[NOTE: Since
I first wrote my first post yesterday [ http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-proposed-extension-of-devoney-loosers.html ] about Mary Russell Mitford’s 1823 mock
letter about Jane Austen, I've listened to Devoney Looser's recent appearance
on the TLS podcast. In it, Looser said that only after she had written her TLS
piece detailing her discovery, did she then learn that Jennie Batchelor had
spoken at Chawton House back in 2017 about that same Mitford 1823 mock letter. Looser
has thus very properly acknowledged the earlier work of Batchelor, who apparently
has taken a different tack, and has a book chapter in process that focuses on
how Mitford's letter relates to the famous Defence of the Novel in Northanger
Abbey.]
Also since I wrote my first
post, I’ve dug up some more goodies, which make the Mitford allusion to Austen
that much more interesting, remarkable, and personal.
DECEMBER 16:
It is serendipitous that this
second post of mine on this topic of Austen and Mitford is “born” on December
16, which is the birthday of both of these literary English gentlewomen! As my
Subject Line indicates, Mitford was 12 years younger than Austen, and so she
was only 26 when she read P&P, and wrote this “pert” and “worldly” review of
P&P in a late 1814 letter:
“The
want of elegance is almost the only want in Miss Austen […] It is impossible
not to feel in every line of P&P, in every word of Elizabeth, the entire
want of taste which could produce so pert, so worldly a heroine as the beloved
of such a man as Darcy. Wickham is equally bad. Oh! They were just fit for each
other, and I cannot forgive that delightful Darcy for parting them. Darcy should
have married Jane. He is of all the admirable characters the best designed and
the best sustained.”
It’s interesting
to wonder about what might have changed for Mitford in her assessment of JA
between then and 1823 – or was it just that the character of Elizabeth struck
her the wrong way –and how interesting that she used the same word, ‘pert’, to
describe Elizabeth, as Sir Walter Scott used in his 1816 review of Austen’s
writing.
Perhaps
the following comment in a June 1819 letter gives a clue to a possible
evolution in Mitford’s literary taste: '[T]he greatest pleasure in reading is to be
critical & fastidious, & laugh at, & pull to pieces.'
If any writing would
meet the test of that sort of intense close reading, it would be Jane Austen’s,
and it certainly seems that reading the last 4 published Austen novels, which I
believe she did, by 1823, did not disappoint Mitford, and apparently turned her
into a hardcore proto-Janeite.
JANE FISHER’S SISTER KITTY:
In her
TLS article Looser wrote:
“If we believe that Jane Fisher is
the creation of Mitford, and if we conclude that the letter’s contents are
based on Mitford’s poking fun at her own author-envy, then it’s only a small
leap to conclude that Miss Hinton’s reports stand behind the mock-letter, too.
Hinton could be the real-life inspiration for Kitty Fisher’s fictional,
portrait-making friend, the one who portrays Austen’s plump face, genius
nose, and hair and chin resembling — Jane Fisher’s. (Or Mitford’s? Where do
fact and fiction meet?)”
What Looser did not catch, is
that any contemporary reader of Mitford’s mock letter who realized that Jane
Fisher’s unmarried sister was therefore Kitty Fisher, would immediately think
of one of the most notorious English courtesans of the 18th century!:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Fisher
Perhaps you wonder if this is
just a coincidence, in an England which had more than a few Kitty Fishers in
it. Well, if you want some evidence that Mitford knew exactly who the
historical Kitty Fisher was, let me take you to an excerpt from a short story called
“Cobus Yerks” written by Mitford in 1832 (9 years after she wrote the mock
letter) as part of an anthology entitled Lights and Shadows of American Life.
As you read it, please take note
not only of the two references to “butterflies” (as in Mitford’s famous
quotation of her mother’s harsh judgment on the young Jane Austen), but also the
reference not only to “the renowned Kitty Fisher”, but also to Constantia
Phillips. She was another famous real life courtesan from the mid-18th
century, whose memoir was woven into a complex intertextuality with Richardson’s
Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, having to do with the plight
of a single woman after she is raped (which was the cruel fate suffered by the very
young real life Constantia Phillips):
“Silent
was the sonorous harmony of the big spinning-wheel, silent the village song,
and silent the fiddle of Master Timothy Carty, who passed his livelong time
in playing tuneful measures, and catching beetles and BUTTERFLIES.
I
must say something of Tim, before I go on with my tale. Master Timothy was first seen in
the village one foggy morning, after a drizzling warm showery night, when he was
detected in a garret, at the extremity of the suburbs, and it was the general
supposition that he had rained down in company with a store of little toads,
that were seen hopping about, as is usual after a shower. Around his garret
were disposed a number of unframed pictures, painted on glass as in the
olden time, representing the four seasons, the old King of Prussia, and
Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, in their sharp-pointed cocked hats, the fat,
bald-pated Marquis of Granby, the beautiful Constantia Phillips, and divers
others, NOT FORGETTING THE RENOWNED KITTY FISHER, who, I honestly
confess, was my favourite among them all.
The
whole village poured into the garret to gaze at these chef d'oeuvres, and it is
my confirmed opinion, which I shall carry to the grave, that neither the
gallery of Florence, Dresden, nor the Louvre, was ever visited by so many real
amateurs. Besides the pictures, there were a great many curiosities to the
simple villagers, who were always sure of being welcomed by Master Tim with a
jest and a tune. Master Tim, as they came to call him when they got to be a
little acquainted, was a rare fellow, such as seldom rains down any where, much
less on a country village. He was of “merry England,” as they call
it—lucus a non lucendo — at least so he said and I believe, although he belied
his nativity by being the merriest rogue in the world, even when the fog was at
the thickest. In truth he was ever in good humour, unless it might be when a
rare beetle or gorgeous BUTTERFLY, that he had followed through thick and
thin, escaped his net at last. Then, to be sure, he was apt to call the
recreant all the “d-d vagabonds” he could think of.”
And
note also that the ‘garret’ of “Master Tim” sounds suspiciously like Fanny
Price’s attic, in the idiosyncratic gallery of pictures hanging on its walls!
So what does this mean about the
“Kitty Fisher” in Mitford’s mock letter in 1823? Does it inject a subliminal
aura of rape and prostitution? And if so, does that have anything to with Mitford’s
mother having described the young Jane Austen as a “husband-hunting butterfly”,
which is very much the way the unchaste Lydia Bennet could be described in
P&P? If Mitford thought Elizabeth Bennet too “pert” and “worldly” for
Darcy, then what about Lydia? And then, what about the young Jane Austen?
JANE AUSTEN’S GHOST, REDUX:
The title of the TLS podcast
interview of Devoney Looser was called “Haunted By Jane Austen” – this was
surely based on the central theme in Mitford’s mock letter of Jane Austen
coming to “Jane Fisher” as a ghost. But guess what, this turns out to be
additional evidence that Mary Russel Mitford wrote the 1823 mock letter, because
of what Mitford wrote nearly 3 decades later:
Recollections
of a literary life (1852)
“…A
place full of associations is Bath. When we had fairly done with the real
people, there were great fictions to fall back upon; and I am not sure, true
and living human beings as Horace Walpole and Madame dArblay have shown
themselves in their letters and journals—full of that great characteristic of
our human nature, inconsistency, of strength and weakness, of wisdom and folly,
of virtues and faults; I am not sure, eminently human as these worthies shine
forth in their writings, that those who never lived except in the writings
of other people—the heroes and heroines of Miss Austen, for example—are not the
more real of the two.
Her
exquisite story of
PERSUASION ABSOLUTELY HAUNTED ME. Whenever it rained (and it did
rain every day that I stayed in Bath, except one), I thought of Anne Elliott
meeting Captain Wentworth, when driven by a shower to take refuge in a
shoeshop. Whenever I got out of breath in climbing up-hill (which, considering
that one dear friend lived in Lansdown Crescent, and another on Beechen Cliff,
happened also pretty often), I thought of that same charming Anne Elliott, and
of that ascent from the lower town to the upper, during which all her
tribulations ceased. And when at last, by dint of trotting up one street and down
another, I incurred the unromantic calamity of a blister on the heel, even that
grievance became classical by the recollection of the similar catastrophe,
which, in consequence of her peregrinations with the Admiral, had befallen dear
Mrs. Croft. I doubt if any one, even Scott himself, have left such perfect
impressions of character and place as Jane Austen.”
In a
nutshell, Mitford sees “ghosts” of Persuasion’s heroine, Anne, and her
eventual sister in law, Mrs. Croft, when Mitford walks the streets of Bath! And
I, in turn, now find myself strangely haunted by the realization that Mary
Russell Mitford was a much sharper elf than I ever dreamt of– did you know,
e.g., that Mitford, at age 24, published a proto-feminist poem, “Christina, the
Maid of the South Seas” about the aftermath on Pitcairn Island of The Mutiny on
the Bounty, with the biracial daughter of Fletcher Christian and his Tahitian
lover as the unlikely heroine – a poem that may well have influenced Byron’s
1823 "The Island"? [For more about that, read “Romancing the Pacific Isles before
Byron: Music, Sex, and Death in Mitford's Christina” ELH, Vol. 76, No. 2
(Summer, 2009), pp. 277-308, authored by my new Tweep, Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar,
who also happens to run the Digital Mitford Project!]
And so,
one last time before I go – Happy Birthday Jane and Mary!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment