrors of the different toothpick cases presented to his inspection" (221). Partridge defines the word "puppyism" as "affectation or excessive care in costume or posture" (669). When he condescends to notice Elinor's and Marianne's features, he does so "impertinent[ly]" (221), asserting his masculine power over them while flashing effeminate traits, thereby trumping them as both a 'man" and a "woman". His affected femininity and male assertion of privilege illustrate Robert Stoller's argument that "one cannot be a male transvestite without knowing, loving, and magnificently expanding the importance of one's own phallus"...The 18th century audience would have identified the transvestite as a sodomite, whether he was or not. In presenting Robert as a fop, and then marrying him to Lucy, Austen in no way backs off addressing same sex love, but in fact makes a sly joke at the ambitious Lucy's expense, marrying her to a man who might be more interested in en than in 'conjugal duties'." END QUOTE

JHS might have derived her interpretation from Miller's book (published in 2003), and I just checked further in JHS's book and see that she did include in her Bibliography Miller's 1981 book, entitled Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. So she knew about his scholarship on JA, and therefore my guess is that JHS did also read Miller's 2003 book as well, including the passage about Robert Ferrars and his toothpick case, but simply forgot to acknowledge Miller for his priority on this interpretation about toothpicks and beaux.

But where Heydt-Stevenson (or Miller, for that matter) cannot think sufficiently outside the box to go, is to imagine what is obvious to me, i.e., that Lucy Steele is perfectly well aware of Robert Ferrars's sexual orientation, and that is precisely why she chose him in the first place! Her goal is not love, but to get to precisely the position of power within the very wealthy and influential Ferrars family that she set her sights on before the action of the novel has actually begun. Lucy is perfectly content to appear to be humiliated, as she knows what she has achieved for herself, and has demonstrated repeatedly that she could care less what some people think about her while she is getting there. Indeed, she has discovered the same kernel of wisdom that Miss Bates (and much later, Miss Marple) discovered---a position of _apparent_ weakness and humiliation is actually the _best_ position from which to operate covertly---like the spider-like Kaiser Soze in The Usual Suspects!

Exactly like her near-namesake, Charlotte Lucas (both not accidentally with last names beginning in "Luc-"), Lucy could care less which Ferrars son she winds up with, as long as it's the one who will inherit the family wealth.

And I will now unpack a key part of my additional interpretation of the symbolism of the toothpick, which I hinted at yesterday and also in my Subject Line for this post----i.e., Lucy Steele uses Robert and Edward Ferrars (_and_ her own sister) as her "toothpicks" to dislodge the wealth of the Ferrars family from between the teeth in the "jaws" of Mrs. Ferrars, jaws which have theretofore held both Edward and Robert firmly in their avaricious, vise-like grip!

Taking this piquant metaphor to its logical end, I further assert that Lucy discovers the perfect strategy to win the courtship game, which is to induce Mrs. Ferrars to do two things--to "expectorate" Edward into the "spittoon" of disinheritance, while at the same time carelessly unclenching her jaws, vesting in Robert free (and irrevocable) access to the family wealth---little realizing that Lucy already has swallowed Robert whole (metaphorically speaking), and that Robert---if Lucy allows him to survive, and not suffer an unfortunate "accident" or "fatal illness"----will be her creature, to forever do her bidding without realizing it, like a puppet on a string!

Or, to also pick up on Juliet McMaster's wonderful interpretation (expressed by her in the latest Persuasions Online)....

http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol32no1/mcmaster.html

...of Lucy and Elinor fighting a metaphorical "duel" over Edward, but to extend it in a direction Juliet did not contemplate, I would argue for the deliciously wicked symbolism of Lucy using sharp objects like needles and toothpicks to fight her own version of duels with both Mrs. Ferrars and Elinor, and ultimately prevailing against both!

There is a reason why her married name is "Lucy Ferrars" ==> "Lucifer" (as I discovered in 2005)---exactly like the Devil himself, she does not achieve her goals by her own direct action, but by taking advantage of the foibles and weaknesses of others, in order to get them to do her dirty work for her, leaving her influence invisible. She wants power, and it is perfectly clear by the end of the novel that she has achieved it, when she wraps Mrs. Ferrars around her little finger. It is easy for me to imagine the Ferrars family twenty years later, with Lucy firmly entrenched as the all-powerful Lady Catherine de Bourgh or Mrs. Churchill of the family, and perhaps having the satisfaction of promoting her own daughter's wealth and power, at the expense of any daughters of her "sister" Elinor!

Not bad for an uneducated country girl whose grammar and spelling leave a lot to be desired. But Jane Austen well understood that for women coming from such a background, nothing would be given to them, they had to grab what they could on their own resourcefulness.

And I say, what's wrong with that? JA may seem to most Janeite readers to be presenting Lucy as deserving to lose in these duels, but I think JA was saying, on a deeper level, "If the deck is stacked unfairly against women in every way, then all's fair in love and war, for women to level the playing field using their wits and ingenuity. " And one can hardly feel sorry for Mrs. Ferrars, or for Robert Ferrars, if they turn out to be flies caught in Lucy's intricate web!

Cheers, ARNIE

The Secret of....Robert Ferrars's toothpicks!

2012-01-01T12:38:00.002-05:00

Diane Reynolds started a new thread in Austen L and Janeites today about the 2003 book about Jane Austen by Miller entitled The Secret of Style:

[Diane] "In the first chapter, Miller engages in an extended discussion of Robert Ferrars and the toothpick case, which we recently covered on the lists, though I have entirely forgotten why we were talking about it."

Diane, Aside from my own joking response about a house of toothpicks last week.....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/search?q=toothpick

...what you're half-remembering is that the topic of Robert Ferrars's effeminacy came up last month during a discussion of "beaux" in S&S in Austen L. Miller's interpretation could not be more relevant to that discussion, thanks for bringing it forward now.

[Diane] "Miller, who begins his book with being a male reader of JA and the inherent alienation of that--and then of the attraction of JA to the gay reader--understands the toothpick case as almost too crude a symbol for
Austen of a homosexual man (RF) living outside of the economy of marriage and family that so dominates the novels. The toothpick case is perhaps the only piece of jewelry or ornament in any of the novels that isn't about cementing or signaling family or marital relationships. It's a bit of excess that underscores RF's "unheterosexual" status--perhaps a bit too crude for Austen and hence a "trace" of where author intrudes on Stylist."

I think Miller is being way too fastidious (a word that Bingley says to Darcy in a witty epigram, but that Elinor also says or thinks in relation to both Edward and Marianne, but not Robert!) in his insistence that Style not be "crude"--a point I will expand on before the end of this post, when I argue that Miller has missed the boat on JA's sly authorial gamesmanship.

I certainly agree with Miller's take on Robert Ferrars as gay, it fits Robert like one of the elegant gloves Robert would have bought in that same London shop----and JHS does indeed pick up on the gay subtext of "beaux"
and "toothpicks" on p. 53 in her book (perhaps she even got the idea from Miller, whose book came out several years before hers).

"Miller brought my attention to two places in the RF "saga:" in the first, Miller emphasizes that RF bestows on Elinor and Marianne "three or four very broad stares." Miller interprets this as angering Elinor by reducing her to insignificance in merely staring at her and offering no other notice. However, I began to wonder why he would bestow as many as "three or four" stares. The three don't, at this point , know each other--why would RF look at the women so many times? Is there a suggestion that they are familiar to him? And if so, how? Miller also reads the astonishment at Lucy marrying RF as more than simply Elinor's surprise that Lucy had not married Edward. This lends credence to the idea that JA was knowingly painting RF as gay--not only does Elinor consider the match "one of the most extraordinary and unaccountable circumstances she has ever heard" and "beyond her comprehension to make out," but "unceasing and reasonable wonder" is the general consensus. Of course, these statements can all be read on several levels--the unceasing and reasonable wonder might just be at how someone of Lucy's status nabbed RF--but Miller makes a compelling case for an alternative reading."

That is indeed excellent close reading, both with _and_ against the grain, by Miller. It is a great example of the doubleness of _all_ of JA's writing, not just that passage!

Apropos that doubleness, I actually think that the toothpick symbolism in S&S is an example of _tripleness_ in JA's writing, as I see an _additional_ very interesting symbolic level in regard to Robert Ferrars and his toothpicks, which I will address in my book. If Miller had picked up on that additional covert symbolism, he might have retracted his indictment of JA's "crudeness" in that toothpick symbolism, because that additional layer is extremely subtle, elegant, and hiding in plain sight--the very essence of JA's quicksilver mysterious Style!

Miller takes unusual risks in being so opinionated in his book, which I like a lot--no one will accuse him of being mealy-mouthed or overly careful in his aesthetic judgments, like so many scholarly books and articles written about Jane Austen, where the interpretation is ridiculously conservative, so much so that the most significant inferences raised by the discussion are left _unstated_, for fear, apparently, of "going too far"!

But when you take risks, as Miller did, sometimes you miss badly. That is what I recall from one other thing I recall from reading Miller's book a few years ago, i.e., he was_totally_ clueless about something he detected in the text of_Emma_ which he found very weird and odd, but ultimately concluded was just a mistake by Jane Austen, i.e., the fact that JA ends Chapter 20, and begins Chapter 21, with the same sentence, describing Emma's thoughts about Jane Fairfax:

"Emma could not forgive her."

Miller apparently never heard of an "anadiplosis", of which I think JA's repetition is an extension:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anadiplosis

I think it's entirely intentional on JA's part that she did this--as for what it means, well, that is not an easy question to answer--but it is a valid question that begs to be asked!

I am always amazed at how readily even close, astute readers of Jane Austen like Miller are ready to conclude that Jane Austen made a mistake when she does something in her writing that does not fit that reader's preconception of what JA would have done, instead of being ready to revise their preconception to fit the evidence in front of their eyes.

JA did not create Miss Bates as a veiled self portrait by accident---JA seduced her presumptuous readers into concluding she was less than she was, and left her deeper secrets to be decoded by those who operate on the principle that if it's there in her writing, it's there for a reason!

Cheers, ARNIE

P.S.: Did you ever wonder whether Anthony Trollope, the great Janeite, noticed that anadiplosis in _Emma_?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_You_Forgive_Her%3F

If he did--and I think his choosing to entitle the first of his many Palliser novels as "Can you Forgive her?" is a huge clue to that effect--then you may be prompted to realize that the heroine Glencora is in some ways strikingly reminiscent of Emma Woodhouse--and makes you wonder if Palliser is Mr. Knightley and Burgo is Frank Churchill!

The Three Faces of Jane: An Update....and A New Perspective!

2012-01-01T09:47:00.000-05:00

Nearly a month ago, when word of Paula Byrne bringing forward an alleged 1815 portrait of Jane Austen first spread like wildfire through the Austen online world, I expressed my strong skepticism here....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/12/three-faces-of-jane.html

From what Byrne said publicly in early December, in particular her totally unconvincing argument that imaginary portraits were an imaginary genre, I was not impressed at all, but, being the lawyer I am, I did add this caveat/hedge at the end of my negative assessment:

"So....unless Byrne has other ammunition in her gunbelt (such as, e.g., some scientific basis for dating the portrait with precision to 1815), I am 100% skeptical that this could be the real Jane Austen in that portrait!"

Well, I _still_ have not seen the BBC2 program in which Byrne fires the remainder of her ammunition, but now I have a very different, and much more favorable, point of view about Byrne's claims, now that I have just read about them in an excellent, detailed, yet not verbose, blog post by Kelly McDonald of the JASNA Vermont chapter here:

http://smithandgosling.wordpress.com/tag/madam-lefroy/

I urge you all to read that post!

So Eliza Chute (nee Smith) was the "bullet" that Byrne had been waiting to "fire" (and as per her comment on Kelly's post, this was apparently because of a very strong nondisclosure agreement she had to sign for the BBC, which makes perfect sense)!

Based on what I read in Kelly's blog post, I now find Byrne's argument _much_ more interesting!

I first became familiar with Kelly's blog seven months ago, in June, 2011, when I wrote a post in which I wrote a great deal about the very interesting Eliza (nee Smith) Chute, and her intriguing connection to Jane Austen:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/06/jane-austens-letter-23-heathcote-chute.html

In the above post, which I also urge you to read in full, I made the argument that Eliza Chute was just the kind of proto-feminist woman whom JA would have befriended, and I argued that the reference in JA's Letter 23 (dated 10/25-27/1800) to "Heathcote and Chute forever" was not about Eliza Chute's husband the MP, but was really a joking reference to Eliza Chute and her friend Mrs. Heathcote, and their "campaign" for women's rights, not in Parliament or in a court of law, but in the bedroom or the salon of the home, where the real action was! And I have since then found other evidence to support the "portrait" of Eliza Chute as a literate, articulate, forceful woman who would have been an ardent supporter of the covert radical feminism I claim is at the heart of Jane Austen's fiction.

So....in light of all _that_, plus all the details that I gleaned from Kelly's blog post, linked above--such as the view of that church from Eliza Chute's window, her skill at portraiture, and spelling "Austen" as "Austin", etc., I am now much more interested in this Byrne portrait as possibly being the work of Eliza Chute, and also being of Jane Austen herself. That it does not look at all like the Jane Austen we see in Cassandra's 1810 watercolor, well.....I don't know what to think about that.

And, again, at least now I can understand why Byrne had to save her big gun for the TV program itself--without Eliza Chute, Byrne's argument is essentially a house of cards. With it, however, it is a viable theory, because Eliza Chute is the "glue" that holds all those cards together and keeps them from collapsing in a heap!

Now I am listening, and I can't wait to watch the BBC show when it airs in the US, or when it gets onto the Internet somewhere that I can actually watch it, as I imagine it has even more tantalizing goodies that did not make it into Kelly's blog post.

Cheers,
ARNIE

Our crowd....and a fortunate woman indeed!

2011-12-31T08:58:00.002-05:00

Overnight, Diana Birchall wrote a short message in Janeites and Austen L which bore on the Amanda Vickery BBC special that just aired in England, also responded to my comments about Jane Austen's Letters 58 &59, vis a vis the death of her sister in law, Elizabeth Austen Knight in October 1808:

Diana: "Oh, you were in the video, Arnie!"

Yes, as an non-speaking "extra"! ;) Seeing the video reminded me how unhappy I was two minutes later when I did _not_ get to ask my question before the assembled throng---my unhappiness, however, was mostly done away with when I got to ask Andrew Davies a few questions one-on-one during the cocktail hour later on Saturday afternoon (which ended with that "Happy Trails" cowboy serenade that ends the BBC program). He was extremely patient, amiable, and available to everyone who wished to talk to him, I am sure every attendee agreed that it was worth every penny they paid him to be there!

Diana: "It went by too fast for me to be sure, but I do know the lady who is asking the question."

And I, too, recognized a few of the other "extras" who had their two seconds of fame like me, in addition, of course, to the "speaking parts" granted to Cheryl, and also to your old pal Janet.

Diana: "Yes, one of the nicest things for long-time Janeites, was spotting so many familiar friends in the crowd. It really is "our crowd." "

That's absolutely so, but isn't it fascinating that there is _another_ "our crowd", too, which you and I know in a different way--of course I refer to the many Janeites who have participated in these groups over the past decade. What is fascinating--but the BBC program of course did _not_ address this point---is how there is so little overlap between those two "crowds"--I can count on one hand the number of Janeites I know from _both_ the JASNA world and also from the online Janeite/Austen L world.

Diana: "And I couldn't agree with you more about Dr. Cheryl Kinney. She was a breath of fresh air in that video, wasn't she!"

She really could do professional comedy, she is so good! In fact, she really ought to think about developing a stand-up comedy routine about Jane Austen, with a focus on Cheryl's medical specialty, which is so uniquely focused on the same concerns that were central to JA--women's health, particularly sex, pregnancy, and childbirth. As you will verify, she had us all in stitches (ha ha) with her drolly Austenian ironic humor as she whipped through the various medical horrors that women of JA's era endured. I think the Beeb should give Cheryl a chance to strut her stuff, she sure has a great deal more of interest to say about Jane Austen than Amanda Vickery!

But on to your other, equally interesting topic:

Me, before, re Letters 58-59: "There's much more going there just under the surface that you are not taking into account, Diana. I believe JA had extremely mixed feelings about her sister in law Elizabeth Austen Knight."

Diana: "Yes, that's true. Her talking about her great worth has the sound of a person who's said a few uncharitable or spiteful things about the person when they were alive. "

Did you say a few _hundred_? ;) Remember, JA and CEA knew Elizabeth Austen Knight for nearly two decades--these women all progressed through the first 20 years of adult life in tandem---so there must have been countless occasions when Elizabeth in some way asserted her higher rank vis a vis one or more of the Austen women, or asserted her dominion over her husband's behavior vis a vis the Austen women. And CEA was the one, like Elinor, who had to shoosh JA, the Marianne of the story, to keep Marianne from reacting overtly to Elizabeth's slights.

I so often write about Mary Lloyd Austen as the real life source for Fanny Dashwood--- but I believe Elizabeth Austen Knight was almost as much of a source for Fanny as James's wife.

PLUS....I think Elizabeth was the primary real life source for Mrs. Churchill, as I explained about the dramatic consequences of Elizabeth's sudden death a few months ago:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/10/wicked-wicked-wicked-wickedly-satirical.html

The upwelling of a massive tsunami of pent-up feelings in Letters 58 & 59 is totally understandable when we realize that Elizabeth's sudden death was _the_ turning point of JA's writing career---it was only because of Elizabeth's death that the Austen women got to move to Chawton, and we all know what effect that move had on JA's writing career, don't we? And what probably doubled the emotional turmoil was the roller-coaster aspect of Elizabeth's final month of life--we see from only a few letters earlier that there was fear for Elizabeth's life a few weeks earlier, fear which evaporated when she seemed to suddenly and totally recover, and delivered a healthy baby. This series of reversals of medical fortune must have raised a lot of very complicated feelings in JA over the entire month of October, 1808, which I think accounts for the wild rhetorical and imaginative content of these late 1808 letters--including the Big Bad Wolf and the 3 Pigs fantasy.

Want to get shivers? Really think about what you've just read in Letters 58-59, as you read the following passage in _Emma_ :

"The following day brought news from Richmond to throw every thing else into the background. An express arrived at Randalls to announce the death of Mrs. Churchill! Though her nephew had had no particular reason to hasten back on her account, she had not lived above six-and-thirty hours after his return. A sudden seizure of a different nature from any thing foreboded by her general state, had carried her off after a short struggle. The great Mrs. Churchill was no more. It was felt as such things must be felt. Every body had a degree of gravity and sorrow; tenderness towards the departed, solicitude for the surviving friends; and, in a reasonable time, curiosity to know where she would be buried. Goldsmith tells us, that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill-fame. Mrs. Churchill, after being disliked at least twenty-five years, was now spoken of with compassionate allowances. In one point she was fully justified. She had never been admitted before to be seriously ill. The event acquitted her of all the fancifulness, and all the selfishness of imaginary complaints."

What, we wonder, did Edward Austen Knight think about the above passage when he read it in _Emma_ 7 years after his wife's death? I wonder if his famous complaint about the apples blooming out of season was actually a coded reference to the way JA portrayed his wife's final pregnancy in _Emma_?

It was an Austenian irony of tsunamic proportions that Elizabeth's death in the aftermath of her dozenth (that is a word, I just checked!) confinement was the necessary precondition to JA's eventual delivery of her _own_ half dozen "children"! I can readily imagine Edward reading that passage in _Emma_ and then paraphrasing Mr. Knightley thusly:

"Jane Austen is, indeed, the favourite of fortune. Every thing turns out for her good.—She is born into a literary family, with connections to a great family with a great estate in Kent, cannot even weary her indulgent brothers by negligent and even malicious treatment in her spoken and written words—and had she and all her family sought round the world for a perfect place to live for him, they could not have found one superior to Chawton Cottage.—Her sister in law is in the way.—Her sister in law dies.—She has only to speak.—Her brothers are eager to promote her happiness.—She had used every body ill—and they are all delighted to forgive her.—She is a fortunate woman indeed!"

Of course, that is what Edward might have said in early 1816, when JA was on top of the world, with a long illustrious literary career stretching out before her---but JA turned out to be the bastard of fortune--she was tempted with the prospect of glory, but, like Moses, she never did get to cross over into the Promised Land of national fame while she was alive---but, just as Moses's eternal fame was established a millenium after _his_ death, so, too, has JA's eternal fame been established after "only" two centuries! ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

“We neither of us perform to strangers": The Dry Wit of Mr. Darcy Amazes....the Attentive Connoisseur?

2011-12-30T23:27:00.002-05:00

In the 1997 Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, Rachel Brownstein, beginning at p. 51, discusses Lizzy's teasing of Darcy:

"When Elizabeth, dancing with the silent, awkward Darcy, teases him in Henry Tilney's engaging, disengaged manner ("It is _your_ turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy.--_I_ talked about the dance, and _you_ ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the room, or the number of couples.'), she jokes that they are both 'unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.'

Brownstein goes on to point out that "Mr. Bennet and his favorite daughter do not do all the laughing in this comic novel," as Miss Bingley and Lydia Bennet also dearly enjoy a laugh, in ways that are not so different from Lizzy's laughter. However unlike _their unsavory laughter, Elizabeth is not moved to laughter by gross deviations from arbitrary standards or norms."

Later still, Brownstein goes on to note that although Lizzy enjoys laughing at Darcy in the first half of the novel, by the end "she remembered that he had yet to learn to be laught at, and it was rather too early to begin."

That's all fine, no one would dispute any of those points, but what is curious to me is that there is not a single word in Brownstein's entire essay about _Darcy_ laughing or having a sense of humor. And I have found that Brownstein is pretty typical of Austen scholars in this regard, in giving Darcy no credit for having a sense of humor, either on the giving or the receiving end. Even John Wiltshire, who spoke at the Chawton House conference in July 2009 on the subject of "Mr. Darcy's
Smiles" [which he followed up on with an essay of that title in a collection edited by David Monaghan]--a title which gave promise of some insight into Darcy's sense of humor---does _not_ given even a whiff of a suggestion that Darcy's smiles are evidence of his being a funny guy, either on the giving or the receiving end.

How many Janeites share that opinion with Brownstein and Wiltshire? I suspect, most. But I'd like to suggest that any such opinion is deeply misguided, because it fails to account for one of the many consequences of having so much of the narration in P&P filtered through the often clueless mind of Elizabeth Bennet--I will argue, below, that Darcy's sense of humor is actually _too_ subtle for Lizzy to catch when _he_ is laughing at _her_! I.e., while she has correctly described herself as
wishing to amaze the whole room with "eclat", she has entirely missed the thrust of Darcy's very different--indeed, antithetical--kind of sense of humor, which begins and ends with _understatement_.

What prompted me to articulate this argument was rereading the following exchange in Ch. 17 of P&P, which occurs only a half dozen lines after the scene described by Brownstein, above. Lizzy continues to press her teasing, merry attack on what she perceives to be Darcy's Achilles heel-- his sour, humorless egotism:

[Lizzy] "I do not think we were speaking at all. Sir William could not have interrupted two people in the room who had less to say for themselves. We have tried two or three subjects already without success, and what we are to talk of next I cannot imagine."

"What think you of books?" said [Darcy], smiling.

"Books—oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings."

"I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be no want of subject. We may compare our different opinions."

"No—I cannot talk of books in a ball-room; my head is always full of something else."

So where is the wit in Darcy's repartee? I claim that the key clue is that word "smiling", which alerts us to ask ourselves the question that it never occurs to Lizzy to ask herself--why does Darcy suddenly launch into an apparent non sequitur about books, and why does he smile as he asks this question?

The answer should be clear if you reflect back on the following famous conversation at Netherfield not so very long before, in Chapter 8:

"On entering the drawing-room [Elizabeth] found the whole party at loo, and was immediately invited to join them; but suspecting them to be playing high she declined it, and making her sister the excuse, said she would amuse herself for the short time she could stay below, with a book. Mr. Hurst looked at her with astonishment.

"Do you prefer reading to cards?" said he; "that is rather singular."

"Miss Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, "despises cards. She is a great reader, and has no pleasure in anything else."

"I deserve neither such praise nor such censure," cried Elizabeth; "I am not a great reader, and I have pleasure in many things."

The conversation eventually turns to the topic of female accomplishment, and Darcy's opinion about extensive reading as a crucial component thereof, which leads to this outcome:

[Lizzy] "I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any."

[Darcy] "Are you so severe upon your own sex as to doubt the possibility of all this?"

[Lizzy] "I never saw such a woman. I never saw such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe united."

I say that Darcy, very quick on his feet, verbally as well as in dance steps, has decided that one good turn deserves another, and so he turns the teasing tables on Elizabeth, and surprises her with a sudden thrust at _her_ weak point--her discomfort with not being as well read as the truly accomplished woman of Darcy's dreams. In Chapter 8, she said she never saw such a woman, but I think she's been thinking about Darcy's setting the bar so high, and worrying that she does not quite make the cut. After all, she knows she's a country girl, who's never had any formal education, and quick witted and clever as she is, she has never encountered such a formidable sparring partner as Darcy. So, on some level, her attack on Darcy is motivated as much by her own feelings of cultural inferiority, which she keeps trying to stuff down, as by her love of laughing at pretension. The young lady doth protest too much how much fun she's having making fun of Darcy--and I think Darcy's thrust shows that he has grasped this vulnerability on Lizzy's part, and he has
found a way to give as good as he gets.

And so here, seemingly out of the blue, is Darcy laughing at Lizzy---and she doesn't even (consciously) realize it! And, as I suggested above, because she does not realize it, it becomes almost invisible to the reader as well---unless, that is, we pay attention to JA's subtle cues, like that smile of Darcy's that Wiltshire did not decipher.

And in hindsight, this reminds me of one of the many subtle beauties of Colin Firth's portrayal of Darcy---which was largely lacking in David Rintoul's portrayal---i.e., that little twinkle in the eye that tells you that Darcy is not _quite_ as Aspergery as his words might literally suggest. It is not only Caroline Bingley, the desperate flatterer, who finds humor in Darcy's bon mot about Mrs. Bennet as a wit, we do as well.

But Darcy's disingenuous inquiry about Lizzy's attitude toward books shows he is capable of much more subtle, sophisticated understated wit, which is not intended to amaze the room, but achieves its goal if it brings a wry smile to the face of the attentive connoisseur.

In conclusion, then, Elizabeth Bennet is, along with Beatrice, at the top of the comic pantheon of female humor. Darcy, I claim, above, has been vastly underrated for his own subtle sense of humor. And I finish by pointing out the obvious--both Lizzy and Darcy are fictional creatures born out of the imagination of the same awesome comic genius, who could, in this one novel alone, give us three such high-powered examples of wit--Mr. Bennet, Lizzy, and Mr. Darcy, each very different,
but all reflecting the Protean sense of humor of Jane Austen herself.

Cheers, ARNIE

Vickery's The Many Lovers of Jane Austen

2011-12-30T11:14:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, Diana Birchall posted the following link for the BBC documentary, The Many Lovers of Jane Austen, which has not been shown in the US, but can be seen here:

http://www.videozer.com/video/R5mHMAS?mid=56427

I replied thusly:

Thanks, Diana! I watched it with my father (who had great trouble, as usual, with understanding the English accents), and I have the following comments about it:

1. Overall, the program had high entertainment value, but was mixed to unimpressive in terms of the intelligence of the commentary about Jane Austen. For purposes of giving Jane Austen wider exposure in the culture, I would say the program was a great success, it will bring in many new readers for Jane Austen, and that is always a good thing.

2. Vickery's intent clearly was to try to get past "dear sweet Aunt Jane", and that of course is a very good intention, but, not surprising, there was often an uncritical acceptance of the standard orthodoxy about Jane Austen. To give one of several examples, a scholar named Lucasta Miller missed the boat entirely, by voicing the usual platitudes about Charlotte Bronte finding JA passionless---Vickery was not about to interview an iconoclast like Jocelyn Harris (forget about her reading _my_ blog!) to air a contrarian view on that subject.

3. Vickery raised one of the great questions of Austenmania---how is it that JA has managed the incredible double-dip of wide appeal among the culture-friendly general public, and also wide intellectual appeal for the literati--but Vickery hasn't a clue as to the real answer to that question--which is that JA intended to appeal to both, and wrote her novels to work on multiple levels, including (as Harding famously and acidly put it) writing the novels so as to be enjoyed by the very people being satirized and criticized on that deeper, less accessible level.

4. Vickery also read Henry Tilney's rant about England as a Christian country, as evidence that Northanger Abbey was merely a satire of Gothic novels, and thereby revealed that she was utterly ignorant of the large body of work, including mine, that shows that Northanger Abbey is, on a deeper level, an anti-parody critique of male privilege--but Vickery was not going there, not even close, for all her clothing herself in the guise of a debunker.

5. Bravo to Prof. John Mullan for pointing out that JA did not publish anonymously because she was so modest, but instead that JA actually enjoyed the guessing game she generated by publishing as "A Lady"---and I would go further and claim that JA intended to generate that guessing game in the first place!

6. Katherine Sutherland had a lot of screen time, and thankfully she did not repeat any of her absurd claims about JA needing an editor.

7. The history of how Austenmania arose was generally pretty good, but of course Vickery was not going to mention DW Harding and the revolution he engendered in Austen studies in the middle of the 20th century. Instead, Vickery took the standard orthodox line that FR Leavis was the most influential figure in Austen studies in that era.

8. All the film versions of P&P were briefly displayed, including a rare one I had not heard of, a 1967 BBC production.

9. There's an interesting interview with Earl Spencer, of course the brother of the late Princess Di, who shows himself to be quite the intelligent Janeite.

7. Several JASNA friends in the program, including a wonderful brief interview of the amazing Cheryl Kinney, who ad libs the funniest line in the whole program. And I realized one of the many parts I love about Cheryl's public speaking--not only does she know her material cold, and have a wonderfully insightful, witty style of writing and speaking--she also sounds _exactly_ like Roz from Frasier, which is the perfect voice to deliver that excellent content!

8. My friend Joan Reynolds of Vancouver made a few brief dancing cameos, and finally, and most interesting to me, take note of the gentleman who appears for a few seconds at precisely 38 minutes and 39-43 seconds into the video.

For those not technically inclined, I include a still image above.

So despite all my above quibbles, this is a wonderful video to show your non-Janeite friends and family, to try to pique their interest!

Cheers, ARNIE

Jane Austen's Stealth Poem to the 8-year old Anna Austen

2011-12-30T09:39:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, Ellen Moody wrote the following in Austen L:

"...my vigilant eye spotted two poems I'd never read before 'attributed to Jane Austen.' True, the attribution is not firm, but (according to Todd and Bree), the handwriting is like that of Austen's, it is found written in a book by Ann Murry (Mentoria; or, The Young Lady's Home Instructor) which literal book was owned by Austen in the 1790s and given to Anna Lefroy in 1801. How much provenance do we need? Here it is:

Sigh Lady sigh, hide not the tear thats stealing
Down thy young face now so pale& cheerless [now is underlined in ms]
Let not thy heart be blighted by the feeling
That presses on thy soul, of utter loneliness.

In sighs supprest& grief that's [ever?] weeping
Beats slow& mournfully [a mourning?] heart
A heart oer which decay& death are creeping
In which no sunshine can a gleam impart.

Thou art not desolate, tho' left forsaken [not underlined in ms]
By one in whom thy very soul was bound
Let Natures voice thy dreary heart awaken
Oh listen to the melodies around.

For Summer her pure golden tress is flinging
On woods& glades& silent gliding streams
With joy the very air around is ringing
Oh rouse thee from those mournful mournful dreams.

Go forth let not that voice in vain be calling
Join thy hearts voice to that which fills the air
For he who een a sparrow saves from falling
Makes thee an object of peculiar care.[thee underlined in ms]

I replied to Ellen as follows:

It's not unknown, Ellen, but I agree, it has not been publicized, and you are absolutely right, it has been deliberately been given a quiet death by faint praise by the usual suspects, Le Faye amongst them. Indeed, it ought to have been announced with a megaphone.

Ellen also wrote about this poem: "So why did David Selwyn not include this when others are in ms's or places just as scattered? My guesses: it's so sad and doesn't fit a preconception of Austen....She had reason to be sad sometimes in the 1790s until 1801 as we've seen, and we've noticed so many letters destroyed and Cassandra continually trying to repress her sister."

I further replied as follows:

Ellen, you need to put on your deerskin cap to notice the obvious crucial clue to the poem's very sad meaning, which you yourself provided to us! That clue is the date (1801) and the person to whom it was given (Anna Austen). Think about what happened in 1801 and how that event affected the relationship between Jane Austen and Anna Austen (at the very least, her psychological daughter).

Of course you see it now, right? JA was forced to leave Steventon and leave poor sad little Cinderella, Anna age 8, in the care of the evil stepmother, Mary Lloyd Austen, who by then was well into her career of spoiling her own 3 year old darling boy, JEAL, the way Mrs. Middleton spoiled her little darling son (until Lucy Steele "accidentally" poked him with a needle!). And that left poor Anna out in the bitter cold, with her two loving aunts exiled away from her in Bath.

Now the poem makes perfect sense, and it is chilling and awful to contemplate the heartbreak that JA and Anna both endured at that wrenching time. Because you can be damned sure that the profit that James and Mary made at the expense of the Austen women and Revd. Austen was _not_ spent on giving extra TLC to Anna, and JA knew it!

And there in that last stanza, by the way, is a perfect example of JA's truly compassionate Christianity, one which cared most for the weak and the powerless.

We can see the seeds of Fanny Price in this poem, can we not?

And how clever JA had to be, in order to leave this message to Anna where it would be safe from detection, and possible destruction, by Mary Lloyd Austen--what better place to hide a poem like this than in a conduct book that would have warmed Mary Lloyd Austen's hard heart, thinking that it was going to teach little Anna to show more respect to her stepmother and her other elders, and not to fall into dejection at the loss of her aunts, and ingratitude toward her "wonderful" stepmother, etc etc.

JA knew that Mary actually had no pleasure in a book--even a book like this one--and so little Anna need not be afraid to keep this book close to her at all times, so she could read her Aunt Jane's loving poem whenever she felt lonely and abused.

And finally, we know JA's satirical stance toward the Murry Mentoria book in which JA hid this poem to her dear Anna, because it was also pointed out 13 years ago in this list by Ursula Rempel and Eugene McDonnell that the Mentoria book contains the following "tactful" suggestion to young ladies...

Murry: "Knowledge ought not wholly to be concealed; yet like beauty, it appears most amiable seen through the veil of diffidence and modesty."

...which JA famously and deliciously mocked with this translation in Northanger Abbey:

"[Catherine] was heartily ashamed of her ignorance. A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."

THAT's why JA could feel safe in Mary Lloyd Austen not being too quick to detect and destroy JA's poem to Anna, as Mary apparently took Murry' advice very seriously, and that is why she read as little as possible!

Cheers, ARNIE

Quick Answers to my Post-Christmas Quiz

2011-12-27T10:37:00.002-05:00

"I just sleuthed out something interesting yesterday about the literary lineage leading to, and the literary lineage leading away from, Jane Austen---connections that, in hindsight, it amazes me that I seem to be the first to notice, because this one has really been hiding in plain sight for over a century and a half!

I will reveal exactly what I found by tomorrow morning 10 am EST, but as this find seems to be particularly suited to a quiz for those so inclined, I will give five hints which, for a Janeite reasonably knowledgeable in Austen studies, should make this quiz quite solvable in an enjoyable way:

Hint #1: There is a work published during JA's lifetime but prior to JA's reaching adulthood, written by a person who was fairly famous then, but who rapidly faded to obscurity during JA's adulthood, and is only known today to academic scholars of a particular ideological slant (which I share).

CATHERINE SAWBRIDGE MACAULAY: THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

Hint#2: There is a work published within a half century _after_ JA's death, written by a person who was very famous, and who has remained well known, and who was famously very positive toward JA's writing, in a way that is known to a fair # of Janeites today.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY: THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

Hint#3: There is a work written by JA herself which has virtually the same title, and the same general subject matter, as those other two works.

JANE AUSTEN: THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

Hint #4: The author of the work from JA's youth, and the author of the work published long after JA's death, both have _exactly_ the same last name.

MACAULAY

Hint #5: That shared last name of those other two authors is not a coincidence, but reflects that they were--apparently unknown to scholars working in regard to either of them--related by marriage!

THOMAS BABINGTON'S FATHER WAS A COUSIN OF, AND IN CONTACT WITH, CATHERINE SAWBRIDGE MACAULAY'S FIRST HUSBAND (AND FATHER OF HER ONLY CHILD)

I have no time right now, but will suggest those intriguing implications later.

Cheers, ARNIE

A Post Christmas Quiz

2011-12-26T15:02:00.002-05:00

I just sleuthed out something interesting yesterday about the literary lineage leading to, and the literary lineage leading away from, Jane Austen---connections that, in hindsight, it amazes me that I seem to be the first to notice, because this one has really been hiding in plain sight for over a century and a half!

I will reveal exactly what I found by tomorrow morning 10 am EST, but as this find seems to be particularly suited to a quiz for those so inclined, I will give five hints which, for a Janeite reasonably knowledgeable in Austen studies, should make this quiz quite solvable in an enjoyable way:

Hint #1: There is a work published during JA's lifetime but prior to JA's reaching adulthood, written by a person who was fairly famous then, but who rapidly faded to obscurity during JA's adulthood, and is only known today to academic scholars of a particular ideological slant (which I share).

Hint #2: There is a work published within a half century _after_ JA's death, written by a person who was very famous, and who has remained well known, and who was famously very positive toward JA's writing, in a way that is known to a fair # of Janeites today.

Hint #3: There is a work written by JA herself which has virtually the same title, and the same general subject matter, as those other two works.

Hint #4: The author of the work from JA's youth, and the author of the work published long after JA's death, both have _exactly_ the same last name.

Hint #5: That shared last name of those other two authors is not a coincidence, but reflects that they were--apparently unknown to scholars working in regard to either of them--related by marriage!

OK, that's a lot of hints, I bet it won't take someone long to figure out the identity of the other two writers, and the shared title of the three works. Please bring forward your answers today!

Then I will explain why I find it amazing that I seem to be the first person to notice pretty much all of these connections, and I will also suggest some intriguing implications for further investigation that arise out of the answers to this little quiz.

Cheers, ARNIE

Cinderellas Presuming to Wear The Magical White Gown of Privilege in Letter 29, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey

2011-12-26T13:02:00.002-05:00

Six months ago, I had a brief exchange with Diane Reynolds about the following passage in Jane Austen's Letter 31:

"...soon afterwards a party of fine ladies issuing from a well-known commodious green vehicle, their heads full of Bantam cocks and Galinies, entered the house -- Mrs. Heathcote, Mrs. Harwood, Mrs. James Austen, Miss Bigg, Miss Jane Blachford."

At that time, Diane asked: "Is the "fine ladies" phrase ironic? Why would their heads be full of "Bantam cocks" (outside of phallic reasons)? " and I replied: "Diane, as with Letter 24 written only 10 weeks earlier, with its memorable turn of phrase "Mrs. Stent will now & then _ejaculate_ some wonder about the _Cocks_ & Hens, what can we want?", I think that the phallic reason is pretty clearly the principal reason for JA's above quoted poultry fantasy--I think the existence of two such usages so close in time, so close in verbiage, so blatant, makes it doubly unlikely that either was an accidental or innocent reference. It sounds like JA's typical ironic raillery, with a ribald edge, JA's exuberant imagination swept up by the bustle and energy of five women bursting out of a large carriage, descending on the Steventon Rectory, and surely this burst of visiting from friends that JA notes in the ensuing sentences is the result of the impending big move to Bath. Now, whether JA perceived each of these visitors as indulging in some covert Schadenfreude, or were genuinely coming to say goodbye, who knows..... Aside from the ribaldry and the explosion of visitors, one more point occurs to me. That phraseology "heads full of" sounded awfully familiar, so I searched, and found that the phrase "head full of" was a favorite of JA's, always in a satirical way, with characters obsessed with something trivial, dangerous, or scandalous..." END QUOTE

Today, I have sleuthed out an expansion on that dark image I drew then of five fine ladies descending on the Steventon Rectory in Mrs. Eltonesque gaiety, enjoying Schadenfreude at the helpless sadness of JA and CEA in being exiled from the Eden of Steventon, pretty much with only the clothes they were wearing. The key to my expansion is the image of a "white gown" as used by Jane Austen as a metaphor for presumption vs. denial of female privilege, in not one, but _three_ other places in her writing.

First, I was reminded of another exchange I had had, about _seven_ months ago, with Diane, regarding another passage, i.e., the first sentence in Letter 29:

"As you have by this time received my last letter, it is fit that I should begin another; & I begin with the hope, which is at present uppermost in my mind, that you often wore a white gown in the morning, at the time of all the gay party's being with you....".

At the time, Diane commented: "I read too much forced jocularity to interpret her as genuinely happy about the move. She begins with a joke about C's wearing a white gown in the morning as what is uppermost in her mind, when, of course, what is uppermost is the move" and I replied: "I wouldn't call it forced jocularity, I'd call it thinly veiled sarcasm." Diane also commented: "How distressing this must have been is hinted at for me in her line: "the prospect of spending future summers by the Sea or in Wales is very delightful." " and I responded to that comment as follows: "You just made me realize something very very peculiar (and very very funny!) about that comment---- think about the second charade in Emma, which refers to the "Monarch of the SEA"---what are two of the secret answers to that charade? Colleen Sheehan's (the "Prince of Whales") and Anielka's ("Leviathan"). Do you get the joke? "in Wales" === > "in Whales"! As in the kind of "delight" that Jonah experienced during his Biblical sea excursion!But what does this wordplay mean in the context of Letter 29? I would say that it fits perfectly with your notion of JA feeling powerless, swept along by "waves" stronger than she can resist, which leave her no choice but to hope that the whale/Leviathan spits the Austens out into a comfortable "Bath"(tub)!...."

What I did not realize as I wrote the above seven months ago, is that the seemingly typical jokingly histrionic hope "uppermost in [JA's] mind" that CEA "often wore a white gown in the morning, at the time of all the gay party's being with" CEA, was actually highly symbolic and deadly serious wordplay by JA---what JA is saying in code, as I will momentarily show, is that JA, writing from Steventon to CEA at Godmersham, hopes that CEA is not being demeaned by treatment as a poor, dependent female relation, who is not allowed to wear the "white gown" of privilege, like the other fine ladies!

Exhibit A of that coded meaning of a "white gown" is found in Mansfield Park, where Mrs. Norris makes a sadistic career out of tormenting Fanny, including in this instance her subtle reminder of Fanny's inferior status during the ride to Sotherton: "That Mrs. Whitaker is a treasure! She was quite shocked when I asked her whether wine was allowed at the second table, and she has turned away two housemaids for wearing white gowns. Take care of the cheese, Fanny. Now I can manage the other parcel and the basket very well."

In a 1988 Persuasions article, Judith Terry explains Mrs. Norris's meaning: "The admonitions on female servants’ attire are numerous, Dr. Trusler’s remarks being typical: “being gaily drest, in gauze and ribbands, is always a blemish on her character, she will be thought to dress for the men more than for a place.”When Mrs. Musgrove refers to Jemima as “fine-dressing” it is no term of approval.Mrs. Norris is delighted to find that the housekeeper at Sotherton had “turned away two housemaids for wearing white gowns.”This again is a question of “fine dressing”; the accessibility of washable cotton was still so recent that the white gowns it made possible were reserved to the upper classes.Ladies’ maids were criticized most often.Traditionally, mistress handed down cast-offs to maid, but the practice was deplored in all books of instruction, since it encouraged servants to ape their betters.Jonas Hanway advised selling the cast-offs rather than wearing them.__"

So Mrs. Norris, by juxtaposing that news item about the dismissed servants at Sotherton with orders to Fanny to perform menial services not asked of Maria or Julia, is warning Fanny, without having to be explicit, that Fanny must not presume herself rising in status because she has been allowed to be of the party to Sotherton--in the end of the day, the wicked "stepmother" is making clear, Fanny is just another version of a servant, who must take care of the cheese.

And we know that the acutely sensitive Fanny hears Mrs. Norris's symbolic warning, and the CInderella symbolism is brought to the fore, when later on, Fanny is given a white gown to wear to the Mansfield ball, but she worries about the implications:

"Now I must look at you, Fanny," said Edmund, with the kind smile of an affectionate brother, "and tell you how I like you; and as well as I can judge by this light, you look very nicely indeed. What have you got on?"

"The new dress that my uncle was so good as to give me on my cousin's marriage. I hope it is not too fine; but I thought I ought to wear it as soon as I could, and that I might not have such another opportunity all the winter. I hope you do not think me too fine."

"A woman can never be too fine while she is all in white. No, I see no finery about you; nothing but what is perfectly proper. Your gown seems very pretty. I like these glossy spots. Has not Miss Crawford a gown something the same?"

Fanny expresses her worries (twice) that it is too fine, but Edmund gives his blessing to Fanny wearing the white gown of privilege, and so Fanny, like Cinderella at the ball, is permitted to be happy, if only for one magical evening.

And it is not just in JA's Letter 29 and in MP that we see this coded usage of "white gown", the third instance is in Northanger Abbey, and it is very droll:

"Mrs. Allen," said Catherine the next morning, "will there be any harm in my calling on Miss Tilney today? I shall not be easy till I have explained everything."

"Go, by all means, my dear; only put on a white gown; Miss Tilney always wears white."

Translation: For all that Mrs. Allen seems to many to be an empty headed fashionista, what she is saying to Catherine, in shrewd code, is that Catherine should be sure to assert her own equal status with Eleanor Tilney, by wearing the same white gown of privilege that Eleanor, the de facto mistress of the great Northanger Abbey, _always_ wears.

In addition to the pleasure of seeing this poignant message in these three heretofore never connected passages in JA's writing---two from novels and one from a letter---I assert that this is a quintessential example of the Jane Austen Code---how JA was consistent over a long period of time (Letter 29 being written in early 1801, Mansfield Park in 1814, and Northanger Abbey, begun around the same time as Letter 29 was written, but last revised as late as 1816) in her usage of coded symbolism--and always, always, about the plight, vulnerability, and forced helplessness of the English gentlewoman lacking financial resources, whether it be Fanny Price as the niece/servant of Mansfield Park, or CEA & JA, as the aunts/servants of Godmersham Park, or as the evictees from Steventon like the Dashwood sisters, who must endure the gloating of the privileged vultures who swoop in for some easy pickins' from the "carcass" of the Austen family at Steventon.

Oh, if only JA and CEA could have avoided turning into permanent pumpkins at the end of the "ball", unlike Fanny and Catherine, who each endure a brief banishment before being magically restored to their white gownishness.

Cheers, ARNIE

Protesting Too Much in Pride & Prejudice

2011-12-24T22:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, it occurred to me to follow up on my earlier post about Lizzy’s and Darcy’s unconscious attraction in P&P...

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/10/jane-austens-conscious-fictional.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/12/brief-meditations-on-pair-of-fine-is.html

...by seeing what came up if I looked at P&P through the lens of “protesting too much”. That is, of course, the very famous line spoken by Queen Gertrude about the Player Queen in the Mousetrap scene in Hamlet, which has come to be the universal idiom to express the idea of a person working extra hard to repress and in effect shout down an idea he or she finds too disturbing. And one brilliant way that Jane Austen shows Lizzy and Darcy being unconsciously attracted to each other is how much they each protest how much they hate the other, over a long stretch of the novel!
As I Googled, I was led to an article I had read a long while ago, Nora Stovel’s “Famous Last Words: Elizabeth Bennet PROTESTS too Much.” The Talk in Jane Austen. Ed. Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinglass Gregg. Edmonton: U Alberta P, 2002.

Most of this chapter can be read at Google Books, and I urge anyone who is interested in this topic to read the accessible pages, as Stovel beautifully lays out the case, even without recourse to the way JA used wordplay to enhance this theme.

What I will do for the remainder of this post is to focus on JA’s brilliant wordplay in P&P on the word “protest” and its variants, which all supports that overarching motif in the novel:

First, in the following passage in Chapter 14, I think the whole world would agree that Mr. Collins PROTESTS way too much about how wonderful Lady Catherine is—is it possible that he could actually believe a quarter of it, or has this poor man convinced himself of all this in a desperate attempt to avoid consciously acknowledging what a horror she really is?:

“During dinner, Mr. Bennet scarcely spoke at all; but when the servants were withdrawn, he thought it time to have some conversation with his guest, and therefore started a subject in which he expected him to shine, by observing that he seemed very fortunate in his patroness. Lady Catherine de Bourgh's attention to his wishes, and consideration for his comfort, appeared very remarkable. Mr. Bennet could not have chosen better. Mr. Collins was eloquent in her praise. The subject elevated him to more than usual solemnity of manner, and with a most important aspect he PROTESTED that "he had never in his life witnessed such behaviour in a person of rank—such affability and condescension, as he had himself experienced from Lady Catherine. She had been graciously pleased to approve of both of the discourses which he had already had the honour of preaching before her. She had also asked him twice to dine at Rosings, and had sent for him only the Saturday before, to make up her pool of quadrille in the evening. Lady Catherine was reckoned proud by many people he knew, but he had never seen anything but affability in her. She had always spoken to him as she would to any other gentleman; she made not the smallest objection to his joining in the society of the neighbourhood nor to his leaving the parish occasionally for a week or two, to visit his relations. She had even condescended to advise him to marry as soon as he could, provided he chose with discretion; and had once paid him a visit in his humble parsonage, where she had perfectly approved all the alterations he had been making, and had even vouchsafed to suggest some herself—some shelves in the closet up stairs."

And a short time after that, Mr. Collins takes his aversion to novels beyond all reasonable bounds:

"...Mr. Bennet's expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment, maintaining at the same time the most resolute composure of countenance, and, except in an occasional glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner in his pleasure. By tea-time, however, the dose had been enough, and Mr. Bennet was glad to take his guest into the drawing- room again, and, when tea was over, glad to invite him to read aloud to the ladies. Mr. Collins readily assented, and a book was produced; but, on beholding it (for everything announced it to be from a circulating library), he started back, and begging pardon, PROTESTED that he never read novels."

So far so good, but now we come to the most peculiar of the usages of “protest” in P&P, three of them in a short space in Chapters 15 & 16, which relate to the otherwise nearly invisible Mrs. Philips (of course the sister of Mrs. Bennet, married to a lawyer). For some reason never explained in the text, Mrs. Philips and Mr. Collins take _quite _ a shine to each other, as you will note. I get the strongest feeling that both Mrs. Philips are protesting way too much about how wonderful they each are, and also how they did not know each other before. Makes me wonder, especially given that Mr. Collins’s mammoth importance in the lives of the Bennets hinges on a point of _law_ that Lady Catherine herself decries, i.e., the entail away from the female line. As I said, it makes me wonder, what sort of communication has there been between Mr. Collins and _Mr._ Philips???

“Mrs. Phillips was always glad to see her nieces; and the two eldest, from their recent absence, were particularly welcome, and she was eagerly expressing her surprise at their sudden return home, which, as their own carriage had not fetched them, she should have known nothing about, if she had not happened to see Mr. Jones's shop-boy in the street, who had told her that they were not to send any more draughts to Netherfield because the Miss Bennets were come away, when her civility was claimed towards Mr. Collins by Jane's introduction of him. She received him with her very best politeness, which he returned with as much more, apologising for his intrusion, without any previous acquaintance with her, which he could not help flattering himself, however, might be justified by his relationship to the young ladies who introduced him to her notice. Mrs. Phillips was quite awed by such an excess of good breeding; but her contemplation of one stranger was soon put to an end by exclamations and inquiries about the other; of whom, however, she could only tell her nieces what they already knew, that Mr. Denny had brought him from London, and that he was to have a lieutenant's commission in the —shire. She had been watching him the last hour, she said, as he walked up and down the street, and had Mr. Wickham appeared, Kitty and Lydia would certainly have continued the occupation, but unluckily no one passed windows now except a few of the officers, who, in comparison with the stranger, were become "stupid, disagreeable fellows." Some of them were to dine with the Phillipses the next day, and their aunt promised to make her husband call on Mr. Wickham, and give him an invitation also, if the family from Longbourn would come in the evening. This was agreed to, and Mrs. Phillips PROTESTED that they would have a nice comfortable noisy game of lottery tickets, and a little bit of hot supper afterwards. The prospect of such delights was very cheering, and they parted in mutual good spirits. Mr. Collins repeated his apologies in quitting the room, and was assured with unwearying civility that they were perfectly needless. As they walked home, Elizabeth related to Jane what she had seen pass between the two gentlemen; but though Jane would have defended either or both, had they appeared to be in the wrong, she could no more explain such behaviour than her sister. Mr. Collins on his return highly gratified Mrs. Bennet by admiring Mrs. Phillips's manners and politeness. He PROTESTED that, except Lady Catherine and her daughter, he had never seen a more elegant woman; for she had not only received him with the utmost civility, but even pointedly included him in her invitation for the next evening, although utterly unknown to her before. Something, he supposed, might be attributed to his connection with them, but yet he had never met with so much attention in the whole course of his life.”

“Elizabeth allowed that he had given a very rational account of it, and they continued talking together, with mutual satisfaction till supper put an end to cards, and gave the rest of the ladies their share of Mr. Wickham's attentions. There could be no conversation in the noise of Mrs. Phillips's supper party, but his manners recommended him to everybody. Whatever he said, was said well; and whatever he did, done gracefully. Elizabeth went away with her head full of him. She could think of nothing but of Mr. Wickham, and of what he had told her, all the way home; but there was not time for her even to mention his name as they went, for neither Lydia nor Mr. Collins were once silent. Lydia talked incessantly of lottery tickets, of the fish she had lost and the fish she had won; and Mr. Collins in describing the civility of Mr. and Mrs. Phillips, PROTESTING that he did not in the least regard his losses at whist, enumerating all the dishes at supper, and repeatedly fearing that he crowded his cousins, had more to say than he could well manage before the carriage stopped at Longbourn House.”

Then in Chapter 20 we have the droll humor of Mrs. Bennet imagining that Elizabeth was protesting too much against Collins’s proposals, as evidence in Mrs. Bennet’s mind that Elizabeth really was attracted to Mr. Collins and that was why she was being so negative on the surface.

“This information, however, startled Mrs. Bennet; she would have been glad to be equally satisfied that her daughter had meant to encourage him by PROTESTING against his proposals, but she dared not believe it, and could not help saying so.”

And next in Chapter 23, we have Mrs. Bennet protesting too much against the assertion that Mr. Collins had just turned around and gotten engaged to Charlotte:
“Elizabeth was sitting with her mother and sisters, reflecting on what she had heard, and doubting whether she was authorised to mention it, when Sir William Lucas himself appeared, sent by his daughter, to announce her engagement to the family. With many compliments to them, and much self-gratulation on the prospect of a connection between the houses, he unfolded the matter—to an audience not merely wondering, but incredulous; for Mrs. Bennet, with more perseverance than politeness, PROTESTED he must be entirely mistaken; and Lydia, always unguarded and often uncivil, boisterously exclaimed: "Good Lord! Sir William, how can you tell such a story? Do not you know that Mr. Collins wants to marry Lizzy?"

But my most favorite of all the usages of “protest” in P&P, the quintessential example, is the following, when Lizzy has finished her first reading of Darcy’s letter, in Chapter 36:

“But when this subject was succeeded by his account of Mr. Wickham—when she read with somewhat clearer attention a relation of events which, if true, must overthrow every cherished opinion of his worth, and which bore so alarming an affinity to his own history of himself—her feelings were yet more acutely painful and more difficult of definition. Astonishment, apprehension, and even horror, oppressed her. She wished to discredit it entirely, repeatedly exclaiming, "This must be false! This cannot be! This must be the grossest falsehood!"—and when she had gone through the whole letter, though scarcely knowing anything of the last page or two, put it hastily away, PROTESTING that she would not regard it, that she would never look in it again.”

There we have Lizzy protesting, in extreme terms, that she would never look at Darcy’s letter again. But how long does “never” last? Only till the next _sentence!:
“In this perturbed state of mind, with thoughts that could rest on nothing, she walked on; but it would not do; in half a minute the letter was unfolded again, and collecting herself as well as she could, she again began the mortifying perusal of all that related to Wickham, and commanded herself so far as to examine the meaning of every sentence. “

There could not be a better example of protesting too much what is already subconsciously known!

And then in Chapter 50, we have Mr. Bennet protesting he will not pay for Lydia’s wedding clothes, but I feel safe in claiming that pretty much all Janeites expect that before the matter is resolved, Mrs. Bennet will prevail on this point, and Mr. Bennet truly will have been protesting too much in the most futile way.

“A long dispute followed this declaration; but Mr. Bennet was firm. It soon led to another; and Mrs. Bennet found, with amazement and horror, that her husband would not advance a guinea to buy clothes for his daughter. He PROTESTED that she should receive from him no mark of affection whatever on the occasion. Mrs. Bennet could hardly comprehend it.”

And finally in Chapter 54, we have the inverse of Lizzy’s short lived protest against rereading and accepting Darcy’s letter, and also of Mr. Collins’s misunderstanding Lizzy’s protests against his proposal, when Lizzy, now desperate for Darcy’s attentions, worries that Darcy would protest against making a second proposal to her.

“Darcy had walked away to another part of the room. She followed him with her eyes, envied everyone to whom he spoke, had scarcely patience enough to help anybody to coffee; and then was enraged against herself for being so silly! "A man who has once been refused! How could I ever be foolish enough to expect a renewal of his love? Is there one among the sex, who would not PROTEST against such a weakness as a second proposal to the same woman? There is no indignity so abhorrent to their feelings!" “
So, I assert that all of the above are a far flung matrix of subliminal textual support for the theme of Lizzy and Darcy protesting too much in their negative responses to each other during the first half of the novel, as Stovel so thoroughly argued in her article, and as I have bolstered with my analysis of how “unconscious” Lizzy is about her own feelings for Darcy.

Cheers, ARNIE

Tittuppy Catherine Morland

2011-12-24T21:04:00.001-05:00

Christy Somer wrote the following earlier today in Janeites and Austen L, in response to my having previously quoted a speech by John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey in which he calls James Morland's gig "tittuppy":

"And the earliest ‘tittup’ reference is to David Garrick’s Miss Tittup in “Bon Ton, or High Life Above Stairs” -1781. It does seem to be the first noted online, at least. And yes, I also remember this being one of the early plays at Steventon. A play in which Eliza may have actually played the character of ‘Miss Tittup’. "

To which I replied thusly:

Bravo, Christy on some first rate sleuthing! You opened the door wide to a significant allusion in JA's writing, and your only error was in not stepping through the door you had just opened yourself! ;)

To be more specific, as soon as I read what you wrote, quoted above, I had a very strong hunch that the usage of "tittuppy" in Northanger Abbey had to be connected to Garrick's play, just based on the word alone, but the Austen theatricals connection made that hunch a virtual certainty in my mind.

And sure enough, I had a chance to read through all of Garrick's play today, and there are _numerous_ significant parallels, both thematically and also via wordplay, between it and Northanger Abbey, which verified to my full satisfaction that this allusion was entirely conscious, informed, and intentional on JA's part.

To very briefly outline the most important of those parallels:

1. Miss Tittup is a young single woman who is being courted by a fortune hunter, Colonel Tivy, who believes that Miss Tittup is going to inherit a large estate from her uncle, Sir John Trotley, but at the end of the play, Sir John announces to the assembled group that she is not assured of inheriting anything from him, at which point Tivy loses all interest in Miss Tittup. There we have, to a tee, John Thorpe and Mr. Allen vis a vis Catherine!

2. Miss Tittup is in London under the protection of her cousins, Lady Minikin, and her husband, Lord Minikin. However, Miss Tittup is having a secret romance with Lord Minikin, even though the Lord tells Miss Tittup's uncle that Lord Minikin has set Miss Tittup up with Tivy. This fits like a glove with General Tilney courting Catherine for himself, while appearing to be courting on his son Henry's behalf!

3. The words "stairs" appears in one variant or another 24 times in the very short NA, as opposed to only 10 times in S&S and 17 times in Emma, both of them twice as long as NA, and also only 11 times in Persuasion. So the word "stairs" is used so much in NA in part because the subtitle of Garrick's play is "High Life Above Stairs". Not only that, there are several moments in Garrick's play where someone is coming up or going down stairs as part of an intrigue, just as Henry Tilney starts grilling Catherine about why she is so surprised that he takes his usual staircase to go to his room at the Abbey.

4. Sir John Trotley obsessively reads pamphlets and laments the radical changes occurring in English society, reminding us of General Tilney (whose name sounds a lot like Trotley), with his jingoistic searching for spies. Plus, the word "trot" or its variant appears only twice in the entire six novels of JA, and both are in the same chapter of NA, spoken by John Thorpe (who of course is the Colonel Tivy representation).

5. In the end, Miss Tittup is taken back to the country away from big city corruption.

6. At the beginning of the play, Lady Minikin refers to "Love and Friendship" in a cynical way, reminding us of JA's juvenilia of that title.

7. At the end of the play, Lady Minikin refers to being restored to her "natural English constitution", which is echoed by NA's reference to Mrs. Morland's good constitution (which keeps her alive through 10 pregnancies), and Mrs. Tilney's bilious fever, which is called "constitutional".

8. "tittupy" actually was a word in use in England by around 1753 or so, and it is still in the dictionary today, meaning "To move in a lively, capering manner; prance. n. A lively, capering manner of moving or walking..." And that reminds us of Catherine Morland basking in the glow of General Tilney's admiring gaze at the "elasticity" of her walk:

"The general attended her himself to the street-door, saying everything gallant as they went downSTAIRS, admiring the elasticity of her walk, which corresponded exactly with the spirit of her dancing, and making her one of the most graceful bows she had ever beheld, when they parted. Catherine, delighted by all that had passed, proceeded gaily to Pulteney Street, walking, as she concluded, with great elasticity, though she had never thought of it before. She reached home without seeing anything more of the offended party; and now that she had been triumphant throughout, had carried her point, and was secure of her walk, she began (as the flutter of her spirits subsided) to doubt whether she had been perfectly right.”

Catherine therefore is "Tittuppy" in both her walk, and also in many aspects of her situation in the big city which resemble those of the feisty Miss Tittup!

So, for these and other reasons, I assert that JA chose to allude in this veiled way to David Garrick's play!

Cheers, ARNIE

Robert Ferrars's Real Life Cottage

2011-12-23T18:58:00.002-05:00

Diane Reynolds wrote the following in Austen L today, in response to Ellen Moody posting the text of an article about the extraordinary cottage built by the Ladies of Llangollen, whom I claimed were Jane Austen's covert source for Charlotte Lucas of Pride & Prejudice as a lesbian:

[Diane] "Thanks for the cottage article, Ellen. Cottage still capture our fancy: http://gaia-health.com/gaia-blog/2011-12-21/man-builds-fairy-tale-home-for-his-family-for-only-3000/"

In the spirit of the season, I just responded as follows:

Diane, that article you linked to is simply astounding, thanks for posting it. It's almost too good to be true, that a guy with no background could build such a home in that fashion.

In that same vein (well, sort of), here's an image of the very house that I am convinced Robert Ferrars built with his bare hands, in the English countryside, beginning shortly after he left Gray's on Sackville Street in Chapter 33 of S&S:

http://img387.imageshack.us/img387/4569/dsc020619jr.jpg

If you don't believe me, just look at that image while reading aloud the following passage in S&S Ch. 36 (only three chapters later, when he had completed construction), and see if you don't see the obvious parallels:

"For my own part," said [Robert], "I am excessively fond of a cottage; there is always so much comfort, so much elegance about them. And I protest, if I had any money to spare, I should buy a little land and build one myself, within a short distance of London, where I might drive myself down at any time, and collect a few friends about me, and be happy. I advise every body who is going to build, to build a cottage. My friend Lord Courtland came to me the other day on purpose to ask my advice, and laid before me three different plans of Bonomi's. I was to decide on the best of them. 'My dear Courtland,' said I, immediately throwing them all into the fire, 'do not adopt either of them, but by all means build a cottage.' And that I fancy, will be the end of it. Some people imagine that there can be no accommodations, no space in a cottage; but this is all a mistake. I was last month at my friend Elliott's, near Dartford. Lady Elliott wished to give a dance. 'But how can it be done?' said she; 'my dear Ferrars, do tell me how it is to be managed. There is not a room in this cottage that will hold ten couple, and where can the supper be?' I immediately saw that there could be no difficulty in it, so I said, 'My dear Lady Elliott, do not be uneasy. The dining parlour will admit eighteen couple with ease; card-tables may be placed in the drawing-room; the library may be open for tea and other refreshments; and let the supper be set out in the saloon.' Lady Elliott was delighted with the thought. We measured the dining-room, and found it would hold exactly eighteen couple, and the affair was arranged precisely after my plan. So that, in fact, you see, if people do but know how to set about it, every comfort may be as well enjoyed in a cottage as in the most spacious dwelling."

I mean, isn't it obvious from looking at that image that his cottage easily exceeded the capacities Robert describes?

But of course the best clue, the one that makes us certain that it is _that_ cottage in particular, is when Robert is being _very_ particular about the _materials_ he is going to use to construct his snug little "castle":

"He was giving orders for a toothpick-case for himself, and till its size, shape, and ornaments were determined, all of which, after examining and debating for a quarter of an hour over every toothpick-case in the shop, were finally arranged by his own inventive fancy, he had no leisure to bestow any other attention on the two ladies, than what was comprised in three or four very broad stares; a kind of notice which served to imprint on Elinor the remembrance of a person and face, of strong, natural, sterling insignificance, though adorned in the first style of fashion. Marianne was spared from the troublesome feelings of contempt and resentment, on this impertinent examination of their features, and on the puppyism of his manner in deciding on all the different horrors of the different toothpick-cases presented to his inspection, by remaining unconscious of it all; for she was as well able to collect her thoughts within herself, and be as ignorant of what was passing around her, in Mr. Gray's shop, as in her own bedroom."

Marianne and Elinor think Robert is being a puppy, but I say, here is a man with a sure sense of his craft, who simply will not compromise when it comes to quality. And I don't care _what_ the fairy tale authors say, no Big Bad Wolf is going to blow _that_ impregnable cottage down, no matter how hard he blows!

Cheers, and have a happy Apri-----er, I mean---happy Holidays! ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

Brief Meditations on A Pair of Fine I's (for "Ironies")

2011-12-22T22:27:00.001-05:00

During the past month, I have had some fascinating exchanges offlist with a variety of very bright Janeites in regard to my post.....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/10/jane-austens-conscious-fictional.html

.... about Jane Austen's virtuosic wordplay around the word "unconscious" in regard to Lizzy's thoughts and feelings vis a vis Darcy of course in P&P.

And, not surprisingly in discussions regarding Jane Austen, but particularly on a slippery topic like this, it seems like irony just sorta naturally pops up!

So, tonight, I leave you with my brief meditations on a _pair_ of fine i's (for "ironies") that I have observed during my exchanges about the above topic:

The first fine irony is that there are many Janeites of long standing who think that it's obvious from the plain meaning of the text that Lizzy is _not_ unconsciously attracted to Darcy, yet...there are many _other_ Janeites also of long standing who think that it's obvious from reading against the grain, as they believe the text begs for, that Lizzy _is_ unconsciously attracted to Darcy!

Whereas I am like Tevya in the great opening number of Fiddler on the Roof, "Tradition", in which he agrees with two neighbors who dispute the identity of an animal in a sale transaction, and then we hear:

Avram: He's right, and he's right? They can't both be right.

Tevye: You know...you are also right.

Avram is not correct in the dispute about P&P, because in the case of a Jane Austen novel, they _can_ both be right, because JA deliberately wrote the text of each of her novels to be ambiguous in a variety of important ways, such that _two_ entirely plausible alternative interpretations would be supported by insightful readings of the same novel text.

So that's Fine Irony #1.

The _second_ fine irony I have found is related, although it is not limited to the above dispute about P&P, but also applies, I find, a thousand times over, during every imaginable sort of Austen-related discussion. To wit: I have so often seen Janeites who would argue to the death that Jane Austen did _not_ covertly depict Freudian-style unconscious motivations and attractions in her novels, and yet, once
they are grudgingly convinced to accept an against-the-grain interpretation, their fallback position seems to be that Jane Austen _must_ have done it _UN_consciously! So they're Freudians about Jane Austen's creative process, while simultaneously denying Jane Austen the creativity and insight to have _consciously_ depicted Freudian-style _UN_conscious feelings in her characters.

And that is Fine Irony #2.

So there's my pair of fine ironies, and I for one also find it ironic that I derive pleasure from meditating on them. ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

Some scholarly views on the Beechen Cliff portrait

2011-12-22T15:57:00.001-05:00

I did a little checking online and found a couple of interesting descriptions and analyses of the "backfacing" portrait by Cassandra

First this one by Margaret Kirkham:

"The 1804 sketch: This is a watercolour drawing, signed C.E.A (Cassandra Elizabeth Austen) and dated 1804 (see frontispiece). Identification of the sitter as Jane Austen is confirmed in a letter by her niece, Anna Lefroy, to JEAL in 1862, in which 'a sketch which Aunt Cassandra made of her on one of their expeditions--sitting down out of doors on a hot day, with her bonnet strings untied' is mentioned. It is also probably referred to in a letter of Henry Austen to Richard Bentley in 1832...It is still owned in the Austen family. RW Chapman did his best for this portrait, saying: 'it shows the graceful outline of a seated lady, and has nothing inconsistent with what is known of JA's figure'....Not everyone agrees; David Nokes says it offers 'a rear view of a plump, dumpy woman seated on a tuft or stool, gazing away from us into a white blankness'. Claudia Johnson has suggested this faceless sketch has a wry appropriateness; it 'reaches us in much the same way as the celebrated irony of her writing does, only by turning away'..."

And I also found the following written by David Nokes, from which Kirkham had quoted only a small portion, above:

"..the Austens spent part of the summer [of 1802] with Charles in Devonshire...and the rest of it in Wales, travelling as far west as Tenby and as far north as Barmouth. Somewhere on this trip, Cassandra made a watercolour sketch of her sister...'I would give a good deal, that is, as much as I could afford,' Anna Lefroy later commented, 'for a sketch [see quote, above]'. Yet this curious, unprepossessing sketch only reinforces the strange, enigmatic image of her sister which Cassandra seems determined to present. The sketch offers a rear view of a plump, dumpy woman seated on a tuft or stool, gazing away from us into a white vacant blankness. The woman's face and expression are completely hidden, for not only is the head turned away, but even the back of the head is concealed by a large blue bonnet which, though its strings are untied, remains very firmly in place. All that we can glimpse is the merest hint of a plump, pink child like curve of cheek. The woman's body is enveloped in a long blue gown whose generous folds unflatteringly suggest a somewhat ample figure beneath. Although in some ways charmingly informal, what this sketch does is to depersonalize Jane Austen, rendering her not as as a character, but as a shape. Seated beneath a tree, it is a shape which suggests nursery associations; this blue bonneted female hardly seems adult at all; she is an innocent childlike Miss Muffet sitting on her tuffet. By destroying her sister's letters, and refusing to draw her adult facial expression, it is Cassandra who most contrived to make a mystery of Jane Austen."

I have the following reactions to the above:

1. Kirkham refers to a date of 1804 on the frontispiece. That would seem to settle the confusion as to the date of composition, if accurate. And 1804 is exactly when we know that Jane and Cassandra were still living in Bath, and so that would add force to my argument that the portrait was done in Bath, and Beechen Cliff would be exactly the place near Bath where Jane and CEA would have gone on an "expedition".

However, to give an alternative its due, we also have Letter 39 that JA wrote from Lyme in mid-September 1804 to CEA in Ibthorp, in which we learn that CEA had, earlier that week, been in Weymouth (only a short distance east of Lyme Regis along the English southern coast). So it is possible that CEA was with JA and the other Austens in Lyme Regis _before_ leaving for Weymouth, and it is therefore also possible that the portrait might have been done by CEA at some scenic spot outside of Lyme Regis. I still lean toward Beechen Cliff, though, because the Austens lived there during most of 1804, whereas I would imagine JA was only in Lyme Regis that one trip.

2. Nokes gets the date wrong, and therefore his speculation as to its being painted in Wales would also appear to be wrong. However, I find Nokes's comments about the portrait very interesting, he clearly has given it a lot of thought and careful examination. I agree that the figure of the woman is not slim, as JA appears in other descriptions. Nokes somehow sees that as a girl's body ("nursery associations"). I see "nursery" associations in a very different way---when, after all, is a normally thin woman much heavier? and when does a woman ever assume the particular pose that is shown in the portrait? The only answer that fits both of those criteria is "while in childbirth"! An association which just happens to fit with my notion that this portrait is in some way also a portrait of Mrs. Tilney, the symbol of English wives dying in childbirth.

3. I like that both Nokes and Johnson pick up on the concealment in the picture, both of the features of the woman, and also of what she is looking at! It's pretty obvious that there is some reason why Kirkham, Nokes, and Johnson, as well as Linda Walker, Diane and I, all find something very mysterious and curious in this picture, and I remain convinced that Northanger Abbey is the ultimate key to its deepest meanings.

So there.

Cheers, ARNIE

Cassandra Austen's Portrait of Mrs. Tilney

2011-12-22T11:57:00.000-05:00

During the past day, in several different ways, I have made the argument that the backfacing watercolour portrait by Cassandra Austen [presumably of Jane Austen, created sometime between 1800 and 1810] was not only an in-joke between CEA and JA (as Linda Walker & Diane Reynolds have both suggested), but was _also_ particularly and significantly connected to Northanger Abbey—and I took that argument to its logical endpoint, and suggested that the portrait might just be that of a woman gazing down at Bath from the top of Beechen Cliff:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/12/view-from-beechen-cliff.html
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/12/beechen-cliff-portrait.html

In support of such claims, I have pointed in particular to the passage in Northanger Abbey that describes the outing to Beechen Cliff, and have shown the uncanny parallelism between several details in that passage and the details of CEA’s watercolour portrait.

Now I wish to add one _more_ layer to my interpretation, focusing on the theme of female portraiture, which----aside from the scenes relating to Emma’s “too tall” sketch of Harriet----only (to the best of my recollection) appears in one other Austen published novel----what a big surprise, Northanger Abbey!

The scene at Beechen Cliff, in which Henry Tilney makes Catherine’s mind reel with his erudite disquisitions on pictorial art, is _not_ the only place in Northanger Abbey in which pictorial art is raised as a theme. I will now quote you three _other_ passages in NA where that occurs, and where the focus soon turns to female portraiture, in a crucial thematic way.

First, this one, from when Catherine has just arrived at Northanger Abbey, afire with curiosity to see the place:

“She was all impatience to see the house, and had scarcely any curiosity about the grounds. If Henry had been with them indeed! But now she should not know what was picturesque when she saw it. Such were her thoughts, but she kept them to herself, and put on her bonnet in patient discontent.”

Clearly, Catherine’s head is still buzzing, many chapters later, with Henry’s lessons in the techniques of pictorial art at Beechen Cliff, and so now her expectations of what she would see at the Abbey have been tempered by what he said to her.

Look at that sentence: “But now she should not know what was picturesque when she saw it.” There is a pun lurking in that enigmatic sentence on the word “picturesque”. On the surface “picturesque” means “visually striking and beautiful”. But on another level it refers to whatever is worth making a “picture” of—as in a portrait of some person or event worth depicting and preserving, whether within a picture frame or within one’s mind. So “picturesque” means, in that alternative mental sense, “intelligible” and “memorable”, having nothing necessarily to do with an actual physical landscape.

And so, I claim, it is no coincidence that not long after this scene, we read the following emotionally climactic scene as Catherine and Eleanor discuss the mysterious deceased Mrs. Tilney:

“Miss Tilney continuing silent, [Catherine] ventured to say, "Her death must have been a great affliction!"
"A great and increasing one," replied the other, in a low voice. "I was only thirteen when it happened; and though I felt my loss perhaps as strongly as one so young could feel it, I did not, I could not, then know what a loss it was." She stopped for a moment, and then added, with great firmness, "I have no sister, you know—and though Henry—though my brothers are very affectionate, and Henry is a great deal here, which I am most thankful for, it is impossible for me not to be often solitary."
"To be sure you must miss him very much."
"A mother would have been always present. A mother would have been a constant friend; her influence would have been beyond all other."
"Was she a very charming woman? Was she handsome? Was there any picture of her in the abbey? And why had she been so partial to that grove? Was it from dejection of spirits?"—were questions now eagerly poured forth; the first three received a ready affirmative, the two others were passed by; and Catherine's interest in the deceased Mrs. Tilney augmented with every question, whether answered or not. Of her unhappiness in marriage, she felt persuaded. The general certainly had been an unkind husband. He did not love her walk: could he therefore have loved her? And besides, handsome as he was, there was a something in the turn of his features which spoke his not having behaved well to her.
"Her picture, I suppose," blushing at the consummate art of her own question, "hangs in your father's room?"
"No; it was intended for the drawing-room; but my father was dissatisfied with the painting, and for some time it had no place. Soon after her death I obtained it for my own, and hung it in my bed-chamber—where I shall be happy to show it you; it is very like." Here was another proof. A portrait—very like—of a departed wife, not valued by the husband! He must have been dreadfully cruel to her!” END QUOTE

The portrait of Mrs. Tilney is no sooner mentioned, than it immediately becomes the center of our attention, and arguably, the emotional, thematic center of the entire novel!

There is so much going on in that passage, it would take pages to unpack it all, but I am focused for now only on how clever, resourceful and empathic Catherine’s thinking is, to correctly guess that there must have been a portrait of Mrs. Tilney, and moreover, to recognize how important such a portrait would have been for Eleanor. Catherine has uncannily shot straight to the heart of the matter, and to the heart of Eleanor (and Jane Austen), for that matter.

And is the presence of this passage about a portrait of a lady, in the same novel with the Beechen Cliff episode, and then Catherine’s reaction to same as she arrives at the Abbey, a coincidence? Surely not!

And here is the last passage, when Eleanor fulfills her promise to Catherine, and shows her the portrait of Mrs. Tilney:

“Eleanor was ready to oblige her; and Catherine reminding her as they went of another promise, their first visit in consequence was to the portrait in her bed-chamber. It represented a very lovely woman, with a mild and pensive countenance, justifying, so far, the expectations of its new observer; but they were not in every respect answered, for Catherine had depended upon meeting with features, hair, complexion, that should be the very counterpart, the very image, if not of Henry's, of Eleanor's—the only portraits of which she had been in the habit of thinking, bearing always an equal resemblance of mother and child. A face once taken was taken for generations. But here she was obliged to look and consider and study for a likeness. She contemplated it, however, in spite of this drawback, with much emotion, and, but for a yet stronger interest, would have left it unwillingly.”

Jane Austen has made a very big deal about this portrait, and I say this is for a special reason. I think Jane Austen left the enigmatic image of Mrs. Tilney—her portrait of all the English wives who died in childbirth over several centuries--most unwillingly. Northanger Abbey itself can be seen as a “backfacing” portrait of Mrs. Tilney and all her sisters in conjugal suffering and death—we never see Mrs. Tilney’s face in the novel, and yet it is there lovingly preserved in the attic by her daughter. Just as Jane Austen, writing her own version of female history—HERstory—to preserve the “portrait” of all those “faceless” English wives who died so anonymously and pointlessly.

And that is yet another reason why the woman in Cassandra’s portrait is seen only from behind, and with no part of her face visible—because she has been obliterated from the histories of England written by men, she is “faceless”. And that is also why she is shown gazing out at a landscape with nothing in it—a perfect metaphor for an empty life with no future, no _prospects_!

For those in sympathy with my interpretation, I hope the above will add to your pleasure in savoring Jane Austen’s virtuosity, and the added significance of Cassandra’s portrait. For the rest of you, I can only echo the inimitably witty exchange about mental portraiture in P&P between Darcy and Elizabeth:

"May I ask to what these questions tend?"
"Merely to the illustration of YOUR character," said she, endeavouring to shake off her gravity. "I am trying to make it out."
"And what is your success?"
She shook her head. "I do not get on at all. I hear such different accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly."
"I can readily believe," answered he gravely, "that reports may vary greatly with respect to me; and I could wish, Miss Bennet, that you were not to sketch my character at the present moment, as there is reason to fear that the performance would reflect no credit on either."
"But if I do not take your likeness now, I may never have another opportunity."
"I would by no means suspend any pleasure of yours," he coldly replied.

I would by no means suspend any pleasure of _yours_ in Jane Austen’s writing which differs from my own pleasure in same.

Cheers, ARNIE

The "Disconcerting" of Mary Bennet, Georgiana Darcy, and....Marianne Dashwood!

2011-12-21T22:55:00.000-05:00

One of the most powerful scenes in Andrew Davies's P&P2 occurs at Pemberley, when Georgiana is playing the pianoforte for the assembled party. Miss Bingley just can't help herself, and tosses out a malicious reference to Wickham, the very sound of whose name so disconcerts Georgiana that she abruptly stops playing. Then Lizzy saves the day by racing to Georgiana's side and restoring the poor girl to calmness, enabling her to resume playing and causing Darcy to give Elizabeth "that look" that could melt ice at the North Pole. Yeah, even guys are touched by that one! ;)

Anyway, I realized a while ago, during a reread of that scene as written in the novel, that we actually have no idea what Georgiana is doing at the moment that Miss Bingley's hurtful verbalization is uttered--certainly there is no mention of her playing piano for the group--- nor does Elizabeth do anything specifically directed toward making _Georgiana_ feel better--all Elizabeth does is to keep her cool and not get upset or "discomposed" when Miss Bingley tosses her zinger at her:

"Miss Darcy, on her brother's entrance, exerted herself much more to talk, and Elizabeth saw that he was anxious for his sister and herself to get acquainted, and forwarded as much as possible, every attempt at conversation on either side. Miss Bingley saw all this likewise; and, in the imprudence of anger, took the first opportunity of saying, with sneering civility: "Pray, Miss Eliza, are not the ——shire Militia removed from Meryton? They must be a great loss to /your/ family."
In Darcy's presence she dared not mention Wickham's name; but Elizabeth instantly comprehended that he was uppermost in her thoughts; and the various recollections connected with him gave her a moment's distress; but exerting herself vigorously to repel the ill-natured attack, she presently answered the question in a tolerably detached tone. While she spoke, an involuntary glance showed her Darcy, with a heightened complexion, earnestly looking at her, and his sister overcome with confusion, and unable to lift up her eyes...Elizabeth's collected behaviour, however, soon quieted his emotion; and as Miss Bingley, vexed and disappointed, dared not approach nearer to Wickham, Georgiana also recovered in time, though not enough to be able to speak any more."

So, I have thought for a while now that this was another example of subtly great screenwriting by Andrew Davies, actually finding a way to improve on JA's own staging of the Pemberley salon scene, in a way that felt completely consistent with the characterizations from the novel, and doing so in a way that also tied back in to the much earlier scene in the novel, when Mr. Bennet literally and figuratively "disconcerts" Mary by interrupting her mid-concerto:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/08/music-to-my-ears.html

Well...purely by serendipity, some recent discussion elsewhere in Austen cyberspace about the tsunami of references to "beaux" (especially by Nancy Steele) in S&S has led me to an even _greater_ respect for Andrew Davies's knowledge of Austen's texts, and even of subtle thematic and wordplay connections _between_ JA' s novels, as I now see that he not only drew upon that earlier scene in P&P with Mary and Mr. Bennet, he _also_ drew upon an amazingly parallel scene in_ S&S_!

And, without further ado, here it is, it's one of those in which Nancy Steele refers to "beaux":

Lucy looked at Elinor again, and was silent.
"Do you know Mr. Robert Ferrars?" asked Elinor.
"Not at all—I never saw him; but I fancy he is very unlike his brother—silly and a great coxcomb."
"A great coxcomb!" repeated Miss Steele, whose ear had caught those words by a sudden pause in Marianne's music.— "Oh, they are talking of their favourite beaux, I dare say."
"No sister," cried Lucy, "you are mistaken there, our favourite beaux are NOT great coxcombs."
"I can answer for it that Miss Dashwood's is not," said Mrs. Jennings, laughing heartily; "for he is one of the modestest, prettiest behaved young men I ever saw; but as for Lucy, she is such a sly little creature, there is no finding out who SHE likes."
"Oh," cried Miss Steele, looking significantly round at them, "I dare say Lucy's beau is quite as modest and pretty behaved as Miss Dashwood's."
Elinor blushed in spite of herself. Lucy bit her lip, and looked angrily at her sister. A mutual silence took place for some time. Lucy first put an end to it by saying in a lower tone, though Marianne was then giving them the powerful protection of a very magnificent concerto...." END QUOTE

It seems clear that there are subtle undercurrents in this scene, where Lucy seems to be upset at her sister saying something aloud that Lucy wished to remain unspoken—perhaps about Robert Ferrars. What I now see for the first time, however, is that _Marianne_ is _also_ "disconcerted" by what Nancy Steele says! So much so that, exactly the way Georgiana reacts with upset to Caroline Bingley's snark in Davies's rewrite of the Pemberley salon scene, so too Marianne's music "suddenly pause[s]" when we hear Nancy spouting off. What's up with _that_? What is Marianne hearing in Nancy Steele's chatter that upsets her too, even though Elinor clearly hasn't a clue about any of it? And then, what enables Marianne to quickly _re_ compose herself and launch into "a very magnificent concerto", one, perhaps, that even Mary Bennet would be proud of? Many interesting and intriguing questions!

But what is for sure is that Davies understood the connection between these scenes in S&S and in P&P, scenes which I feel safe in saying have not been connected in the minds of any other Janeites prior to my pointing this out.

And I have a final question in regard to this whole thing, which I am too lazy to check the answer to myself-- i.e., in Davies's adaptation of S&S, does he include the scene with the Steele girls and Marianne playing piano, and, if so, how do they play it? Does Marianne pause abruptly and get "disconcerted"?

Cheers, ARNIE

The Beechen Cliff Portrait

2011-12-21T16:01:00.004-05:00

In another online venue, among the reactions to my posting earlier today…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/12/view-from-beechen-cliff.html

…it was suggested that this watercolour portrait by Cassandra would have been typical ofa strong and widespread artistic tradition, particularly in illustrations for picturesque books and romances.

I at first responded by pointing out that Cassandra’s portrait was different from pictures painted in that tradition, because Cassandra’s portrait had virtually nothing at all eye-catching in it _except_ the woman portrayed from behind. Now I realize that I failed to grasp the full significance of that tradition, in terms of how it makes the in-joke between Cassandra and JA that much wittier and more profound.

To wit: the large blank space of canvas that take up almost exactly half of the space within the frame is precisely where there _should_ have been a picturesque view! Everything that we see in the picture points this way: the woman seated between two rocks, some shrubbery to her right, but in front of her, absolutely nothing!

I.e., this set-up announces to the viewer that it is a _parody_ of all those paintings in that hoary artistic tradition, it’s a send up that says, in so many words, that the picturesque depictions in all those paintings might be a tad overrated and overdone!

And that further interpretation aligns the passage in NA at Beechen Cliff that much more closely with Cassandra’s portrait:

“…Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape. Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit…”

What better way to illustrate Catherine’s rejection of "the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape", than to delete the landscape entirely from the painting—but the humor comes from leaving in the observer next to “a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit.” It’s the very essence of theater of the absurd, the deletion of an essential element from a picture, instead of simply tossing the entire thing in the circular file!

And i was about to conclude by pointing out that I am certain that this painting, whatever the year of its composition (I have seen guesses for 1802, 1804 and 1810, respectively, in my quick search a few minutes ago), is inextricably linked to that very same passage in Northanger Abbey, and so, by being the first to connect them, I dub this portrait the Beechen Cliff Portrait. But then it occurred to me as I was about to post this, that if it was actually painted by Cassandra _at_ Beechen Cliff, then that would suggest that it was painted during the Bath years, i.e, 1801-1805---as Bart Simpson would say, DOH!!

Cheers, ARNIE