As soon as I sent my second message on this subject, I started to wonder if it was possible that I was the first person to catch James Edward Austen Leigh (JEAL) red-handed, and, if so, how that could be, given that Jane Austen's (JA’s) April 1817 letter to Charles Austen was first published in toto as early as Chapman’s first edition of JA’s letters, which was a VERY long time ago! Well, it turns out that I am not the first, D.W. Harding spotted the issue in 1965, as I just found out via Google Books. But...the story of the trajectory of this meme is, as with everything else about JEAL's deceptions, very interesting to trace and analyze, as I have so enjoyed doing the past hour:
So, Ron, when you wrote, in Austen L, "Arnie, to my mind this reasoning is a stroke of genius. ", you are very very kind, and I deeply appreciate your praise, but as this message will demonstrate, I cannot claim priority on this point. But, as must be evident from my messages today, I LOVE this stuff, and I am glad you enjoyed reading the fruits of my labors! ;)
Anyway, back to business. First, here is what D.W. Harding wrote as a footnote in his 1965 edition of Persuasion and The Memoir:
“Henry’s bankruptcy occurred in March 1816, but the letters that Austen-Leigh goes on to quote date from 1817 and refer to the disappointment the family felt at the will of James Leigh Perrot, Mrs. Austen’s brother. Although he made large bequests to members of the family, all were subject to his widow’s life interest. They were none of them well off, except Edward [Austen Knight], and had hoped for immediate benefit. Where Austen-Leigh quotes her as saying ‘I am the only one of the party who has been so silly’, she actually wrote ‘I am the only one of the legatees who…’
Note that Harding (who of course is famous for coining the term “regulated hatred” to describe JA’s literary state of mind), zeroed in on the same two key points that I did, being the change of “legatees” to “party” and the conflation of letters from 1816 with the April 1817 letter to Charles Austen. But Harding, after deploying the key evidence of JEAL’s guilt, abruptly stops and leaves the unseemly conclusion about JEAL's shenanigans COMPLETELY unspoken! Wuzzup with that????
I checked further, and, as far as I can tell from the Internet, Harding's footnote about this has only been noticed once, by Kathryn Sutherland, at P. 251 of HER 2002 edition of the Memoir. But...I cannot read that whole page 251 on Google Books, and I don't have the print copy of her edition in my house, and so if anyone reading here DOES have that edition, PLEASE post any comments that Sutherland may have made, beyond what I know she did, which was to point out JEAL's change of "legatees' to "party". It seems as though Sutherland did not make any comment beyond that, or even make any comment about Harding's footnote, so perhaps Sutherland independently rediscovered the change on her own, as I did, but, unlike myself, did not realize the significance?
But back to Harding for now, pending more info about Sutherland's take on this question.
As I said, above, I wondered why Harding would have failed to explicitly state such an explosive and important conclusion? First, Harding was not exactly shy or avoidant of controversy in the world of Janeites, and, even in other footnotes to the Memoir, he did not hesitate to point out a couple of other distortions and bowdlerizations by JEAL. So, why did he fail to explicitly “land the plane” in this most egregious instance of all? After all, this deception by JEAL goes to the heart of the Memoir as a reliable source of information about JA. JEAL's willingness to go to such lengths to obfuscate this point dramatically illustrates what an unreliable memoirist he really was. Not only was he prepared to keep general Austen family secrets, he was prepared to keep secrets that mattered only to him personally!
So why would Harding drop the ball in this way, and, by not giving prominence to his discovery, give aid and comfort in the perpetuation of such a serious lie in the Memoir? One possibility is that Harding did not know about JEAL inheriting Scarlets from the Leigh Perrots, and so did not realize that JEAL had a very personal motive for twisting the reality of the effect of the disinheritance on JA’s health. If Harding was not aware of that crucial fact, then he might plausibly have interpreted JEAL’s outrageous deception of his readers as just another Austen family attempt to keep unseemly family skeletons in the closet, and therefore not really worthy of explicit exposure. But, had Harding realized that JEAL not only had committed this literary “crime”, but also had personal motivation that was not shared by all the Austen descendants, but was uniquely JEAL’s, then perhaps Harding would have wished to more aggressively and prominently present his point.
My guess is that Harding, being a very sharp and a very skeptical guy, wondered why JEAL would make up this lie and go to the trouble of carefully concealing it, And then Harding would have readily learned that JEAL inheriting Scarlets.
So…I think the culprit behind Harding’s partial abetting of JEAL’s deception was not Harding, but Harding’s publisher, which, in 1965, in what seems to me to be an excess of editorial squeamishness (and perhaps a desire not to offend the many living descendants of JEAL), did not permit Harding to explicitly draw the obvious conclusion, but compromised by letting him put out the evidence standing alone.
Supporting this inference by me is the very curious fact that Harding’s discovery of JEAL’s deception is relegated to a footnote at the very end of the volume (P. 399 out of 399!), instead of being mentioned in his Introduction to the Memoir in that same edition. Obviously a whole lot more people were going to read the Introduction than were ever going to read the buried footnote!
And what makes that omission of same from the Introduction even more curious is that Harding Introduction DID echo another one of his footnotes, the one about JEAL referring to Edward Austen Knight as the second eldest brother with the following comment regarding same in his Introduction: “[JEAL] followed the family practice of completely ignoring the existence of her defective or handicapped brother…”
It makes sense, doesn’t it? Harding, writing in 1965, and NOT being the one “breaking the story” about the collective Austen family attempt to hide the existence of JA’s brother George Austen, explicitly mentions the hiding of George Austen the younger in both his Introduction and a footnote. But Harding’s detection of JEAL’s outright lying, being a genuine news story in the burgeoning world of modern Austen studies, is relegated to a footnote only, and one that only implies, but does not make explicit, JEAL’s wrongdoing.
“Very interesting….”, as Arte Johnson used to say, “…but deceitful!”
ARNIE
P.S.: By the way, it just occurs to me that the principal reason why Letter 157 survived to be read by the world is precisely that it was written to Charles Austen, not to Cassandra, who surely would have reduced it to ashes as being far too revealing of dirty Austen family secrets of a particularly explosive kind. But I suspect CEA did not even know of the letter’s existence, and fortunately it passed down to Charles’s granddaughters who eventually sold it during the 1920s to Chapmans, who published it.
And….taking this line of thinking one step further, now I understand better why JEAL quoted from Charles’s letter, and chose to grapple with this issue head on, as opposed to simply ignoring it. It was precisely because he became aware at some point of its existence and the explosive material it contained (perhaps from correspondence between him and Charles’s daughter, Cassandra-Esten, JEAL’s first cousin), and he was attempting a preemptive strike to neutralize it if Letter 157 were to be published, which it eventually was. By just changing a single word, “party”, etc., his clever stratagem did apparently work for nearly a century, and even after that, has remained universally unnoticed until 01/20/2010.
Why I love this stuff so much is that the world of Jane Austen is such a seamless web of biography, reading of fiction, and literary criticism, and questions like Diane's can lead those so inclined, like myself, on an endless ride, to and fro, along the various strands of that web. I feel a little like Jake in Avatar, flying around Pandora, soaking up its endless wonders! ;)
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
The News that Really Made Jane Austen Sicker
The following is a sequence of two messages that I sent this afternoon to the Janeites and Austen groups, responding to one comment made by Diane Reynolds, who has ably been leading a group discussion there on the subject of James Edward Austen Leigh’s 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen. My second message is a correction of part of my first message, and I have copied them both here, because I think the sequence is interesting.
Diane actually began as follows, in relevant part:
“In Chapter 11 of The Memoir, James Edward Austen-Leigh describes the decline and death of JA….. The chapter opens with ‘Early in the year 1816 some family troubles disturbed the usually tranquil course of Jane Austen’s life; and it is probable that the inward malady, which was to prove ultimately fatal, was already felt by her ..’ We don't learn what those "family troubles" are, though I have a dim recollection of her brother's bank failure, and there is no explanation for what appears an implicit linking of these outer troubles with JA's "inward malady.' "
That sets the stage for my two responses, as follows:
MY FIRST POST:
Diane, you have zeroed in on a very interesting question here. In my considered opinion, the passage you questioned may be the single most disingenuous, self-serving and even despicable passage written by JEAL in the entire Memoir, and I will try to explain why I feel so strongly about this.
Indeed, it does appear from the passage you point to that JEAL is subtly laying some blame for JA's ill health at the door of Henry's bankruptcy, which, as far as we know, was THE major bad news in the Austen family in the first months of 1816 (it occurred in March 1816). Superficially, it seems like a very plausible suggestion on JEAL's part, and if we didn't have any other background, we would have no reason to look behind his comments. However, I believe this innuendo about Henry does not stand up to closer scrutiny, and actually smacks of something out of Iago's playbook--the "inadvertent" slander.
So let's look at the other evidence. As I read the letters from late 1815 and the first half of 1816, what I see is that they are all overflowing with JA's elation over her completion of Emma, and its publication. Unless I have overlooked something, there is not a word in any of them about JA herself feeling ill, let alone about her feeling ill because of Henry's troubles. JA is on a massive high, she has reached the heights, people are beginning to know who she is and she is horsing around with new friends like the Countess Morley.
That of course does not negate the possibility that the stress from Henry's travails did make JA sicker--and if it had happened, JA was highly unlikely to complain about such a thing to her nieces and nephews (who were her sole familial correspondents during that time). But the high she was on from the giddiness of the encounters with Haden the apothecary, the whole charade she carried on with Stanier Clarke, etc etc, is not pretended, this is real, and I believe it muted the negative effects of whatever illness she was suffering then, and overpowered even the distress of Henry's bankruptcy.
But far more important in this analysis is what we DO know about extrinsic events having an adverse effect on JA's health during the last years of her life. JEAL makes sure to include this innuendo pointing the finger at Henry for making JA sicker, but JEAL utterly ignores the one AND ONLY extrinsic event that occurred during the last two years of JA's life which she herself EXPLICITLY referred to as having a drastically bad effect on her health! To wit: check out the following passage from Letter 157, Sunday April 6, 1817 {when was Easter Sunday that year?], to Charles Austen (who was then staying in London):
"A few days ago my complaint appeared removed, but I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle's Will brought on a relapse, & I was so ill on friday & thought myself so likely to be worse that i could not but press for Cassandra's returning with Frank after the Funeral last night...I am the only one of the Legatees who has been so silly, but a weak Body must excuse weak Nerves. My mother has borne the forgetfulness of HER extremely well....."
Is it just a coincidence that we have this passage in a letter written by JA in April 1817, which harps on that exact theme of extrinsic stress exacerbating JA's illness? The next question is, did JEAL have any idea about what a shock JA suffered when she, her sister and her mother heard that Uncle Leigh Perrot had [quoting Le Faye] "left everything to his wife for her lifetime, with the reversion of a large sum to James Austen and his heirs, and of L1,000 each to those of Mrs. Austen's younger children who should survive Mrs. LP." ? You might wonder, perhaps he did not know of the existence of Letter 157, and did not know about that.
Well, that doesn't stand up, because something else JEAL wrote in the Memoir shows that he was aware of the family dynamics which made that testamentary omission of JA, CEA and Mrs. Austen so shocking and upsetting. Look at this other bit of memoiristic doubletalk on this very subject:
"I do not know how early the alarming symptoms of her malady came on. It was in the following March [i.e., 1817] that I had the first idea of her being seriously ill. It had been settled that about the end of that month, or the beginning of April, I should spend a few days at Chawton, in the absence of my father and mother, who were just then engaged with Mrs Leigh Perrot in arranging her late husband's affairs; but Aunt Jane became too ill to have me in the house, and so I went instead to my sister Mrs Lefroy at Wyards'."
So JEAL zeroes in on precisely that moment when JA wrote that letter to Charles, but taking subtle pains to make it sound like he has given the reader the lowdown on the Leigh Perrot inheritance, while remaining utterly silent about the reason WHY JA becoming too ill for him to visit the house!
But why would JEAL go to such lengths to create the false appearance of Henry's bankruptcy having been a contributing factor to JA's decline, instead of the shock of the disinheritance by Uncle Leigh Perrot? That one is easy, and it's the same answer I gave a few weeks ago for why JEAL never mentions Aunt Leigh Perrot's famous trial for shoplifting. To wit, when Mrs. Leigh Perrot died in 1836, JEAL became the squire of the Leigh Perrot estate, Scarlets. So, if JEAL was aware of how devastating an effect that disinheritance had upon JA's health, he had every self-serving reason NOT to mention it! Ultimately, he was the primary beneficiary of that disinheritance of the Austen women!!!
What I find not merely self serving, but despicable, is that JEAL protests too much. He could have just left the subject of extrinsic events triggering health declines for JA silent, but he has a further agenda. He knows about JA having been devastated by the disinheritance, and so he wants to put the kibosh on that meme. And his method was to go to the trouble of implying very strongly that it must have been some event OTHER than the disinheritance which so adversely affected JA's health, and then mentioning the Leigh Perrot inheritance and NOT connecting it to JA's health.
It's all too pat, it sounds like "spin" that is specifically designed to address the question of JA's health as impacted by family news, but then point to a superficially plausible cause that preserves the reputation of the Leigh Perrots, JEAL's benefactors.
MY SECOND MESSAGE:
As I was preparing to post that same message on my blog, I went back to the text of Chapter XI of the Memoir to quote the actual passage originally quoted by Diane, and only then realized that the case for JEAL's disingenuousness, self-interest and despicacity (I know it's not a word, but it sounds good!) is much stronger than I had realized. In light of what I will show you, below, the evidence of JEAL's intentional duplicity is overwhelming and 100% conclusive.
Specifically, I had not reread the ENTIRE opening paragraph of Chapter XI, which reads as follows [I put certain excerpts in all caps for emphasis]:
"Early in the year 1816 some family troubles disturbed the usually tranquil course of Jane Austen's life; and it is probable that the inward malady, which was to prove ultimately fatal, was already felt by her; for some distant friends whom she visited in the spring of that year, thought that her health was somewhat impaired, and observed that she went about her old haunts, and recalled old recollections connected with them in a particular manner, as if she did not expect ever to see them again. It is not surprising that, UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES, some of her letters were of A GRAVER TONE than had been customary with her, and expressed resignation rather than cheerfulness. In reference to these troubles IN A LETTER TO HER BROTHER CHARLES, after mentioning that she had been laid up with an attack of bilious fever, she says: 'I live upstairs for the present and am coddled. I am the only one of the PARTY who has been so silly, but a weak body must excuse weak nerves.' "
JEAL's audacious lying is positively breathtaking! It is now clear that JEAL DID read Letter 157 (that JA wrote to brother Charles), and it is especially clear because JEAL quotes from it! And not just quotes from it, but quotes from the most important line in that letter! Or should I say, MISquotes from that line in Letter 157. The smoking gun of JEAL's culpability is the word "party" in that last sentence. In the original letter, that word was "legatees", and of course it is apparent why JEAL made this change. He correctly judged that by changing that single word, and also using the phrase "under these circumstances" in his own sentence introducing that quotation, he could completely alter the context of that sentence. JA's bilious attack is presented as the ultimate effect of Henry Austen's bankruptcy (with the intervening passage of 13 months cleverly obscured). And, what's more, the exhilaration of JA's Spring 1816 letters is actively denied by referring to letters of "a graver tone". Really, this is the kind of lying you expect in modern political campaigns!
So it turns out that what could at least theoretically have been a coincidence is not a coincidence at all, it was a completely intentional deception, where JEAL's agenda of whitewashing the devastating effect of the Leigh Perrot disinheritance was accomplished by smearing the memory of Henry Austen.
And it now is also clear that my analogy of JEAL to Iago turns out to be incredibly apt, because Iago's technique was exactly the same, not merely misleading, but turning truth COMPLETELY upside down, by deploying the damning evidence against Leigh Perrot as evidence against Henry Austen, and leaving it to the reader (i.e., Othello) to connect the dots. JEAL may as well have purloined one of Henry Austen's handkerchiefs and dropped it in JA's sickroom!
What incredible chutzpah---you almost, as with Iago, have to admire the technique, even as you deplore the horrible immorality!
And don't forget what is perhaps the sharpest irony of all. JEAL was a CLERGYMAN, and, compared to this sort of wicked deception perpetrated on the world by a clergyman, Mr. Collins and James Stanier Clarke seem like holy saints. JEAL claimed that JA never represented real people in her novels, but he neglected to point out that HE did not always represent real people in his Memoir!
Arnie
Diane actually began as follows, in relevant part:
“In Chapter 11 of The Memoir, James Edward Austen-Leigh describes the decline and death of JA….. The chapter opens with ‘Early in the year 1816 some family troubles disturbed the usually tranquil course of Jane Austen’s life; and it is probable that the inward malady, which was to prove ultimately fatal, was already felt by her ..’ We don't learn what those "family troubles" are, though I have a dim recollection of her brother's bank failure, and there is no explanation for what appears an implicit linking of these outer troubles with JA's "inward malady.' "
That sets the stage for my two responses, as follows:
MY FIRST POST:
Diane, you have zeroed in on a very interesting question here. In my considered opinion, the passage you questioned may be the single most disingenuous, self-serving and even despicable passage written by JEAL in the entire Memoir, and I will try to explain why I feel so strongly about this.
Indeed, it does appear from the passage you point to that JEAL is subtly laying some blame for JA's ill health at the door of Henry's bankruptcy, which, as far as we know, was THE major bad news in the Austen family in the first months of 1816 (it occurred in March 1816). Superficially, it seems like a very plausible suggestion on JEAL's part, and if we didn't have any other background, we would have no reason to look behind his comments. However, I believe this innuendo about Henry does not stand up to closer scrutiny, and actually smacks of something out of Iago's playbook--the "inadvertent" slander.
So let's look at the other evidence. As I read the letters from late 1815 and the first half of 1816, what I see is that they are all overflowing with JA's elation over her completion of Emma, and its publication. Unless I have overlooked something, there is not a word in any of them about JA herself feeling ill, let alone about her feeling ill because of Henry's troubles. JA is on a massive high, she has reached the heights, people are beginning to know who she is and she is horsing around with new friends like the Countess Morley.
That of course does not negate the possibility that the stress from Henry's travails did make JA sicker--and if it had happened, JA was highly unlikely to complain about such a thing to her nieces and nephews (who were her sole familial correspondents during that time). But the high she was on from the giddiness of the encounters with Haden the apothecary, the whole charade she carried on with Stanier Clarke, etc etc, is not pretended, this is real, and I believe it muted the negative effects of whatever illness she was suffering then, and overpowered even the distress of Henry's bankruptcy.
But far more important in this analysis is what we DO know about extrinsic events having an adverse effect on JA's health during the last years of her life. JEAL makes sure to include this innuendo pointing the finger at Henry for making JA sicker, but JEAL utterly ignores the one AND ONLY extrinsic event that occurred during the last two years of JA's life which she herself EXPLICITLY referred to as having a drastically bad effect on her health! To wit: check out the following passage from Letter 157, Sunday April 6, 1817 {when was Easter Sunday that year?], to Charles Austen (who was then staying in London):
"A few days ago my complaint appeared removed, but I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle's Will brought on a relapse, & I was so ill on friday & thought myself so likely to be worse that i could not but press for Cassandra's returning with Frank after the Funeral last night...I am the only one of the Legatees who has been so silly, but a weak Body must excuse weak Nerves. My mother has borne the forgetfulness of HER extremely well....."
Is it just a coincidence that we have this passage in a letter written by JA in April 1817, which harps on that exact theme of extrinsic stress exacerbating JA's illness? The next question is, did JEAL have any idea about what a shock JA suffered when she, her sister and her mother heard that Uncle Leigh Perrot had [quoting Le Faye] "left everything to his wife for her lifetime, with the reversion of a large sum to James Austen and his heirs, and of L1,000 each to those of Mrs. Austen's younger children who should survive Mrs. LP." ? You might wonder, perhaps he did not know of the existence of Letter 157, and did not know about that.
Well, that doesn't stand up, because something else JEAL wrote in the Memoir shows that he was aware of the family dynamics which made that testamentary omission of JA, CEA and Mrs. Austen so shocking and upsetting. Look at this other bit of memoiristic doubletalk on this very subject:
"I do not know how early the alarming symptoms of her malady came on. It was in the following March [i.e., 1817] that I had the first idea of her being seriously ill. It had been settled that about the end of that month, or the beginning of April, I should spend a few days at Chawton, in the absence of my father and mother, who were just then engaged with Mrs Leigh Perrot in arranging her late husband's affairs; but Aunt Jane became too ill to have me in the house, and so I went instead to my sister Mrs Lefroy at Wyards'."
So JEAL zeroes in on precisely that moment when JA wrote that letter to Charles, but taking subtle pains to make it sound like he has given the reader the lowdown on the Leigh Perrot inheritance, while remaining utterly silent about the reason WHY JA becoming too ill for him to visit the house!
But why would JEAL go to such lengths to create the false appearance of Henry's bankruptcy having been a contributing factor to JA's decline, instead of the shock of the disinheritance by Uncle Leigh Perrot? That one is easy, and it's the same answer I gave a few weeks ago for why JEAL never mentions Aunt Leigh Perrot's famous trial for shoplifting. To wit, when Mrs. Leigh Perrot died in 1836, JEAL became the squire of the Leigh Perrot estate, Scarlets. So, if JEAL was aware of how devastating an effect that disinheritance had upon JA's health, he had every self-serving reason NOT to mention it! Ultimately, he was the primary beneficiary of that disinheritance of the Austen women!!!
What I find not merely self serving, but despicable, is that JEAL protests too much. He could have just left the subject of extrinsic events triggering health declines for JA silent, but he has a further agenda. He knows about JA having been devastated by the disinheritance, and so he wants to put the kibosh on that meme. And his method was to go to the trouble of implying very strongly that it must have been some event OTHER than the disinheritance which so adversely affected JA's health, and then mentioning the Leigh Perrot inheritance and NOT connecting it to JA's health.
It's all too pat, it sounds like "spin" that is specifically designed to address the question of JA's health as impacted by family news, but then point to a superficially plausible cause that preserves the reputation of the Leigh Perrots, JEAL's benefactors.
MY SECOND MESSAGE:
As I was preparing to post that same message on my blog, I went back to the text of Chapter XI of the Memoir to quote the actual passage originally quoted by Diane, and only then realized that the case for JEAL's disingenuousness, self-interest and despicacity (I know it's not a word, but it sounds good!) is much stronger than I had realized. In light of what I will show you, below, the evidence of JEAL's intentional duplicity is overwhelming and 100% conclusive.
Specifically, I had not reread the ENTIRE opening paragraph of Chapter XI, which reads as follows [I put certain excerpts in all caps for emphasis]:
"Early in the year 1816 some family troubles disturbed the usually tranquil course of Jane Austen's life; and it is probable that the inward malady, which was to prove ultimately fatal, was already felt by her; for some distant friends whom she visited in the spring of that year, thought that her health was somewhat impaired, and observed that she went about her old haunts, and recalled old recollections connected with them in a particular manner, as if she did not expect ever to see them again. It is not surprising that, UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES, some of her letters were of A GRAVER TONE than had been customary with her, and expressed resignation rather than cheerfulness. In reference to these troubles IN A LETTER TO HER BROTHER CHARLES, after mentioning that she had been laid up with an attack of bilious fever, she says: 'I live upstairs for the present and am coddled. I am the only one of the PARTY who has been so silly, but a weak body must excuse weak nerves.' "
JEAL's audacious lying is positively breathtaking! It is now clear that JEAL DID read Letter 157 (that JA wrote to brother Charles), and it is especially clear because JEAL quotes from it! And not just quotes from it, but quotes from the most important line in that letter! Or should I say, MISquotes from that line in Letter 157. The smoking gun of JEAL's culpability is the word "party" in that last sentence. In the original letter, that word was "legatees", and of course it is apparent why JEAL made this change. He correctly judged that by changing that single word, and also using the phrase "under these circumstances" in his own sentence introducing that quotation, he could completely alter the context of that sentence. JA's bilious attack is presented as the ultimate effect of Henry Austen's bankruptcy (with the intervening passage of 13 months cleverly obscured). And, what's more, the exhilaration of JA's Spring 1816 letters is actively denied by referring to letters of "a graver tone". Really, this is the kind of lying you expect in modern political campaigns!
So it turns out that what could at least theoretically have been a coincidence is not a coincidence at all, it was a completely intentional deception, where JEAL's agenda of whitewashing the devastating effect of the Leigh Perrot disinheritance was accomplished by smearing the memory of Henry Austen.
And it now is also clear that my analogy of JEAL to Iago turns out to be incredibly apt, because Iago's technique was exactly the same, not merely misleading, but turning truth COMPLETELY upside down, by deploying the damning evidence against Leigh Perrot as evidence against Henry Austen, and leaving it to the reader (i.e., Othello) to connect the dots. JEAL may as well have purloined one of Henry Austen's handkerchiefs and dropped it in JA's sickroom!
What incredible chutzpah---you almost, as with Iago, have to admire the technique, even as you deplore the horrible immorality!
And don't forget what is perhaps the sharpest irony of all. JEAL was a CLERGYMAN, and, compared to this sort of wicked deception perpetrated on the world by a clergyman, Mr. Collins and James Stanier Clarke seem like holy saints. JEAL claimed that JA never represented real people in her novels, but he neglected to point out that HE did not always represent real people in his Memoir!
Arnie
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Jane Austen and Miss Bates the great talkers on little matters
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Janeites/message/30750
The following is what I wrote nearly two years ago in Janeites, in response to someone's comment about Jane Austen (JA) not writing about happy spinsters, and I believe what I wrote even more strongly today than I did when I wrote it then. It's no coincidence that Henry Austen, James Edward Austen Leigh and so many others (especially the male critics) tried to minimize JA's literary achievements, constantly paying her the backhanded compliment of saying, yes, she created perfection, but on a tiny stage. JA was well aware that her writing would seem like it was concerned with "small potatoes" to readers without deep insight, and what better way to covertly laugh at those minimizers than by covertly depicting herself as Miss Bates, literature's most famous talker on little matters, and inviting those same readers to minimize Miss Bates? JA (and Miss Bates, in the novel) had the last laugh, albeit a very private one.
ARNIE
My Feb. 2008 message (my comments are not in quotes):
"Austen did not write a story about a happy spinster because stories about Happy spinsters did not sell very well then and don't sell well now, unless the woman is of a certain age."
Uh.....Miss Bates? I think Miss Bates is JA's most beautiful and delicate self portrait. It is only because we see Miss Bates through Emma's eyes that she seems to be a motormouth ditz..Just ask Agatha Christie----Miss Marple is one part Miss Bates, one part Miss Austen.
"They do not want to see her a a woman who looked about her with clear eyes eyes, who saw things as they were but was not a bitter, biting, nasty old woman.
How can people find solace and comfort in a bitter, hatefilled, frustrated old maid?"
I for one don't believe JA was a bitter hate-filled frustrated old maid. But I DO believe she often, and very cleverly, expressed a great deal of bitter, sarcastic, ironic feelings and perceptions in her letters and novels. Much of it veiled.
She was like most people, with a great deal of anger and bitterness, but also with an even greater deal of love and empathy. The balance with her was definitely positive. But make no mistake, Miss Mitford was entirely correct when she characterized JA as a local terror, someone who was feared by all local hypocrites and snobs for what she might say to them.
ARNIE
The following is what I wrote nearly two years ago in Janeites, in response to someone's comment about Jane Austen (JA) not writing about happy spinsters, and I believe what I wrote even more strongly today than I did when I wrote it then. It's no coincidence that Henry Austen, James Edward Austen Leigh and so many others (especially the male critics) tried to minimize JA's literary achievements, constantly paying her the backhanded compliment of saying, yes, she created perfection, but on a tiny stage. JA was well aware that her writing would seem like it was concerned with "small potatoes" to readers without deep insight, and what better way to covertly laugh at those minimizers than by covertly depicting herself as Miss Bates, literature's most famous talker on little matters, and inviting those same readers to minimize Miss Bates? JA (and Miss Bates, in the novel) had the last laugh, albeit a very private one.
ARNIE
My Feb. 2008 message (my comments are not in quotes):
"Austen did not write a story about a happy spinster because stories about Happy spinsters did not sell very well then and don't sell well now, unless the woman is of a certain age."
Uh.....Miss Bates? I think Miss Bates is JA's most beautiful and delicate self portrait. It is only because we see Miss Bates through Emma's eyes that she seems to be a motormouth ditz..Just ask Agatha Christie----Miss Marple is one part Miss Bates, one part Miss Austen.
"They do not want to see her a a woman who looked about her with clear eyes eyes, who saw things as they were but was not a bitter, biting, nasty old woman.
How can people find solace and comfort in a bitter, hatefilled, frustrated old maid?"
I for one don't believe JA was a bitter hate-filled frustrated old maid. But I DO believe she often, and very cleverly, expressed a great deal of bitter, sarcastic, ironic feelings and perceptions in her letters and novels. Much of it veiled.
She was like most people, with a great deal of anger and bitterness, but also with an even greater deal of love and empathy. The balance with her was definitely positive. But make no mistake, Miss Mitford was entirely correct when she characterized JA as a local terror, someone who was feared by all local hypocrites and snobs for what she might say to them.
ARNIE
Thursday, November 26, 2009
The 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen
Upon the reread of James Edward Austen Leigh's (JEAL's) 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen going on in Austen L and Janeites, even as we have only gotten through Chapter 3, the almost absurdly funny self-contradictions that repeatedly emerge as we look at one passage after another, almost makes me wonder whether, crazy as it sounds, JEAL was having a bit of fun with the reader, taking on the persona of the "self-satisfied, smug, pompous, controversy-phobic, prudish, Victorian fool", but actually undermining the message he appears to be harping on at every possible turn. He is just so over the top in his smarmy obfuscations and tortured rationalizations that it just cannot be real.
His choice of "The Mystery" as the bit of the Juvenilia to provide as an example of JA's "youthful effusions" is a perfect example. Yes, his choice could have been completely pragmatic and non-ideological, i.e., based solely on the extreme shortness of the piece, which allowed it to be reproduced in toto. And yet, as has been noted in our discussion, "The Mystery", while on a superficial level it can (and often has been) been taken as a silly girlish joke with no substance beneath it, is to a more perceptive reader anything but that. To me, it is almost a Rosetta Stone or template (or, to use a term more meaningful vis a vis JA's literary mysteriousness, a CHARADE) standing in for ALL of the Juvenilia. In a matter of a few pages, JA unmistakably conveys the message that there is some dark family mystery so awful that it can only be whispered about, it cannot even be named, whether in this short mini-play, or in any of the much longer juvenilia filled with absurdist sociopathy on every page.
And this business with the Eliza Brydges letter, however different it appears on the surface from "The Mystery", has the same effect. Not only do we have the absurd self-parody of criticizing the absurd Egerton Brydges and then immediately imitating him. But when you read the content of the letter, with its nauseating repetition of the necessity of a young lady keeping her expenses down so as not to cause alarm or distress to the powers that be, and then you step back and realize that the actual fate of poor Mary Brydges, when she became Mary Leigh, was to become a baby-making "Automat" for 14 years straight, until her premature death at about age 30 or thereabouts, you realize that perhaps her mother, off gallivanting in Turkey with her husband, might well have given her daughter some better advice--like, try to avoid getting married as long as possible!
Could JEAL (and any of his friends and advisors upon whom he relied for editorial assistance) possibly have been so clueless, so dumb as not to realize that he was repeatedly cracking open with one hand the very doors he was so pointedly slamming with his other hand?
He, like his father, had literary aspirations, we know that from JA's surviving correspondence with him. Was JEAL, unlike his father, perhaps more receptive to his aunt's love of shadow and mysterious Gothicism masked as everyday quaint realism? He was, after all, the younger half brother of the very literary Anna Austen Lefroy, to whom he remained close throughout their lives, the one member of the Austen family who clearly was JA's closest literary confidant--we know that she was an active participant in his research for the Memoir, and she did not die till two years after its publication.
While I have not made up my mind as of yet (and I hope this group reading will sharpen my thinking on this very point), my tentative opinion at the moment is that JEAL meant the Memoir to be readable both as a straight Victorian suppression of the shadow side of JA's life and writings, and also as a covert subversive celebration of the shadow side of her life and writings. If this was what he did, then there could be no greater tribute to her.
His choice of "The Mystery" as the bit of the Juvenilia to provide as an example of JA's "youthful effusions" is a perfect example. Yes, his choice could have been completely pragmatic and non-ideological, i.e., based solely on the extreme shortness of the piece, which allowed it to be reproduced in toto. And yet, as has been noted in our discussion, "The Mystery", while on a superficial level it can (and often has been) been taken as a silly girlish joke with no substance beneath it, is to a more perceptive reader anything but that. To me, it is almost a Rosetta Stone or template (or, to use a term more meaningful vis a vis JA's literary mysteriousness, a CHARADE) standing in for ALL of the Juvenilia. In a matter of a few pages, JA unmistakably conveys the message that there is some dark family mystery so awful that it can only be whispered about, it cannot even be named, whether in this short mini-play, or in any of the much longer juvenilia filled with absurdist sociopathy on every page.
And this business with the Eliza Brydges letter, however different it appears on the surface from "The Mystery", has the same effect. Not only do we have the absurd self-parody of criticizing the absurd Egerton Brydges and then immediately imitating him. But when you read the content of the letter, with its nauseating repetition of the necessity of a young lady keeping her expenses down so as not to cause alarm or distress to the powers that be, and then you step back and realize that the actual fate of poor Mary Brydges, when she became Mary Leigh, was to become a baby-making "Automat" for 14 years straight, until her premature death at about age 30 or thereabouts, you realize that perhaps her mother, off gallivanting in Turkey with her husband, might well have given her daughter some better advice--like, try to avoid getting married as long as possible!
Could JEAL (and any of his friends and advisors upon whom he relied for editorial assistance) possibly have been so clueless, so dumb as not to realize that he was repeatedly cracking open with one hand the very doors he was so pointedly slamming with his other hand?
He, like his father, had literary aspirations, we know that from JA's surviving correspondence with him. Was JEAL, unlike his father, perhaps more receptive to his aunt's love of shadow and mysterious Gothicism masked as everyday quaint realism? He was, after all, the younger half brother of the very literary Anna Austen Lefroy, to whom he remained close throughout their lives, the one member of the Austen family who clearly was JA's closest literary confidant--we know that she was an active participant in his research for the Memoir, and she did not die till two years after its publication.
While I have not made up my mind as of yet (and I hope this group reading will sharpen my thinking on this very point), my tentative opinion at the moment is that JEAL meant the Memoir to be readable both as a straight Victorian suppression of the shadow side of JA's life and writings, and also as a covert subversive celebration of the shadow side of her life and writings. If this was what he did, then there could be no greater tribute to her.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Catherine Morland's Home Run
" A book intended for children, A Pretty Little Pocket Book, mentions a game for children in which they struck a ball and ran around bases."
Nancy, that is the very same 1751 book by Newbery, with respect to which I posted the URL for the page image that pertains to Base-ball!
I was just looking at it again, and I see that they did not use bases then, but instead used posts, which were about waist high. And what is cool is that both "base" AND "post" have more or less the same meaning in nautical terms, in the sense of a sailor being "based" or "posted" at a particular port during a long, multi-phase sea voyage.
And it makes sense that a boy's game would have a nautical terminology, because I imagine that if you asked the average English country boy what he wanted to be when he grew up, many of them would surely say "sailor", and so playing base-ball for them would have resonated with the idea of taking part in imaginary sea voyages, and so of course nautical terminology would enhance that fantasy aspect.
But I do now believe that JA's mentioning Catherine playing baseball was not solely to show that she had been a tomboy. I also think that baseball does work as a metaphor for Catherine's experience over the course of the entire novel. Although she never goes to sea, Catherine does feel that in leaving her home for the first time, she has not only embarked on a grand "voyage" into life, she has also stepped up to the plate and made her first appearance in the grand game of courtship.
And she somehow, improbably, manages to hit a "home run"----where she begins at home in Fullerton, then goes to first base (Bath), thence to second base (Northanger Abbey), then third base (Fullerton), and finally and climactically home, which of course is Woodston, which will thenceforth indeed be her new home, where she will presumably be "safe", despite General Tilney's having literally "thrown her out" !
Arnie
Nancy, that is the very same 1751 book by Newbery, with respect to which I posted the URL for the page image that pertains to Base-ball!
I was just looking at it again, and I see that they did not use bases then, but instead used posts, which were about waist high. And what is cool is that both "base" AND "post" have more or less the same meaning in nautical terms, in the sense of a sailor being "based" or "posted" at a particular port during a long, multi-phase sea voyage.
And it makes sense that a boy's game would have a nautical terminology, because I imagine that if you asked the average English country boy what he wanted to be when he grew up, many of them would surely say "sailor", and so playing base-ball for them would have resonated with the idea of taking part in imaginary sea voyages, and so of course nautical terminology would enhance that fantasy aspect.
But I do now believe that JA's mentioning Catherine playing baseball was not solely to show that she had been a tomboy. I also think that baseball does work as a metaphor for Catherine's experience over the course of the entire novel. Although she never goes to sea, Catherine does feel that in leaving her home for the first time, she has not only embarked on a grand "voyage" into life, she has also stepped up to the plate and made her first appearance in the grand game of courtship.
And she somehow, improbably, manages to hit a "home run"----where she begins at home in Fullerton, then goes to first base (Bath), thence to second base (Northanger Abbey), then third base (Fullerton), and finally and climactically home, which of course is Woodston, which will thenceforth indeed be her new home, where she will presumably be "safe", despite General Tilney's having literally "thrown her out" !
Arnie
JA and Running Home Safely
I am so glad the question was asked about the seniority of JA’s reference to Catherine playing baseball in Northanger Abbey, because this is a perfect illustration of how the answers to a thousand questions about JA are out there like one of the low-hanging apricots at the Mansfield parsonage, just waiting to be picked----and it isn't "insipid" fruit, either!:
Take a peek at this:
http://www.sabr.org/sabr.cfm?a=cms,c,739,34,0
I don’t know how long the folks at SABR have known about the 1751 Newbery book description of baseball being played in England (perhaps they got the info from a guy named Barry Baldwin, who addressed the Calgary JASNA branch in 2006 and mentioned the Newbery book) , but what is clear is that the baseball mavens at SABR have not talking to Janeites at large, or vice versa, and, as a result, this very interesting connection has not previously been made between our two otherwise entirely unconnected worlds, even though Janeites are every bit as interested, I think.
My point is that all it takes is the mental awareness that a Google search often can help find connections that render the OED and similar pre-Google resources nearly completely useless. It is not at all surprising to me that the OED still has that incorrect information, because the OED is a dinosaur.
I can't count how many discoveries I have made about various aspects of JA scholarship, just by being curious and proactive, and searching online, and by NOT assuming that "someone has already checked". The truth is that most of the interesting questions about JA have NEVER been checked online--it's an intellectual Wild West, completely virgin territory for "fruitful" investigation! Remember, Google Books did not even exist until 3 years ago, and they keep adding newly scanned texts at a breathtaking rate, so that searches you may have done a year ago are now out of date!
Anyway, I did another 30 seconds of searching and was thrilled to find a digitized copy of Newbery's little book, and another minute of patient virtual thumbing through the pages led me to this image of the actual page, with a drawing depicting the playing of baseball:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/displayPhoto.pl?path=/service/rbc/rbc0001/2003/2003juv05880&topImages=0051r.jpg&topLinks=0051v.jpg,0051u.tif,0051a.tif,0051.tif&displayProfile=0
For those who for some reason can't open that URL, here is the text on that page under the drawing of kids playing 18th century English base-ball:
Base-Ball
The Ball once struck off,
Away flies the Boy
To the next destin'd Post,
And then Home with Joy.
MORAL
Thus Seamen, for Lucre
Fly over the Main,
But, with Pleasure transported
Return back again.
I imagine that JA, with her two sailor brothers, would, if she had read that little poem as a girl, have found the message very touching, and it leads me to wonder whether a small piece of the inspiration for the great climactic scene of Persuasion, when Anne and Harville discuss the constancy of sailors like Benwick, who go off in search of “lucre” (and of course also Wentworth), and the women, like Fanny Harville (and of course also Anne), who wait at home for them.
When you think about it, perhaps the Newbery poem is a clue to a nautical metaphorical origin of the peculiar terminology of baseball. After all, sailors did go out across the world, stopping here and there at “bases”, making daring “runs” in their journeys in defense of England and in search of wealth, but always the ultimate goal was to return “home” “SAFELY”!
And, by the way, even Wikipedia is way ahead of the OED, as it cites the SABR website for the Newbery reference, and it also adds an additional bit of info that takes us very close to the environs of Emma in Surrey (and not that far from Hampshire):
“English lawyer William Bray recorded a game of baseball on Easter Monday 1755 in Guildford, Surrey; Bray's diary was verified as authentic in September 2008.”
ARNIE
Take a peek at this:
http://www.sabr.org/sabr.cfm?a=cms,c,739,34,0
I don’t know how long the folks at SABR have known about the 1751 Newbery book description of baseball being played in England (perhaps they got the info from a guy named Barry Baldwin, who addressed the Calgary JASNA branch in 2006 and mentioned the Newbery book) , but what is clear is that the baseball mavens at SABR have not talking to Janeites at large, or vice versa, and, as a result, this very interesting connection has not previously been made between our two otherwise entirely unconnected worlds, even though Janeites are every bit as interested, I think.
My point is that all it takes is the mental awareness that a Google search often can help find connections that render the OED and similar pre-Google resources nearly completely useless. It is not at all surprising to me that the OED still has that incorrect information, because the OED is a dinosaur.
I can't count how many discoveries I have made about various aspects of JA scholarship, just by being curious and proactive, and searching online, and by NOT assuming that "someone has already checked". The truth is that most of the interesting questions about JA have NEVER been checked online--it's an intellectual Wild West, completely virgin territory for "fruitful" investigation! Remember, Google Books did not even exist until 3 years ago, and they keep adding newly scanned texts at a breathtaking rate, so that searches you may have done a year ago are now out of date!
Anyway, I did another 30 seconds of searching and was thrilled to find a digitized copy of Newbery's little book, and another minute of patient virtual thumbing through the pages led me to this image of the actual page, with a drawing depicting the playing of baseball:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/displayPhoto.pl?path=/service/rbc/rbc0001/2003/2003juv05880&topImages=0051r.jpg&topLinks=0051v.jpg,0051u.tif,0051a.tif,0051.tif&displayProfile=0
For those who for some reason can't open that URL, here is the text on that page under the drawing of kids playing 18th century English base-ball:
Base-Ball
The Ball once struck off,
Away flies the Boy
To the next destin'd Post,
And then Home with Joy.
MORAL
Thus Seamen, for Lucre
Fly over the Main,
But, with Pleasure transported
Return back again.
I imagine that JA, with her two sailor brothers, would, if she had read that little poem as a girl, have found the message very touching, and it leads me to wonder whether a small piece of the inspiration for the great climactic scene of Persuasion, when Anne and Harville discuss the constancy of sailors like Benwick, who go off in search of “lucre” (and of course also Wentworth), and the women, like Fanny Harville (and of course also Anne), who wait at home for them.
When you think about it, perhaps the Newbery poem is a clue to a nautical metaphorical origin of the peculiar terminology of baseball. After all, sailors did go out across the world, stopping here and there at “bases”, making daring “runs” in their journeys in defense of England and in search of wealth, but always the ultimate goal was to return “home” “SAFELY”!
And, by the way, even Wikipedia is way ahead of the OED, as it cites the SABR website for the Newbery reference, and it also adds an additional bit of info that takes us very close to the environs of Emma in Surrey (and not that far from Hampshire):
“English lawyer William Bray recorded a game of baseball on Easter Monday 1755 in Guildford, Surrey; Bray's diary was verified as authentic in September 2008.”
ARNIE
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Luke Lickspittle, Sophia Sentiment and Fame
"I loved the article about the sport of tuft-hunting, and the cautionary letter from the obsequious Luke Lickspittle. Tufts were the golden tassles worn on the caps of titled undergraduates, and those who toadied to them were known as tuft-hunters. Was this how Collins obtained his living?"
Reading the first part of the Tuft Hunting article and then reading Luke Lickspittle's reply reminds me of that great scene in the original movie version of Fame, when the young dancer Leroy and his girlfriend show up for auditions at the High School of Music and Art. At first, it seems like she is the one who really belongs there, and he is just a young thug being dragged along. But as soon as the music starts, and they start dancing for the panel, it becomes immediately and painfully obvious to everyone, including his girlfriend, that Leroy wanted to be there all along, and that he is a major talent, whereas his girlfriend, unfortunately for her and her big dreams, is not--not even close. But he doesn't care, he is there, because he wants the FAME he has been dreaming of.
I will tell why I was reminded of Fame in the next paragraph, but first my thoughts about the essay on tuft hunting, written by the twentysomething James Austen. I see it as the work of someone with big artistic dreams, but lacking the talent to match them, and knowing it, and so, instead of a literary career, he will be a clergyman. I see the first essay as his attempts to distance himself, by a major bit of what the shrinks would call "projection", from his chosen career path. He is clearly disturbed by the unpleasant prospect he faces of having to kiss some major butt over a very long period of time, in order to advance in the clergy and attain a comfortable living or two, and maybe, if he's really lucky, live to inherit some real wealth from a dead aunt or uncle. Having a soul, and a good deal of intelligence and education, what better way for James to tell himself and his family (because who else was ever going to read The Loiterer anyway?) "Hey, it's not ME, it's those other guys doing this stuff!", than to turn his own dilemma on its head, and assume the persona of a toadyish clergyman and laugh at it. Ha ha, it's not me, it's somebody else. But the satire of that first part is as dry and limp as a dead fish. Because in his heart he knows it's fake, it's not really a satire at all, but a confession.
And why I was reminded of Fame is that it is obvious to me that Luke Lickspittle, like Sophia Sentiment (note the alliteration in both), was NOT written by James Austen, but was instead the production of the exploding prodigious genius of the 14 year old Jane Austen, bursting out of her cocoon already fully formed and ready for her life's work of writing subtly searing satire of the absurd world she was born into!
What I find most incredible is that James actually allowed her uncannily prescient portrait of the rest of HIS life to make it into print at all, let alone that he would be the one who would be the instrumentality of its publication! Somehow she must have convinced him that she was extending his joke, doing her own "insubstantial" best to emulate his literary mastery.
And of course, JA repeated that same gambit 25 years later, when she gulled another pompous, toadyish clergyman named James into a correspondence in which she made a fool out of HIM in a dozen ways in the space of a few letters, and further used him as a tool in order to have her greatest achievement, Emma, dedicated to the man Clarke sucked up to, the man who was the epitome of, and the main allusive source for, the Men Behaving Badly who are the subtextual "heroes" of Emma.
So I see the Luke Lickspittle letter as being the world's first glimpse of the character who was James Austen and who became Mr. Collins. And don't you bet that James realized it whenever it was that he got to first read P&P! And did I read somewhere recently (in this group?) that James in particular was shocked when he found out it was really JA who wrote P&P?
If you are skeptical about JA being the author of Luke Lickspittle, just read the two pieces one after the other, and see if you can't see the difference in the power of the writing. And then think about what David Nokes so insightfully wrote (combining imagination and reason) in his bio of JA (just one of a hundred reasons why his is still, in my view, the best of the Austen bios out there, because he "gets" enough of who JA really was, and is not afraid to say it straight out):
“Jane Austen was both shocked and disappointed when she read the first issues of The Loiterer. Until that moment she had naively cherished a thrill of pleasure at her brothers’ literary aspirations. As a child, she had always loved their quick wittedness at family charades, Henry’s impromptu jokes and James’s theatrical improvisations. But when she read The Loiterer, with its labored facetiousness, its well worn formulas and self important Oxford jokes, she experienced a bewildering disillusionment. Denied any training in the classical languages and literature on account of her sex, she had hitherto instinctively deferred to her brothers’ supposed superiority in literary matters. It came as a shock to discover, at the age of thirteen, that her own gift for literary invention might actually exceed theirs. The tone of her “Sophia Sentiment’ piece is a kind of comic exultation."
There are moments in Luke Lickspittle's letter where the mask of polite satire is dropped, and the painful ugliness of what is being portrayed turns the reader's chuckle to a sad headshake. It's as if JA read James's first part, with its attempt to fuzzify the nature of the obsequious behavior he had to engage in, and said, "No! Stop beating around the bush with all these lame fox hunting metaphors. Be honest. Be real, for once. Tell it like it REALLY is. I'm describing, in detail, exactly the way you are going to sell your soul for the rest of your life, big brother. Let's make sure you understand that if it's a fox hunt, then YOU'RE the fox, not the hunter!" In a way, she has heard James's "confession", and is being a good priest, by challenging him to dredge up some moral integrity, to face the reality of his life, possibly to turn from the Dark Side of the Force before it is too late. She is being cruel to be kind.
But he didn't. And maybe that's why James Austen was into hunting so much, a way, if only for a half a day once in a while, to feel like a predator and not the prey. Not a pretty, or particularly funny, picture.
And this is just as, when Lizzy jokes with Caroline Bingley about Darcy, Lizzy at first wants to laugh at Darcy, but then, when she brilliantly succeeds in provoking him into owning his narcissism explicitly, she then most tellingly adds:
"But you have chosen your fault well. I really cannot laugh at it. You are safe from me."
Indeed, Jane Austen, aka Luke Lickspittle, already finds it difficult to laugh, when she considers the cost to her elder brother's soul of his decision to become a Mr. Collins. She does not approve, but she already can predict that he will not listen, he will not be brave enough to avoid the moral corrosion of living that way. And maybe that is why he will, 16 years later, when his father dies, cheat his sisters out of a fair deal on the Steventon property he, in effect, steals from them for a song. So, in the end, JA could perhaps foresee that the adverse consequences of James's chosen path in life will redound on her, her sister and her mother, as well as on him.
Having nothing surviving of JA's writing from prior to age thirteen, we cannot know if Nokes was correct about JA having EVER been naive. Either way, it's clear that by the time she assumed the personae of Sophia Sentiment and Luke Lickspittle, at the tender age of 14, she was already flying light years ahead of her brothers.
ARNIE
P.S. If you still have ANY doubt that Luke Lickspittle was really Jane Austen, then consider the following two passages side by side:
"My father was the son of the half brother of the third cousin of an Irish Peer, and as his family had not condescended to bring him up to any profession, was for some years of his life nearer starving, without being actually starved, than I hope you, though an author, can easily conceive. "
"My Father was a native of Ireland and an inhabitant of Wales; my Mother was the natural Daughter of a Scotch Peer by an Italian Opera-girl--I was born in Spain, and received my Education at a Convent in France."
The latter, of course, is from Love and Freindship, written a year after Luke Lickspittle.
Reading the first part of the Tuft Hunting article and then reading Luke Lickspittle's reply reminds me of that great scene in the original movie version of Fame, when the young dancer Leroy and his girlfriend show up for auditions at the High School of Music and Art. At first, it seems like she is the one who really belongs there, and he is just a young thug being dragged along. But as soon as the music starts, and they start dancing for the panel, it becomes immediately and painfully obvious to everyone, including his girlfriend, that Leroy wanted to be there all along, and that he is a major talent, whereas his girlfriend, unfortunately for her and her big dreams, is not--not even close. But he doesn't care, he is there, because he wants the FAME he has been dreaming of.
I will tell why I was reminded of Fame in the next paragraph, but first my thoughts about the essay on tuft hunting, written by the twentysomething James Austen. I see it as the work of someone with big artistic dreams, but lacking the talent to match them, and knowing it, and so, instead of a literary career, he will be a clergyman. I see the first essay as his attempts to distance himself, by a major bit of what the shrinks would call "projection", from his chosen career path. He is clearly disturbed by the unpleasant prospect he faces of having to kiss some major butt over a very long period of time, in order to advance in the clergy and attain a comfortable living or two, and maybe, if he's really lucky, live to inherit some real wealth from a dead aunt or uncle. Having a soul, and a good deal of intelligence and education, what better way for James to tell himself and his family (because who else was ever going to read The Loiterer anyway?) "Hey, it's not ME, it's those other guys doing this stuff!", than to turn his own dilemma on its head, and assume the persona of a toadyish clergyman and laugh at it. Ha ha, it's not me, it's somebody else. But the satire of that first part is as dry and limp as a dead fish. Because in his heart he knows it's fake, it's not really a satire at all, but a confession.
And why I was reminded of Fame is that it is obvious to me that Luke Lickspittle, like Sophia Sentiment (note the alliteration in both), was NOT written by James Austen, but was instead the production of the exploding prodigious genius of the 14 year old Jane Austen, bursting out of her cocoon already fully formed and ready for her life's work of writing subtly searing satire of the absurd world she was born into!
What I find most incredible is that James actually allowed her uncannily prescient portrait of the rest of HIS life to make it into print at all, let alone that he would be the one who would be the instrumentality of its publication! Somehow she must have convinced him that she was extending his joke, doing her own "insubstantial" best to emulate his literary mastery.
And of course, JA repeated that same gambit 25 years later, when she gulled another pompous, toadyish clergyman named James into a correspondence in which she made a fool out of HIM in a dozen ways in the space of a few letters, and further used him as a tool in order to have her greatest achievement, Emma, dedicated to the man Clarke sucked up to, the man who was the epitome of, and the main allusive source for, the Men Behaving Badly who are the subtextual "heroes" of Emma.
So I see the Luke Lickspittle letter as being the world's first glimpse of the character who was James Austen and who became Mr. Collins. And don't you bet that James realized it whenever it was that he got to first read P&P! And did I read somewhere recently (in this group?) that James in particular was shocked when he found out it was really JA who wrote P&P?
If you are skeptical about JA being the author of Luke Lickspittle, just read the two pieces one after the other, and see if you can't see the difference in the power of the writing. And then think about what David Nokes so insightfully wrote (combining imagination and reason) in his bio of JA (just one of a hundred reasons why his is still, in my view, the best of the Austen bios out there, because he "gets" enough of who JA really was, and is not afraid to say it straight out):
“Jane Austen was both shocked and disappointed when she read the first issues of The Loiterer. Until that moment she had naively cherished a thrill of pleasure at her brothers’ literary aspirations. As a child, she had always loved their quick wittedness at family charades, Henry’s impromptu jokes and James’s theatrical improvisations. But when she read The Loiterer, with its labored facetiousness, its well worn formulas and self important Oxford jokes, she experienced a bewildering disillusionment. Denied any training in the classical languages and literature on account of her sex, she had hitherto instinctively deferred to her brothers’ supposed superiority in literary matters. It came as a shock to discover, at the age of thirteen, that her own gift for literary invention might actually exceed theirs. The tone of her “Sophia Sentiment’ piece is a kind of comic exultation."
There are moments in Luke Lickspittle's letter where the mask of polite satire is dropped, and the painful ugliness of what is being portrayed turns the reader's chuckle to a sad headshake. It's as if JA read James's first part, with its attempt to fuzzify the nature of the obsequious behavior he had to engage in, and said, "No! Stop beating around the bush with all these lame fox hunting metaphors. Be honest. Be real, for once. Tell it like it REALLY is. I'm describing, in detail, exactly the way you are going to sell your soul for the rest of your life, big brother. Let's make sure you understand that if it's a fox hunt, then YOU'RE the fox, not the hunter!" In a way, she has heard James's "confession", and is being a good priest, by challenging him to dredge up some moral integrity, to face the reality of his life, possibly to turn from the Dark Side of the Force before it is too late. She is being cruel to be kind.
But he didn't. And maybe that's why James Austen was into hunting so much, a way, if only for a half a day once in a while, to feel like a predator and not the prey. Not a pretty, or particularly funny, picture.
And this is just as, when Lizzy jokes with Caroline Bingley about Darcy, Lizzy at first wants to laugh at Darcy, but then, when she brilliantly succeeds in provoking him into owning his narcissism explicitly, she then most tellingly adds:
"But you have chosen your fault well. I really cannot laugh at it. You are safe from me."
Indeed, Jane Austen, aka Luke Lickspittle, already finds it difficult to laugh, when she considers the cost to her elder brother's soul of his decision to become a Mr. Collins. She does not approve, but she already can predict that he will not listen, he will not be brave enough to avoid the moral corrosion of living that way. And maybe that is why he will, 16 years later, when his father dies, cheat his sisters out of a fair deal on the Steventon property he, in effect, steals from them for a song. So, in the end, JA could perhaps foresee that the adverse consequences of James's chosen path in life will redound on her, her sister and her mother, as well as on him.
Having nothing surviving of JA's writing from prior to age thirteen, we cannot know if Nokes was correct about JA having EVER been naive. Either way, it's clear that by the time she assumed the personae of Sophia Sentiment and Luke Lickspittle, at the tender age of 14, she was already flying light years ahead of her brothers.
ARNIE
P.S. If you still have ANY doubt that Luke Lickspittle was really Jane Austen, then consider the following two passages side by side:
"My father was the son of the half brother of the third cousin of an Irish Peer, and as his family had not condescended to bring him up to any profession, was for some years of his life nearer starving, without being actually starved, than I hope you, though an author, can easily conceive. "
"My Father was a native of Ireland and an inhabitant of Wales; my Mother was the natural Daughter of a Scotch Peer by an Italian Opera-girl--I was born in Spain, and received my Education at a Convent in France."
The latter, of course, is from Love and Freindship, written a year after Luke Lickspittle.
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