An Interesting & Significant Austen-Fielding PERSONAL Connection

My recent string of posts about the 1806 Godmersham amateur theatricals (which I claim were JA's dramatized adaptations of fiction written by both Sarah Fielding and her much more famous brother, Henry, fictions which JA later also alluded to in her own novels) led me to revisit all of my prior research about JA's literary allusions to the Fieldings, which I had accumulated over the past 6 years. However, what I am writing about today is a _biographical_ discovery that my revisiting took me to, an entirely unexpected bonus that arose when two files I had generated years ago on seemingly completely unrelated subjects turned out to have a point of crucial intersection.

I have discovered an Austen-Fielding _personal_ connection which, as best as I can tell online, has never been mentioned by any Austen biographer prior to me, in no small part because members of the Austen family did _not_ wish this connection to be noticed. Read on and see what _you_ think.

First, using Google Desktop, I searched through all my files which included both "Fielding" and "Austen"--a large number of files, but most of them pertained to Jane Austen's fiction vis a vis Tom Jones, which I had last exhaustively researched over a year ago, and which were not the tree I was barking up, so I quickly skimmed past them.

The point of intersection that serendipitously led to my latest discovery was the name "Denbigh". It showed up in a file describing Henry Fielding's ancestry, mentioning that Henry Fielding was born into a junior branch of an ancient noble family, the Earls of Denbigh. No big deal so far. You probably never heard of it in connection with Jane Austen, nor had I noticed it before, and it only rang a bell for me at all, because it was a character name in James Fenimore Cooper's 1820 Austen homage, entitled Precaution---but that appeared to me to be coincidental and insignificant.

But then, a short time later, another of the files I had retrieved _also_ mentioned the Earls of Denbigh--and what electrified me was that this latter file did not mention Henry (or Sarah) Fielding at all, but instead had mentioned the Earls of Denbigh in connection with the Bridges family at Goodnestone!

I had never previously paid attention to, or taken note of, the name "Denbigh" in either of those files, but I quickly realized why this intersection was so interesting--I recalled another factoid that I _had_ taken note of, in passing, round about 2005, which was that there were two female Fieldings who were part of the Bridges/Knight family matrix in Kent!

At that earlier time, as I now recalled, it was during my initial forays into Le Faye's edition of JA's letters, and the question had popped into my head, wondering if those Kentish female Fieldings (some of you might have noticed it, too, because one of them was known by the colorful nickname "Aunt Fatty") might have been family relations of _the_ Henry Fielding. But I also recalled that my curiosity in 2005 was quickly quenched when I read Le Faye's Bio Index entry for the Fielding family, which made _NO_ mention whatsoever of Henry Fielding. In 2005, although I was already neck deep in sleuthing out the shadow story of _Emma_, I was much much less suspicious and inquisitive, and much more passive, than I am today about the standard understanding of JA's biography. So, in 2005, I took Le Faye's Index at face value and assumed that if there _had_ been a personal connection of part of the Austen family to the famous Henry Fielding, of course it would have been discovered long ago.

WRONG! Today, with my policy of questioning every part of the received wisdom about JA, I would have immediately sleuthed out an answer to that question--but better late than never, because this one is significant. Anyone who wishes can use Google and other online resources to verify the following essential genealogical connections:

ONE JUNIOR LINE:

Henry and Sarah Fielding were some of the children of Edmund Fielding (1681-1741), the 3rd son of John Feilding (1650-77), who was in turn the youngest son of George Feilding (1614-65), the 1st Earl of Desmond (and also younger brother of the 2nd Earl of Denbigh and also uncle of the 3rd Earl of Denbigh and great uncle of the 4th Earl of Denbigh)-or, stated in another way, Henry and Sarah Fielding were great grandchildren of the 1st Earl of Denbigh. (Wikipedia is wrong on this point, by the way)

A SECOND JUNIOR LINE:

Colonel Charles Fielding was the son of another Charles Fielding, the 3rd son (therefore the grandson) of the 4th Earl of Denbigh. And he also married Sophia, the niece of the 8th Earl of Winchilsea, but he died of war wounds in 1783. Aunt Fatty, Isabella Fielding, was the spinster sister of that same younger Colonel Charles Fielding! So this means that JA personally knew a 4th cousin (i.e., sharing the 1st Earl of Denbigh as an ancestor) of Henry and Sarah Fielding, and also the widow of a 3rd cousin of Henry Fielding.

So we have one junior line associated with the Goodnestone Bridges family, and a second junior line leading to Henry and Sarah Fielding.

I could not ascertain from the Internet whether Henry or Sarah Fielding, or any of Henry's descendants, ever met any of their cousins, the members of the junior branch of the Feilding family that included Aunt Fatty and her sister in law (JA's Mrs. Fielding). But even if such a meeting never occurred, this heretofore unrecognized family connection is still interesting, for the following reasons.

First and foremost, what the above means is that at the 1806 Godmersham theatricals, three of the participants, Harriot-Mary Bridges (who would shortly marry George Moore), her elder sister, Elizabeth Knight (Edward's wife, who had less than 3 years to live), and of course Fanny Knight, then age 13, were _all_ lineal descendants of Anne Palmer Bridges, who, after the death of her first husband, Brook Bridges II, had, 50+ years earlier, married into that junior line of the Earls of Denbigh, in the person of the aforementioned Col. Charles Fielding, 4th cousin of Henry and Sarah Fielding!

And here's where it gets even more interesting. Even though I appear to be the first Austen scholar to take note in print of this Austen-Fielding connection, I believe this connection _would_ have been well known to JA herself!

Why? Because the Bridges and Knight families would obviously have been well aware, and very proud, of their connection to a junior line of the family of the Earls of Denbigh, and also, for that matter, of their connection by marriage to the family of the Earls of Winchilsea (which included the Miss Finches of whom JA often writes in her letters). And in their pride, they'd have been sure to make JA and CEA aware of those connections, in exactly the same way Sir Walter Elliot tells the world about their connection to Lady Dalrymple.

And JA, as the _literary_ scholar she most definitely was, would have been aware that Henry and Sarah Fielding were also members of a junior line of that same family of the Earls of Denbigh. Google Books shows that several published accounts of Henry Fielding's biographical info were extant prior to 1806, and we know from JA's earliest surviving letters from 1796 of her longterm interest in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones.

So JA would most certainly have connected the "Denbigh dot" to both Aunt Fatty and Mrs. Fielding at Goodnestone, and also to Henry and Sarah Fielding, and that is why I reach the only logical conclusion, which is that JA chose to adapt Sarah's The Governess and Henry's The Virgin Unmasked for that special group of performers and audience, precisely _because_ of that connection!

In light of all the above, it is very interesting to read the following bit of biographical info in Lord Brabourne's 1884 edition of JA's letters remembering that he too was a distant cousin of Henry and Sarah Fielding. We can see Lord Brabourne's class snobbery in full bloom:

"But, in following up the Finches and Hattons, I have left Anne, the third Miss Palmer, too long alone, and must hasten back to her, with many apologies. She was the lady who, as has been already mentioned, married the second Sir Brook Bridges; but, whether the honour of the alliance, or the responsibilities of the office of High Sheriff of the county, or some other cause, brought about the catastrophe, certain it is that Sir Brook left her a widow, as has already been stated, in 1733; and, in 1737, she took to herself a second husband, in the person of Charles Fielding, second son of Basil, fourth Earl of Denbigh, by whom she had two sons and two daughters before her death in 1743. This lady's second son Charles was a commodore in the navy; he married Sophia Finch, sister of George Finch, eighth Earl of Winchilsea, and daughter of William and Lady Charlotte Finch (nee Fermor). Lady Charlotte was governess to the children of King George III., and her daughter, Mrs. Charles Fielding, lived with her at Windsor and St. James', so her children were brought up with the Royal Family. This will explain the various references to members of the Fielding family which will be found in Jane Austen's letters; and, though I feel rather ashamed of having inflicted upon my readers such a dull chapter of genealogy, those who care to do so will be able to identify by its aid many of the people who were her contemporaries, friends, and relations."

What is so juicily ironic is that I bet Brabourne was well aware of Henry Fielding's being from a junior line from the Earls of Denbigh, but that's the last thing he's going to mention--foolish status snob that he obviously was, what he wants to emphasize is the _aristocratic_ connections of his family, not the aesthetic connections, especially Henry Fielding's "vulgar" fictions!

Also, in the Appendix of his 1884 edition of JA's letters, which contained the text of three 1791 letters written to "Mrs. Fielding" by Fanny Fowler, the widow of Brook Bridges III and the Lady Bridges JA knew well, announcing the engagement of her three daughters, respectively, during that fruitful year, Lord Brabourne added the following biographical details:

"Sir Brook died before his daughters were married. ' Fatty' was Isabella, sister of Mrs. C. Fielding's husband, and daughter of ' Anne Palmer,' by her second husband Col. Fielding. She seems to have been a popular person, known all her life as ' Fatty Fielding,' and often at Goodnestone and Godmersham. She was godmother to one of Mr. E. Knight's children (Marianne), and died unmarried in 1812."

Fatty is Fanny Fowler's sister in law, in that Fatty is a half sister of Brook Bridges And Mrs. Fielding must be Sophia Finch Fielding, widow.

And think about Henry Austen's Bio Notice in light of my discovery--I believe he also knew of this connection, just as I believe all the Austen siblings knew:

"She did not rank any work of Fielding quite so high. Without the slightest affectation she recoiled from every thing gross. Neither nature, wit, nor humour, could make her amends for so very low a scale of morals. Her power of inventing characters seems to have been intuitive, and almost unlimited. She drew from nature; but, whatever may have been surmised to the contrary, never from individuals."

Talk about protesting too much, again, shame on Henry Austen for such an unseemly deception! He has to mention Fielding specifically, so as to try to snuff out the very idea that there was an unseemly Austen-Fielding family connection!

I finish with a famous example of Henry Fielding's wit, which happens to pertain to his being from the Denbigh line, and which could very well have been read by JA prior to publication of all of her novels other than S&S:

Literary anecdotes of the eighteenth century, Vol. 3, by John Nichols, Samuel Bentley, 1812: "The following anecdote has been communicated to Dr. Kippis by a friend, who had it from the present Mr. Fielding, our author's son. Henry Fielding being once in company with the Earl of Denbigh [that would have been the 5th Earl], and the conversation turning on Fielding's being of the Denbigh family, the Earl asked the reason why they spelt their names differently; the Earl's family doing it with the E first, (Feilding), and Mr. Henry Fielding with the I 'first, (Fielding.) "I cannot tell, my Lord," answered Harry*, "except it be that my branch o*f the family were the first that knew how to spell."

And how ironic that this spelling error was the very same one that JA chronically made, putting "e" before "i", even when not following "c", was it because she could not spell, or was this a little homage to Fielding's bon mot?

Cheers, ARNIE

P.S.: It has been previously noted by literary scholars that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was Henry Fielding's much younger second cousin, but that family connection is independent of the one I have outlined.

P.P.S.: Another associated factoid: Ironically, Charles Austen (and his wife) served on the Namur in 1813, LONG after Charles Fielding's command as Captain of the Namur ended in 1779, more or less when Charles Austen was born--but again, it was a factoid JA would have been aware of.

Sarah Fielding's The Governess: The Unmistakable Austen allusions to same in Emma and S&S

My recent two part discovery was that JA, CEA and Anne Sharpe, joined by Elizabeth Knight, put on a Fielding extravaganza combining Sarah's The Governess with Henry's The Virgin Unmasked----joined, no doubt, by Fanny, Louisa, and Marianne Knight, playing some unknown combination of the girls at the Female Academy and the very un-naive heroine of The Virgin Unmasked:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/theres-even-more-fielding-subtext-in.html

(which includes a link to my first post)

I will now disclose the principal Austenian allusions to The Governess I see:

First and foremost, the story of Chloe, Caelia, and Sempronius was taken by JA and reworked in the most interesting and complex way imaginable into the characters of Emma, Jane F/Harriet S, and Knightley, respectively.

Chloe and Caelia are two girls of 22 (Emma and Jane are both 21) who lost their mothers while they were six (Emma was 3, Jane was younger still), who are supposed to be friends, but one (Chloe) tells jealous and slanderous tales about the other (Caelia) --sound familiar?

And, even more important, the same disturbance noted in Ellen's blog at the Machiavellian character of Sempronius has been mirrored even more disturbingly in the character of Knightley. He is the self-interested Pygmalion who covertly sets up "educational" experiences for the young women who place their trust in him.

I think JA was well aware of Sarah Fielding's subversive silence about Sempronius's machinations, and mirrored it with her own subversive silence about the dark side of Knightley's machinations---and it's no accident that the tale of Sempronius comes not longer after we read the fairy tale of the two giants, one benevolent, one malevolent----those are transformed by JA into two _alternative_ views of Knightley.

And there's much, much more to this allusion when you carefully read Fielding's tale, and match it, in your mind, against the 1000 times more complex interaction of Jane F and Emma in Austen's novel.

And that's just the beginning....

We also, of course, have Mrs. Teachum, the wise, proactive governess of the Little Female Academy, transformed satirically into Mrs. Weston, the governess who seems to have _no_ power to educate her primary charge, Emma, and also into the societal role of governess itself, which is held up by Jane Fairfax as a horrible fate to be avoided at all costs, "the sale of human intellect".

And....we have Mrs. Teachum's boarding school transformed satirically into Mrs. Goddard's parlour boarding school, where the primary education the girls receive seems to be how to place themselves in the path of dangerous and/or mercenary young men, and/or to ingratiate themselves to rich naive girls they can manipulate to gain advantage.

And the story of Lucy Sly is transformed by JA into the story of the very sly Lucy _Steele_ Ferrars ("Lucifer", as I noted years ago), a survivor who finds a way to level the playing field tilted so heavily against females. Lucy Sly has "a pair of exceeding fine black eyes, only with the alloy ofsomething cunning in their look". Lucy Sly also says of her original governess, "I knew by her tone of voice, and her manner of speaking, that she did not blame me in her heart, but rather commended my ingenuity." Lucy-Ferrars to a tee, I'd say.

And, continuing with allusions in _Emma_, take a look at this description in The Governess of the youngest student in Mrs. Teachum's Little Academy, Polly _SUCKLING_:

"Miss Polly Suckling was just turned of eight years old, but so short of her age, that few people took her to be above five. It was not a dwarfish shortness; for she had the most exact proportioned limbs in the world, very small bones, and was as fat as a little cherub. She was extremely fair, and her hair quite flaxen. Her eyes a perfect blue, her mouth small, and her lips quite plump and red. She had the freshness of a milkmaid; and when she smiled and laughed, she seemed to show an hundred agreeable dimples. She was, in short, the very picture of health and good-humour, and was the plaything and general favorite of the whole school."

JA not only gives the last name of this little girl to Mrs. Elton's sister and brother in law, JA also gives many of the little girl's physical and personality attributes (shortness, plumpness, fairness, blue eyes, milkmaidishness, good humour) to Harriet Smith!

And, what's more, look at how JA transforms the following description in Fielding's story of the al fresco adventure Mrs. Teachum takes her little female charges on:

"The housekeeper led them through an avenue of tall elm-trees into this magnificent house, in which were many spacious apartments, furnished with the utmost grandeur and elegance. Some of the rooms were adorned with fine pictures, others were hung with tapestry almost as lively as those paintings, and most of the apartments above stairs were furnished with the finest sorts of needle-work.....in short, they should not go till they had been in her room, and eat some sweetmeats of her own making. The good woman seemed to take so much delight in giving them any pleasure, that Miss Jenny could not refuse accepting her offer; and, when they were all in her room, Polly Suckling said, 'Well, this is a most charming house; I wish we could all live here for ever. How happy must the lord and lady of this fine place be!'

There you have the prototype of Harriet Smith at Donwell Abbey, being led by Mr. Knightley through an avenue of lime trees, and then not long afterwards shocking Emma with Harriet's ambition to marry Knightley and become the lady of Donwell Abbey (and by the way, the fairy tale (and there are two fairy tales in The Governess) of Harriet and the Gipsies takes place just outside Highbury on a road "deeply shaded by _elms_ on each side"! And when Emma's nephews insist on hearing the story of Harriet and the Gipsies repeated just so, we hear the echo of the girlsat Mrs. Teachum's school also wishing to hear the fairy tales recited just so.

And as I was just editing this post, I realized that this passage in The Governess is also (and equally disturbingly) pointed to in Lizzy Bennet's reactions upon first seeing Pemberley.

And underlying all of the above is the overarching question of female education--what is good for girls to learn, and what role should imagination play in the development of their minds? The mind reels at the richness and mysteriousness of Austen's allusions to The Governess, which seem to me to demonstrate that JA read Fielding _against_ the grain, picking up on the unstated satire subtly embedded by Sarah Fielding beneath the seemingly conventional moral message to young girls to conform, accept, and obey the orders of men.

And there's more, but that's plenty for now.....

So, how is it possible that so many Janeites, including a fair number of knowledgeable Austen scholars, could actually read Sarah Fielding's The Governess and _not_ see any of the above unmistakable parallels that, it is obvious to me, were intentionally drawn by JA to Fielding's _very_ famous and influential novella, which is generally acknowledged as the first English fiction written for _and_ about children?

I claim that this deep blindness has arisen because nobody before me has read JA as being so audacious, sly, _and_ erudite, as to allude so subtly and covertly, so as to hide such massive parallels in plain sight. JA knew from personal experience in the world, especially at Godmersham where she was viewed by many of the rich and powerful she met as a poor spinster nobody, that her readers would not accord JA sufficient respect to pay attention to those echoes, but instead would treat these echoes the way that Emma treats Miss Bates's stream of comments about everything--as so much blah, blah, blah, to be ignored, and thereby the most important layer of meaning is missed entirely. No one before me has suspected JA of this sort of massive subversive feminist agenda, and therefore no one has seen it. Because, as Tom Wolfe so cleverly turned the proverb on its head 40 years ago, believing is seeing--and no one has previously believed that JA was this sort of author!

JA knew exactly what she was doing, and hoped that there would be some sharp elves among her readers who would pick up on some or all of this. Her novels were _her_ incredibly sophisticated version of Mrs. Teachum's fairy tales and parables, intended to educate her adult female readers as to what they needed to know in order to survive in a man's world!

And all of the above must be related back to JA's enactment of an amateur theatrical at Godmersham in 1805 (ie., 10 years before she wrote _Emma__), and we must realize that JA made very very good use of the delay in publication of her novels until she was in her mid 30's, enabling her to send all six of them out into the world as works of mature fiction, all informed by her fully developed genius.

Cheers, ARNIE

There's EVEN MORE Fielding Subtext in the 1805 Godmersham All-Female Theatricals

Diana Birchall in Janeites and Austen L: "…I am delighting in the Fielding connections. I don't think I've read anything that has charmed me so much as the little word-picture image of Aunt Cassandra playing Miss Teachum to Jane Austen's The Governess, and Miss Sharpe in the thick of it!"

And I am equally delighted, Diana, at all the responses I've received, both in these groups and privately, to my discovery of the Sarah Fielding’s The Governess subtext in the 1805 Godmersham all-female theatricals, as (for those who might have missed it) I posted here:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/jane-austens-playlet-adaptation-of.html

Among those responses, it was suggested to me that if The Governess was actually adapted/parodized, it must have been a very free adaptation, because several of the characters listed by Fanny Knight in her diary entry do _not_ appear in The Governess. It was also suggested to me that perhaps The Governess was not adapted at all, but that, as was the Godmersham custom on Twelfth Night, characters were assumed like costumes, and all was improvised.

These were both plausible observations, and they made me curious to have a second, closer look at those subordinate characters, and see what else Google might turn up, which might bring further clarity to these interesting and important questions. And, it turned out that in this instance, to my great good fortune, lightning struck a second time, and just as powerfully!

First, here again is that excerpt from Fanny Knight’s diary for June 26, 1805:
“Aunts and Grandmama played at school with us. Aunt Cassandra was Mrs Teachum, the Governess Aunt Jane, Miss Popham the Teacher Aunt Harriet, Sally the Housemaid, Miss Sharpe, the Dancing master the Apothecary and the Serjeant. Grandmama Better Jones the Pie woman, and Mama the Bathing Woman. They dressed in Character and we had a most delightful day…”

At first I misidentified Miss Popham as a character name, but then realized that must have been a real life Miss Popham, part of the Godmersham social circle (and probably a close relation of Sir Home Popham, the famous English military man, as to whom JA wrote the following poem in 1807:

ON SIR HOME POPHAM'S SENTENCE, APRIL 1807.
Of a Ministry pitiful, angry, mean,
A gallant commander the victim is seen.
For promptitude, vigour, success, does he stand
Condemn'd to receive a severe reprimand!
To his foes I could wish a resemblance in fate:
That they, too, may suffer themselves, soon or late,
The injustice they warrant. But vain is my spite,
They cannot so suffer who never do right.

So, while that was an interesting factoid, it was a dead end in terms of allusive sources for the thematic significance of these Godmersham all-female theatricals. But then I Googled “Dancing Master” & “Apothecary”, and look at what popped up on my monitor!:

http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA120&dq=apothecary+%22dancing+master%22&ei=xBWDTuq3I8OCgAfCxZFS&ct=result&id=EPEjAAAAMAAJ#v=onepage&q=apothecary%20%22dancing%20master%22&f=false

An Old Man Taught Wisdom, or The Virgin Unmask’d by Henry Fielding, Esq. (1734)
Dramatis Personae: Good-will, Lucy, his daughter, Blister, an _apothecary_, Coupee, a _dancing-master_, Quaver, a singing-master, Worm-wood, a lawyer, Mr Thomas, a footman

Was it just a coincidence that Googling character names from those theatricals had _again_ led me to a work written by a Fielding, this one by _Henry_? Of course it could not be a coincidence!! I quickly read through the text of Fielding’s wicked little farce, and concocted the following very interesting synopsis:

Goodwill, an arrogant 70-year old, rich widower, wants to marry off his 16 year old daughter Lucy to a rich relative, to keep his wealth ‘in the family’ (shades of Mr. Collins in P&P, and also the Bible stories of Zelophehad’s daughters!). Goodwill is cocksure that Lucy, whom he has deliberately raised in isolation, is under his complete control. However, as the action quickly unfolds, and not surprisingly in a farce, it is immediately apparent that Lucy has her own mind, including some strong but conflicting mercenary and sexual inclinations, far beyond the control of her clueless father.

Lucy winds up marrying Thomas the handsome footman of a neighboring lord, but first deftly deflects several unpleasant suitors, including Blister the _apothecary_ (who tries to physic everyone, even Lucy), and Coupee the _dancing master_ (who finds it scandalous that Lucy has not been taught to dance).

And, apropos the role of “Serjeant” that Fanny also listed, would you be surprised to learn that there are different ranks of footmen, and that the one just beneath valet status is called “_sergeant_ footman”?!

And, for good measure, there is also a character named Mr. Achum, a disabled old man—so now we have a Fielding triumvirate of Thwackum (from Tom Jones), Teachum (from The Governess), & Achum (from The Virgin Unmask’d)!]

And Blister, by the way, sounds disturbingly like the real life Harris Bigg Wither, when Lucy tells him point blank that she finds him too fat and ugly.
And perhaps most relevant to my inquiry vis a vis the Governess, the threat that Goodwill hangs over the head of Lucy (the same name, by the way, as the sharp-eyed girl in The Governess) is that if Lucy disobeys his courtship orders, he will send her to a _boarding school_ where she will be whipt.
So, from the half dozen direct echoes I have just quickly outlined, I feel safe in claiming that the performance that day at Godmersham was in some way a blending of Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, with Henry Fielding’s The Virgin Unmask’d, a truly Fieldingesque extravaganza!

And…(apropos Diana’s comments in particular), it also seems clear to me that Miss Sharpe, in playing the apothecary, the dancing master and the serjeant (footman), has played all three of the listed _male_ parts, the exact reverse of an Elizabethan performance of Shakespeare (as portrayed so memorably in Shakespeare in Love) when men played all the parts, including the female parts! Could there be a more feminist message conveyed to young Fanny? And what, if anything, does this casting suggest regarding Anne Sharpe? Is she like Tom Bertram—whose sexual orientation we have discussed in the past--taking the role of the Rhyming Butler?

The mind reels at all these connections and intimations.

What immediately came to my mind in particular, though, was the following passage from Henry Austen’s 1818 Biographical Notice:

“Richardson's power of creating, and preserving the consistency of his characters, as particularly exemplified in "Sir Charles Grandison," gratified the natural discrimination of her mind, whilst her taste secured her from the errors of his prolix style and tedious narrative. She did not rank any work of Fielding quite so high. Without the slightest affectation she recoiled from every thing gross. Neither nature, wit, nor humour, could make her amends for so very low a scale of morals.”

To which I can only respond “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” Henry Austen, you naughty man, you were successful for a very long time with your charade that JA found Henry Fielding too gross and lacking in morals—quite the contrary, Fielding’s writing was grist for JA’s mill, just as Richardson’s Grandison—and is it just coincidence that we have JA’s playlet of Grandison alongside this (alas) now lost text of a Fielding playlet? No, of course not! Henry knew there was a lot of “Fielding” smoke surrounding his recently deceased sister (don’t forget the 1796 Tom Lefroy letters!), and now that she was no longer alive to complain, he seized the moment to try to bury any sign of JA’s sympatico with Henry Fielding (and perhaps also with Sarah Fielding). And, as I suggested in my previous message, I suspect that if Le Faye did know about JA’s sympathy for “the devil” Fielding, she was not going to bring that to anyone’s attention!

But wait…..there’s even _more_!

I Googled “Virgin Unmask’d”, and I was immediately transported from Henry Fielding’s short, wicked 1734 farce (which, while not famous today, was deemed worthy of inclusion, later in the 18th century, , in the above-linked collection of great farces), to a truly infamous work of literature from 1724 by Bernard de Mandeville, entitled The Virgin Unmask’d: Or, Female Dialogues Betwixt an Elderly Maiden-Lady and her Niece, On several Diverting Discourses On Love, Marriage, Memoirs and Morals, &c. of the times.

Mandeville’s greatest infamy arose from his very popular Fable of the Bees. Here is what Fredson Bowers, in his 1975 edition of Tom Jones, says, in a footnote at ppg. 268-9, re the beginning of Book VI of Tom Jones, when Fielding addresses the “modern doctrine” that there is no such thing as love in human beings, and “that there were no such things as Virtue or Goodness really existing in Human Nature, and who deduced our best Actions from Pride”:
“Throughout his career as novelist and journalist, Fielding warmly denounced the views of those “Political Philosophers’ who followed Hobbes….In Fielding’s own century, the most notorious exponent of this cynical doctrine was Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), who in several essays in The Fable of the Bees (1714-34) dedicated himself to refuting Shaftesbury and to elaborating the proposition that ‘the nearer we search into human nature, the more we shall be convinced, that the moral virtues are the political offspring which flattery begot upon pride.” (“An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue” (1714)…Accordingly, Fielding’s sharpest criticism of this school was generally directed at ‘that charming Fellow Mandevil’, as Miss Matthews calls him in Amelia (1751, III.v)….”

So….as with my previous post, this additional discovery opens a half dozen doors of fruitful further inquiry, in terms of the significance of there now being not one, but _two_ Fielding subtexts embedded at the heart of the 1805 Godmersham all-female theatricals. It seems clear to me that these were not just random assignments of amusing literary characters, but that there was, as we see with the Sir Charles Grandison playlet that JA wrote (with some unknown input from Anna Austen), some sort of script.

We also see that the overarching theme is that of female education, the pros and cons of good and bad boarding schools, but all filtered through at least two literary works, Henry Fielding’s The Virgin Unmask’d,

And we are left with the very interesting question of why JA (with CEA’s obvious consent) would choose to stage a performance of works of literature that would not only subvert male authority by promoting a female-centered education for girls, but would go one step further and would seem to celebrate darkly cynical views of human nature and morality, as were at the heart of the satire of both Mandeville and Fielding?

What I wonder is, what was Elizabeth Knight’s take on all of this? Was she Fanny Price, dragged into playing a minor role (the Bathing Woman), while the main players had a satirically good time, and all of this with an audience that included Elizabeth’s own 12 year old daughter, Fanny, who seemed to enjoy the proceedings.

Cheers, ARNIE

Jane Austen's Playlet Adaptation of a Famous Novel (other than Sir Charles Grandison)

A few days ago, I wrote the following to Christy Somer in Austen L and also here in this blog:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/jane-austens-rapidly-moving-fingers.html

"...if you look at all of _your_ posts from the past 72 hours, there is information contained in _one_ of them which I (with my suspicious eye, working on the assumption that there are interesting connections and meanings everywhere which have never been noticed by Le Faye et al) immediately identified as worthy of closer examination in one respect. That information immediately (via _one_ Google search) led me to a heretofore unidentified, significant, and meaningful connection from Jane Austen to an allusive source from the world of literature published and extant in her world. And, that connection, upon further examination, turns out to strongly support my claim that Jane Austen had a strong authorial agenda to educate and empower young women to think critically and independently, and not to passively accept male prescriptions for female education."

In that post, I promised a quick explanation of the above, and, after a few days’ delay due to travel, here is my explanation.

This is what Christy wrote that caught my eye:

“Another recording from Fanny [Knight]’s diary for Wednesday, the 26th: “Aunts and Grandmama played at school with us. Aunt Cassandra was Mrs Teachum, the Governess Aunt Jane, Miss Popham the Teacher Aunt Harriet, Sally the Housemaid, Miss Sharpe, the Dancing master the Apothecary and the Serjeant. Grandmama Better Jones the Pie woman, and Mama the Bathing Woman. They dressed in Character and we had a most delightful day…” From DLF Record: :”In July some of the Bridges in-laws joined the house-party, and three years afterwards Jane remembered how ‘animated’ she and Cassandra had been when talking with Harriet Bridges and the Godmersham governess, Anne Sharp…..Miss Sharp left Godmersham a few months later, early in 1806.…” END QUOTE

As you see, Christy was quoting from Fanny Knight’s and Le Faye's accounts of an all-female Godmersham amateur theatrical that took place early in 1806.

What struck me immediately was the farcical name Mrs. TEACHUM, the role played by CEA in the theatrical. It reminded me of THWACKUM, the pious horrible hypocritical clergyman/tutor in Henry Fielding's very famous 1749 novel Tom Jones. It was just the kind of verbal—and character- similarity I thought JA-- to whom I ascribed the role of stage director---would definitely have been aware of. And so I thought, hmm… there's a pretty good chance that Teachum was either a name made up by JA as a parody of Thwackum, or maybe, just maybe, it was an allusion to some other work of literature which in some way was related to Fielding’s Tom Jones.

So I Googled "Teachum" and I saw a remarkable validation of my hunch beyond my wildest expectations. In a nutshell, it turns out that Mrs. Teachum is the main adult character in _another_ novel, which, amazingly, shared _three_ crucial similarities with _Tom Jones_:

Both were published in 1749; both were wildly successful, going through many 18th century editions, and (last but certainly not least)…..both were written by an author with the surname Fielding!!!!

How could this be? Because that other novel was _The Governess, or The Little Female Academy_, and its author was none other than SARAH Fielding, the less famous but still well known (among literary scholars) _sister_ of Henry Fielding!

As far as I can tell, after diligent online search during the past 5 days, no literary scholar prior to myself has ever pointed out that this little "play" staged at Godmersham was an adaptation of Sarah Fielding’s famous didactic novel. And what is particularly curious about that lack is the following passage in JA’s Letter 32 dated 1/22/1801….

“Fanny shall have the Boarding-school as soon as her Papa gives me an opportunity of sending it-& I do not know whether I may not by that time have worked myself up into so generous a fit as to give it to her for ever….”

…and Le Faye’s footnote to that passage:

“This would appear to be one of JA’s own childhood storybooks, now being lent to little Fanny; in which case, it may have been Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, or, Little Female Academy (1741, and reprinted up to 1768), or [two other possible books]…”

So there we have Le Faye speculating—based on what might seem to be a tenuous resonance between the two titles, “The Boarding School” and “Little Female Academy”--that JA may have given Sarah Fielding's novel to niece Fanny, age 8 in 1801.

But then Le Faye appears completely unaware of a connection of that passage in Letter 32 to the amateur theatricals that actually occurred at Godmersham in early 1806, a connection which would appear to validate Le Faye’s footnoted speculation, as it would make perfect sense that JA gave that novel to Fanny in 1801, and then, 5 years later, when Fanny has become a young teen, JA and CEA put on a little performance of scenes from that same novel with the participation of the Godmersham women, in effect turning Godmersham into a Little Female Academy for that time period!

There is so much more about the complex relationship between Sarah Fielding’s and Jane Austen’s writing, of which I was previously aware, but which becomes much more interesting in light of this discovery, but that is far beyond the scope of this posting.

Suffice for now to say that I believe I have fulfilled my promise of producing significant evidence of JA’s complex relationship to feminist literature available to be read during her lifetime, which has literally been hiding in plain sight under the nose of Le Faye and all those who swear by her authority. This example is, as I have previously stated, one of a thousand just like it that I have uncovered during the past 7 years, for one simple reason—I actively look for them, and expect to find them!

And my discovery doesn’t just have significance for Austen scholars—I wonder how many Fielding scholars have ever taken note of the coincidence of the character names Teachum & Thwackum (which would make a rather satirical name for a boarding school in JA’s era), and have written about covert coordination between Sarah and brother Henry in their two contemporaneous publications—that would certainly seem likely in the instance of _The Governess_ and _Tom Jones_!

And one final thought—I would not at all be surprised to learn that Le Faye was _already_ aware of the Sarah Fielding subtext underlying Fanny Knight’s 1806 diary entry, but chose not to say anything about it in a footnote—why? Because Sarah Fielding’s novel was _subversive_ in a very proto-feminist way (and there are several excellent modern scholarly articles on that very topic), and Le Faye would rather not raise the ominous spectre of feminism in the minds of readers of JA’s letters.

Or maybe Le Faye really was just clueless about it. Either way, it’s not exactly an advertisement for the usefulness of her footnotes.

Cheers, ARNIE