" 'Tis NIGHT, and the LANDSCAPE is LOVELY NO MORE" & “SO FRAIL, so fair, are THE FOND VISIONS of thy early day”: The Blind-Becoming, Poetry-Loving “Hermits”, Jane Austen & Anne Elliot

Happily, my research has reached the advanced stage, when, more often than not, new discoveries often connect the dots between earlier finds which did not seem related at all. This post is a classic example.

In a post last week…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-subtle-spect-ocular-subtext-of-jane.html

…I claimed that Jane Austen in writing “I have not YET FELT QUITE EQUAL to taking up your Manuscript…” to niece Caroline in Letter 123, was referring to her own long-term and worsening “eye  weakness”, a condition which Caroline remembered a half century later in her memoir of her aunt.

In that post, I also provided links to a series of seven posts which I wrote two months ago about Anne Elliot’s vision impairment in Persuasion, which I claimed were autobiographical to Jane Austen own “spect-ocular” woes.

Today, I am back to add an eighth post to that series, which weaves all the strands of this theme of vision impairment in Persuasion and in Jane Austen’s own life, even more tightly together, as will be clearly visible to those who carefully follow all the relevant strands of meaning & thinly veiled allusion, below.

PART ONE: THE ALREADY-IDENTIFIED POETRY ANNE ELLIOT CHANTED TO HERSELF

In the first of those seven earlier posts in the series…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-wild-idea-about-weakness-in-eyes-of_25.html

..I argued that one strong bit of textual evidence of Anne Elliot’s vision impairment was (like Odysseus’s and Sherlock Holmes’s proverbial dogs who did NOT bark) the absence of real-time external visual perception by Anne Elliot as she walked between Winthrop and Uppercross, because Anne during that walk only has eyes, so to speak, for the internal poetically-inspired re-creations of her own mind during that walk. Here’s how I put it then:

“…Anne derives pleasure from “repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which had drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. She occupied her mind as much as possible in such like musings and quotations” –the poignant irony of this activity cannot be overemphasized— here Anne is, in the midst of actual visual, picturesque beauty during actual autumn, but she has zero access to that direct experience, and instead MUST derive what pleasure she can from the indirect, internal, cerebral imagining of that beauty as expressed by word poets. Talk about being too much in one’s head and not enough in the moment! But it does not appear to be an indifference or lack of interest, it appears to be a mechanical problem with the operation of her eyes.”

Today, while reading an excellent article I just obtained in followup to my investigation of the hypocritical mourning of James Benwick in Persuasion as a negative representation of the real life mourning hypocrite, recently widowed Capt. Charles Austen…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/10/more-of-captain-james-benwick-in.html

…I received the unexpected and serendipitous bonus of learning that Prof. Anne Ehrenpreis, way way back in 1971, had suggested that one of those “some few” poems which Anne Elliot very likely repeated to herself as she walked near Winthrop, was Charlotte Smith’s famous Elegiac Sonnet 2.  

I learned this from “Time and mourning in Persuasion” by Loraine Fletcher, Women's Writing Vol. 5, Issue 1, 1998 ppg 81-90, where Fletcher writes as follows:

“The walk to Winthrop takes place in November 1814. Wentworth with his pompous musing on the hazel nut is as eager as Wordsworth to find a moral lesson in Nature. Anne sees the landscape through a colouring of regret. As she walks she remembers one of Charlotte Smith’s elegiac sonnets, first published in 1784 but reprinted 11 times in England before the date of Persuasion, including 1806, the year of Anne’s meeting and parting from Wentworth. Smith’s Sonnet 2 is refracted through Anne’s consciousness [ALL CAPS added by me for emphasis of words associated with loss of vision]:

The garlands FADE that Spring so lately wove,

Each simple flower, which she had nurs’d in dew,

Anemonies, that spangled every grove,

The primrose WAN and harebell, mildly blue.

No more shall violets linger in the dell,

Or purple orchis variegate the plain,

Til Spring again shall call forth every bell,

And dress with humid hands her wreaths again. -

Ah! poor humanity! so frail, so fair,

Are THE FOND VISIONS OF THY EARLY DAY,

Til tyrant passion, and corrosive care,

Bid ALL THY FAIRY COLOURS FADE AWAY!

Another May new buds and flowers shall bring;

Ah! why has happiness – no second Spring? 

I agree with Ehrenpreis’s brilliant catch, and further assert a fresh insight, which is that JA chose to covertly allude to this particular Sonnet 2 by Smith, precisely because a diminishment of visual experience was central to that Sonnet’s imagery of irretrievable loss. That of course corroborates my claims in my earlier series of posts about Anne Elliot’s visual impairment, —and please note that this is a case of convergent evidence, because as far as I can tell, Ehrenpreis claimed (and Fletcher reiterated) the identification of this covert allusion to Smith’s Sonnet 2 by JA, based on thematic resonance having nothing to do with vision impairment, but instead on parallels between Smith’s Sonnet 2 and Persuasion in the contrast of renewal in nature vs. irretrievable loss in the individual human being.  

PART TWO: THE OTHER POETRY ANNE ELLIOT CHANTED TO HERSELF

And now, those who’ve been reading along in my very recent posts can probably guess what writing Part One, above, made me realize, with the excitement that only a literary sleuthing nerd like myself can feel. I.e., I realized that the theme of Smith’s Sonnet 2 was uncannily parallel to that of Beattie’s “The Hermit”, the poem which JA explicitly refers to in Letter 123 to Caroline Austen, and which I was just writing about last week, and which I will reproduce here again now {again with ALL CAPS to pinpoint the imagery of visual impairment]:

 THE HERMIT by James Beattie

At the close of day, when the hamlet is still,
And mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove,
When nought but the torrent is heard on the hill,
And nought but the nightingale's song in the grove.
'Twas thus, by the cave of the mountain afar,
While his harp rung symphonious, a Hermit began
No more with himself or with nature at war,
He thought as a Sage, though he felt as a Man.

"Ah, why, all abandon'd to DARKNESS and wo,
Why, lone Philomela, that languishing fall?
For Spring shall return, and a lover bestow,
But, if pity inspire thee, renew the sad lay,
Mourn, sweetest complainer, man calls thee to mourn;
O soothe him, whose pleasures like thine pass away
Full quickly they pass - but they never return.

"Now gliding remote, on the verge of the sky,
The Moon, half-extinguish'd, her crescent displays:
But lately I mark'd, when majestic on high
She shone, and THE PLANETS WERE LOST IN HER BLAZE.
Roll on, thou fair orb, and with gladness pursue
The path that conducts thee to splendour again.
But Man's FADED glory what change shall renew!
Ah fool! to exult in a glory so vain!

"'Tis NIGHT, and THE LANDSCAPE IS NO MORE;
I mourn, but, ye woodlands, I mourn not for you;
For morn is approaching, your charms to restore,
PERFUMED with fresh fragrance, with glittering dew,
Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn;
Kind Nature the embryo blossom will save.
But when shall Spring visit the mouldering urn!
O when shall it dawn on the night of the grave!

"'Twas thus, by the GLARE of false Science betray'd,
That leads, to bewilder; and dazzles, TO BLIND;
My thoughts wont to roam, from shade onward to shade,
Destruction before me, and sorrow behind.
'O pity, great Father of LIGHT,' then I cried,
'Thy creature who fain would not wander from Thee!
Lo, humbled in dust, I relinquish my pride:
From doubt and from DARKNESS thou only canst free.

"And DARKNESS and doubt are now flying away,
No longer I roam in conjecture forlorn.
So breaks on the traveller, faint, and astray,
The BRIGHT and the balmy effulgence of morn.
see Truth, Love, and Mercy, in triumph descending,
And Nature all GLOWING in Eden's first bloom!
On the cold cheek of Death smiles and roses are blending,
And Beauty Immortal awakes from the tomb."

Now that I read “The Hermit” through the lens of Smith’s Sonnet 2, I see that Beattie’s poem also deploys imagery of diminished vision as part of its theme of mourning for that which was loved but is now irretrievably lost.

And …..here’s the best part---which almost made me fall out of my chair---it turns out that the line in Beattie’s poem which is the epicenter of its vision-loss subtext is:

“ 'Tis NIGHT, and the LANDSCAPE is LOVELY NO MORE”

is--as anyone who paid close attention to my Subject Line may have already realized--that line is one that Jane Austen actually quoted in a Letter—and it wasn’t even Letter 123! Again, by serendipity, as I searched in my blog to find the text of “The Hermit”, so I could post it now--the search function showed me I had not posted the text of “The Hermit” before, but it also led me to an earlier post of mine….

 http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/11/jane-austens-letter-89-tis-night-and.html

…which I had written nearly a year ago, as part of our same Group Read of JA’s Letters, that one being about Jane Austen alluding to Beattie’s The Hermit in Letter 89 dated 9/24/13!

You are welcome to read that earlier post in full, but if you don’t want to, then just know that in Letter 89, to CEA, written two years before JA wrote Letter 123 to niece Caroline, Jane Austen, while staying at Godmersham, had quoted that very same line from The Hermit, "'Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more".

In my above earlier post re same, I suggested this line, along with the line JA also quoted therein from Cowper’s “Alexander Selkirk”, was a marker of the increasing isolation that JA felt from her world. I suggested that this isolation was psychological, a reflection of her deep alienation from the Godmersham elite set with which she was mingling at that moment, and I still hold to that interpretation.  As I suggested in that earlier post, JA was thumbing through a book of poetry in brother Edward’s home library, and came upon Beattie’s poem, and also Cowper’s “Alexander Selkirk” on the same page, and found both struck a chord for her in that common theme of isolation.

But now I also understand that Beattie’s poem must have also resonated to JA’s own experience as her vision was deteriorating, shrinking and fuzzying her distance vision, and making her, of necessity, feel that sort of perceptual isolation as well! That’s why she wrote “ ‘Tis night” –for Jane Austen, even as early as 1813, “night” was beginning to descend gradually on her vision! And that’s why Anne Elliot, in walking between Winthrop and Uppercross, is not even looking around her at the landscape—she can’t see it! Hence, “the landscape is lovely no more”!

And so, based on all of that, it almost goes without saying that I now believe that my hunch last week that Caroline Austen was not actually playing The Hermit all the time as JA seemed to be saying in Letter 123, was spot-on.  It seems clearer than ever that JA had deliberately chosen to indirectly allude to Beattie’s lyrics, to convey the idea of not aggravating little Cassy’s grief for her recently deceased mother. But she also worked her own vision impairment into the subtext of Letter 123, coinciding with her writing, perhaps, of the Winthrop scene in Persuasion!

That JA was quoting from Beattie in Letter 89 two years earlier, and in such a pointed but veiled thematic way, shows that JA was quite deliberate in her reinvoking Beattie’s words in Letter 123 in a similarly thematic but veiled way.

And by the way, add this to the long list of Footnotes Le Faye Ought To Have Written. Even in the new 4^th Edition, she does not in the footnote for Beattie’s “Hermit” in Letter 123 refer to the footnote for Beattie’s “Hermit” in Letter 89, or vice versa. To have realized the connection from her edition, you’d have to go to her listing for Beattie allusions under her Topic Index heading “Authors”, and then follow each one to see if they overlapped. In other words, you’d have to have already known about it, as I did!

CODA & CONCLUSION:

I also believe that we owe another line in Persuasion to Beattie’s poem---When Anne Elliot seems to be walking on air after leaving Mrs. Smith’s apartment, I think she’s recalling the one optimistic line in Beattie’s poem:

“For spring is returning your charms to restore, PERFUMED WITH FRESH FRAGRANCE and glittering with dew.”

And that’s why we read, at that instant, in Persuasion:

“It was almost enough to spread purification and PERFUME all the way.”

It’s not just the “perfume” that would be needed for “purification” of Anne’s shoes, and of the air she breathes, as she walks through the poo outside Westgate Buildings in the lowrent part of Bath…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/09/jane-austens-comedy-of-manures-re-odors.html

….it’s also the “perfume” from Beattie’s poem, the happy ending that Anne Elliot is about to reach

So there you have it from Letters 89 & 123: strong corroboration of my claim that Beattie’s “The Hermit”, and Ehrenpreis’s claim that Smith’s Sonnet 2, were both very likely two of the short list of  poems Anne Elliot chanted to herself as she walked between Winthrop and Uppercross!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

More of Captain James Benwick in Persuasion as a Negative Representation of Captain Charles Austen

Earlier today, I wrote briefly about Letter 123 as being, in part, JA’s coded and not very positive view in 1815 of brother Charles Austen’s overly quick attachment to his sister in law after the death of his wife in 1814 ….

http://listserv.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1310d&L=austen-l&T=0&F=&S=&P=2013

…and I intended to return to amplify on the following comments with which I concluded:

“So, viewing Letter 123 through the lens of JA making a veiled commentary on Charles's blossoming relationship with his young sister in law, we can see that the reference to Cassy playing The Hermit was doubly loaded. I.e., JA was sarcastically but veiledly commenting that Charles was the furthest thing from Beattie's hermit, and he was anything but a husband consumed with grief over the death of his wife. And JA was in effect casting little Cassy as Hamlet, who (metaphorically) is the Hermit of Hamlet, the brooding child mourning the death of a beloved parent, and watching the surviving parent in effect marry with the funeral meats used to furnish the marriage table!

And best of all, does any of this sound like anything in one of Jane Austen's novels--such as, e.g., the novel that she had already begun to write as she wrote Letter 123?  Of course, JA revisited what she must have seen as brother Charles's shocking lack of grieving for his dead wife, when she created the character of James Benwick, who similarly does not spend a long time grieving for his dead fiancee FANNY Harville!”

Apparently, I am the first (1) to see Letter 123’s veiled sarcasm directed at Charles Austen, (2) to realize that Captain Benwick’s short-lived grief for his dead fiancée Fanny is also a veiled criticism of Charles Austen’s short-lived grief for his dead wife, and (3) to connect the dots between (1) and (2) and realize that this connection is no surprise, given that Letter 123 and Persuasion were written contemporaneously by JA. 

What’s disturbing--yet oddly fascinating--is to observe the power of the mythology around the Austen family, which prompts Austen scholars to sugar-coat and drastically distort reality, in this instance. I think the general blindness of Austen scholars to Jane Austen’s judgment on Charles Austen via the Benwick character in Persuasion is a particularly good (or bad) example of this phenomenon.

Exhibit “A” of this phenomenon has to be Sheila Johnson Kindred’s 2009 Persuasions article “The influence of Naval Captain Charles Austen's North American experiences on Persuasion and Mansfield Park.”

Read the following, and ask yourself, did Kindred read the same Persuasion that we all know and love?  

“Finally, an echo of Charles and Fanny's devotion to each other occurs in another context in Persuasion. Recall that Captain Benwick, Wentworth's lieutenant on the Laconia, had been engaged to the beautiful young Fanny Harville. He is made desolate by her death while he is at sea and is in deep mourning when the reader first meets him. A similar catastrophic event had shattered Fanny and Charles's relationship when suddenly in early September 1814 she died from complications following the birth of their short-lived daughter Elizabeth. This unexpected death of a sister-in-law, who was only twenty-four, occurred in the period before Jane began to write Persuasion. She was touched by Fanny's tragic demise and the deep effect it had on the grieving Charles. Her closeness to this event may explain her characterization of the emotionally devastated Captain Benwick in chapters eleven and twelve of Persuasion.”

The whole point of our hearing how emotionally devastated Benwick is left by his uncontrollable grief for Fanny—how he even asks Anne for recommendations for poetry to read to help him through his grief (like, perhaps Beattie’s The Hermit?) ---is the devastating irony of his abrupt turnabout, when Anne (and we later learn, also Harville and Wentworth) is shocked to learn that Benwick has gotten engaged to Louisa so quickly. This is Hypocrisy with a capital H.

  

Even Peter Knox-Shaw, in his wonderfully subversive 2004 book Jane Austen & The Enlightenment, where he repeatedly demonstrates that he does not wear blinders, fails to reach the point of seeing Benwick as a negative representation of Charles Austen, when Knox-Shaw discusses Benwick and Charles Austen vis a vis naval grief, real and fictional, at ppg. 221-2.

And even the strongly outside the box Janine Barchas, in her 2009 Persuasions article “Artistic Names in Austen’s Fiction: Cameo Appearances by Prominent Painters”, speculates, along with the equally outside the box Jocelyn Harris, that the “small miniature portrait” of Captain Benwick which Wentworth agrees to refit for delivery to Louisa Musgrove was an allusion to a miniature of Frank Austen, without seeming to consider how much  better it would fit if it were an allusion to the Benwick-like Austen brother, Charles.

But back to the Kindred article, which by the way, had to get past the editorial process at Persuasions in 2009 only 4 years ago, during which this error should have been caught by other scholarly eyes---such is the power of the still prevalent Austen mythology, that a paragraph like the above which ignores what we learn about Benwick after Chapter 12 of Persuasion, could be presented to Janeites as a valid description of Jane Austen’s family, and not even be challenged….until now, by me.

To see the character Benwick as Jane Austen’s positive tribute to Charles Austen’s admirably intense grief, instead of as her parody of his less than noble haste into the arms of another woman (and with considerably larger income than Fanny Harville would have had), is to completely misunderstand and misrepresent the true Jane Austen. Benwick’s worst sin is not just that  he was inconstant in his grief for Fanny Harville-it is the intense hypocrisy of his exaggerated grieving followed by his exaggerated speed in marrying another woman, which makes the veiled allusion to Charles Austen so disturbing.

And so it’s obvious why this scholarly neutering of JA’s sometimes brutally honest satire happens—it is too disruptive of the myth of Jane Austen to imagine that she would, in her novel considered by most Janeites to be a love letter to both of her brothers in the Royal Navy, present such a harsh parodic portrait of her younger sailor brother’s moral and emotional foibles.

It’s a Pandora’s Box Moment for Austen scholarship—because if this sort of harsh parody is possible, then who knows, maybe this nutty conspiracy theorist Arnie Perlstein is also correct in some of his other outside the box interpretations about Jane Austen.  

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Jane Austen’s Letter 123: The Hidden Explosiveness of “Believe me, my dear Sister-Aunt”, & Other Subtextual Tales

In addition to the “eye weakness” subtext of Letter 123 to which I devoted an entire post earlier today….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-subtle-spect-ocular-subtext-of-jane.html

…I will now make the case for additional, similar subtext, of equal significance to that of the “eye weakness” subtext, all crammed into this short, seemingly trivial & innocuous Letter 123 to 10 year old niece Caroline Austen.

Letter 123 now seems to me to be a textbook example of how JA effortlessly and frequently met the challenge of writing her letters so as to communicate dicey and even explosive meaning in code to knowing readers of those letters other than the named addressee, while at the same time preserving total opacity to a reader not “looking for trouble”.  I’ve divided this post into four topical sections, and this is one post you really want to read all the way to the end, because I’ve saved the best (or the worst, depending on your point of view) for the fourth and last section.

The Delights of Taking Care of Children:

“It gives us great pleasure that you should be at Chawton. I am sure Cassy must be delighted to have you.”

Of course on the surface these two sentences appear merely to be Aunt Jane delighting in the prospect of her two age-similar nieces, Caroline (age 10) and Cassy (age 7), getting to spend some quality time together at Chawton.

But first, I believe it did not escape Jane Austen that “Cassy” also just happened to be the childhood nickname of sister Cassandra, who was at that very moment at Chawton taking care of Caroline and Cassy. So, that second sentence takes on a new ironic layer of meaning, if it is read to refer to Aunt Cassandra’s own feelings about now having Caroline around to attend to and contend with, along with the younger, perhaps more difficult, Cassy, who was already there, and for whom, as Diana pointed out, the recent death of her mother was a still-fresh wound.

For that matter,  I also wonder how delighted 7-year old Cassy really was to suddenly have an older rival for her aunt Cassandra’s attentions right there in the Cottage. Sounds like droll irony on JA’s part, because we know JA was already aware of Cassy’s jealous bossiness as JA described it in Letter 120 to Anna Lefroy, when little Cassy, less than a month earlier, put the kibosh on a visit with her aunts to the very pregnant Anna at Wyards in favor of a trip to the fair that she really wanted to take.

Jane Austen would not have been blind to these family dynamics, and I think she was working for a wry smile from Cassandra upon reading the above, as if to say, I just bet you must be delighted to have more children to care for.

Jane Austen’s Precious Pianoforte:

“You will practise your Music of course, & I trust to you for taking care of my Instrument & not letting it be ill used in any respect.-Do not allow anything to be put on it, but what is very light.”

Here, what comes through loud and clear, without resort to hints, and from the rapid fire repetition of several emphatic warnings and prohibitions, is the real fear that JA has that somehow Caroline will mess up JA’s precious pianoforte. My guess is that Caroline minded her aunt’s stern admonitions. For sure, it tells us just how important that pianoforte was to JA’s mental and spiritual health—I imagine her piano playing as a deeply nourishing private discipline & practice, a time for communing with her own imagination in preparation for the sacred act of literary composition. So, JA was not leaving her pianoforte vulnerable to the vagaries of a 10-year old’s judgment, and was being crystal clear about the supreme importance of its not being “ill used in any respect”.

The Hermit:

“I hope you will try to make out some other tune besides the Hermit.”

Thanks to Diana, for pointing out Le Faye’s gloss on this sentence, and then quoting the first stanza and giving us that brief bio re Beattie’s sad family history. I think that brief bio is the key to understanding JA’s subtext in the above sentence.

First, I think it clear that JA was aware of the deep sadness underlying Beattie’s familiar lyrics (which are the voice of human grief, agonizing over the pain and despair of knowing that deceased loved ones are, unlike the perennial fruits of Mother Nature,  never going to return in the spring—Beattie’s dead wife and children were gone forever.

Was it just a coincidence, then, that the overarching theme of Letter 123 is the Austen family dynamics at Chawton , in particular the presence at Chawton of a little girl who has just lost her mother, and perhaps, with a 7-year-old’s mind, was at times lost in fantasies of a return of her mother, in defiance of the cold, harsh finality of those lryics?

So this is what leads me to speculate that Caroline Austen in fact had not playing the Hermit all the time, or even at all, on Jane Austen’s pianoforte! This was another one of JA’s spontaneous fantasies which dramatize an important message—and that message, which I believe she thought Caroline capable of understanding, even at 10, was that Caroline should be extra sensitive to little Cassy’s needs during her visit at Chawton. In effect, “don’t play the Hermit all the time” could be translated as  “Be a good cousin, and do what you can to raise the little girls spirits, perhaps by playing cheery songs!”.

My Dear Sister-Aunt:

“Now that you are become an Aunt, you are a person of some consequence & must excite great Interest whatever you do. I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible, & I am sure of your doing the same now. Beleive me my dear Sister-Aunt”

On the surface, this appears to be a charming attempt by JA to make Caroline Austen feel some sense of herself as special, given her seniority, at least in comparison to the younger Austen cousins from the two naval families. Whereas, in her birth family, Caroline was “the baby”.

This charming attempt takes on more significance when viewed in the context of the veiled request that I suggested in my third section, above, that JA was making to Caroline, i.e., that Caroline not do anything to rekindle little Cassy’s grief over losing her mother. JA takes this final moment, then, to reiterate this theme of Caroline as playing an adult-like role vis a vis younger relatives, whether it be a grieving 7 year old cousin or a newborn niece.

But in her characteristic mode of hiding her biggest secrets in plain sight, JA casually tosses in something extra from left field as she signs off on Letter 123, something that gives the informed reader pause…in this case, it’s JA’s calling Caroline “my dear Sister-Aunt”.

If this peculiar turn of phrase sounds familiar to a reader familiar with literature that Jane Austen might have been familiar with, there’s a very very good reason. There are (at least) two famous works of literature which I believe Jane Austen knew very well indeed, which contain dialog which refers to exactly that same sort of familial double-relationship:

Act 2 Scene 2 Hamlet:

Hamlet: You are welcome: but my UNCLE-FATHER and AUNT-MOTHER are deceived.

Guildenstern:  In what, my dear lord?

Hamlet: I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.

Sophocles’ Antigone:

Ismene: 

Bethink thee, sister, of our father's fate,

Abhorred, dishonored, self-convinced of sin,

Blinded, himself his executioner.

Think of his MOTHER-WIFE (ill sorted names)

Done by a noose herself had twined to death

And last, our hapless brethren in one day,

Both in a mutual destiny involved,

Self-slaughtered, both the slayer and the slain

Now why in the world would JA, in a letter to her young niece, make a veiled allusion to

 (1) Hamlet’s hint to Guildenstern that he is only pretending to Claudius and Gertrude that he is crazy, even as he slips in a dig about the incestuous nature of Claudius’ marriage with Gertrude, and/or to

(2) Ismene’s (in talking to sister Antigone) description of the ill-fated incestuousness of their own family, in which Jocasta, mother of Oedipus as well as of Ismene and Antigone, was also the wife of Oedipus, hence Ismene’s epithet for Jocasta?

And actually, Shakespeare had the entire Oedipus Trilogy firmly in mind when he wrote Hamlet- so what better way for JA to kill two allusive birds with one stone than to select this double-relatedness epithet format, which uniquely appears in both of those sources, one ancient and one early modern.

But that’s all background, so let’s cut to the chase. The common theme in these two literary sources, it is obvious, is incest—incest with tragic consequences.

And so, incredible as this will sound, this allusion becomes ten times more explosive, when we realize that there actually is a very plausible reason, based on real textual evidence, why JA, in a letter written while Emma was on the verge of being published, might make a veiled allusion to this theme of incest, i.e., why JA would in effect cast herself and Caroline in an amateur mini-theatrical based on the two most tragic instances of incest in Western literature.

This more than decided whiff of incestuous innuendo would of course be utterly imperceptible by a 10 year old, but might just be brought to mind in any adult who was “intimate by instinct” with Shakespeare, as I suspect many members of the Austen family were besides Jane Austen.   

So…try to wrap your mind around the possibility that JA, in this way, was hinting in Letter 123 at the explosive riddle she had hidden, double-wrapped for safekeeping, at the end of Emma (which she was on the verge of publishing).  For those of who for whom this double-wrapped riddle does not ring a bell as to what I am referring to, I am suggesting that in Letter 123 JA combined:  

(1) Jane Fairfax’s concealed pregnancy, with Jane covertly giving her newborn baby girl to Mrs. Weston [all discovered by me in 2005), with

(2) Anielka Briggs’s 2007 discovery (right after I revealed #1 to her) of Jane Austen’s word game in Emma, with the newborn Anna Weston === > Ann Aweston === > Anna Austen, who just happened to be Caroline Austen’s elder half-sister.

Translated into simple English, the combination of (1) and (2) leads to the inference---whether imagined by JA or factually lived by her, I believe we will never know for sure either way—that Jane Austen was the biological mother of Anna Austen Lefroy, but gave her newborn daughter to her brother James Austen, and his wife, to raise as if their own biological child.

And so, there would be an odd consistency in JA including an epistolary hint to this event, that may or may not have occurred in 1793 when JA was 17, in a letter to Caroline Austen, who, according to this ambiguity, would be the younger  “sister-cousin” of Anna.  

And you thought Letter 123 was nothing special when you first read it, right?

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter