tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1436417288060370638.post2525931795893657686..comments2024-01-29T03:20:32.291-05:00Comments on ...... SHARP ELVES SOCIETY ...... Jane Austen's Shadow Stories: The Blazing Fires of Harriet Smith and Lady Caroline LambArnie Perlsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01720424361279466002noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1436417288060370638.post-64519336982766407262015-12-14T15:01:47.862-05:002015-12-14T15:01:47.862-05:00I am convinced by posts like this that Jane Austen...I am convinced by posts like this that Jane Austen was much more aware of and informed about life in London and Great Britain than I ever realized.<br /><br />It is certainly possible that the verses for Guy Fawkes Day were published somewhere at the time (circa 1812-13), but I am not able to find them in any newspapers or journals. The source is a document in the John Murray Archives now in the National Library of Scotland. But unless Austen had access to the text, a close reading based on her awareness of its specific vocabulary and phraseology is improbable, and the echoes are therefore coincidental. Lady Caroline's episode might have been known to JA, but I'm dubious she ever saw the verses we now know so well.<br /><br />We have a tendency to read retrospectively and leap to tempting conclusions. For example, as William Torrens notes in his early biography of Lord Melbourne from the late 19th c., the phrase "mad, bad, and dangerous to know," is first recorded in the account that Lady Morgan gives in her memoirs of 1862 (Lady Morgan is the source of a number of popular anecdotes and red herrings in LCL's biography, many of them the product of Lady Caroline's own re-imagining of her life). Lady Morgan REPORTS that Lady Caroline SAYS she went home after meeting Byron and wrote the phrase ("mad, bad...") in her diary. In other words, that phrase is nowhere on the record until 1862. Byron in 1812 was probably nothing like his bad-boy public image after 1816. Yet everyone assumes that the phrase was commonly applied to Byron and even to Lady Caroline herself during their lifetimes. This is creative reading that leads us into "finding" connections that cannot possibly have existed. [See Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan. _Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries, and Correspondence_. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: William H. Allen & Co., 1863. vol. 2, page 200.<br />At the same time, there is undoubtedly something tantalizingly solid about Jane Austen's canny knowledge of her contemporaries, and something very convincing about the thesis that her work adapts and alludes to many well-known personages and their peccadilloes. Thanks for this interesting post.Paul Douglasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14416063828659880201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1436417288060370638.post-74128484312326760662015-12-02T20:54:34.517-05:002015-12-02T20:54:34.517-05:00This is not the first time she has seemed to be aw...This is not the first time she has seemed to be aware of literary gossip - she had her informants Arnie Perlsteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01720424361279466002noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1436417288060370638.post-57448576898805252712015-12-02T18:10:11.172-05:002015-12-02T18:10:11.172-05:00We know about Lady Caroline Lamb's bonfire no...We know about Lady Caroline Lamb's bonfire now but it wasn't public knowledge at the time.<br />How did Jane Austen know it?<br />Regencyresearcherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10828749339318882968noreply@blogger.com