Doris Lessing & Jane Austen

Yesterday, I posted the following in Austen-L and Janeites:

I am sure many of you read of the recent death of Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize winner in literature a few years back.

I have never read any of her fiction, but I asked my wife, who reads a lot of contemporary fiction, and she said that she had read at least one of her works, which was written some decades ago, which she found prescient in terms of Lessing's anticipation of current societal trends.

Anyone here a Lessing fan? If so, any recommendations on what to read, and why (especially if you see an Austen connection)?

I always wonder about any contemporary female writer's engagement with Jane Austen, so I Googled Lessing re that, and was led to the following very interesting 12-page essay by Lessing about Jane Austen:

http://books.google.com/books?id=UJK4goVwI00C&pg=PA1&dq=%22doris+lessing%22+%22jane+austen%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HZ-JUv7gH-T54AO1moG4DQ&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22doris%20lessing%22%20%22jane%20austen%22&f=false

While Lessing does not peer into the shadows of JA's fiction, she does an excellent job of addressing a number of themes and issues in Pride & Prejudice and a bit about JA's bio and some of the other novels.

I recommend it.

I then received an interesting response from Ellen Moody…

Ellen: "Thank you to Arnie. I'll get that book. I'm a strong admirer of Doris Lessing: I enjoy her realistic fiction intensely, her memoirs, essays, journalism; she wrote one of the two best books on cats (the other is by Olivia Manning)."

…to which I now respond as follows:

You're welcome, Ellen.

I enjoyed Lessing's discussion of Jane Austen, even though I did not agree with half of what she wrote, in particular that Lessing was unable to imagine that there was another, radically different but still plausible, way of seeing Mary Bennet, Mr. Bennet, Charlotte, etc. Lessing, for all her independence of thought, remained imprisoned inside Lizzy's subjective perceptions. It made me wonder what she thought about Miss Bates, but she limits her discussion of  JA’s fiction to P&P---I suspect she pitied Miss Bates, but did not understand that there was more to Miss Bates than Emma realizes.

Nonetheless, I really enjoyed following Lessing's writerly way of constructing an argument --now after browsing through Ellen's blog about Lessing's book about cats (our cat, by the way, is named Rufus, purely by coincidence with Lessing's Rufus) it occurs to me that Lessing stalks her ideas, the way a cat stalks a lizard (we have lots of tiny lizards here in South Florida)-- indirectly, craftily.

It's an infectious writing style, and not a bad "infection" to catch.

Here are a few passages in Lessing's essay on Jane Austen that I especially liked, having to do with JA’s own life:

“Jane and her sister Cassandra felt themselves to be, and were often treated as, poor relations, dependent on presents, little trips and handouts from better-off and generous relatives. Not until – late – Jane earned some money writing, did she enjoy any kind of independence. Her situation was a common one then for poor unmarried women anywhere in Europe.”

So Lessing is knowledgeable about JA’s biography, and good on her that she has not been seduced at all by the mythology of the Great Big Happy Austen Family which kept  JA safe and secure, and nurtured JA’s genius. And then Lessing attacks the mythology head on—I love it!:

“What do we have here? A woman of the kind I remember from when I was a girl [Lessing was born nearly a century ago], the unmarried maiden aunt, ready to be useful to others, without any life of her own, a pitiable figure. Austen was supposed, so we have often read, to be a sheltered woman, her experience limited to village life and a narrow middle-class circle…[quoting a 1943 biographer] ‘Jane Austen was protected  by a hedge of unquestionable values…’Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, her situation among the genteel poor exposed her: there can be few worse positions in society, even if often useful for the creation of literature….Above all, Jane was enmeshed in the lives of female relatives and  friends, who were always pregnant, nursing, giving birth to innumerable children who died then so easily and often. And, more potent as an influence than anything, Jane was sent as a tiny child to  boarding school, and there was as miserable and neglected as Jane Eyre was at her school.

The triumph of JA’s art was that the little piece of ivory she claimed as her artistic territory was carved out of such an abundance of experience and material.

…it is useful to remember here that Cassandra reported Jane’s moments of exultation at being free and unmarried. Free from what? Surely, childbearing. Again and again, one reads how some cousin, or friend, has died in childbed with her eighth or ninth child, having been pregnant or breastfeeding for all those years. Matrimony at the level it was being observed by Jane and Cassandra cannot have appeared salubrious. Looking back now it is hard not to conclude that perhaps those despised spinsters had the best of it….There is a dark under-stratum in Austen’s novels where the ill health, mostly of women, is hinted at. Not only childbirth killed women: people died then as they do not now.”

Bravo, Doris Lessing! Spot-on in all the points she makes about JA’s opinions about the precariousness of female health in a world of serial pregnancy.

And as to the effect of JA’s early experience sent away from home to boarding school where she almost died, I wonder if Lessing, who published this essay in 2004, had a chance to later read the following 2005 essay in Persuasions Online by Linda Walker, which goes into great, insightful detail on that very point of the traumatic memory of JA’s being sent away at seven:

http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol26no1/walker.htm

But most  of all, I wonder what Lessing would have thought about my shadow story interpretations of Jane Austen’s novels—I would like to think that she’d realize that they provide an even deeper and more heartfelt expression of the very same points Lessing made about JA’s own life-i.e., that JA did not limit herself in her novels to sophisticated reworkings of the Cinderella myth (as Lessing asserts at the end of her essay), but that JA was, on a deeper level, warning women of the seductiveness of such myths, and the danger of a young woman like Lizzy believing she is equipped to protect herself from all the subtle  manipulation and influence she is subject to from others.

ADDED 12:30 pm EST 11/19/13:
 
From a 1999 interview when Lessing was asked to name three books about or by women that were very significant for her (the second paragraph is the one Janeites will focus on):

"Doris Lessing: This is very difficult. There are so many. Olive Schreiner, a South African writer who came to London before the first World War -- her novel THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM is extraordinary. She was a very original thinker, a feminist. She was asking questions that I don't think people got around to asking until the '60s. She was a socialist of that kind and time. She wrote about things such as trade unionism, the labor struggle, and birth control. She was truly remarkable. Also Nadezhda (the word for "hope" in Russian) Mandelstam: She was the wife of Osip Mandelstam, the great Russian poet, and she wrote a book called HOPE AGAINST HOPE, a pun on her name, about the persecution suffered under poets under Stalin. It is one of the greatest books of this century, and I recommend it. She wrote another called HOPE ABANDONED. These two books together are extraordinary.

Also a biographer, Claire Tomalin -- she wrote a book about Jane Austen called JANE AUSTEN: A LIFE, recently out. What is admirable about this is that we have been used to seeing Austen rather as a maiden aunt observing the world from a corner, but Claire puts her into the context of a great web of family relations of that time, a detailed society. Jane Austen was very busy indeed, working with friends, family, and children, and had a hard time -- there was never any money. There is a refrain throughout this book -- cousin Fanny died in childbirth with her tenth child last summer -- and a whole new picture is painted for us of this time. Really great detail in this book -- what people were eating, how they were dressing, how they traveled. It is a completely new picture of a lady believed to have never gotten dust on her hands -- which is very far from the truth." END QUOTE

So...it seems clear that Lessing's 2004 essay about Jane Austen was sparked by Lessing's having read Tomalin's bio of JA in 1999, which led her to change her prior understanding of Jane Austen in a fundamental way. It remains endlessly fascinating to me to see the reactions to Jane Austen of later writers, especially later female writers.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Did Jane Austen really worry that Emma was “overwritten”? Of course not!

What did Jane Austen mean when she wrote, at the end of her letter to Countess Morley, the following seemingly self-deprecating comments about the writing in Emma?:

“In my present State of Doubt as to [Emma’s] reception in the World, it is particularly gratifying to me to receive so early an assurance of your Ladyship’s approbation. – It encourages me to depend on the same share of general good opinion which Emma’s Predecessors have experienced, & to beleive that I have not yet – as almost every Writer of Fancy does sooner or later – overwritten myself.”

In her post this morning in Austen L and Janeites, Ellen Moody interpreted this language as Jane Austen’s anxiously worrying out loud, in total sincerity and without irony, that she was written out, i.e., that while writing Emma perhaps she had run out of fresh ideas, invention, and imagination.

Given that I read this passage in a completely opposite way, as I will explain later in this post, I wondered to myself whether Ellen’s was the standard critical reading of that letter passage. I quickly found out that it was not only standard, it was actually the universal view (with one exception, which I will also mention, with due praise, in a moment).

Here then, in reverse chronological order, is the parade of Austen scholars who have during the past few decades taken Jane Austen literally, as writing in total sincerity and without irony about having possibly “overwritten” herself:

Claire Harman, in Jane’s Fame: “Jane’s letter of thanks to Countess Morley contains a similarly lonely, self-reflective comment…The idea of having ”overwritten herself”  was not the only thing preying on Austen’s mind early in 1816.”

Emily Auerbach in Searching for Jane Austen, saw it as JA claiming she has not yet exhausted her imagination as a fiction writer.

Valerie Grosvenor Myer in her Austen bio: “Like every creative artist she was afraid of drying up.”

David Nokes in his Austen bio: “She was, as she confessed to Lady M., still greatly fearful about the success of this latest work and filled with apprehensions that she might…have already ‘overwritten herself.’ “

Josephine Ross also took JA literally.

P. Barry referred to “Jane Austen's own copy of her letter to the Countess of Morley, thanking her (in perhaps surprisingly deferential tones) for her praise of Emma, and taking it gratefully as proof that she had not yet, 'as every Writer of fancy does sooner or later – overwritten myself.”

Margaret Llewellyn wrote “Another of her anxieties was expressed in a letter to the Countess of Morley who, in admiring Emma, had encouraged her 'to believe that I have not yet - as almost every Writer of Fancy does sooner or later - overwritten myself.'

So, judging from the above critical litany over several decades, it would appear to be beyond question that Jane Austen meant what she seemed to be saying to Countess Morley.

There’s only one dissenting voice I found, and that is our very own Diana Birchall, who, in her post that initiated this thread three days ago, wrote, in passing, the following bon mot:

“As if Jane Austen could ever have overwritten herself!”

I believe I am correct in inferring that Diana would agree with me that the last thing Jane Austen would have felt anxiety about, let alone expressed anxiety in a sincere, unironic way, to anyone, let alone one of her readers, was that the writing in Emma was faulty in any way.

In the remainder of this post, I will explain myself, in detail, as to why I believe that the “truth universally acknowledged” by pretty much all Austen scholars, that Jane Austen was in want of confidence about her writing in Emma, is completely in error, in the most significant way possible, both as to the meaning of “overwritten” and also as to JA’s sincerity.

First, I suggest that JA in this letter to Countess Morley is clearly engaging in exactly the same sort of

mock-self-deprecation that we find in much more exaggerated form in her flamboyantly absurd letters to James Stanier Clarke (written, as I noted yesterday, at exactly the same time and about exactly the same interrelated subjects, Emma and novel-writing); and that we also find, and not coincidentally, in Letter 79, when JA seemed to express her fears that P&P “wants shade” and is “too light, bright, and sparkling”.

I mean, really. P&P is, arguably, the most light bright and sparkling work of literature in the English language—along with the comedies of Shakespeare and Wilde and a handful of other authors, it defines the genre of witty romantic comedy with brilliant dialog and a merry romantic war of words.

And so, are we supposed to believe that JA, in her giddy exultation over the publication of P&P, is at the same moment seriously doubting her own Mozartean achievement? As if she, who knew Mozart’s music well, didn’t know that she had created a literary analog of same--the epitome of “light, bright, and sparkling” in which she had perfectly balanced those qualities with a considerable amount of subtle “shade”!

I suggest the exact same reasoning applies to JA’s mock self-deprecation of Emma. To imagine that JA--- having just received tangible evidence in hand, in the form of 12 copies of the newly minted and printed Emma, that she had overcome all obstacles and had managed to produce what is arguably one of the greatest novels ever written in any language—a towering masterpiece of huge proportions, in which she in effect juggles a dozen literary balls without dropping one----was worried that she had not done a very good job, is beyond absurd.

I am not the first to notice the creative fever which took hold of Jane Austen as she wrote Emma, the way the writing seems at times to boil over from prose into a brave new combination of poetry and prose, foreshadowing Joyce’s achievements a century later.

And, on top of all this, it’s not just that all Austen scholars have completely missed JA’s huge irony in her faux self-deprecation writing to Countess Morley. They’ve even misunderstood what she meant, technically, by “overwritten”!

I assert that by “overwritten”, JA did not at all mean “written out” or “tapped out as a creative writer”, but that Emma is simply too long, i.e., that it contains passages which could have been  shortened or even deleted.

But wait!—where did we read that very same critique of Emma only a few days ago? Of course, in one of the letters that Countess Morley (the recipient of JA’s above quoted letter) wrote to her sister in law, Theresa Villiers about Emma!:

“…then, surely, her talking characters talk too much. The pages filled with Miss Bates & Mrs. Elton wd. make up one of the volumes & that is more than can well be afforded.”

So, is it just a coincidence that JA writes a letter to Countess Morley, in which JA expresses apparent concern over having failed in her editing of Emma, to (in effect) “lop and crop” enough of the text; and then, within two months thereafter, Countess Morley writes to her sister in law and appears to complain about that exact same, specific defect?  Of course it’s NOT a coincidence!

Now, here’s the most interesting question, then. Was the Countess, in her letter to her sister in law, being totally sincere (and clueless)? Or was she totally in on the joke, and acting upon JA’s implicit instructions to spread the word, among the literati in the Royal Court circle, that Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton’s speeches were just dross, and therefore to be ignored by any sensible reader?

As of this moment, pending further information which could tilt me one way or the other, I am on the fence on that question. It’s really hard to know whether Countess Morley was, like JA, someone who enjoyed a dangerous put-on of powerful men, and could play her role in one with aplomb; or whether she, like James Stanier Clarke, was actually a pompous pretentious gull who would fall for such a put-on, and become its unwitting agent. I’d like to think the former, but can’t solidly commit to that reading, without some additional knowledge of Countess Morley’s personality, which I currently lack—I think I need to get hold of some of her correspondence with Sydney Smith, and pore over it, to search for clues…..

And…upon further reflection, and having reread Countess Morley’s comments about Emma over and over again, I temporarily retreat halfway from my position espoused yesterday, and confess that it’s equally hard for me to know whether Countess Morley was an active and informed participant in JA’s guerilla campaign to induce the Prince to command her to dedicate Emma to him, or if she was, also like JS Clarke, a dupe in that audacious affair.

The only thing I know for sure is that from JA’s own perspective, she never for one second really meant to deprecate her writing in Emma, especially in the over-the-top verbosity of Miss Bates. As I’ve opined countless times, Miss Bates was JA’s most bravura literary self-portrait, and the entire point of all of Miss Bates’s endless speeches was to trick the gullible reader into joining into Emma’s deeply misguided opinion that it was all so much “blah, blah, blah”, when actually Miss Bates is constantly revealing everything that really matters in the novel! 

In a nutshell, it is precisely the “overwriting” of Miss Bates (and Mrs. Elton, to a lesser extent) which is JA’s greatest literary achievement!

DEFINITION OF “OVERWRITTEN”

Before completing this post, I do want to bolster my claim that by “overwritten”, JA was specifically referring to verbose, baroquely ornate, overlong writing. Where’s my evidence?  Well, first of all, if you check online, you will see that the consensus among dictionaries is that “overwritten” means “too verbose, too ornately written” or the like.

But second and far more probative even than dry dictionary proof, I give you, as Exhibit A, from Volume 8 of Sir Charles Grandison, the following textual smoking gun as to JA’s intended meaning. In the below quoted passage, the heroine, Harriet Byron, in one of the incredibly long letters which appear everywhere in Richardson’s novels, gushes to her cousin, Lucy Selby, regarding Harriet’s extreme gratitude to, and adoration of, Sir Charles & his sister.

This letter seems clearly to be among the passages in SCG, upon which JA modeled—but of course in JA’s vastly superior, understated writing style--- Lizzy Bennet’s thoughts and spoken words reflecting her identical rapture over  Darcy & Georgiana in the last volume of P&P.

But I reproduce it for you below to show you that in a literary source extremely well known to JA,  Richardson used “overwritten” in precisely the same sense as those dictionaries indicated:

“…I HAVE WRITTEN A LONG, LONG LETTER, OR RATHER FIVE LETTERS IN ONE, of my distresses, of my deliverance: and, when my heart is stronger, I will say more of the persons, as well as minds, of this excellent brother and sister. But what shall I do with my gratitude? O my dear, I am overwhelmed with my gratitude! I can only express it in silence before them. Every look, if it be honest to my heart, however, tells it: reverence mingles with my gratitude—yet there is so much ease, so much sweetness, in the behaviour of both—O my Lucy! Did I not find that my veneration of both is equal; did I not, on examination, find, that the amiable sister is as dear to me, from her experienced tenderness, as her brother from his remembered bravery, (which must needs mingle awe with my esteem); in short, that I

love the sister, and revere the brother; I should be afraid of my gratitude.

I HAVE OVER-WRITTEN MYSELF. I am tired. O my grandmamma! you have never yet, while I have been in London, sent me your ever-valued blessing under your own hand: yet, I am sure I had it; and your blessings, my dear uncle and aunt Selby; and your prayers, my Lucy, my Nancy, and all my loves;

else my deliverance had not perhaps followed my presumptuous folly, in going dressed out, like the fantastic wretch I appeared to be, at a vile, a foolish masquerade.—How often, throughout the several stages of my distress, and even in my deliverance, did I turn my eye to myself, and from myself, with the disgust that made a part, and that not a light one, of my punishment! And so much, my Lucy, for masquerades, and masquerade-dresses, for ever!”  END QUOTE

Indeed, Harriet Byron was spot-on in her assessment of the letter she was writing, it was indeed and in her own words, extremely “overwritten”!

So, JA, in writing to Countess Morley about Emma being overwritten, is not only writing satirically and with a total lack of sincerity, she is reinforcing her irony by this veiled allusion to the very famous work read by every English novel-reader—in effect, for satirical purposes, JA assumes the pathetic  persona of Harriet Byron, who DOES overwrite, constantly! JA by this covert allusion shows that she knows very well what “overwritten” looks like in fiction—but whereas Harriet Byron’s overwritten letters do not conceal a satirical subtext, Miss Bates’s speeches all do!

Now, back to Emma for one final observation. I suggest to you that anyone who actually thinks Emma is too verbose or ornately written, surely belongs in that special circle of hell where resides the Emperor Joseph II, who infamously opined to Mozart that his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio contained “too many notes”. [an anecdote from the 1780’s which I have found in print in English as early as 1817, so perhaps JA was aware of it in late 1815!]

But seriously….is it not every bit as absurd to imagine that JA thought the writing in Emma too bloated, as to imagine she thought P&P  too light, bright and sparkling? Then, how is it possible that Austen scholars have all been so utterly taken in? How has it been possible that they’ve all failed to recognize that she was KIDDING around in both cases?

I suggest to you that the power of the Myth of Jane Austen, which still largely prevails in the 21^st century as surely as it did when it was first propagated by the likes of Henry Austen and James Austen Leigh, is still extremely formidable. Because it is a “truth universally acknowledged” that Jane Austen was the kind of modest, unprovocative lady who would never have dared to engage in audacious put-ons mocking the most powerful and rich people of her era, even the most informed Austen scholars are blind to who she really was. Over and over and over again. And I don’t know if there is a better example of this community of shared blindness than this interpretation of “overwritten” Emma.

So, one more bravo to Diana for her witty insight, and I will now move on to demolish the next part of that monstrously inaccurate, pervasive and insidious Myth.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Countess Morley as Jane Austen's Secret Agent in the Royal Court

Two days ago, I wrote a post...

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-countess-of-morley-violent.html

...in which I claimed that Countess Morley, with whom Jane Austen briefly corresponded at the time Emma was published, and to whom Jane Austen gave one of the twelve original copies of the novel, was aware of the hidden significance of the allusion in Emma to de Genlis's famous novel about female education, Adelaide & Theodore.

Today I am back with my thoughts about my claim that Countess Morley was a secret agent on behalf of Jane Austen, in the plot by Jane Austen to induce the Prince Regent, who was the secret butt of very strong satire in Emma, to command Jane Austen to dedicated the novel to him. 

The end of Jane Austen’s Letter #128 to sister Cassandra dated 11/26/15, or about a month prior to JA’s exchange of letters with Countess Morley, is as follows:

 “Thank you very much for the sight of dear Charles' [JA's brother] Letter to yourself. - How pleasantly & how naturally he writes! and how perfect a picture of his Disposition and feelings, his style conveys! - Poor dear Fellow! - not a Present! - I have a great mind to send him all the twelve copies which were to have been dispersed among my near Connections - beginning with the P.R. & ending with Countess Morley.”

 In that last sentence, JA is clearly joking as she refers to the Prince Regent and Countess Morley as being among the “near connections”  who were near enough to warrant their receiving one of the twelve precious original copies of Emma that JA, as author, was free to dispose of.

 And yet, is it all just a joke? It does not appear, from what I’ve read so far [although I’m waiting to receive a copy of Chris Viveash’s 1992 Persuasions article about Frances Talbot Parker (aka Lady Boringdon from 1809 onward and Countess Morley from 1815 onward) which I once read, but cannot now find in my files], that any Austen scholar has taken seriously the fact that JA grouped Countess Morley with the P.R. as the sole members of her short list of “near connections” from outside her family.

 I suggested in my previous posts that I suspected Countess Morley of having been a friendly co-conspirator in JA’s daring plot to induce the Prince Regent into commanding that JA dedicate Emma to him. As I’ve thought some more about how that might have come about, I’ve done some more digging on the Internet about Countess Morley and also about her husband, Lord Boringdon/Earl of Morley. Here’s what I’ve found so far--several intriguing factoids which show that Countess Morley had several of her own near connections to the Royal Court, which would have given her plenty of opportunity, being the sharp elf that she clearly was, to discreetly push multiple levers designed to prompt the Prince to issue that command to JA.

 

ONE: In 1784, 25 years before he married the (future) Countess Morley, in 1809, her future husband Lord Boringdon (who became Earl of Morley in 1815) sold a successful thoroughbred racehorse & sire (named, of course, Saltram) to…..the Prince of Wales. This transaction was apparently a big deal at the time, as it was reported in multiple books.

 

TWO: Wikipedia:  "Morley took his seat in the House of Lords on his 21st birthday in 1793. He was an active member of the House of Lords, initially supporting government policies until the death of William Pitt the Younger in 1806. After Pitt's death he supported George Canning, with whom he corresponded on political matters for many years. In 1815 he was created Viscount Boringdon, of North Molton in the County of Devon, and Earl of Morley, in the County of Devon." 
From the above, it is clear that Lord Boringon/ Earl of Morley was a political mover and a shaker on the highest level in England, who, especially from 1809 onward after marrying his second wife the (future) Countess Morley, who as we know was socially and artistically ccomplished, they both would have been in the thick of the social circle of the elite closest to the Royal Family.

THREE: As dramatic evidence of how much of an insider Countess Morley was, see the following snippet written by the editor of The Correspondence of George IV: “Theresa Villiers was the trusted confidante of Princess Amelia, who nicknamed her husband “Tant Mieux”. “

 Theresa Villiers was, of course, the very same sister in law of Countess Morley to whom the latter expressed her opinions about Emma, which I discussed in my previous posts! I don't think I need to explain how much of an opening that connection would have provided to Countess Morley.

FOUR: In Privilege and scandal: the remarkable life of Harriet Spencer by Janet Gleeson (2007) at p. 286: “[The King] had become fond of the princess, but he was a man of high moral values and had long deplored the sexual license of his eldest son. It was the princess's wantonness rather than the fact of her adultery that riled him. "Had it been one serious attachment, even with consequences, I would have screened and protected her through everything," the king had told Lord Boringdon, 'but there have been so many and mix’d with so much levity, that it proves a determined  profligacy of character.”

 I find it very curious that the King himself was quoted as saying something strikingly similar to what JA wrote to Martha Lloyd, about the sexual indiscretions of the King’s daughter in law, the Princess. Like JA, he’s saying that his heart was with the Princess, not his own son, in regard to their bitter disputes, but that the Princess had just gone too far for him to protect her.

 And I find it even more remarkable that Lord Boringdon was the King’s confidant in regard to such delicate, personal information about the Royal Family! It suggests that all JA would have needed in order to know this information long before it was eventually published in any book, was to hear it from her friend Countess Morley (who would surely have been her own beloved husband’s confidante) over a cup of tea.

 

FIVE: In Pictorial history of England:  “On the 19th of March [1812] Lord Boringdon in the House of Lords moved for an address to the prince regent, beseeching him to form an administration, so composed as to unite the confidence and good will of all classes of his majesty's subjects. This was asking the regent to do what had never been possible, and what was rendered more than ever impossible by the present state of parties: but Lord Boringdon only meant that the regent should form a Grey and Grenville administration.”

 This is clear evidence that Lord Boringdon were engaged at the highest levels of government over significant policy issues, and it seems quite plausible that, even 30 years after their equine transaction, they were surely in private communication and ftf meetings as well.

 

SIX: In Private Correspondence, 1781-1821, Volume 2   Granville, etc (1917) at P.498:  “a few Days ago the Arrangements respecting your friends, I informed His Royal Highness of your  anxiety to secure at a proper Opportunity a Peerage for Lord Granville Leveson and an Earldom for Lord Boringdon. The Prince Regent has authorized me to assure you that He will not make any Peers, on any other Ground than that of immediate Public Service without Lord Granville Leveson… “

So this letter (I can’t tell for sure from this snippet in Google Books who wrote it to whom) shows that one or more of Lord Boringdon’s highly placed friends was pushing for him to be made an earl, and of course we know that in 1815, this actually occurred.

In interim conclusion, then, I am sure you’ll agree that, in terms of my claims about Countess Morley as secret agent on behalf of JA’s satire of the Prince Regent, these seven factoids collectively demonstrate that she certainly had opportunity to act on JA’s behalf, so as to induce the Prince to command the dedication. And I think JA, in the passage of the letter to CEA that I quoted at the beginning of this post, was winking at just that role of Countess Morley when she grouped her highly-placed “near connection” with the P.R.

I will be back with more intelligence, I am sure, when I receive the Viveash article—I already know from notes I took in 2005 that Viveash claimed that Frances Talbot (still Lady Boringdon) was the subject of one of the famous Rejected Addresses that JA enjoyed, but I will wait to write about that till I have all possible information at my disposal.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter