"...but it was MOONLIGHT and EVERY BODY was full of engagements..."

In Chapter 7 of S&S, we read the following description of the Dashwood women's first visit to Barton Park:

"Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters were met at the door of the house by Sir John, who welcomed them to Barton Park with unaffected sincerity; and as he attended them to the drawing room repeated to the young ladies the concern which the same subject had drawn from him the day before, at being unable to get any smart young men to meet them. They would see, he said, only one gentleman there besides himself; a particular friend who was staying at the park, but who was neither very young nor very gay. He hoped they would all excuse the smallness of the party, and could assure them it should never happen so again. He had been to several families that morning in hopes of procuring some addition to their number, but it was moonlight and every body was full of engagements. Luckily Lady Middleton's mother had arrived at Barton within the last hour, and as she was a very cheerful agreeable woman, he hoped the young ladies would not find it so very dull as they might imagine. The young ladies, as well as their mother, were perfectly satisfied with having two entire strangers of the party, and wished for no more."

At first, my 21st century mind was puzzled by Sir John's explanation for why he had been unable to gather a larger crowd, and especially "any smart young men", at Barton Park, the better to entertain the Dashwood women. What did it mean that "it was moonlight and every body was full of engagements."? At first I considered the far-fetched possibility that adventurous hunters like Willloughby might be out on moonlit nights shooting game birds, under extremely difficult conditions, as a kind of macho amusement. But I soon realized how ridiculous that was, and that there was a much more plausible real-world explanation, which was that, 2 centuries ago, moonlit nights were the safest ones on which to travel, because drivers of coaches and carriages would be much less likely to have accidents when they had the best visibility. Which also renders a bit more rational Mr. Woodhouse's panic over the short carriage ride from Randalls to Hartfield on a dark and snowy night. And a quick check of various online Austen archives confirmed that this explanation was the generally accepted one in Janeite circles, among those to whom the question had occurred, such as our own Nancy Mayer.

But a third, and not at all benign explanation, had also occurred to me by this time, which is the true subject of this post, and which I believe is original. To wit, another significance of a "moonlight night" could have been that the smart young men of the neighborhood would all be "full of engagements".....at the local version of the infamous Sir Francis Dashwood's Hellfire Club!

Janine Barchas has written about the thinly veiled allusion to the Hellfire Club in great detail in “Hell-Fire Jane:**Austen and the Dashwoods of West Wycombe” **// at Eighteenth Century Life, Volume 33, Number 3, ppg. 1-36, Fall 2009. However, Barchas did _not_ pick up on Sir John's apology about the unspecified _moonlight_ engagements of the smart young men of the neighborhood as being a sly clue provided by JA pointing toward Sir Francis. But I draw encouragement from another scholar, Daniel Willens, who, in“The Hell-Fire Club: Sex, Politics, and Religion in Eighteenth-Century England”, in Gnosis, Summer 1992, begins his article with the following statement:

" ON MOONLIT NIGHTS during the reign of England's King George III, immensely powerful members of His Majesty's Government, important intellectuals, and influential artists could sometimes be seen travelling up the Thames River by gondola to a ruined abbey near West Wycombe. There, to the sonorous tolling of the deconsecrated cloister's bell, they dressed in monkish robes and indulged in every manner of depravity, culminating in a Black Mass celebrated on the naked body of a debauched noblewoman and presided over by that notorious rake Sir Francis Dashwood...."


For the Hellfire Club, I would imagine that the moonlight was not merely a pragmatic consideration that prompted scheduling of Black Masses on those particular nights, but rather was _symbolically_ meaningful.

I conclude by pointing out that JA, with her wicked way with puns and wordplay, was not content to leave her veiled allusion to the Hellfire Club's activities to rest merely upon a reference to "moonlight" connected to the surname "Dashwood". No, always alert to a way to insert an extra clue, she also played with the orthographical ambiguity, which still prevailed in the written English of her day, of the word "everybody", which was in her lifetime was often written as "every body".

I just did some quick checking, and the result is very interesting. I verified that in the first edition of S&S, over 3/4 of the usages were of the now archaic "every body", whereas only 15 months later, in P&P, only one out of _forty_ used "every body", and in MP, only 2 years later still, the usages were _all_ the modern "everybody"! So I think it is reasonable to infer that in S&S, JA may very well have meant to engage with this ambiguity in a subtle thematic way.

That is why I am quite confident that in the above-quoted passage, JA was having some punny fun with the spelling ambiguity---i.e., she deliberately and carefully constructed her sentence so that every _body_, when read against the grain, could plausibly be read as referring to the _physical_ "body" of every person present at the Black Mass, including in particular the debauched lady whose _body_ was the focal point of the proceedings, a particular part of her body being _full_ of...."engagements", a very flexible word which can function as a euphemism for engagement in various sorts of unmentionable actions.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.:  This post is directly connected to my much earlier post about Lucy Ferrars (aka Lucifer!) and her Hell-born cousins!:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/07/lucy-ferrarss-hell-born-cousins.html

There Ain’t No Cure For Love? Not according to Closet Classicist Mrs. Jennings!

As part of my followup on my series of posts the past two days about the veiled and layered allusions (to Ovid, to Shakespeare, & to Goldsmith) in Sense & Sensibility (as reflected by hints at such allusions in Jane Austen’s Letter 74 (written as she was proofreading S&S prior to publication), I decided to check in all the usual online venues to see if I could find any additional previous scholarly identifications of allusions to Ovid in JA’s writing, of which I was unaware.

In short order, I struck gold in the JASNA website, where I was led to the following paragraph in Persuasions #15, 1993 ppg. 89-100 “Persuasion: or, The Triumph of Cheerfulness”, written by my friend Isobel Grundy, writing about Anne Elliot:

“….About Anne’s first disappointment in love Austen wrote, “No second attachment, the only thoroughly natural, happy, and sufficient cure, at her time of life, had been possible to the nice tone of her mind, the fastidiousness of her taste, in the small limits of the society round them” (57)…..That sentence about second attachments is so unobtrusive that it can use some unpacking here.  The usual grammatical form for maxims or aphorisms or Truths Universally Acknowledged, like the one which opens Pride and Prejudice, is statement. THAT IS THE FORM THE ROMAN POET OVID USED WHEN HE WROTE “ALL LOVE IS VANQUISHED BY A SUCCEEDING LOVE” [“Successore novo vincitur omnis amor” (Remedia Amoris or The Cure For Love)].  Jane Austen, virtually paraphrasing Ovid here, conceals her Truth Seldom Acknowledged in an appositional phrase.  If we rejig her syntax we get the statement, “A second attachment is the only thoroughly natural, happy, and sufficient cure for lost love” (at her time of life).  This is a very odd aphorism to discover embedded in a novel which is all about fidelity, and the almost magical restoration of first lost love, as good as new.”  END QUOTE

I found Isobel’s analysis very ingenious and insightful, and was 90% convinced, but ultimately her catch was not 100%  satisfying, because the need to “rejig” JA’s syntax so much in order to bring it into  parallel with Ovid’s original, cast at least some doubt on the intentionality of JA’s allusion.

But then, it flashed into my mind that there _was_ actually _another_ passage in JA’s fiction which was also a virtual paraphrase of Ovid’s formulation, but did _not_ have to be “rejigged” in order to bring it into syntactical parallelism with Ovid. And what’s more, this other passage in JA’s fiction just happened to be located in one of the _very_ _same_ two speeches by Mrs. Jennings about the mulberry tree, which Jane Odiwe had first identified as being a veiled allusion to Ovid’s tale of Pyramus & Thisbe in The Metamorphoses!!!

 Here are the relevant portions of Mrs. Jennings’s speech in Chapter 30:

“….quite shut in with GREAT GARDEN WALLS that are covered with the best fruit-trees in the country: and SUCH A MULBERRY TREE IN ONE CORNER!....Well, I shall spirit up the Colonel as soon as I can. ONE SHOULDER OF MUTTON, YOU KNOW, DRIVES ANOTHER DOWN. If we can but put Willoughby out of her head!"

Mrs. Jennings is nothing less than an Austenian female Falstaff, rephrasing Ovid’s abstract prose into the earthiest concreteness, without sacrificing a whit of Ovid’s meaning!

And it did not take me long to spot the passage a little bit earlier in Chapter 30, when Jane Austen’s narrator winks broadly at the title of Mrs. Jennings’s source for that earthy aphorism, being Ovid’s “The Cure for Love”:

“Marianne was to have the best place by the fire, was to be tempted to eat by every delicacy in the house, and to be amused by the relation of all the news of the day. Had not Elinor, in the sad countenance of her sister, seen a check to all mirth, she could have been entertained by MRS. JENNINGS’S ENDEAVOURS TO CURE A DISAPPOINTMENT IN LOVE, by a variety of sweetmeats and olives, and a good fire……”

And there’s more---punny wordplay is Jane Austen’s m.o.----so think about where “mutton” comes from---it comes from _sheep_. And what is the Latin name of the genus to which all species of sheep belong?  _OVIS_!

JA, with her rare combination of encyclopedic knowledge, and unerring ear for puns and wordplay, recognized that she could have her shoulder of mutton and eat it too, so to speak! I.e., she could use the serendipity of the vulgar English adage happening to involve a word that coincided with the name of the Roman poet who first made that adage famous in Latin!

So, looking back at my last four posts about Letter 74 and S&S, could it possibly be a coincidence that there would be so much “smoke” pointing to two entirely different Ovidian allusions hiding in the same _paragraph_ of S&S? And the icing on the allusive layer cake is that their close proximity in that paragraph of Chapter 30 of S&S is not trivial---these two Ovidian allusions are actually thematically connected---i.e., Thisbe  (and Marianne)_refuse_ the “cure for love” that Ovid (and Mrs. Jennings) suggest!

And I conclude by pointing out that JA, by making the marriage of Brandon and Marianne so…. romantically unconvincing (at least, to many Janeites), JA seems to be straddling the “great garden wall” on the great question of whether, when it comes to the cure for love, one shoulder of mutton _always_ drives another down. And, I suggest, that unconvincingness is directly connected to the oddness that Isobel Grundy found in the “rejigged” passage about second attachments in Persuasion. JA was always, I think, on guard against getting too wrapped up in a romantic fairytale.

In conclusion, I cannot help but provide a YouTube link for a remarkably fine cover of a great song by a modern day poet---Leonard Cohen---who disagrees with Ovid and Mrs. Jennings---his song is entitled “There Ain’t No Cure For Love”, sung by the soulful Aaron Neville:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDCmYWQVhU

Cheers, ARNIE

Letter 74: Its Veiled Allusions to……Sense & Sensibility!

In my previous two posts, I have dug deeper and deeper into the subtext of Letter 74, demonstrating, when I left off, that Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was covertly alluded to by JA in Letter 74 to CEA. And I further speculated that JA was thereby linking herself to the forbidden love of the tragic heroine Thisby in the play within a  play in MND, and also perhaps to the tragic plight of Ariel prior to his release  by Prospero from tree-bound torture in The Tempest.

While running errands after I sent my second post re Letter 74, I dimly recollected seeing a reference to mulberry trees somewhere in one of JA’s novels, and so when I returned home, I quickly searched to see if my memory had served me well---and it turned out that it had, and had, in fact, led me to the center of the onion of Letter 74, as I will now explain.

What I found was that there are _two_ references to a mulberry tree in JA’s fiction, and _both_ are made by the voluble Mrs. Jennings, in fairly rapid succession, as follows, to the same mulberry tree!:

Ch. 30:  Delaford is a nice place, I can tell you; exactly what I call a nice old fashioned place, full of comforts and conveniences; quite shut in with great garden walls that are covered with the best fruit-trees in the country: and SUCH A MULBERRY TREE IN ONE CORNER! Lord! how Charlotte and I did stuff the only time we were there! Then, there is a dovecote, some delightful stewponds, and a very pretty canal; and everything, in short, that one could wish for: and, moreover, it is close to the church, and only a quarter of a mile from the turnpike-road, so 'tis never dull, for if you only go and sit up in an old yew arbour behind the house, you may see all the carriages that pass along. Oh! 'tis a nice place! A butcher hard by in the village, and the parsonage-house within a stone's throw. To my fancy, a thousand times prettier than Barton Park, where they are forced to send three miles for their meat, and have not a neighbour nearer than your mother. Well, I shall spirit up the Colonel as soon as I can. One shoulder of mutton, you know, drives another down. If we can but put Willoughby out of her head!"

Ch. 32: Colonel Brandon's delicate unobtrusive inquiries were never unwelcome to Miss Dashwood. He had abundantly earned the privilege of intimate discussion of her sister's disappointment, by the friendly zeal with which he had endeavoured to soften it, and they always conversed with confidence. His chief reward for the painful exertion of disclosing past sorrows and present humiliations, was given in the pitying eye with which Marianne sometimes observed him, and the gentleness of her voice whenever (though it did not often happen) she was obliged, or could oblige herself to speak to him. These assured him that his exertion had produced an increase of good-will towards himself, and these gave Elinor hopes of its being farther augmented hereafter; but Mrs. Jennings, who knew nothing of all this -- who knew only that the Colonel continued as grave as ever, and that she could neither prevail on him to make the offer himself, nor commission her to make it for him -- began at the end of two days to think that, instead of Midsummer, they would not be married till Michaelmas, and by the end of a week that it would not be a match at all. The good understanding between the Colonel and Miss Dashwood seemed rather to declare that THE HONOURS OF THE MULBERRY-TREE, the canal, and the yew arbour, would all be made over to her ; and Mrs. Jennings had for some time ceased to think at all of Mr. Ferrars.

I did some quick searching in Janeites and Austen L and found that Anielka, with her usual acute sensitivity to JA’s word usage,  had commented a few months ago in Austen L that JA was “very keen to number and name trees”, and Anielka had specifically mentioned those same two references by Mrs. Jennings. But at the time, Anielka gave no explanation for what this curious repetition by Mrs. Jennings might mean.  Well, now I would like to suggest a very compelling meaning.

In some fashion, I suggest that Mrs. Jennings is pointing the reader back to Midsummer Night’s Dream (and did you notice her reference to “Midsummer” in that Chapter 32 excerpt?), and also to Shakespeare’s ancient source for that mulberry tree, which is none other than the story of Pyramus & Thisby in Ovid’s Metamorphoses!

And while I’m at it, I would also like to bring forward yet another, much more contemporary literary source for Mrs. Jennings’s winking reference to the Delaford mulberry tree, which I just found--a work with which, it is already well established, JA was familiar with---Oliver Goldsmith’s 1771 play, She Stoops to Conquer.

Here is the relevant excerpt from Act 5 of She Stoops, a dialog between Mr. & Mrs. Hardcastle:

Mrs. Hardcastle: Mr. Hardcastle, as I’m alive! My fears blinded me. But who, my dear, could have expected to meet you here, in this frightful place, so far from home? What has brought you to follow us?

Mr. Hardcastle. Sure, Dorothy, you have not lost your wits? So far from home, when you are within forty yards of your own door! [To son Tony] This is one of your old tricks, you graceless rogue, you. [To her.] Don’t you know the gate, and the MULBERRY-TREE; and don’t you remember the horse-pond, my dear?

Mrs. Hardcastle. Yes, I shall remember the horse-pond as long as I live; I have caught my death in it. [To TONY.] And it is to you, you graceless varlet, I owe all this? I’ll teach you to abuse your mother, I will.”

Let me immediately point out that I do not hang my claim of an allusion by JA to this speech merely upon Mr. Hardcastle’s reference to a mulberry tree, there are two other clues which seal the deal. First note also that Hardcastle emphasizes the “horse-pond”, just as Mrs. Jennings refers to “stewponds”; but second, and best of all, there is another key character involved in that climactic scene in She Stoops, and he is named _Hastings_!  And for JA, that name had special significance in the subtext of S&S, which I have previously described in detail here:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/02/lady-middletons-delicacy-mrs-jenningss.html

In short, I now see that Mrs. Jennings’s obsession with that mulberry tree is a huge additional wink in the direction of _Warren_ Hastings,  master of _Delafield_, who, I suggest, is represented in S&S by Colonel Brandon, master of _Delaford_!

And now we come to the best part of all---because seeing these allusions in Letter 74 pointing to S&S and _its_ allusive sources, made me realize, with the greatest satisfaction, that there was a reason why these allusions would appear in Letter 74—and that reason is revealed in Letter 71, written five weeks earlier, which includes the following famous passage:

“No indeed, I am never too busy to think of S & S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child; & I am much obliged to you for your enquiries. I have had two sheets to correct, but the last only brings us to W.s first appearance. Mrs K. regrets in the most flattering manner that she must wait till May, but I have scarcely a hope of its being out in June.-Henry does not neglect it; he has hurried the Printer, & says he will see him again today.-It will not stand still during his absence, it will be sent to Eliza.-The Incomes remain as they were, but I will get them altered if I can.”

So, given that JA, as of April 25, has only corrected two sheets, and has only gotten up to Willoughby’s first appearance in the beginning of Chapter 9, it makes perfect sense, chronologically, that JA would have just read the proofs for Chapters 30-32 (which contain the “mulberry tree” references of Mrs. Jennings) while writing Letter 74 dated 05/31/11!  

And so I suggest we must reread all the veiled allusions in Letter 74 to Midsummer Night’s Dream in light of the crucial fact that JA was proofreading from S&S at the same time! At that moment, JA was alluding to a rich vein of allusive subtext that included Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And then, intoxicated with what must have been the nearly unbearable anticipation of the imminent birth of her first “sucking child”, S&S, JA could not resist alluding to it all in Letter 74, to the one audience who would understand all the layers of meaning without the necessity of explicit explanation—CEA.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Shakespearean Web of Jane Austen's Letter 74

"You cannot imagine-it is not in Human Nature to imagine what a nice walk we have round the Orchard. The row of Beech look very well indeed, & so does the young Quickset hedge in the Garden.-I hear today that an Apricot has been detected on one of the Trees.-My Mother is perfectly convinced now that she shall not be overpower'd by her Cleft Wood-& I beleive would rather have more than less."

Regarding the above passage near the end of Jane Austen's Letter 74, Diana Birchall wrote:

"She describes her orchard walk with humorous exaggeration: "You canot imagine - it is not in Human nature to imagine what a nice walk we have round the Orchard." She mentions a quickset hedge, which translates thus: "A quickset hedge is a type of hedge created by planting live hazel or whitethorn (common hawthorn) cuttings directly into the earth. Once planted, these cuttings root and form new plants, creating a dense barrier. The technique is ancient, and the term quickset hedge is first recorded in 1484. The word quick in the name refers to the fact that the cuttings are living (as in "the quick and the dead"), and not to the speed at which the hedge grows.
Cleft wood is another technical old fashioned term: "Timber that has been split once (half section wood) or several times (split section, wedge section) along the grain to produce planks." There are lots of interesting examples of cleft wood gates and fences all over England, though why Mrs. Austen was "convinced now that she shall not be overpower'd by her Cleft Wood - & I beleive would rather have more than less," we do not know; perhaps she wanted a fence built."

Diana, you've zeroed in on another (deliberately, I believe) enigmatic passage filled with mysterious clues--- here is my train of thought, which, as I hint in my Subject Line, leads to a remarkable insight about the deeper meaning of it all:

What got me started was the humorous exaggeration of "It is not in Human nature to imagine" in the first sentence. Right away, it _strongly_ reminded me of some famous literary passage, but I could not quite put my finger on it for a few minutes. But my crossword puzzle obsession--which trains me to use fragmentary data to retrieve from my subconscious what I already know--served me well, and I suddenly knew exactly where to find that passage:

"I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,—and methought I had,—but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was."

Of course this is Bottom in Act 4, Scene 1, of Midsummer Night's Dream, and there is no doubt in my mind that Jane Austen, in her mimicry of Bottom's famous hyperbole about imagination, was sharing a sophisticated literary allusion with fellow Shakespeare lover CEA.

Spotting that thinly veiled Shakespearean allusion made me wonder whether there might also be a connection between it and the following absurdist passage earlier in Letter 74 which you also flagged, Diana:

"I will not say that your Mulberry trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive. We shall have pease soon-I mean to have them with a couple of Ducks from Wood Barn & Maria Middleton towards the end of next week."

I now realize that that earlier sentence contains not one, not two, but _three_ additional allusions to Shakespeare!:

(a) one of the fairies whom Titania summons to serve Bottom during "Bottom's Dream" (which the senses of man cannot comprehend) is named _Pease_blossom!;

(b) in Letter 75, written less than a week later, there will be yet _another_ reference by JA to "pease" (which are what we today call "peas") in an _explicitly_ literary context that includes both Walter Scott and Shakespeare (specifically, The Merchant of Venice)!

(c) there are two references to "mulberry" in all of Shakespeare's plays, and one of them is the following speech by Peter Quince in Act 5 Scene 1 of (what else?) Midsummer Night's Dream, narrating the action of the play within a play, Pyramus and Thisbe:

Gentles, perchance you wonder at this show;
But wonder on, till truth make all things plain.
This man is Pyramus, if you would know;
This beauteous lady Thisby is certain.
This man, with lime and rough-cast, doth present
Wall, that vile Wall which did these lovers sunder;
And through Wall's chink, poor souls, they are content
To whisper. At the which let no man wonder.
This man, with lanthorn, dog, and bush of thorn,
Presenteth Moonshine; for, if you will know,
By moonshine did these lovers think no scorn
To meet at Ninus' tomb, there, there to woo.
This grisly beast, which Lion hight by name,
The trusty Thisby, coming first by night,
Did scare away, or rather did affright;
And, as she fled, her mantle she did fall,
Which Lion vile with bloody mouth did stain.
Anon comes Pyramus, sweet youth and tall,
And finds his trusty Thisby's mantle slain:
Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broach'd his boiling bloody breast;
And Thisby, tarrying in _mulberry_ shade,
His dagger drew, and died. For all the rest,
Let Lion, Moonshine, Wall, and lovers twain
At large discourse, while here they do remain.

And that brings us to the enigmatic reference to "cleft wood" which you also took note of, Diana. Does JA, by "cleft wood", in some way mean to refer to the "chink" in the "Wall" through which Pyramus and Thisby communicate? The mulberry trees at Chawton which may not be dead but which are not alive---are they pointing toward Pyramus and Thisby who have killed themselver next to the mulberry tree?

And/or does JA also mean, by "cleft wood", to wink at the following very famous passage in the _other_ Shakespeare play besides Midsummer Night's Dream which has fairies acting at the behest of a powerful master?:

This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child
And here was left by the sailors. Thou, my slave,
As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant;
And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands,
Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
By help of her more potent ministers
And in her most unmitigable rage,
Into a _cloven_ _pine_; within which rift
Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years; within which space she died
And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groans
As fast as mill-wheels strike.

Of course this is Prospero, in Act 1, Scene 2 of The Tempest, reminding Ariel of the torment that Prospero freed him from-and, when you think about it, during his imprisonment inside the _cloven_ tree, Ariel was not really dead and yet not really alive either!

And _that_ is my clue as to why JA has spun this entire gossamer web of veiled Shakespearean allusion in Letter 74. It is not just meaningless display of erudition, it is a veiled commentary on the real world subject matter of Letter 74, specifically, JA's sharp desire to have a visit from Anne Sharp, which I wrote about earlier today.

JA, in the beginning of Letter 74, has revealed a desperate desire to reunite with Anne Sharp after what has surely been a long separation. And therefore, I think JA sees herself as one part Ariel, one part Thisby, in every aspect lacking the _power_ to be close to her dear Anne Sharp--to enjoy, as in the case of Pyramus and Thisbe, a forbidden love----and needing the intervention of a powerful sorcerer---perhaps referring thereby to CEA herself---to free JA from the tree in which she sits imprisoned, to knock down the wall dividing her from her dear Anne, but lacking the power to do either of these things herself!

And maybe, just maybe, that absurdist suicidal subtext is part of the reason why JA has also written, in Letter 74:

"I had a great mind to add that if she persisted in giving it, I would spin nothing with it but a rope to hang myself-but I was afraid of making it appear a less serious matter of feeling than it really is."

That "spinning wheel" which JA does not wish to accept from Mrs. Knight sounds awfully symbolic to me as well.

Bottom, upon awakening, could not be more in awe of his dream than I am of Jane Austen's awesome display of meaningful erudition, spun into the most exquisite gossamer web of metaphor, pun, and allusion, in Letter 74!

Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Letter 74, 31 May 1811: Jane Austen's Sharp Desire for a visit from Miss Sharp

Diana wrote: "She begins by being brisk and purposeful, fully determined on having Miss Sharp to visit...."

Diana, that passage struck me very strongly, I think it's worth analyzing it for what it suggests in terms of Chawton family dynamics:

"I have a magnificent project.-The Cookes have put off their visit to us; they are not well enough to leave home at present, & we have no chance of seeing them till I do not know when-probably never, in this house. This circumstance has made me think the present time would be favourable for Miss Sharp's coming to us; it seems a more disengaged period with us, than we are likely to have later in the summer; if Frank & Mary do come, it can hardly be before the middle of July, which will be allowing a reasonable length of visit for Miss Sharpe supposing she begins it when you return; & if you & Martha do not dislike the plan, & she can avail herself of it, the opportunity of her being conveyed hither will be excellent.-I shall write to Martha by this post, & if neither You nor she make any objection to my proposal, I shall make the invitation directly-& as there is no time to lose, you must write by return of post if you have any reason for not wishing it done.-It was her intention I beleive to go first to Mrs. Lloyd-but such a means of getting here may influence her otherwise."

What is striking to me is how desperately JA wishes for Anne Sharp to come visit Chawton Cottage, and at the same time, how hard JA apparently feels she has to work in order to convince CEA (and Martha) that a visit from Anne Sharp is a good idea which will not interfere with any other plans of the Chawton Cottage women. Chawton Cottage is a democracy run jointly by CEA, JA and Martha (apparently Mrs. Austen has no vote?) and a visit from a friend must receive unanimous approval, so JA needs to "win the vote" of _both_ CEA and Martha, or it won't happen. And we also see, once again, all the tortured logistics of arranging travel by women who have no independent means of travel.

How very sad, JA is 35 years old, and all she wants is a long satisfying visit from her dear old friend (or perhaps there is more to it than platonic friendship, as Ashford's recent Austen bio-novel suggests---and I agree, in fact I wonder if there might not be some subtle undercurrent of jealousy going on here, given JA's extremely close relationship with Martha), but JA cannot have this simple thing, that she ought to be able to take for granted, without having to dance on the head of a pin.

And what a clever "lawyer" JA is--she does not want to wait for an affirmative "yes" from CEA and Martha, so instead she sets up the rules of the "vote" so that if JA does not receive a "no" by a certain date, then she will go forward with the plan.

For any of you who don't want to wait till next week to find out whether the visit actually did happen, just read Letter 75, the answer is right there.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S. re Letter 73: "MY name is Diana"

In response to my recent post about the mysterious sentence "MY name is Diana" in Jane Austen's Letter 73.....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/07/jane-austens-letter-73-mystery-of-my.html

....an occasional poster in Janeites named Terry, whose m.o. is to sleuth out some interesting subtext in Jane Austen's writings, posted the following brilliant analysis:

“Miss [Diana] H. is an elegant, pleasing, pretty-looking girl, about nineteen, I suppose, or nineteen and a half, or nineteen and a quarter, with flowers in her head and music at her finger ends. She plays very well indeed. I have seldom heard anybody with more pleasure. They were at Godington four or five years ago. My cousin, Flora Long, was there last year. *My* name is Diana.”
A string of little coincidences.
Diana and Flora were staying at GOD-ington.
Diana and Flora are goddesses – moon and flowers.
Both have dominion over May, the month the letter was written.
The phases of the moon are known as quarters (‘Half moon is often used to mean the first- and third-quarter moons, while the term 'quarter' refers to the extent of the moon's cycle around the Earth’, ‘nineteen, I suppose, or nineteen and a half, or nineteen and a quarter’) while ‘flowers in her head’ are associated with Diana in a minor way, notably as tributes stuck on her statues. Her twin brother Apollo was the god of music.
If we pretend that JA was referring to *herself* with “*My* name is Diana,” then we have a chaste virgin who was a goddess of fertility and childbirth, not inappropriate given “It was a mistake of mine, my dear Cassandra, to talk of a tenth child at Hamstall. I had forgot there were but eight already.”
Are all these *just* coincidences?
I think so.--Terry"    END QUOTE

To which I respond as follows:

Absolutely brilliant, Terry, bravo! The two best aspects of your ingenious explanation are (1) it fits all the names with a minimum of contortions, and (2) it's an explanation that, once you hear it, is seen to have been hiding in plain sight all along.

One might quibble with your ultimate interpretation of the specific significance of the various gods, goddesses and symbols involved, but you've convinced me beyond a reasonable doubt that JA was having a great time joking about Greek mythology with her lifelong partner in such erudite tomfoolery.

And here are two tidbits to add even further richness to your brilliant solution to this veiled enigma created on a dime by JA for her sister's amusement:

1. Le Faye's Bio index tells us that Mrs and Miss Harding were both named Dionysia, which I at first guessed was a feminized version of Dionysus, but actually is as follows, per Wikipedia:

"The Dionysia was a large festival in ancient Athens in honor of the god Dionysus, the central events of which were the theatrical performances of
dramatic tragedies and, from 487 BC, comedies."

2. We already know that JA was a connoisseur of Greek and Roman mythology, from the many veiled allusions to same hidden in plain sight in all her writings. And it's no accident that we find characters named Lydia and Penelope (twice) in her novels, after all, JA's own mother and sister were named Cassandra--Of all people in the world who would enjoy a joke on Greek names, you would think CEA would be at the top of the list!

Now, JA's joke was opportunistic, because surely the parents who gave their daughters names like Flora and Dionysia were themselves enamored of the Greeks--but JA, with her eagle eye, spotted that, and took fully punny advantage of it.

And, by the way, your explanation does not negate Diana's, relating to Anna---perhaps Anna, who was herself (as we well know) very bright and literarily inclined,  was the original spotter of all the Greek names, and JA was (proudly) repeating Anna's erudite joking to CEA.

How powerful a medium of creative brainstorming a group like Janeites can be.
Starting from my taking a long hard look at this heretofore critically ignored passage in one of JA's letters, I was rewarded with not one but two excellent and ingenious explanations for its meaning.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Betrayed Beyond an Accident: Fanny Cage and Louisa Musgrove

In Janeites, in response to my post (about Letter 73).....

 http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/07/jane-austens-letter-73-i-had-forgot.html


 ....which included a reference to the sexual meaning of "accident" in relation to Mrs. Knight, someone named Terry sharpened matters by pointing out the recognized euphemism of "accident" for "miscarriage" in JA's era.  I responded as follows:

Terry, glad you were prompted to write the above by my post about Aunt Leigh-Perrot and Mrs. Knight as unwitting "victims" of "accidents" in JA's wickedly satirical imagination. You have in turn prompted me to revisit this whole question, with fruitful results!

In my longstanding reading of that passage from JA's 1801 letter about Mrs. Knight's "accident", I had always focused on the absurd aspect of a pregnancy outside wedlock of a woman past childbearing years. In that focus, I had always glided past the _specific_ euphemistic replacement of "accident" for miscarriage. But your post prompted me to look more closely at "accident" for the first time---i.e., I did a global search of the word "accident" in JA's writings.

In addition to some usages of interest, I found not one but two _very_ interesting (and, as you will, closely and significantly interrelated) passages that fit perfectly with that sexual euphemism in a way that hints at a hushed-up scandal in JA's extended family.

First the following passage from Letter 87 dated Sept. 15-16, 1813:

"Now for Bath. Poor F. cage has suffered a good deal from her ACCIDENT. The noise of the White Hart was terrible to her. They will keep her quiet, I dare say. She is not so much delighted with the place as the rest of the party; probably, as she says herself, from having been less well, but she thinks she should like it better in the season. The streets are very empty now, and the shops not so gay as she expected. They are at No. 1 Henrietta Street, the corner of Laura Place, and have no acquaintance at present but the Bramstons."

Fanny Cage was the orphaned first cousin of Fanny Knight, and was in 1813 twenty years old, the same age as Fanny K.

No Janeite can read that passage, with its various details about an accident and a stay at the White Hart, without immediately thinking of Louisa Musgrove's fall down the steps on the Cobb in Lyme in Persuasion. I would have expected Le Faye (ever the enemy of unpleasant parallels between real life and JA's fiction) to be especially intent upon ignoring those parallels. However, Le Faye could not very well ignore them in this instance, because Chapman had already let the cat out of the bag decades earlier! So Le Faye was forced to acknowledge them in fn 19 to Letter 87, by quoting Chapman's footnote:

"The combination of the White Hart and susceptibility to noise reminds us of Louisa Musgrove's accident and subsequent nerves. I can find no report of the accident in the Bath newspapers."

I would suggest that the reason Chapman could find no report of the "accident" in the Bath newspapers is that Fanny Cage's misfortune was precisely the sort of "accident" that commentators like Valerie Grosvenor Myer (who discussed the alternative meaning of "accident" in 1995, long before Jones did so in 2009) took note of, but that respectable families did all they could to keep _out_ of the newspapers! I.e. I suggest that there was no more likelihood of Chapman finding that report in the Bath newspapers than there was of Le Faye's finding a real-life dyer in Southampton named "Mr. Floor" (the one, you'll recall, who was _low_ in JA's estimation!).

Once again, we have JA indulging in creative metaphor and wordplay in her letters as well as her novels! And, speaking of her novels ....what I also realized is that my longstanding interpretation of Louisa Musgrove as having "fallen" (sexually) to Wentworth's masculine charms and became pregnant prior to the excursion to Lyme, needed to be amended to take into account the further, specific innuendo that Louisa miscarried in Lyme! And, further, that JA had chosen to memorialize Fanny Cage's 1813 "accident" forever in one of the most dramatic scenes in Persuasion!

Here are the two passages in Persuasion where JA delicately brings the scandalous subtext an inch from the surface, using the word "accident" in its euphemistic sense of "miscarriage", without allowing it to break through to clear visibility:

"There was a little awkwardness at first in their discourse on another subject. They must speak of the _accident_ at Lyme. Lady Russell had not been arrived five minutes the day before, when a full account of the whole had _burst_ on her; but still it must be talked of, she must make enquiries, she must regret the imprudence, lament the result, and Captain Wentworth's name must be mentioned by both. Anne was conscious of not doing it so well as Lady Russell. She could not speak the name, and look straight forward to Lady Russell's eye, till she had adopted the expedient of telling her briefly what she thought of the attachment between him and Louisa. When this was told, his name distressed her no longer. Lady Russell had only to listen composedly, and wish them happy, but internally her heart revelled in angry pleasure, in pleased contempt, that the man who at twenty-three had seemed to understand somewhat of the value of an Anne Elliot, should, eight years afterwards, be charmed by a Louisa Musgrove."

When something "bursts" on someone in a Jane Austen novel, you can be sure the powerful watery imagery is entirely intentional, and is meant to convey the raw physicality of events pertaining to pregnancy and childbirth.

"The sad _accident_ at Lyme was soon the prevailing topic, and on comparing their latest accounts of the invalid, it appeared that each lady dated her intelligence from the same hour of yestermorn; that Captain Wentworth had been in Kellynch yesterday (the first time since the _accident_), had brought Anne the last note, which she had not been able to trace the exact steps of; had staid a few hours and then returned again to Lyme, and without any present intention of quitting it any more. He had enquired after her, she found, particularly; had expressed his hope of Miss Elliot's not being the worse for her exertions, and had spoken of those exertions as great. This was handsome, and gave her more pleasure than almost anything else could have done. As to the sad catastrophe itself, it could be canvassed only in one style by a couple of steady, sensible women, whose judgements had to work on ascertained events; and it was perfectly decided that it had been the consequence of much thoughtlessness and much imprudence; that its effects were most alarming, and that it was frightful to think, how long Miss Musgrove's recovery might yet be doubtful, and how liable she would still remain to suffer from the concussion hereafter! The Admiral wound it up summarily by exclaiming--"Ay, a very bad business indeed. A new sort of way this, for a young fellow to be making love, by breaking his mistress's head, is not it, Miss Elliot? This is breaking a head and giving a plaster, truly!""

Indeed, Admiral Croft, you witty rogue!

And the above interpretation also sheds fresh light on the critical practical importance of the question of who would care for Louisa during the critical days at Captain Harville's home---perhaps Mary's histrionics, demanding priority over Anne as caretaker, followed later that same day by Mary's being entirely displaced by Mrs. Harville who assumed exclusive control over the nursing of Louisa, was not accidental, and not merely evidence of Wentworth's esteem for Anne's capableness, Mary's selfish jealousy toward Anne, and Mrs. Harville's ultimate assumption of exclusive control, but was actually evidence of subtle manipulation by certain watchful, concerned persons who wished at all costs to take Anne's sharp, insightful eyes far far away from witnessing things which it would be, shall we say, devastating for her to see, terrible things which even Anne's enduring love could not survive.

My personal favorite bit of wordplay in all of this is JA's comment about Fanny Cage: "They will keep her quiet, I dare say." In context, it seems to mean that the Bridges family will keep Fanny Cage in a quiet room where her nerves will be soothed by quiet. However, a plain alternative meaning, which takes on a very droll, even cynical, connotation, is that the Bridges family will convince their young (and perhaps Romantic) niece of the dire necessity for keeping permanently quiet, i.e., keeping her mouth shut, about the true nature of her "accident"! Did they succeed?

Fanny Cage, in case you were wondering, did not marry until age 41. One wonders whether her "accident" in 1813 had anything to do with her not marrying during childbearing years. And while we know nothing about Fanny Cage's taste for romantic poetry, we do know that she liked P&P a lot, liked Emma somewhat less, and liked MP less still.....but oh, wouldn't you like to know what Fanny Cage thought about Louisa Musgrove's "accident" in particular?

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: Several comments in Janeites, responding to the above, strongly objected to the notion of Wentworth being so unheroic as to engage in sexual relations with Louisa Musgrove and then compound matters by not marrying her. I responded to their objections as follows:

Such an interesting sampling of reactions to my claim about Wentworth and Louisa--which claim, I reiterate, I did not invent out of thin air, I followed the "bread crumbs" in the text, including the particularly telling one about "accidents" as "miscarriages". And I will take a moment to turn your attention to my earlier post from several years back in which I presented a great deal of textual evidence about "the dear old Asp" which first alerted me to Wentworth and Louisa, and in particular the persistence of Wentworth's bitter anger toward Anne:

 http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/05/dear-old-aspgo-to-bottom-together.html

It took me several years _after_ I first understood the doubleness of all of Jane Austen's novels to realize the answer to the problem of the Austen hero who does unheroic things. It's quite simple, elegant, and powerful, to wit:

By giving us romantic, intelligent, powerful heroes like Wentworth, JA taps into the natural wellspring of female fantasy. But...by showing us, in the shadows, a version of Wentworth which seems completely inconsistent with that romantic fantasy--a version which even the perceptive, intelligent, pragmatic heroine, Anne, cannot detect, JA provides the reader with the ultimate cautionary tale, the necessary corrective to the romantic fantasy. So instead of trying to blend the heroic and unheroic sides of Wentworth into one "grey" character, I suggest that JA instead gives us Wentworth in bright "white", but, simultaneously, Wentworth in dark "black"! The Wentworth who acts in an ungentlemanly way is one possibility--and the Wentworth who does everything right in the second half of the novel is another possibility---JA is saying, to the female reader who can see both versions of Wentworth--be careful, don't be overly romantic and don't be overly cynical---strive for the clearest possible vision unclouded by either fantasy or cynicism, be as alert as you can to subtle cues that may hold elusive truth about human nature, and in the end, make the best judgment you can as to the "Wentworth" in your own life, and try to get it right, because (in Jane Austen's era, at least) your very life may well depend on getting it right!