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

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

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!

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!

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

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!

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")

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