Nava Atlas's Blog, page 27
May 10, 2022
Analysis and plot summary of Persuasion by Jane Austen
Jane Austen by Sarah Fanny Malden (1889) offers a detailed 19th-century view of Jane Austen’s life and works. The following analysis and plot summary of Persuasion focuses on the novel that many have judged to be Austen’s most mature and accomplished work.
Persuasion, the last novel Austen wrote, and Northanger Abbey, her first completed novel, were both published six months after her death in 1817.
Mrs. Malden said of her sources, “The writer wishes to express her obligations to Lord Brabourne and Mr. C. Austen Leigh for their kind permission to make use of the Memoir and Letters of their gifted relative, which have been her principal authorities for this work.”
The 1889 publication of Malden’s Jane Austen was part of an Eminent Women series published by W.H. Allen & Co., London. The following excerpt is in the public domain.
Arguably the greatest of Jane Austen’s works
In approaching Persuasion, we have to deal with the last, and, in my opinion, the greatest of Jane Austen’s works, for though Emma usually holds the first place in her writings, and although there are unquestionably one or two weak points in Persuasion from which Emma is free, I cannot but heartily concur with Dr. Whewell that “Persuasion is the most beautiful of all Jane Austen’s stories.”
It is, I think, the only one of those stories to which the epithet “beautiful” can appropriately be given; not that it differs in style from her earlier works or contains any intentional sentiment beyond what all her stories have, but it possesses throughout a sort of tender, pathetic grace that appears nowhere else.
A reviewer who criticized Mansfield Park in 1821 asserted that the details of Fanny Price’s attachment could scarcely have come from any writer but a woman who had herself lived through such an attachment.
It is unnecessary and, as has been seen, would probably be incorrect, to say that Jane Austen ever described love from any experience except what her genius gave her, but I think Persuasion would be far stronger testimony to her having once loved than Mansfield Park is.
Fanny Price’s apparently hopeless attachment is followed through its course with the affectionate but critical interest of one who regards a touching phase of human nature. Persuasion is in the tone of a woman who looks back upon her own early romance with sorrowful tenderness and permits to her imaginary story the happy finale which she had not experienced herself.
The heroine has a sort of subdued charm about her; she makes no brilliant speeches, and exhibits no special gifts, but from first to last, we feel that with Anne Elliot we are in the presence of a high-bred, gracious, charming woman, and nothing better could be said of Captain Wentworth than that he is worthy of her.
Jane Austen was herself conscious of having evolved a superior heroine in her last novel, for in 1816 she wrote to her niece, Fanny Knight: “I have a something ready for publication which may, perhaps, appear about a twelvemonth hence You may, perhaps, like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me.”
From first to last the story may be said to strike a minor key, for it is no longer the bright picture of young love which Jane Austen gave us in her other novels; it is the coming together of sundered lovers after the difficulties and hindrances of eight years of separation, in which neither has ever been able to forget the other.
Introducing Anne Elliot
Anne Elliot, already well into her twenties, is the second of the three daughters of Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, Somersetshire. She has lost her mother early and has never had congenial society in her father or sisters. Sir Walter is an intensely conceited man, of an ancient family, very handsome, even in middle life, and inordinately vain both of his birth and his looks.
His eldest daughter, Elizabeth, is himself over again; and the youngest daughter, Mary, is a common-place, self-engrossed woman. There is no son, and the title and estate will, at Sir Walter’s death, devolve upon a cousin whom Elizabeth always intended to marry, but who, having chosen to make a mésalliance for the sake of money, has been ignored by the Kellynch Hall family ever since, although he has lately become a widower.
From such a father and such sisters, it is clear that Anne, cultivated, thoughtful, and refined, can gain no pleasant companionship, and, in fact, the only real companion she has is a very intimate friend of her mother who has settled near them.
Lady Russell is sensible, right-minded, and a little prosaic; she is not Anne’s equal intellectually, but she loves her for her mother’s sake and for her own; and Anne is thankful to be loved at all.
Enter Captain Wentworth
Frederick Wentworth makes the acquaintance of this attractive and neglected girl when she is nineteen, and in the full bloom of her beauty. He is a few years older, a young naval officer, full of spirit, energy, and brightness.
The natural consequences ensue, and for a short time the young people are rapturously happy; but both Sir Walter Elliot and Lady Russell regard the engagement with strong disfavor. He considers any untitled marriage as beneath his daughter’s acceptance, whilst Lady Russell objects to a long engagement, dislikes the uncertainty of the naval profession, and does not believe that Captain Wentworth will ever make a fortune. Thus the connection is severed.
An eight-year separation
A somewhat unexpected, yet—as in all Jane Austen’s books—apparently natural chain of circumstances brings about a meeting between the two former lovers after eight years of separation. Sir Walter Elliot, after his wife’s death, gets gradually deeper and deeper into debt.
Mr. Shepherd, Sir Walter’s confidential attorney, and Lady Russell are called upon to advise in the dilemma; and as neither Sir Walter nor Elizabeth will hear of any retrenchment which will affect their luxuries in any way, there is nothing for it but to let Kellynch Hall.
A tenant soon offers for it. Admiral Croft, and Anne remembers with a thrill at her heart that Mrs. Croft is Frederick Wentworth’s sister. Still, there is no particular likelihood of her seeing him, as Sir Walter and Elizabeth intend to go to Bath, and Anne is earnestly desirous of avoiding a meeting with her former lover.
But fate is too strong for her. Her youngest sister Mary is married to Charles Musgrove, the eldest son of a man of property living at Uppercross, about three miles from Kellynch.
Elizabeth is delighted to get rid of Anne, for she has lately struck up a violent friendship with a widowed daughter of Mr. Shepherd, a young Mrs. Clay, who is enchanted to act as hanger-on to Miss Elliot at Bath. Anne is glad to avoid Bath, which she dislikes, and to be of use to anyone. Her father, sister, and Mrs. Clay depart for Bath, and Anne is installed at the Musgroves for the summer.
A capital picture follows, in Jane Austen’s most characteristic style, of the relations between Charles Musgrove and his family, who live about a quarter of a mile from them.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Quotes from Persuasion by Jane Austen
. . . . . . . . . . .
The Crofts take possession of Kellynch Hall; and Captain Wentworth comes there to visit his sister. Mr. Musgrove calls upon him at Kellynch; he is invited to dine at Uppercross, and Anne can no longer avoid meeting him. None of the Musgroves know anything of the former passages between her and Captain Wentworth, so no one thinks of screening her, and Anne can only struggle to keep her feelings to herself.
Whether Captain Wentworth remembers the past as she does, she has no means of discovering, but she has soon reason to believe that he is in no way anxious to recall it.
She keeps herself in the background, prepared to hear at any moment of her former lover being now engaged to a Miss Musgrove; and the struggle in her mind is all the more severe because, in the first place, Frederick Wentworth has deteriorated neither in mind nor person since the days of their early attachment. And, in the second place, she cannot help continually how much better she can understand and appreciate him than either Henrietta or Louisa Musgrove can.
Anne is yet unforgiven
He, on his side, is not at all anxious to renew the feeling which he believes he has completely conquered. He has not forgiven Anne for her desertion of him years ago; and though he intends to marry as soon as he can find a wife to his liking, he has no idea that that wife will be Anne Elliot.
Nothing in the story is better than his attempt to persuade himself into caring for one of the young ladies with whom he is thrown into contact; and the gradual way in which he finds himself turning, as of old, to Anne for the companionship and appreciation with which she only can supply him, while he is quite unconscious of the feeling slowly working in him.
Eventually Anne departs for Bath, and, as her absence leaves an insupportable blank for him, Captain Wentworth sets off as well. Anne has been there with her father and sister for some time before his arrival, and has found an ardent admirer in the cousin, William Elliot, who is the heir to her father’s baronetcy. Of course, the marriage would be an extremely suitable one for both parties, and Lady Russell, who is also at Bath, is delighted at the possibility of it and cannot resist speaking of it to Anne.
“I am no match-maker, as you well know,” said Lady Russell, “being much too well aware of the uncertainty of all human events and calculations. I only mean that if Mr. Elliot should some time hence pay his addresses to you, and if you should be disposed to accept him, I think there would be every possibility of your being happy together. A most suitable connection everybody must consider it, but I think it might be a very happy one.”
“Mr. Elliot is an exceedingly agreeable man, and, in many respects, I think highly of him,” said Anne, “but we should not suit.”
Anne herself cannot help believing, after Captain Wentworth has been in Bath for a short time, that she is his object there; but she is afraid to trust to this idea and is almost maddened by the quiet but unmistakable way in which Mr. Elliot monopolizes her. The moment of explanation comes at last and is one of the best and most touching scenes in all Jane Austen’s works.
. . . . . . . . . . .
You may enjoy: Jane Austen-inspired novels by Sonali Dev
. . . . . . . . . . .
Anne, going one day to call on Mrs. Musgrove, finds Captains Wentworth and Harville both in the room. The former goes to a writing-table to write letters, and the latter begins a conversation with Anne which drifts into a debate on the strength of feeling in men as against that of women. Captain Harville defends his own sex warmly.
“Ah,” cried Captain Harville, in a tone of strong feeling, “if I could but make you comprehend what a man suffers when he takes a last look at his wife and children and watches the boat that he has sent them off in, as long as it is in sight, and then turns away and says, “God knows whether we shall ever meet again!” …
“Oh,” cried Anne, eagerly, “I hope I do justice to all that is felt by you, and by those who resemble you. God forbid that I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures! I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by women. No, I believe you capable of everything great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion and to every domestic forbearance so long as—if I may be allowed the expression—so long as you have an object. I mean while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it) is that of loving longest when existence or when hope is gone.”
She could not immediately have uttered another sentence: her heart was too full, her breath too much oppressed … Their attention was called towards the others.
Captain Wentworth then drew out the letter he had been writing and “placed it before Anne with eyes of glowing entreaty fixed on her, and, hastily collecting his gloves, was again out of the room, almost before Mrs. Musgrove was aware of his being in it: the work of an instant.”
Anne manages to read the letter in the next five minutes, but the result is to upset her so much that the Musgroves all fancy her ill, and, instead of letting her go home quietly by herself to realize her own “overpowering happiness,” as Jane Austen calls it, Charles Musgrove insists on accompanying her. Fortunately, when halfway home, they encounter Captain Wentworth; and Charles, being anxious to keep an engagement elsewhere, puts Anne under his escort.
In half a minute Charles was at the bottom of Union Street again, and the other two proceeding together; and soon words enough had passed between them to decide their direction towards the comparatively quiet and retired gravel walk, where the power of conversation would make the present hour a blessing indeed, and prepare it for all the immortality which the happiest recollections of their own future lives could bestow.
There they exchanged again those feelings and those promises which had once before seemed to secure everything, but which had been followed by so many many years of division and estrangement; and there, as they slowly paced the gradual ascent, heedless of every group around them, seeing neither sauntering politicians, bustling housekeepers, flirting girls, nor nursery-maids and children, they could indulge in those retrospections and acknowledgments, and especially in those explanations of what had directly preceded the present moment, which were so poignant and so ceaseless in interest. All the little variations of the last week were gone through; and of yesterday and to-day there could scarcely be an end …
The evening came, the drawing-rooms were lighted up, the company assembled. It was but a card-party, it was but a mixture of those who had never met before and those who met too often: a commonplace business, too numerous for intimacy, too small for variety; but Anne had never found an evening shorter.
Glowing and lovely in sensibility and happiness, and more generally admired than she thought about or cared for, she had cheerful or forbearing feelings for every creature around her.
With the Musgroves there was the happy chat of perfect ease; with Captain Harville, the kind-hearted intercourse of brother and sister; with Lady Russell, attempts at conversation which a delicious consciousness cut short; with Admiral and Mrs. Croft, everything of peculiar cordiality and fervent interest, which the same consciousness sought to conceal; and with Captain Wentworth, some moments of communication continually occurring, and always the hope of more, and always the knowledge of his being there.
All ends well for dear Anne Elliot
Dear, charming Anne Elliot! We rejoice to feel that we are leaving her in the midst of such a tender, radiant Indian summer of happiness; and we safely predict a married life at blessedness for her and her husband; but even in this crowning hour of their felicity, there is the same tinge of pathos visible as throughout the book.
It does not seem intentional; it is rather as though the writer could no longer treat her subject with the bright gaiety of former days, and it is not wonderful that a dying woman could not.
Persuasion is the swan song of Jane Austen’s authorship, and, true to its character, the saddest and sweetest of her works. When she finished it, only a few months before her death, she had in fact laid down the pen for ever; and doubtless it was the consciousness of this which shaded the story to a more autumnal tone than anything she had yet written.
We could not wish it otherwise, for the group of novels would have been incomplete without some such story of comparatively late happiness.
In Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility we have the brilliant, rather thoughtless happiness of early youth; in Mansfield Park, Emma, and Pride and Prejudice the love-story goes on in the usual way, though somewhat slowly, through the usual period of life; in Persuasion the attachment of early youth is abruptly checked, and only comes to its full perfection after eight years of separation.
The cycle is complete, and it seems as though Jane Austen would have been compelled to take some fresh departure, had she lived to write more. We regret that she did not, but we rejoice that her life was spared long enough to give us the immortal group we now possess, and we must all echo the already quoted lament of Sir Walter Scott, “What a pity such a gifted creature died so early.”
. . . . . . . . . . .
Film versions of Persuasion
2022 – A Netflix production
2007 made for television film
1997 film (available to stream on Amazon*)
More about Persuasion by Jane Austen
Persuasion on Jane Austen Society of North America “I am half agony, half hope” Reader discussion on Goodreads Seeing the Light at Last (on re-reading Persuasion) Jane Austen’s Persuasion: A Study in Literary History Jane Austen’s Greatest Novel Turns 200. . . . . . . . . .
*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Analysis and plot summary of Persuasion by Jane Austen appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
May 8, 2022
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen—plot summary and analysis
The first novel intended for publication by Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey was originally titled Susan. Completed in 1803, it wasn’t published until 1817, the year of the author’s death. This coming-of-age novel’s heroine, Catherine Morland, at first young and rather naïve, learns the ways of the world in the course of the narrative.
Set in Bath, England, the fashionable resort city where the Austens lived for a time, Jane Austen critiques young women who put too much stock in appearances, wealth, and social acceptance. Catherine values happiness but not at the cost of compromising one’s values and morals.
A brief synopsis from a 1995 edition
From the 1995 Wordsworth Limited edition of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey is the most joyous of Jane Austen’s novels and is an early work conceived as a pastiche of the melodramatic excesses of the Gothic novel (a type of romance popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries).
Jane Austen was temperamentally incapable of keeping her youthful sense of fun from bubbling over, and the result makes the social and romantic trials of young heroine, Catherine Morland, a delight to follow.
The story is set in fashionable Bath, where Catherine is taken to come out is society by her neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Allen. There she meets a young clergyman, Henry Tilney and his sister, the children of the eccentric General Tilney who resides at Northanger Abbey in nearby Gloucestershire.
Having been invited to Northanger Abbey by the General on mistaken grounds that she is extremely well-off, there follows the series of hilarious misunderstandings and the Gothic suspicions which are the essence of the book.
Northanger Abbey was actually the first novel that Jane Austen completed with the hopes of publication, in 1803. It was first titled Susan and she sold the copyright to a London publisher for a pittance.
The publisher held on to it for years without ever printing it. It was tied up until 1816 when Jane’s brother Henry managed to buy it back, after much dispute. Jane spent some time revising the original, renaming her heroine Catherine, but by the time it was published in 1817, she died. That year, another of her novels, Persuasion, was published as well.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Quotes from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
. . . . . . . . . .
Jane Austen by Sarah Fanny Malden (1889) offers an excellent 19th-century view of Jane Austen’s works. The following analysis and plot summary of Pride and Prejudice (1813) focuses on this beloved novel, which was Jane Austen‘s second to be published. It followed Sense and Sensibility, published two years earlier.
Mrs. Malden said of her sources, “The writer wishes to express her obligations to Lord Brabourne and Mr. C. Austen Leigh for their kind permission to make use of the Memoir and Letters of their gifted relative, which have been her principal authorities for this work.”
The 1889 publication of Malden’s Jane Austen was part of an Eminent Women series published by W.H. Allen & Co., London. The following excerpt is in the public domain:
Unlike her other novels
Although not published until after her death, Northanger Abbey was one of Jane Austen’s earliest works; and the scheme of it is so unlike her other novels that it may be said to occupy a place by itself.
It is so complete and so clever a parody of many of the novels of her day, that it can hardly be appreciated by those who do not recognize the originals of its situations and characters or understand the kind of sensational writing in which Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding were leaders, followed at a considerable distance by a host of inferior writers.
Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland is the heroine of Northanger Abbey. Her début is intentionally made unsuccessful to contrast with the outbursts of admiration that greeted Fanny Burney’s Evelina and Cecilia when they first appeared in public.
Enter Henry Tilney and the Thorpes
Soon Catherine meets her fate in the person of Henry Tilney, to whom she is introduced at a ball, and who is just the sort of brilliant, clever, cultivated young man to attract a girl of her age.
As is natural under the circumstances, she is much struck with him, and very ready to improve the acquaintance, but she sees nothing more of Henry for some time.
Meanwhile the Thorpes appear upon the scene. Mrs. Thorpe and Mrs. Allen were former school-friends, and Mrs. Thorpe’s eldest daughter, Isabella, professes a violent affection at first sight for Catherine, chiefly in hopes of renewing an old flirtation with Catherine’s brother James, who may come to Bath.
Catherine, quite unsuspicious of any double motive, is much flattered by Isabella’s warmth, and, being dazzled by her showy beauty, does not perceive her shallowness, vulgarity, and insincerity. A warm schoolgirl friendship is set up between them, in which Catherine’s simplicity and straightforwardness contrast much to her advantage with Isabella’s insufferably bad taste.
The acquaintance with Isabella Thorpe proves important for Catherine in more ways than one. James Morland comes to Bath, and—having, of course, light eyes and a sallow complexion—is very soon Isabella’s declared and accepted lover.
John Thorpe comes too; and having fallen in love—or supposing he has—with Catherine, she receives her first offer from him, though being quite unconscious of his admiration for her, which isn’t very intelligibly expressed, she doesn’t know, until later in the story, that he has offered himself. Last, but not least, Isabella introduces Catherine to the class of novels which are to influence her mind so powerfully.
Between these horrid novels and the society of Isabella Thorpe, Catherine is in danger of deterioration, but she is fortunately saved from any permanent ill effects.
An invitation to Northanger Abbey
Henry Tilney is in Bath with his father and sister; and General Tilney, under a mistaken impression of the amount of Catherine’s fortune, is quite willing to encourage his son’s dawning attachment for her. Elinor Tilney is charming, and Catherine has good taste enough to take greatly to her, and to be pleased and flattered by her notice.
Finally, to her unutterable delight, the Tilneys invite her to accompany them when they leave Bath. Their home is called Northanger Abbey; and Catherine, who has never seen an old house in her life, believes herself to be on the verge of similar adventures to those that befell her favorite heroines.
Henry Tilney discovers her expectations, and amuses himself with heightening them, having no idea that she will take his nonsense so seriously. The first sight of Northanger Abbey is disappointing to her, as it is modernized out of all picturesqueness or romance, and even her own room she finds very unlike the one by the description of which Henry had endeavored to alarm her.
Too influenced by gothic novels
Nevertheless, she has not been long in it, and is still occupied in dressing for the five o’clock dinner, when her eye suddenly fell on a large high chest, standing back in a deep recess on one side of the fireplace. The sight of it made her start; and, forgetting everything else, she stood gazing on it in motionless wonder while these thoughts crossed her:
“This is strange, indeed! I did not expect such a sight as this. An immense heavy chest! What can it hold? Why should it be placed here? Pushed back, too, as if meant to be out of sight! I will look into it; cost me what it may, I will look into it; and directly, too—by daylight. If I stay till evening, my candle may go out.”
She advanced, and examined it closely; it was of cedar, curiously inlaid with some darker wood, and raised about a foot from the ground on a carved stand of the same. The lock was silver, though tarnished from age; at each end were the imperfect remains of handles, also of silver, broken, perhaps prematurely, by some strange violence; and on the center of the lid was a mysterious cipher in the same metal.
Catherine has sense enough to be abashed at the perception of her own folly, but not quite enough to get immediately over the effects of being really in an abbey like one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines; and that night her courage is again put to the test.
It is a very stormy night, quite “like what one reads about,” but Catherine, determined now to be brave, undresses very leisurely, and even resolves not to make up her fire. When daylight brought returning courage and cheerfulness, her first thought was for the manuscript:
… springing from her bed in the very moment of the maid’s going away, she eagerly collected every scattered sheet which had burst from the roll on its falling to the ground and flew back to enjoy the luxury of their perusal on her pillow.
She now plainly saw that she must not expect a manuscript of equal length with the generality of what she had shuddered over in books; for the roll, seeming to consist entirely of small, disjointed sheets, was altogether but of trifling size, and much less than she had supposed it to be at first.
Her greedy eyes glanced rapidly over a page. She started at its import. Could it be possible, or did not her senses play her false? An inventory of linen, in coarse and modern characters, seemed all that was before her! If the evidence of sight might be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand.
Instead of finding a manuscript revealing deep dark secrets about the Tilney family, all she finds are ordinary household accounts, receipts, and bills.
Another pointless flight of fancy
Now, her great anxiety now is to conceal her folly from Henry Tilney’s satirical observation, and for some time she succeeds; but her lively imagination leads her into another hallucination, from which she does not escape so easily.
She gathers from Miss Tilney that her mother had not been so fully valued by the General as she might have been, and thereupon jumps to three conclusions, first, that he had been unkind to his wife in her lifetime, secondly, that he had been in some way instrumental in causing her death, and, finally, as her fancy continues to run riot, that perhaps Mrs. Tilney was not really dead at all, but kept somewhere in close confinement by a cruel and tyrannical husband.
The successive stages by which this crowning point of absurd delusion is reached are very well worked out, and they culminate in intense anxiety on Catherine’s part to see Mrs. Tilney’s room, which, she hears, has been left exactly as it was at her death, and from which she thinks she may discover something; she scarcely knows what.
Miss Tilney is puzzled by her extreme desire to visit the room but is very willing to show it to her. The inopportune presence of the General, however, more than once prevents them; and Catherine, convinced that his interference is not accidental, determines to visit the important room by herself, and see what revelations it will make to her.
It was done; and Catherine found herself alone in the gallery before the clocks had ceased to strike. It was no time for thought; she hurried on, slipped with the least possible noise through the folding doors, and, without stopping to look or breathe, rushed forward to the one in question.
The lock yielded to her hand, and luckily with no sullen sound that could alarm a human being. On tiptoe she entered; the room was before her; but it was some minutes before she could advance another step.
She beheld what fixed her to the spot, and agitated every feature. She saw a large well-proportioned apartment, a handsome dimity bed, unoccupied, arranged with a housemaid’s care, a bright Bath stove, mahogany wardrobes, and neatly painted chairs, on which the warm beams of a western sun gaily poured through two sash-windows. Catherine had expected to have her feelings worked, and worked they were. Astonishment and doubt first seized them, and a shortly succeeding ray of common sense added some bitter emotions of shame …
Thereupon Henry Tilney presents himself, having returned a day before he is expected, and is much amazed at finding Catherine there by herself. She is unable wholly to conceal from him what her delusions had been, and she gets from him, in consequence, a half lover-like, half brotherly lecture, which makes her thoroughly ashamed of herself, and as she really is a nice girl, does her a world of good.
Now that her mind is cleared of all its strange delusions, she has time and opportunity to consider their origin, and her conclusions, are given us with some delightful touches.
Imaginary troubles end, real ones begin
Catherine’s imaginary troubles are at an end, but there are some very real ones in store for her. Her brother’s engagement with Isabella Thorpe is broken off through Isabella’s hoping to secure a better match for herself; and Catherine, who receives the news in a letter from James, feels his sorrow as if it were her own.
The affectionate sympathy of Henry and Eleanor has just restored her to some comfort, when a far greater blow falls. The young Tilneys have never been able to understand their father’s marked partiality for Catherine, being quite unaware that when in Bath he had received from John Thorpe a glowing account of her parents’ position and her future expectations.
Thorpe had at that time intended to marry her himself, and, as his sister was also on the eve of an engagement to her brother, his vanity had led him into telling the General a series of untruths, all tending to the glorification of the Morland family.
. . . . . . . . .
The Masterpiece adaptation of Northanger Abbey
to stream on Amazon*
. . . . . . . . .
General Tilney’s interventions
While Catherine is at Northanger Abbey, General Tilney goes to London for a week, and there again encounters Thorpe, who being by this time greatly angered at the failure of all the projected marriages between his family and the Morlands, not only retracts all he had before said in their favor, but casts imputations upon them and represents them as not only poor but far from respectable.
The General is a man of ungovernable temper, and his rage at the mistake he has been led into is past all control. He returns instantly to Northanger Abbey, and forces Catherine out of the house alone, at a few hours’ notice, under the obviously flimsy pretext of an engagement for himself and his daughter.
He gives no explanation, even to Eleanor, of his motives; her grief and shame at the whole transaction are great, but she is powerless, and Henry is away. Catherine leaves Northanger Abbey under the full conviction that she shall never see it or any of its inmates again, and her wretchedness may be imagined.
The marriage plot concludes
She is not, however, left long uncomforted, for Henry, on learning what has happened, follows her as soon as possible, and makes her an offer of his heart and hand, which are, of course, accepted. His conduct is in direct defiance of his father’s last directions; but he is independent as regards income; confident of obtaining the General’s consent when his rage has cooled down and he is able to understand the real position of the Morlands, which is far from despicable.
These explanations take place in about a year’s time; and the story winds up with the happy marriages of both Henry and Eleanor Tilney; Catherine being, as may be supposed, at the seventh heaven of felicity.
A critique of Northanger Abbey and its uninteresting heroine
I think that Catherine Morland, though in many respects attractive, is the most uninteresting of Jane Austen’s heroines, and betrays the writer’s youth. Emma Woodhouse (of Emma) Fanny Price (of Mansfield Park), and Elizabeth Bennet (of Pride and Prejudice) are all women we should like to have known. For Anne Elliot (of Persuasion), what words of praise are high enough?
But Catherine Morland is an obvious copy of Evelina: a good-hearted, simple-minded little goose, who will never develop into much. She is distinctly inferior to Eleanor Tilney, and it is impossible not to have a lurking suspicion that Henry, after trying—as he would do for some years—to form his wife’s mind, will discover, like David Copperfield, that it is already formed, and that his life at Woodston Parsonage may someday be just a little dull.
Perhaps Jane Austen felt this herself, for she closes the story with a playful account of their marriage, and makes no attempt to picture their future life together.
It is the only one of her stories in which the heroine is decidedly inferior to the hero, and that was so often the case with the standard novels of her day that it is impossible not to see in this the unconscious plagiarism of a young author, and to feel that Northunger Abbey, in plan and construction if not in all its details, must have been one of her earliest attempts at novel writing.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen on Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . . .
More about Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads Listen on Librivox The 1987 BBC adaptaion on Amazon*. . . . . . . . . . .
*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen—plot summary and analysis appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
May 1, 2022
Did Little Women’s Jo March Become a Writer After All?
Jo March, the standout sister of Little Women (1868), was the idealized alter ego of her creator, Louisa May Alcott — both were tomboyish, with a bit of a temper. Like Louisa, Jo was completely dedicated to the pursuit of writing and the writer’s life. Or was she? Certainly, that was her stated ambition in Little Women, in which we witness the birth of her first book.
I can’t think of another fictional character who inspired generations of real-life aspiring female writers. It’s almost easier to find writers who weren’t at least a little influenced by Jo, than those who were. Because so, so many young wordsmiths wanted to grown up to be like Jo.
Though Jo longed to be a writer more than anything, she also sought a happy medium between achieving independence and finding love, something that was expected of women of her time. That’s why she felt she had to turn down Laurie’s proposal (much to the chagrin of millions of readers).
So Jo marries the avuncular, middle-aged Professor Bhaer. And at the end of Little Women, having achieved a modicum of success by publishing a book, she inherits prickly Aunt March’s large home, Plumfield.
In an homage to Little Women on the occasion of its 150th anniversary in 2018, Sarah Lyall wrote in the New York Times:
“The book, especially in its creation of Jo — independent, unconventional, irreverent, impatient, devoted to her writing and proud of her ability to earn money at it — has been an inspiration and a model. Jo has always appealed to tomboys, rebels, and freethinkers, her passion for creativity providing aspiring writers with a glimpse of how to operate in the world.”
In the first sequel, Little Men, Jo and Professor Bhaer have established a school for boys in Plumfield. We scarcely recognize the Jo March of Little Women. In the text, she is called “Mrs. Jo” and “Mother Bhaer” (which in the audio version sounds just like “Mother Bear”). Indeed, Jo has become a kind, sensible mother figure to the school’s students.
. . . . . . . . . .
10 Writers Who Were Inspired by Jo March of Little Women
. . . . . . . . . .
But what of her writing career? Little Men barely hints at it, if at all. She and Friedrich Bhaer are now parents of two beloved boys, and appears satisfied with her lot. She seems happy, but what about all of the readers who wanted to be Jo March when we grew up? Have we been betrayed? Fortunately, no.
Jo did become a writer, and a rather rich and famous one at that. But we have to wait until the next sequel, Jo’s Boys, to find that out. Louisa didn’t do the best job of explaining just how a 19th-century wife, mother, and school-overseer would have woven a writing career in with all her other duties.
Louisa wrote for a living. She never married nor had children (though she did help raise her niece, after her sister, May Alcott Nieriker —the inspiration for Amy in Little Women — died prematurely). She didn’t run a school full of wayward boys, either. So her description of Jo’s writing success is kind of plunked down awkwardly into chapter three of Jo’s Boys, “Jo’s Last Scrape.”
Louisa didn’t bother to fictionalize this chapter too much; her description of Jo’s success and her own real-life renown match up quite well, other than the marriage, the children, and the school.
But at least she was wise enough to sense that depriving Jo of literary accomplishment would be a betrayal to readers who wished to emulate her. So let’s let Louisa take over from here, and tell what it was like when she — I mean Jo — achieved her dream of becoming a famous author.
From chapter 3, “Jo’s Last Scrape” of Jo’s Boys
The March family had enjoyed a great many surprises in the course of their varied career, but the greatest of all was when the Ugly Duckling turned out to be, not a swan, but a golden goose, whose literary eggs found such an unexpected market that in ten years Jo’s wildest and most cherished dream actually came true.
How or why it happened she never clearly understood, but all of a sudden she found herself famous in a small way, and, better still, with a snug little fortune in her pocket to clear away the obstacles of the present and assure the future of her boys.
It began during a bad year when everything went wrong at Plumfield; times were hard, the school dwindled, Jo overworked herself and had a long illness; Laurie and Amy were abroad, and the Bhaers too proud to ask help even of those as near and dear as this generous pair.
Confined to her room, Jo got desperate over the state of affairs, till she fell back upon the long-disused pen as the only thing she could do to help fill up the gaps in the income. A book for girls being wanted by a certain publisher, she hastily scribbled a little story describing a few scenes and adventures in the lives of herself and sisters, though boys were more in her line, and with very slight hopes of success sent it out to seek its fortune.
Things always went by contraries with Jo. Her first book, labored over for years, and launched full of the high hopes and ambitious dreams of youth, foundered on its voyage, though the wreck continued to float long afterward, to the profit of the publisher at least.
The hastily written story, sent away with no thought beyond the few dollars it might bring, sailed with a fair wind and a wise pilot at the helm into public favor, and came home heavily laden with an unexpected cargo of gold and glory.
A more astonished woman probably never existed than Josephine Bhaer when her little ship came into port with flags flying, cannon that had been silent before now booming gaily, and, better than all, many kind faces rejoicing with her, many friendly hands grasping hers with cordial congratulations.
After that it was plain sailing, and she merely had to load her ships and send them off on prosperous trips, to bring home stores of comfort for all she loved and labored for.
The fame she never did quite accept; for it takes very little fire to make a great deal of smoke nowadays, and notoriety is not real glory. The fortune she could not doubt, and gratefully received; though it was not half so large a one as a generous world reported it to be.
The tide having turned continued to rise, and floated the family comfortably into a snug harbor where the older members could rest secure from storms, and whence the younger ones could launch their boats for the voyage of life.
All manner of happiness, peace, and plenty came in those years to bless the patient waiters, hopeful workers, and devout believers in the wisdom and justice of Him who sends disappointment, poverty, and sorrow to try the love of human hearts and make success the sweeter when it comes.
. . . . . . . . .
Louisa May Alcott’s Advice to Aspiring Writers
. . . . . . . . .
The world saw the prosperity, and kind souls rejoiced over the improved fortunes of the family; but the success Jo valued most, the happiness that nothing could change or take away, few knew much about.
It was the power of making her mother’s last years happy and serene; to see the burden of care laid down for ever, the weary hands at rest, the dear face untroubled by any anxiety, and the tender heart free to pour itself out in the wise charity which was its delight. As a girl, Jo’s favorite plan had been a room where Marmee could sit in peace and enjoy herself after her hard, heroic life.
Now the dream had become a happy fact, and Marmee sat in her pleasant chamber with every comfort and luxury about her, loving daughters to wait on her as infirmities increased, a faithful mate to lean upon, and grand-children to brighten the twilight of life with their dutiful affection.
A very precious time to all, for she rejoiced as only mothers can in the good fortunes of their children. She had lived to reap the harvest she sowed; had seen prayers answered, hopes blossom, good gifts bear fruit, peace and prosperity bless the home she had made; and then, like some brave, patient angel, whose work was done, turned her face heavenward, glad to rest.
This was the sweet and sacred side of the change; but it had its droll and thorny one, as all things have in this curious world of ours. After the first surprise, incredulity, and joy, which came to Jo, with the ingratitude of human nature, she soon tired of renown, and began to resent her loss of liberty.
For suddenly the admiring public took possession of her and all her affairs, past, present, and to come. Strangers demanded to look at her, question, advise, warn, congratulate, and drive her out of her wits by well-meant but very wearisome attentions.
If she declined to open her heart to them, they reproached her; if she refused to endow her pet charities, relieve private wants, or sympathize with every ill and trial known to humanity, she was called hard-hearted, selfish, and haughty; if she found it impossible to answer the piles of letters sent her, she was neglectful of her duty to the admiring public; and if she preferred the privacy of home to the pedestal upon which she was requested to pose, ‘the airs of literary people’ were freely criticized.
She did her best for the children, they being the public for whom she wrote, and labored stoutly to supply the demand always in the mouths of voracious youth—’More stories; more right away!’
Her family objected to this devotion at their expense, and her health suffered; but for a time she gratefully offered herself up on the altar of juvenile literature, feeling that she owed a good deal to the little friends in whose sight she had found favor after twenty years of effort …
Little Women and its sequels online Little Women (Project Gutenberg) Little Men (Project Gutenberg) Jo’s Boys (Project Gutenberg)
The post Did Little Women’s Jo March Become a Writer After All? appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
Did Little Women’s Jo March Become a Writer?
Jo March, the standout sister of Little Women (1868), was the idealized alter ego of her creator, Louisa May Alcott — both were tomboyish, with a bit of a temper. Like Louisa, Jo was completely dedicated to the pursuit of writing and the writer’s life. Or was she? Certainly, that was her stated ambition in Little Women, in which we witness the birth of her first book.
I can’t think of another fictional character who inspired generations of real-life aspiring female writers. It’s almost easier to find writers who weren’t at least a little influenced by Jo, than those who were. Because so, so many young wordsmiths wanted to grown up to be like Jo.
Though Jo longed to be a writer more than anything, she also sought a happy medium between achieving independence and finding love, something that was expected of women of her time. That’s why she felt she had to turn down Laurie’s proposal (much to the chagrin of millions of readers).
So Jo marries the avuncular, middle-aged Professor Bhaer. And at the end of Little Women, having achieved a modicum of success by publishing a book, she inherits prickly Aunt March’s large home, Plumfield.
In an homage to Little Women on the occasion of its 150th anniversary in 2018, Sarah Lyall wrote in the New York Times:
“The book, especially in its creation of Jo — independent, unconventional, irreverent, impatient, devoted to her writing and proud of her ability to earn money at it — has been an inspiration and a model. Jo has always appealed to tomboys, rebels, and freethinkers, her passion for creativity providing aspiring writers with a glimpse of how to operate in the world.”
In the first sequel, Little Men, Jo and Professor Bhaer have established a school for boys in Plumfield. We scarcely recognize the Jo March of Little Women. In the text, she is called “Mrs. Jo” and “Mother Bhaer” (which in the audio version sounds just like “Mother Bear”). Indeed, Jo has become a kind, sensible mother figure to the school’s students.
. . . . . . . . . .
10 Writers Who Were Inspired by Jo March of Little Women
. . . . . . . . . .
But what of her writing career? Little Men barely hints at it, if at all. She and Friedrich Bhaer are now parents of two beloved boys, and appears satisfied with her lot. She seems happy, but what about all of the readers who wanted to be Jo March when we grew up? Have we been betrayed? Fortunately, no.
Jo did become a writer, and a rather rich and famous one at that. But we have to wait until the next sequel, Jo’s Boys, to find that out. Louisa didn’t do the best job of explaining just how a 19th-century wife, mother, and school-overseer would have woven a writing career in with all her other duties.
Louisa wrote for a living. She never married nor had children (though she did help raise her niece, after her sister, May Alcott Nieriker —the inspiration for Amy in Little Women — died prematurely). She didn’t run a school full of wayward boys, either. So her description of Jo’s writing success is kind of plunked down awkwardly into chapter three of Jo’s Boys, “Jo’s Last Scrape.”
Louisa didn’t bother to fictionalize this chapter too much; her description of Jo’s success and her own real-life renown match up quite well, other than the marriage, the children, and the school.
But at least she was wise enough to sense that depriving Jo of literary accomplishment would be a betrayal to readers who wished to emulate her. So let’s let Louisa take over from here, and tell what it was like when she — I mean Jo — achieved her dream of becoming a famous author.
From chapter 3, “Jo’s Last Scrape” of Jo’s Boys
The March family had enjoyed a great many surprises in the course of their varied career, but the greatest of all was when the Ugly Duckling turned out to be, not a swan, but a golden goose, whose literary eggs found such an unexpected market that in ten years Jo’s wildest and most cherished dream actually came true.
How or why it happened she never clearly understood, but all of a sudden she found herself famous in a small way, and, better still, with a snug little fortune in her pocket to clear away the obstacles of the present and assure the future of her boys.
It began during a bad year when everything went wrong at Plumfield; times were hard, the school dwindled, Jo overworked herself and had a long illness; Laurie and Amy were abroad, and the Bhaers too proud to ask help even of those as near and dear as this generous pair.
Confined to her room, Jo got desperate over the state of affairs, till she fell back upon the long-disused pen as the only thing she could do to help fill up the gaps in the income. A book for girls being wanted by a certain publisher, she hastily scribbled a little story describing a few scenes and adventures in the lives of herself and sisters, though boys were more in her line, and with very slight hopes of success sent it out to seek its fortune.
Things always went by contraries with Jo. Her first book, labored over for years, and launched full of the high hopes and ambitious dreams of youth, foundered on its voyage, though the wreck continued to float long afterward, to the profit of the publisher at least.
The hastily written story, sent away with no thought beyond the few dollars it might bring, sailed with a fair wind and a wise pilot at the helm into public favor, and came home heavily laden with an unexpected cargo of gold and glory.
A more astonished woman probably never existed than Josephine Bhaer when her little ship came into port with flags flying, cannon that had been silent before now booming gaily, and, better than all, many kind faces rejoicing with her, many friendly hands grasping hers with cordial congratulations.
After that it was plain sailing, and she merely had to load her ships and send them off on prosperous trips, to bring home stores of comfort for all she loved and labored for.
The fame she never did quite accept; for it takes very little fire to make a great deal of smoke nowadays, and notoriety is not real glory. The fortune she could not doubt, and gratefully received; though it was not half so large a one as a generous world reported it to be.
The tide having turned continued to rise, and floated the family comfortably into a snug harbor where the older members could rest secure from storms, and whence the younger ones could launch their boats for the voyage of life.
All manner of happiness, peace, and plenty came in those years to bless the patient waiters, hopeful workers, and devout believers in the wisdom and justice of Him who sends disappointment, poverty, and sorrow to try the love of human hearts and make success the sweeter when it comes.
. . . . . . . . .
Louisa May Alcott’s Advice to Aspiring Writers
. . . . . . . . .
The world saw the prosperity, and kind souls rejoiced over the improved fortunes of the family; but the success Jo valued most, the happiness that nothing could change or take away, few knew much about.
It was the power of making her mother’s last years happy and serene; to see the burden of care laid down for ever, the weary hands at rest, the dear face untroubled by any anxiety, and the tender heart free to pour itself out in the wise charity which was its delight. As a girl, Jo’s favorite plan had been a room where Marmee could sit in peace and enjoy herself after her hard, heroic life.
Now the dream had become a happy fact, and Marmee sat in her pleasant chamber with every comfort and luxury about her, loving daughters to wait on her as infirmities increased, a faithful mate to lean upon, and grand-children to brighten the twilight of life with their dutiful affection.
A very precious time to all, for she rejoiced as only mothers can in the good fortunes of their children. She had lived to reap the harvest she sowed; had seen prayers answered, hopes blossom, good gifts bear fruit, peace and prosperity bless the home she had made; and then, like some brave, patient angel, whose work was done, turned her face heavenward, glad to rest.
This was the sweet and sacred side of the change; but it had its droll and thorny one, as all things have in this curious world of ours. After the first surprise, incredulity, and joy, which came to Jo, with the ingratitude of human nature, she soon tired of renown, and began to resent her loss of liberty.
For suddenly the admiring public took possession of her and all her affairs, past, present, and to come. Strangers demanded to look at her, question, advise, warn, congratulate, and drive her out of her wits by well-meant but very wearisome attentions.
If she declined to open her heart to them, they reproached her; if she refused to endow her pet charities, relieve private wants, or sympathize with every ill and trial known to humanity, she was called hard-hearted, selfish, and haughty; if she found it impossible to answer the piles of letters sent her, she was neglectful of her duty to the admiring public; and if she preferred the privacy of home to the pedestal upon which she was requested to pose, ‘the airs of literary people’ were freely criticized.
She did her best for the children, they being the public for whom she wrote, and labored stoutly to supply the demand always in the mouths of voracious youth—’More stories; more right away!’
Her family objected to this devotion at their expense, and her health suffered; but for a time she gratefully offered herself up on the altar of juvenile literature, feeling that she owed a good deal to the little friends in whose sight she had found favor after twenty years of effort …
Little Women and its sequels online Little Women (Project Gutenberg) Little Men (Project Gutenberg) Jo’s Boys (Project Gutenberg)
The post Did Little Women’s Jo March Become a Writer? appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 30, 2022
A 19th-Century Analysis and Plot Summary of Emma by Jane Austen
Jane Austen by Sarah Fanny Malden (1889) offers views of Jane Austen‘s life and work from a 19th-century perspective. The following analysis and plot summary of Emma (1815) focuses on what some readers and critics believe to be the author’s finest novel (some might beg to differ, of course).
Mrs. Malden said of her sources, “The writer wishes to express her obligations to Lord Brabourne and Mr. C. Austen Leigh for their kind permission to make use of the Memoir and Letters of their gifted relative, which have been her principal authorities for this work.”
The 1889 publication of Malden’s Jane Austen was part of an Eminent Women series published by W.H. Allen & Co., London. The following excerpt is in the public domain:
The summit of Jane Austen’s Literary Powers
Many readers of Jane Austen will agree in thinking that in Emma she reached the summit of her literary powers. She has given us quite as charming individual characters both in earlier and later writings, but it is impossible to name a flaw in Emma; there is not a page that could with advantage be omitted, nor could any additions improve it.
The story, as usual with Jane Austen, is a mere thread of the most everyday kind: the loves, hopes, fears, and rivalries of a dozen people, with all their home lives and surroundings. But every one of the characters stands out clearly from the canvas, and all are life-like and delightful.
It has all the brilliancy of Pride and Prejudice, without any immaturity of style, and it is as carefully finished as Mansfield Park, without the least suspicion of prolixity.
In Emma, too, as has been already noticed, she worked into perfection some characters which she had attempted earlier with less success, and she gave us two or three, such as Mr. Weston, Mrs. Elton, and Miss Bates, which we find nowhere else in her writings.
Moreover, in Emma, above all her other works, she achieved a task in which many a great writer has failed; for she gives us the portrait of a thorough English gentleman, drawn to the life.
Edmund Bertram (of Mansfield Park) in the best sense of the word, a gentleman, but he is a very young one; Mr. Darcy (of Pride and Prejudice) and Henry Tilney (of Northanger Abbey) at times are on the verge of not being quite thoroughbred; but Mr. Knightley is from head to foot a gentleman, and we feel that he never could have said or done a thing unworthy of one.
Jane Austen herself classed Knightley with Edmund Bertram as “far from being what I know English gentlemen often are.” I think she was unjust to both her heroes, but, above all, to Mr. Knightley, for it is difficult to see how he could be surpassed.
Introducing Emma Woodhouse
Emma Woodhouse, too, is very good. Her faults, follies, and mistakes are completely those of a warm-hearted, rather spoilt girl, accustomed to believing in herself, and to be queen of her own circle.
She deserves the amount of punishment she gets, but we are glad it is no worse; and, with Mr. Knightley to look after her, she will do very well. Her position would be a spoiling one for any girl:
“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.”
Emma Woodhouse is, of course, the most prominent character, and a considerable part of the plot turns upon the strenuous attempts at matchmaking for a friend, which she takes up to amuse and occupy herself when the marriage of her beloved governess has left her alone in her father’s house.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Quotes from Emma by Jane Austen
. . . . . . . . . .
This friend, Harriet Smith, is pretty, silly, and second-rate, of unknown parentage, and educated at a neighboring boarding-school; but Emma, fascinated by her beauty and simplicity, ignores her worst defects, and resolves upon marrying her to the vicar of the parish, Mr. Elton, who is young, handsome, and a good imitation of a gentleman.
Her eagerness for the marriage is quickened by finding that Harriet has a pronounced admirer in a neighboring young farmer, whom Emma considers quite beneath her; and she directs much of her energy to quell this rising attachment on Harriet’s part, honestly believing it to be a very bad connection for her.
Harriet herself has never aspired higher than Mr. Robert Martin, and, but for Emma’s interference, his course of true love would have run exceedingly smooth. An unexpected meeting with him out walking gives Emma an opportunity for lowering him in Harriett’s eyes.
Mr. Elton vs. Robert Martin
Emma is persuaded that very little encouragement will bring Mr. Elton forward as Harriet’s declared suitor, and, under this belief, she throws the two together in every possible way at Hartfield.
Having further convinced herself that Mr. Elton’s pretty speeches, which would suit every woman equally well, are solely intended for Harriet through her, she receives them all with the utmost graciousness, quite unconscious of the presumptuous hopes for himself which he builds upon her manner to him.
She begins a portrait of Harriet, which, she trusts, may someday be a wedding present to Mr. Elton, and her eyes are not opened to his real views even by his remarks upon the picture when finished.
Perhaps Mr. Robert Martin hears enough of what is passing at Hartfield to alarm him; at all events, he determines to put his fate to the touch; and the very day of Mr. Elton’s going to London Harriet comes to Emma:
“… with an agitated hurried look, announcing something extraordinary to have happened which she was longing to tell. Half a minute brought it all out. She had heard, as soon as she had got back to Mrs. Goddard’s, that Mr. Martin had been there an hour before . . . had left a little parcel for her from one of his sisters, and gone away; and, on opening this parcel, she had actually found, besides the two songs which she had lent Elizabeth to copy, a letter to herself, and this letter was from him—from Mr. Martin—and contained a direct proposal of marriage.
Who could have thought it? She was so surprised, she did not know what to do. Yes, quite a proposal of marriage; and a very good letter, at least, she thought so. And he wrote as if he really loved her very much—but she did not know—and so she had come as fast as she could to ask Miss Woodhouse what she should do.”
It is clear enough what she wants to do; but Emma, still bent upon saving her friend from a supposed mésalliance, is indignant with Mr. Martin’s presumption, and only wishes Harriet to lose no time in giving him his dismissal.
There can be no better picture of a strong, decided nature bearing down a weak, vacillating one, yet entirely unconscious of its own tyranny.
But Emma’s triumph is of short duration. She has first to endure a sharp lecture from Mr. Knightley, who, from his position in the family as brother to her sister’s husband, is on terms of full intimacy with her and her father, and is, moreover, “one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them.”
Robert Martin has confided his hopes to him, and, when they are crushed, Mr. Knightley is much grieved for him, and, guessing the part which Emma has had in the business, is much annoyed with her for dissuading Harriet from a safe and respectable connection.
Emma has hardly tranquilized him, when, to her intense vexation, Mr. Elton declares himself her lover, and she then perceives the truth, to which she has been so blind, and sees how all her efforts for Harriet have been set down by him to dawning attachment on her own part.
Of course, Harriet has to be comforted and talked out of love—a far harder task than talking her into it; and even Mr. Elton’s very speedy engagement to “a Miss Hawkins of Bath” has not all the success Emma has hoped for.
Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax
In the interval before his marriage, we are introduced to Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, who may be considered the secondary hero and heroine of the story. She is the granddaughter of a Mr. Bates, a former clergyman of Highbury.
Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax have met at the house of a friend, and he having fallen violently in love, and being a young man with little regard for anyone’s feelings but his own, has persuaded her, against her better judgment, into a secret engagement.
The plea for it is that his family might disinherit him if they knew of the engagement too soon, and, for a time, the secret is easy enough to keep; but when Jane comes for her usual visit to her grandmother and aunt at Highbury, Frank Churchill immediately finds the opportunity for a visit to his father there, and the connection between him and his fiancée necessitates an amount of double-dealing which is very painful to her though it greatly amuses him. Emma narrowly escapes being a sufferer by this.
“In spite of Emma’s resolution of never marrying, there was something in the name, in the idea, of Mr. Frank Churchill which always interested her. She had frequently thought—especially since his father’s marriage with Miss Taylor—that if she were to marry, he was the very person to suit her in age, character, and condition. He seemed, by this connection between the families, quite to belong to her. She could not but suppose it to be a match that everybody who knew them must think of.”
When Mr. Frank Churchill appears, he is pleasant, lively, and well-bred, quite willing to carry on a graceful flirtation with Emma in order to cover his real attraction at Highbury; and both the Westons and Emma believe him to be seriously falling in love with the latter.
Is Emma falling in love?
Emma, having much time on her hands, and a lively imagination, tries to convince herself that she is falling in love with him; and her attempt at this is an excellent passage in the book. She is quite unsuspicious of his secret engagement, in spite of the sharp-sightedness on which she prides herself, but the real superiority of her own nature enables her to see a certain shallowness in his.
Quite unconsciously to herself, she is always comparing him with Mr. Knightley, and the comparison is not favorable to Frank; but, having made up her mind that she will not marry at present, and that Frank is in love with her, she magnanimously decides not to give him any further encouragement, and begins to consider if he could be induced to fall in love with Harriet Smith.
On her own side she honestly believes that she has fallen in love with him—which she has never done for a moment—and considers herself heroic for determining not to leave her father. Meanwhile Mr. Elton has returned to Highbury with his bride, and Emma feels bound to call upon her. Mrs. Elton duly returns the visit, and Emma tries to be civil.
. . . . . . . . . .
Emma by Jane Austen on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . .
The secret of Frank Churchill’s engagement at last comes out unexpectedly and is a very startling revelation to a good many people, even to Emma, though not in the way she might have expected. In his effort to conceal his real attachment, Frank Churchill has flirted with Emma to an extent that has exasperated Jane Fairfax, whose nerves are over-wrought and irritable beyond measure, and she at length hastily decides on taking a situation as a governess which has been offered to her by friends of Mrs. Elton.
She has carefully concealed this step from her lover up to the last moment; but when he learns it, all his better feelings are roused, and he announces the engagement to his family, determined to brave all possible consequences.
Emma, in addition to being much displeased at this secrecy, which is so repugnant to her whole nature, is sincerely grieved for Harriet Smith, who, she believes, is as much attached to Frank Churchill as she can be to anyone.
For some time past it has been clear that there is a successor to Mr. Elton in Harriet’s somewhat unstable affections; and though Emma, taught by experience, has resolutely held her tongue on the subject, she has been delighted at a prospect which promised so much happiness to her friend.
Now, when the truth is known, she is preparing to pity and sympathize with Harriet over Frank Churchill’s unjustifiable concealment, when, to her amazement, she finds herself again completely mistaken, and learns with dismay that Mr. Knightley is the man on whom Harriet’s present ideas are fixed.
“A mind like hers, once opening to suspicion, made rapid progress; she touched, she admitted, she acknowledged the whole truth. Why was it so much worse that Harriet should be in love with Mr. Knightley than with Frank Churchill? Why was the evil so dreadfully increased by Harriet’s having some hope of a return? It darted through her with the speed of an arrow that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!”
Poor Emma! It is impossible not to feel for her in her agony of self-revelation and self-reproach, and to hope that her sufferings may not last long, as, indeed, they do not. Mr. Knightley, who is away in London at his brother’s, hears, while there, of Frank Churchill’s engagement.
He has always had some suspicion of the real state of affairs between Mr. Churchill and Miss Fairfax, and has even tried to warn Emma, who had repelled the suggestion with scorn; but he has feared that Emma’s own affections were ensnared, and he has suffered much from the belief that his own cause was hopeless.
Now all other feelings are swallowed up in his distress for what he supposes Emma is suffering; and when he makes his way to Hartfield, and sees her melancholy and depressed, his belief in her heart-broken state is confirmed.
Nevertheless, during a walk in the garden, he is undeceived as to her supposed attachment for Frank Churchill, and, in the rush of delight that follows upon such a discovery, he cannot resist speaking for himself, with what rapturous results for both may be imagined.
Everyone marries well
Emma’s one remaining piece of compunction must be for her unlucky little protégée, Harriet Smith; but even this difficulty is surprisingly soon smoothed out of her way. Harriet, while on a visit to Emma’s sister, Mrs. John Knightley, in London, again comes across Robert Martin, and, as he has always been faithful to her, the result is easily guessed; although Emma, true to her mistaken estimates of character, is greatly amazed when the engagement is announced. She is pacified, however, and accepts Mr. Knightley’s quiet opinion of the story.
“You ought to know your friend best, but I should say she was a good-tempered, soft-hearted girl, not likely to be very determined against any young man who told her he loved her”— which is, of course, the precise truth.
The three marriages of the story take place within a very short time of each other, Harriet Smith’s being the first; “and Mr. Elton was called on within a month from the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Martin to join the hands of Mr. Knightley and Miss Woodhouse.
More about Emma by Jane Austen How Jane Austen’s Emma Changed the Face of Fiction Reader discussion on Goodreads Full text on Project Gutenberg Audio recording of Emma on Librivox.org. . . . . . . . .
*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post A 19th-Century Analysis and Plot Summary of Emma by Jane Austen appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 29, 2022
A Tribute to Claudia Emerson, Poet and Friend
Claudia Emerson (1957 – 2014) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Late Wife in 2006. I think she would have been eventually chosen as the United States Poet Laureate if her brilliant career hadn’t been cut short by cancer.
She not only published eight collections of verse, but she was also a gifted teacher and musician. I knew her because we were in the same class at Chatham Hall, an all-girls’ school in Pittsylvania, County, southside Virginia. We were the class of 1975.
Chatham Hall was founded in 1894, originally named Chatham Episcopal Institute, and our most famous graduate was Georgia O’Keeffe. The school’s motto is Esto perpetua – “Let it be perpetual.”
Years at Chatham Hall
Both my mother and godmother attended; I was a boarder from Richmond and Claudia was a day student from Chatham. As I peruse old yearbooks, The Chathamite, I see photos of her on the yearbook staff and as a singer in Sextet while I played all sports and was in Dramatic Club. Senior year she was on Student Council. I wasn’t.
Our lives in a girls’ school with a student body of about 135 in the tiny town of Chatham must have had an enormous impact in helping us both become writers. I have published articles and essays for over forty years; she became an English and creative writing professor, publishing widely, editing journals, appearing at writers’ conferences, and winning awards. A celebrity.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Photo: Courtesy of Chatham Hall
. . . . . . . . . . .
I majored in history at Kenyon College and in 1980 travelled around the world and settled in the Seychelles for two years; when I returned home, after such an adventure, I started writing.
Claudia chose a different path. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in English and returned to Chatham and worked as a part-time rural mail carrier and managed a used bookstore.
Spending the day with all those books, writing songs, reading authors like Rainer Maria Rilke and his Letters to a Young Poet, inspired her so she enrolled and was accepted into the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she earned a master’s degree. She chose poetry as her métier.
In the coming years, her teaching career took off. Not only was she the Dean of Students and head of the English Department at Chatham Hall, she also taught at a long list of schools including fifteen years at the University of Mary Washington (UMW) and the final year of her life at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) where she achieved her dream of teaching graduate students.
Prolific output and numerous awards
Louisiana State University Press published all her books in their Southern Messenger Series: Pharoah, Pharoah (1997); Pinion, an Elegy (2002); Late Wife (2005); Figure Studies (2008); Secure the Shadow (2012); The Opposite House (2015); Impossible Bottle (2015); and Claude Before Time and Space (2018). The last three books were published posthumously.
Moreover, she won a long list of prizes and fellowships including the Academy of American Poets Prize; a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; a Guggenheim; and from 2008 to 2010 she was poet laureate of Virginia.
Her work was highly anthologized, and she published in dozens of journals and magazines, including Southern Review; Blackbird; New England Review; Ploughshares; and even The New Yorker.
And Claudia just wasn’t a poet and teacher. She played her Gibson guitar well, wrote songs, and performed with her husband, Kent Ippolito.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Claudia Emerson on Poetry Foundation
Photo: Courtesy of Chatham Hall
. . . . . . . . . . .
What did Claudia Emerson write about? Everything. Life in a small southern town, Mother Nature, our school, her family, mortality, all of the characters and nuances from the rich life she had led.
Her work is a kaleidoscope of stories written by a poet with a practiced eye and flowing hand who noticed all. In an interview, she once said she “processed the world through poetry” which is why she was such an eloquent interpreter for her readers.
I rarely read poetry but even her poems speak to me. Late Wife is something all of us should have on our shelves. Claudia writes of love and loss and rejuvenation through a series of letters written to her first husband after their marriage comes to an end, her journey through heartbreak and healing, and the final chapter is sonnets to her second husband who had lost his wife to cancer.
The depth and brilliance of the book are stellar. Rereading these poems after all these years was like going to a movie I had seen before: I knew the husbands, the lover, Claudia, so for all the highs and lows, I knew what was coming.
In an interview with the journal Blackbird in describing the book she said, “In my mind, it’s sort of a call-and-response kind of book, where I disappear from my life in some ways to reappear in another life where there has been a disappearance.”
David Wojahn, a poet and English professor at VCU called the book “a masterly managed narrative” and deserved the Pulitzer Prize because “It’s a very self-possessed and tender book, deserving of the prize in part because of Claudia’s command of form – particularly the sonnet – and because of the book’s unity.”
It would be difficult for me to critique Claudia’s work. I am neither a professor nor a poet, so I cannot write of pentameter, narrative structure nor threnody yet Claudia wrote from the heart and captured detail in a deep and enduring way; these are poems I actually understand.
Influenced by many, a word scientist upturning the rocks of life, probing the emotions of the human condition whether true or imagined. I enjoy her poems so much because they are graspable.
Now that I am rereading her work, I remember how verse can elevate prose — Pat Conroy read a poem each morning before he started writing for this very reason. These poems encourage a writer like me to slow down. Look. Listen. Remember. Take notes. Ponder.
The other day I did this while driving around the small town where I live, and I noticed the red tulips in front of the Presbyterian church had splayed, the sheriff or someone from his department was having lunch at the Blackstone Herb Cottage, and a couple was arguing in front of the post office. (Oh, all right. I made the last one up.)
When asked about Claudia’s writing, Frazier Armstrong, who grew up in Chatham and attended Chatham Hall said, “In a word, she gave me courage. She gave me someone to aspire to become.”
As a writer of sorts, and poetry being my chosen medium, I ate every word. I watched her struggle with her first marriage, I watched her evolve and turn outward and into her talent. She was always cool and calm or appeared to be. She showed me what quiet looked like.”
. . . . . . . . . . .
Claudia’s journals; photo by Kent Ippolito
. . . . . . . . . . .
Most of us writers and readers are interested in the details of writers’ lives. What work habits did they have? According to her widower, Kent Ippolito, who still lives in their house in Richmond, Claudia always kept journals, writing regularly in her Moleskine notebooks and using her Retro ‘51 or Pelican pens.
He explained she would often research these words and phrases, and many found their way into her writing. Some of the “valid but unused ideas” would migrate to her next journal. Often, she would carry these thoughts around for years.
According to Ippolito, Claudia would come up with an idea for a book, then gather her ideas and start writing poems. Once she had enough poems to match the concept, she’d arrange them for a book and if the poems took on a new life and didn’t fit current themes, she would hold on to them for the future.
“Claudia constructed her books in the way a composer does a symphony,” said Wojahn. “Each of them has a prevailing theme and cast of characters. Few poets are able to create the sort of unity that Claudia managed to feature in all of her books.”
Impact on her students
When I interviewed some of Claudia Emerson’s students, it was clear that she not only had an impact on their writing, but also on their careers.
Lindley Estes, a former student at UMW said Claudia “could really impart her love for poetry,” and “she was the gem of the English department” and “sassy,” a professor who had so much time for her students. As time passed, Estes concluded she probably wouldn’t be a poet and Claudia helped her realize she was still a writer and lyricism could play a role in prose as well. After a successful career as a reporter, Estes will begin teaching journalism at UMW and creative writing at George Mason University this fall.
“She was always there to help writers,” Estes recalled.
I’m sure there are many more students out there whom Claudia helped, including me. Not only did she agree to teach a workshop at my daughter’s high school, but she also wrote a recommendation so I could audit a two-semester novel-writing class at VCU.
Allison Seay, teacher, award-winning poet, teacher, and also a former student of Claudia’s, said “she was the kind of teacher that revered her students. The kind of teacher who revered nature. The kind of teacher that did not shy away from difficulty or pain or the grotesque or the real. The kind of teacher who believed The Soul – the numinous, the divine – was always in the room.”
Seay considered Claudia a mentor, a muse, and when asked what she had taught her as a poet, she explained, “I learned from Claudia, above all else, that all writing is a radical act of hope. Even deep sorrow, in form, is the seed of hope.” (On a personal note — years ago, Ms. Seay taught my daughter high-school courses in rhetoric, composition, and elegy. My daughter, now a budding actress in Los Angeles, said those classes had a profound impact on her so clearly the light of Claudia shines on in many ways.)
. . . . . . . . . . .
Photo: Tyler Scott
. . . . . . . . . . .
It is hard to write about a late friend because I am remembering not only her illness and death, but the good times as well. The reunions, the dancing – Chatham Hall girls love to dance – the time my husband and I went to visit her when she was living in the old post office in Chatham, and we forgot our baby’s suitcase and had to go to The Dollar Store to buy a weekend wardrobe. The time I hosted a party for her when she won the Pulitzer and later, after everyone had gone home, Claudia said the best line ever, “I’m not proud of myself because I won a Pulitzer. I’m proud of myself because I won a Pulitzer and didn’t become an #$%^!”
In her final years, Claudia and I didn’t see each other much. She had an enormous career, and I was living the suburban life, raising a daughter, and working as a fundraiser. By the time she moved to Richmond, the cancer had returned.
Shortly before her death, my husband and I went to a reading featuring Claudia and other well-known poets. We sat up front, awaiting excitedly. I remember one of the panelists was Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate.
And then we were told Claudia would not be able to attend because she had fallen and broken her arm. She died a short time later, age fifty-seven, of complications from colon cancer.
Claudia Emerson’s legacy
Claudia Emerson has left us quite a legacy. “She was one of the most essential poets of her time, and she will continue to find readers, “observed Wojahn. “Because of her talent, of course, but also because of her ambition, especially toward the end of her life, when she wrote with a fervor that amazes me. She has much to teach us.”
According to Ippolito, there are enough unpublished poems to publish another collection.
In the coming weeks, on a fine spring day, I will drive the 100 miles to Chatham to visit my alma mater and I will meander up the serpentine road to that ivory tower on the hill so I can remember my schoolgirl days.
Later, I will walk around town, visit a bookstore, look at some antiques, maybe eat a grilled cheese sandwich in a quiet restaurant. And then I will visit Claudia’s grave. Her husband told me she is easy to find: she rests at the back end of a memorial garden with her mother Mollie, her father Claude, and her brother Bev.
Claudia Emerson deserved a better ending. For the people she left behind, life has never really been the same without her voice, her light, and her laugh.
Esto perpetua, Old Friend.
Contributed by Tyler Scott, who has been writing essays and articles since the early 1980s for various magazines and newspapers. In 2014 she published her novel The Excellent Advice of a Few Famous Painters. She lives in Blackstone, Virginia where she and her husband renovated a Queen Anne Revival house and enjoy small town life.
. . . . . . . . . .
Poems by Claudia Emerson“Aftermath”
I think by now it is time for the second cutting.
I imagine the field, the one above the last
house we rented, has lain in convalescence
long enough. The hawk has taken back the air
above new grass, and the doe again can hide
her young. I can tell you now I crossed
that field, weeks before the first pass of the blade,
through grass and briars, fog — the night itself
to my thighs, my skirt pulled up that high.
I came to what had been our house and stood outside.
I saw her in it. She reminded me of me —
with her hair black and long as mine had been —
as she moved in and then away from the sharp
frame the window made of the darkness.
I confess that last house was the coldest
I kept. In it, I became formless as fog, crossing
the walls, formless as your breath as it rose
from your mouth to disappear in the air above you.
You see, aftermath is easier, opening
again the wound along its numb scar; it is the sentence
spoken the second time — truer, perhaps,
with the blunt edge of a practiced tongue.
—From Late Wife (Pulitzer Prize winner) by Claudia Emerson ©2005
Reprinted with permission from LSU Press, Baton Rouge, LA
“On Leaving the Body to Science”
The my becomes
a the, becomes
the state’s
the coroner’s,
a law’s, something
assignable,
by me, alone,
though it will not
be the I
I am on
leaving it, no
longer to be
designated human or
corpse: cadaver
it will be,
nameless patient
stored in
the deep hold
of the hospital
as in the storage
of a ghost ship
run aground –
the secret in it
that will,
perhaps, stir again
the wind that
failed. It
will be preserved,
kept like larva,
like a bullet
sealed gleaming
in its chamber.
They will gather
around it,
probe and sample,
argue – then
return it
to its between-
world, remove
their aprons
and gloves
and stroll, some evenings,
a city block
for a beer,
a glass of chilled
white wine. Even there, they
will continue
to speak of it,
what they
glean from beneath
the narrative
of scars, surgical
cavities, the
wondrous
mess it became
before I left it
to them
with what’s
left of me, this
name, a signature,
a neatened
suture, perfect, this
last, selfish stitch.
— From Claude Before Time and Space by Claudia Emerson ©2018
Reprinted with permission from LSU Press, Baton Rouge, LA
. . . . . . . . . .
Claudia Emerson’s books on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . . .
*These are Bookshop.org and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
More classic women poets and poetry on this site.
The post A Tribute to Claudia Emerson, Poet and Friend appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 22, 2022
The Matriarch by G.B. Stern (1924)
British writer G.B. Stern (1890 – 1973) published a five-volume Jewish family saga collectively entitled, confusingly, both The Rakonitz Chronicles, the first three volumes published together in 1932, and The Matriarch Chronicles in their expanded 1936 form.
This overview of The Matriarch, the first in a series and the best-known work by Stern is excerpted from A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth ©2022. Reprinted by permission.
Born in London as Gladys Bertha Stern, she was later Gladys Bronwyn, and wrote mainly under her initials. She was a friend of Somerset Maugham, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, and Noël Coward, she wrote over forty novels, as well as plays, short stories, criticism.
Extremely prolific and largely forgotten, Stern was the author of over fifty novels and memoirs, the best known of which were the five novels collectively known as the Matriarch series: The first was The Tents of Israel (1924), published in the U.S. and later known more widely as The Matriarch.This was followed by the other volumes in the series: A Deputy was King (1926), Mosaic (1930), Shining and Free (1935), and The Young Matriarch (1935).
As noted above, the first three books were collected in a single volume as The Rakonitz Chronicles, in 1932, and all five volumes were finally published together as The Matriarch Chronicles. Stern also published a play version of The Matriarch in 1931. Rakonitz was the name of Stern’s maternal grandfather, and the Chronicles are loosely based on her own family.
According to Rabbi Julia Neuberber’s introduction to the Penguin edition, Stern did not like the word “Jew” and preferred “Israelite.” In 1947, Stern converted to Catholicism.
Like Vera Caspary’s Thicker Than Water, though far longer, the Chronicles are a family saga covering a dramatically changing world, beginning when the Rakonitz family diaspora begins at the end of the nineteenth century.
All the Rakonitz women were happiest in Cosmopolis. Imagination cannot easily picture them in a setting of brown ploughed field on a whipped grey morning after storm. Instead, spacious drawing rooms, with parquet floor throwing back the glitter from the Venetian crystal candelabra, brocade hangings, and a polished grand-piano – these were more natural than nature to Babette and her descendants. They scattered from Vienna, certainly, but always to other big cities, capitals of the world; Paris, Budapest, Constantinople, Venice, London – Anastasia was the first Rakonitz in London.
. . . . . . . . . . .
G.B. Stern in 1949
. . . . . . . . . .
Indomitable, cosmopolitan Anastasia, who presides over the family from her exotic home in West London is The Matriarch of the title, “at the age of sixty, in full blossom, at the very height of her mental and physical powers, brilliant, tireless, despotic, at the apex of the family triangle.” Anastasia has not always been the Matriarch, however:
“The Matriarch first began to assert itself in Anastasia, when she insisted that her eldest son and her eldest son’s wife – poor, pretty little Susie Lake, who had so longed for a home of her own – should, as a matter of course, well with her in the same house, sharing her table and controlled by her wishes.”
For Susie, coming from an English suburb, “into the very Rakonitz stronghold itself, into the house of the Matriarch, life was a tragedy and the bewilderment.” Instead of her own house, Suzie now has only her own room, which does not at all seem like her own.
“Heavily furnished by more exotic and profuse taste than her own, on the top floor of a house resembling some foreign palace within, with its antiques used as though they were commonplace; heirlooms thickly clustered about with anecdotes less conventionally romantic than broadly ludicrous; treasures brought from distant cities, not via the medium of shops, but by real people – real relations; dark, heavy furniture, and chandeliers that were a thousand dropping crystals that swayed and reflected light; portraits of ancestors . . . No wonder Suzie marveled how such a fantastic caravanserai could still manage, from the outside, to look almost like every house in Granville Terrace.”
Both metaphorically and physically, the incoming Jewish family have integrated, like Amy Levy’s, into formal, wealthy West London twentieth-century society but internally, behind, as it were closed doors, they are still Middle European, nineteenth-century Jewish. Anastasia’s daughter and youngest child, Sophie is as frightened of the Matriarch as her daughter-in-law Susie; always having given precedence to her older brothers, she feels ignored.
All she can do to assert her place in the family is to try to have a son. “If she did not bear a son who was also Anastasia’s first grandchild, she determined to kill herself.” Worse, she has married the wrong kind of man. “Not only a stranger, and a Gentile, but, from the point of view of Rakonitz, such a ludicrous stranger!”
Not only is he an Englishman, “and what was known as a profligate, without any sense of family,” he is “an artist by temperament, although not overmuch by virtue of work and creation; but carrying all the suspicious attributes of an artist as they were in the late nineteenth century.”
In the 1936, five volume-in-one re-issue of The Matriarch Chronicles, we are less than fifty pages into a book of nearly one thousand pages at this point; a Jewish family saga indeed. Stern dedicated it to John Goldsworthy, in admiration of his The Forsyte Saga; Caspary was a big admirer of the fictional Forsytes; when she first lived in London with Hope Skillman in the 1920s they visited Fleur Forsyte’s house in Belgravia – always the most expensive and exclusive part of London – and when she went back to live there again in the 1950s, far more financially secure now, she had was proud to tell Hope that she had a house round the corner from Fleur.
. . . . . . . . . .
A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie on Amazon (US)*
and *
. . . . . . . . . .
Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:
Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England.
. . . . . . . . . .
You may also like:
Jewish Women in Novels by Early Jewish Female Writers
. . . . . . . . .
*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post The Matriarch by G.B. Stern (1924) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 17, 2022
Jane Austen’s Childhood and Glimpses of Her as a Young Woman
Jane Austen by Sarah Fanny Malden (1889) offers an excellent 19th-century view of Jane Austen’s works, along with a handful of chapters on the life of this beloved British author. This excerpt, featuring one such chapter, offers glimpses of Jane Austen’s childhood and what she engaged with as a young woman.
Born in Steventon, Hampshire (England), Jane (1775 – 1817) was part of a convivial middle-class family consisting of five brothers and her sister Cassandra, with whom she was very close. Her father was an esteemed rector. Jane spent the first twenty-five years of her life in Steventon, after which the family moved to Bath.
Mrs. Malden said of her sources, “The writer wishes to express her obligations to Lord Brabourne and Mr. C. Austen Leigh for their kind permission to make use of the Memoir and Letters of their gifted relative, which have been her principal authorities for this work.”
The 1889 publication of Malden’s Jane Austen was part of an Eminent Women series published by W.H. Allen & Co., London. The following excerpt is in the public domain:
The society at Steventon
The society immediately around Steventon when Jane Austen was growing up was neither above nor below the average of country society seventy miles from London.
It was not unusual for a country clergyman to find himself the only educated gentleman within a radius of some miles round his parsonage. But the dense ignorance of country gentlemen a hundred years ago is a thing of the past, and it could scarcely happen to any clergyman now to be asked, as Mr. Austen was once by a wealthy squire, “You know all about these things. Do tell us. Is Paris in France, or France in Paris? for my wife has been disputing with me about it.”
The Austens were not, however, dependent entirely on neighbors of this class for their social life, and whether, like Mrs. Bennet, they dined with four-and-twenty families or not, they certainly managed to have a good deal of pleasant society.
By birth and position the Austens were entitled to mix with the best society of their county, and though not rich, their means were sufficient to enable them to associate with the best families in the neighborhood.
Country visits were more of a business then than now; wet weather and bad roads and dark nights made more obstacles to social intercourse than we realize in these days; but a houseful of merry, cultivated young people, presided over by genial parents, is sure to be popular with its neighbors, and Jane Austen had no lack of society when she was growing up.
She was one of a most attractive family party, for they were all warmly attached to each other, full of the small jokes and bright sayings that enliven family life, and blessed with plenty of brains and cultivation, besides the sweet sunny temper that makes everyday life so easy.
. . . . . . . . .
A drawing of Jane by her sister Cassandra
. . . . . . . . . .
Steventon Rectory in Jane Austen’s girlhood was as cheerful and happy a home as any girl need have desired, and she remembered it affectionately throughout her life, unconscious how much of its sunshine she herself had produced, for in her eyes its brightness was mainly owing to her sister, Cassandra.
It was natural that two sisters coming together at the end of a line of brothers should draw much together, and from her earliest childhood Jane’s devotion to her elder sister was almost passionate in its intensity.
As a little child she pined so miserably when Cassandra began going to school without her, that she was sent also, though too young for school life; but, as Mrs. Austen observed at the time, “If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate;” and this childish devotion only increased with riper years.
From beginning to end Jane never wrote a story that was not related first to Cassandra and discussed with her; she literally shared every thought and feeling with her sister, and the two pleasant volumes of letters which Lord Brabourne has published show us how the intense attachment between the two sisters never waned throughout their lives.
All her warmth of heart and devotion to her family shine out in them, as well as her quick perception of character; and they sparkle throughout with quiet fun, and with humor, which is never ill-natured, while from first to last there is not a line written for effect, nor an atom of egotism or self-consciousness.
It is characteristic both of Jane’s self-abnegation and of her complete faith in her sister that, even after she was a successful authoress, she always gave Cassandra’s opinion first to anyone consulting her on literary matters, and if it differed from her own, she mentioned the fact almost apologetically, and merely as if she felt bound to do so.
If she did not actually pine for her sister’s presence after she was grown up, she certainly missed her, even in a short time, far more than most sisters, however affectionate, would do.
At twenty she is eager to give up a ball to which she had been looking forward, merely that Cassandra may return from a visit two days earlier than she otherwise could, and writes, “I shall be extremely impatient to hear from you again, that I may know when you are to return.”
At another time she reproaches her for staying away longer than she need have done, and entreats her to write oftener while away, declaring, “I am sure nobody can desire your letters as much as I do,” while every letter she receives from Cassandra is commented on with the same lover-like ardor, and received with the same delight, long after both the sisters had passed the romantic stage of girlhood.
“Excellent sweetness of you to send me such a nice long letter,” writes Jane, in 1813, when she was eight and thirty years old; and though doubtless letters were greater treasures then than now, it must be remembered that these and similar expressions are from a woman who was usually anything but “gushing” or “sentimental” in her language.
Wherever the sisters were they always shared their bedroom, and if Jane’s feeling was the clinging devotion of a younger to an elder sister, Cassandra certainly returned it with an intense sympathy and affection that never diminished in life or in death.
The sisters were educated together chiefly at home. Mr. Austen taught his sons in great part himself, and was well fitted to do so, but the higher education for women had not then been discovered, and the Austen girls were not better instructed than other young ladies of their day.
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
Jane’s special gift was skill and dexterity with her fingers; she was a first-rate needlewoman and delighted in needlework; she excelled also in any game or occupation that required neat-fingeredness; but she was no artist, and not a great musician, though far from a bad one.
Like Elizabeth Bennet, “her performance was pleasing, though by no means capital.” She was an excellent French scholar, and a fair Italian one; German was in her day quite an exceptional acquirement for ladies; and as to what was then thought of the dead languages for them, all readers of Hannah More must remember her bashful heroine who put the cream into the teapot and the sugar into the milk-jug on it being discovered that she read Latin with her father!
. . . . . . . . .
You may also enjoy: Jane Austen’s Literary Ambitions
. . . . . . . . . . .
Jane Austen risked no such overwhelming discovery, but she was well acquainted with the standard writers of her time and had a fair knowledge of miscellaneous literature. Crabbe, Cowper, Johnson, and Scott were her favorite poets, though, rather oddly, she set Crabbe highest; and it was a standing joke in the family that she would have been delighted to become Mrs. Crabbe if she had ever been personally acquainted with the poet.
Old novels were her delight, and the influence of Richardson and Fanny Burney may be traced in some of her early writings. I have always thought that her criticism on the Spectator in Northanger Abbey proves that she could have known very little of Steele and Addison’s masterpieces; but tastes differ, and she may have been unlucky in her selections.
She always took pleasure in calling herself “ignorant and uninformed,” and in declaring that she hated solid reading; but her letters continually make mention of new books which she is reading, and there was a constant stream of literature setting through the rectory at Steventon, in which Jane shared quite as fully as any of the others.
An early and avid writer
The delight and pursuit of her life, however, from very early days, was writing, and she seems to have been permitted to indulge in this pleasure with very little restraint; all the more, perhaps, that no amount of scribbling ever succeeded in spoiling her excellent handwriting.
After she grew up to womanhood she regretted not having read more and written less before she was sixteen and urged one of her nieces not to follow her example in that respect; but there must have been many wet or solitary days in the quiet rectory life which would have been very dull for the child without such a resource, and posterity may rejoice that no one hindered Jane Austen’s inclination for writing.
How soon she began to produce finished stories is not certain, but from a very early age her writings were a continual amusement and interest to the home circle, where they were criticized and admired with no idea as to what they might lead.
Most young authors try their hands at dramatic writing some time or other, and Jane passed through this stage of composition when she was about twelve years old, though she never seems to have attempted it later in life.
Private family theatricals
It was not a style which could have suited her, but at the time she tried it the young Austens had taken a craze for private theatricals, and Jane’s plays are thus easily accounted for. [According to James Edward Austen Leigh, a nephew who later wrote a memoir of his famed aunt, Jane was between thirteen and sixteen at the time of this family pursuit.]
The corps dramatique consisted of the brothers and sisters and a cousin, who had become one of them under pathetically romantic circumstances. She was a niece of Mr. Austen’s, had been educated in Paris, and married to a French nobleman, the Count de la Feuillade. He was guillotined in the Revolution, and she, with great difficulty, made her way to England, where she found a home in the already well-filled rectory at Steventon.
She was clever and accomplished, rather un-English in her ways and tastes, and very ready to help in the theatricals, which, perhaps, would not have existed but for her. There was no theatre but the dining-room or a barn, and both actors and audience must have been limited in number; but plays were got up in which Mme. de Feuillade was the principal actress.
James Austen wrote brilliant prologues and epilogues when they were wanted, and Jane Austen looked on and laid in materials for the immortal theatricals of the Bertram family.
Space must have made it impossible for a Mr. Yates, a Mr. Rushworth, or the Crawfords to be among the Steventon actors; but there may have been a very sufficient spice of lovemaking throughout the business, for Mme. de Feuillade afterwards married Henry Austen, Jane’s third brother. It is probable that there were enough “passages” between them during the theatricals to interest a girl of Jane’s age keenly.
Meanwhile, something—perhaps the absurdly transparent mysteries in which some old comedies abound—suggested to her a little jeu d’esprit, which, slight as it is, shows her keen sense of fun and her close observation, for she has copied the style and manner of an old play very closely, even in the dedication.
The post Jane Austen’s Childhood and Glimpses of Her as a Young Woman appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 15, 2022
A 19th-Century Analysis & Plot Summary of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Jane Austen by Sarah Fanny Malden (1889) offers an excellent 19th-century view of Jane Austen’s works. The following analysis and plot summary of Pride and Prejudice (1813) focuses on this beloved novel, which was Jane Austen‘s second to be published. It followed Sense and Sensibility, published two years earlier.
Mrs. Malden said of her sources, “The writer wishes to express her obligations to Lord Brabourne and Mr. C. Austen Leigh for their kind permission to make use of the Memoir and Letters of their gifted relative, which have been her principal authorities for this work.”
The 1889 publication of Malden’s Jane Austen was part of an Eminent Women series published by W.H. Allen & Co., London. The following excerpt is in the public domain:
Pride and Prejudice appeared in 1813 under its new and certainly better title (it had at first been called First Impressions), and Jane’s letters at the time are full of the unaffected interest which she always displayed in her own writings, mixed with her usual keen criticism. Jane’s opinion of her heroine, and of the first edition of the book is described in a letter to her sister Cassandra:
“I must confess, that I think her (Elizabeth) as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know. There are a few typical errors, and a ‘said he’ or a ‘said she’ would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear; but ‘I do not write for such dull elves’ as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.”
. . . . . . . . . .
Learn more about Jane Austen
. . . . . . . . . .
No admirer of Elizabeth Bennet will wonder that her delineator could not find a satisfactory portrait of her, for she is a vary rare type of character; indeed, it is a distinguishing characteristic of Pride and Prejudice that both the hero and heroine are uncommon in every respect, and yet thoroughly lifelike.
A shade more of gaiety would have made Elizabeth a flippant, amusing, commonplace girl, just as a degree less intellect would have made Darcy as intolerable as Mrs. Bennet thought him. But Jane Austen had shaken off all tendency to exaggeration by the time she brought out Pride and Prejudice, and henceforth her characters are kept well within bounds.
We see in Darcy the man who has had everything to spoil him yet is really superior of being spoilt. He is handsome, wealthy, well-born, and of powerful intellect, and the adulation and submission he has always had from everyone about him wearies him into receiving such homage with cold indifference and apparent haughtiness, yet under this repellent exterior is a warm, generous, and tender heart, which is capable of great sacrifices for anyone he really loves.
Elizabeth Bennet is exactly the right wife for him, for, with a nature as capable of tenderness and constancy as his, she has all the simplicity, brightness, and playfulness which are wanting in him; yet from the day that she and Mr. Darcy first meet they take a mutual aversion to each other, and long after he has succumbed, and fallen in love with her, she is unconscious of his feelings, and continues to dislike him.
Elizabeth Bennet and her family
Elizabeth lives in Hertfordshire with a clever satirical father (whose pet she is), an intensely vulgar silly mother, and four sisters, of whom only one is her equal and companion: Jane and Elizabeth Bennet are as Cassadra and Jane Austen were to one another.
The Bennets, though well off, are not rich, and the daughters will be very poor, as their father’s estate is entailed to male heirs, and, at his death, goes to a distant cousin. This arrangement is a perpetual grievance to Mrs. Bennet, who cannot be made to understand the nature of an entail, and makes thereupon the remark which is so much truer than appears at first sights that “there is no knowing how estates will go when once they come to be entailed!”
Bad first impressions
The Bingleys, consisting of Mr. Bingley, a married and an unmarried sister, and the former’s husband, come to reside on an estate near the Bennets, and Mr. Darcy comes with them; he is Mr. Bingley’s great friend, and Miss Bingley has formed the intention of becoming his wife.
The Bingleys and Bennets meet at a ball, where Bingley falls in love at first sight with Jane Bennet, while Darcy is much bored by the whole thing, and, being urged to dance with Elizabeth Bennet, answers hastily and coldly that “she is not handsome enough to tempt me, and I am in no humour to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.”
Elizabeth overhears him, and registers a vow of eternal dislike to him. From this time, though neither the gentleman nor the lady have any wish to meet again, circumstances, which neither of them can control, force them into an intimacy.
. . . . . . . . .
Film and Mini-Series Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice
. . . . . . . . . .
In due course, Darcy, who has begun by despising Elizabeth as a mere country-town belle, and believes himself perfectly safe from her attacks, falls hopelessly in love with her, although she has no idea of it.
When at last he is impelled to throw himself at her feet, she rejects him indignantly, not only, it should be said, on account of the original insult, but also because she believes him to have acted treacherously and basely in some occurrences of his past life.
She has, however, been deceived, in the stories she has heard, which her original dislike to him made her accept too readily, and Darcy, feeling bound to clear himself, writes her an explanation which opens her eyes to see that she has cruelly misjudged and needlessly insulted him.
Upon a generous nature like Elizabeth’s this knowledge can have but one result—she is gradually drawn over, first to admire, then to esteem him, and so reaches the brink of love, though he has no suspicion of her change of feeling and is determined never again to try his fate.
Circumstances, which seem likely to separate him and Elizabeth forever, prove to be the chain which draws them together at last.
Lydia’s disreputable elopement
Lydia, the youngest of the five Bennet sisters, a foolish, spoilt, flirting girl, makes a disreputable elopement with a young officer, named Wickham, of whom Elizabeth had seen a good deal.
He is the son of a former steward of Mr. Darcy, handsome, plausible, and unprincipled, and, having been thwarted by his employer in a disgraceful attempt to take Holy Orders, had revenged himself first by attempting an elopement with Miss Darcy, a girl of fifteen, to whom her brother is guardian, and afterwards by spreading abroad scandalous stories of Darcy, all absolutely false, although concocted with skill.
Elizabeth, at the time when her feelings against Mr. Darcy were most hostile, had heard and believed these stories, and it is to these she made an allusion when rejecting him. To clear himself he is obliged to tell her of his sister’s narrow escape, which, he entreats, she will tell no one but her sister Jane, and she obeys the injunction.
Now, in the first agony at Lydia’s shameful elopement, she reproaches herself bitterly for not having warned her own family against Wickham.
. . . . . . . . . .
Why Has Mr. Darcy Been Attractive to Generations of Women?
. . . . . . . . . . .
Darcy, generously taking the blame upon himself, sets off in pursuit of the fugitives, whom he traces, and reinstates in comparative comfort and decency, after spending much time, trouble, and money in the undertaking, and (having done all this without the knowledge of the Bennet family) only requires that none of them shall ever be made acquainted with all that they owe him.
Of course, the secret leaks out, and Elizabeth is overwhelmed by the magnanimity of the man she has disliked and insulted, so that when be again ventures to plead his cause she grants it. She is all the more willing to do so as Jane is on the eve of a happy marriage with Bingley, and one of her bitterest prejudices against Darcy had been engendered by his opposition to their engagement.
Everything is now rose-color, but, unfortunately, Elizabeth had been at first so very outspoken against Mr. Darcy, and afterwards (partly from necessity) so very reticent about his rise in her good opinion that none of her relations, except an uncle and aunt, who have lately seen them together, can believe in her changed feelings, and even her own beloved sister is hard to convince.
Elizabeth, by repeated assurances that Mr. Darcy was really the object of her choice, by explaining the gradual change which her estimation of him had undergone, relating her absolute certainty that his affection was not the work of a day, but had stood the test of many months’ suspense, and enumerating with energy all his good qualities, she did conquer her father’s incredulity, and reconcile him to the match.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Memorable Quotes from Pride and Prejudice
. . . . . . . . . .
In following the career of the hero and heroine, the secondary characters of Pride and Prejudice have been somewhat passed over, but there is not one that could be suppressed without injury to the book, and each and all are excellent in their way.
Take, for instance, Mr. Collins, the prim, self-satisfied, under-bred young clergyman. He is cousin to Mr. Bennet, and (to Mrs. Bennet’s never-ending wrath) heir to the Longbourn estate.
Mr. Collins, being in search of a wife, hopes to find one among his cousins, and, for that purpose, invites himself to stay with them. He is kindly received, and after dinner the conversation turns upon his good fortune in having been presented to his living by Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
We feel, after a certain dialogue, that we know something of Lady Catherine as well as of Mr. Collins, and our acquaintance with both is allowed to increase. Mr. Collins fixes his intentions on Elizabeth, who, of course, refuses him; but she has an intimate friend, Charlotte Lucas, whose ideas about marriage are by no means as lofty as her own, and who is quite willing to accept a comfortable house and good income with Mr. Collins attached.
She becomes Mrs. Collins, and Elizabeth, though shocked and grieved at the marriage, cannot refuse her friend’s earnest entreaty to pay her a visit in her new home.
Darcy tries again
During this visit she unexpectedly meets Mr. Darcy, who is Lady Catherine’s nephew, and receives the offer from him, which she refuses with such indignant surprise.
She has traveled with Sir William and Maria Lucas—Charlotte’s father and sister—and two days after their arrival the whole party are invited to dine with Lady Catherine, Darcy and his friend not having then arrived.
There could not be a better picture of a second-rate great lady’s behavior towards people whom she considers as her inferiors, and it may be supposed from this how angry she is when her cherished nephew, whom she also intended should be her son-in-law, falls in love with Elizabeth.
She hears of it from outside sources, at about the time of Jane’s engagement to Bingley, and at once sets off for Longbourn to load Elizabeth with reproaches, and insist upon her giving up all idea of marrying Darcy.
Of course, Elizabeth absolutely refuses to do this, and her ladyship departs in great wrath; but as she has wrung from Elizabeth an admission that she is not actually engaged to Darcy, she calls on him in the hopes that he may be deterred from proposing again.
Her anger has, however, just the contrary effect; her account of what she calls Elizabeth’s “perverseness and assurance” fills him with hope, and urges him on to the final proposal, in which he is successful.
“It taught me to hope,” said he, “as I had scarcely ever allowed myself to hope before. I knew enough of your disposition to be certain that had you been absolutely, irrevocably decided against me, you would have acknowledged it to Lady Catherine, frankly and openly.”
As Elizabeth observes, “Lady Catherine has been of infinite use, which ought to make her happy, for she loves to be of use,” and though her ladyship’s fury knows no bounds when she hears that Darcy is actually married to Elizabeth, she condescends in time to make overtures to them, which they care too little about her to refuse.
Elizabeth Bennet charms throughout
Elizabeth Bennet’s charm is one that pervades the book, and is not easily condensed into any isolated passage; but her first connected conversation with Mr. Darcy after their engagement is fairly characteristic of both of them.
Elizabeth’s spirits soon rising to playfulness again, she wanted Mr. Darcy to account for his having ever fallen in love with her.
“How could you begin?” said she. “I can comprehend your going on charmingly when you had once made a beginning; but what could set you off in the first place?
“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”
“My beauty you had early withstood, and as for my manners—my behaviour to you was at least always bordering on the uncivil, and I never spoke to you without rather wishing to give you pain than not. Now, be sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?”
“For the liveliness of your mind, I did.”
Darcy is quite as well-drawn a character as Elizabeth, for though his pride and self-will are, in the early part of the story, almost overpowering, we always see the really fine nature behind them, and we can feel that when he meets with a woman who will respect him, but never stoop to flatter his faults, and whom he can love enough to bear with her laughing at him, he will be a most devoted and excellent husband.
. . . . . . . . .
Pride and Prejudice on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . .
If the book can be said to have any defects, they are—first, that it is impossible to see how such a woman as Mrs. Bennet could have two daughters like Jane and Elizabeth; secondly, at Lydia’s elopement is a disagreeable incident, told too much in detail, and made needlessly prominent.
It is intended to bring Wickham’s baseness into greater relief, and to show how Darcy’s love could even triumph over such a connection; but it is revolting to depict a girl of sixteen so utterly lost to all sense of decency as Lydia is, and the plot would have worked out quite well without it.
Still, at the time Jane Austen wrote, she might have pointed to many episodes in great writers that were far more strangely chosen, and Lydia’s story does not really occupy much of the book, thought, for a time, it is prominent.
The other flaw is, I venture to think, the mistake of a young writer, and Mrs. Bennet is so excellently drawn, and is so amusing, that we cannot wish her refined into anything different.
It may be said, also, that Lady Catherine is too vulgar for a woman who was really of high birth; but it must be remembered that she is introduced among people whom she considers her inferiors, and vulgarity in high life is not so rare but that even Jane Austen, in her quiet country home, may have come across it.
There is not a character nor a conversation in Pride and Prejudice that could be omitted without loss, and we may, therefore, very well give over criticizing small defects, and yield ourselves to the full enjoyment of its genius as a whole.
. . . . . . . . . .
*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post A 19th-Century Analysis & Plot Summary of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 10, 2022
Writing for Madame: The Complex Friendship of Violette Leduc and Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir first met the French author Violette Leduc in 1945. At the time, de Beauvoir and her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre were the golden couple of Parisian intellectual circles, while Violette Leduc was a struggling writer mired in poverty.
Their first meeting, in the heady atmosphere of the Café Flore on the Left Bank, came only after Leduc had observed de Beauvoir and Sartre from a distance for several months, gathering the courage to introduce herself.
The resulting friendship seemed unlikely. Yet it lasted for several years, with mutual respect and admiration that survived Leduc’s unrequited attraction to de Beauvoir as well as the differing circumstances of the two women and their wildly diverging experiences of success.
Even today, Simone de Beauvoir remains a feminist icon while Leduc herself is marginalized, little known to either French or English readers, and their rich, complex friendship is often reduced to that of mentor and protege.
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
An unlikely friendshipTheir backgrounds could not have been more different. Leduc spent her childhood in poverty, as the unwanted daughter of an affair between a servant and the son of a wealthy family. Her education was piecemeal. She was expelled from her boarding school for having an affair with her female music teacher, Denise Hertgès, and she ultimately failed her baccalaureate exam.
Along with Denise (who she lived with until their relationship ended in 1935), she moved to Paris and began working as a secretary for a publishing company. In 1939, she married an old friend, Jacques Mercier, but the marriage only lasted a year and resulted in an abortion that almost killed her. Poor and alone, nursing an unrequited obsession for her friend Maurice Sachs, she attempted to make a living during the war by selling on the black market.
In contrast, de Beauvoir was raised in a bourgeois Parisian family and grew up in the prestigious 6th arrondissement not far from where she would eventually meet Leduc. Despite the family’s fortunes that had suffered during World War I, she attended a prestigious convent boarding school and passed her baccalaureate exams in both math and philosophy in 1925.
She then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne before achieving second place in the agrégation in philosophy, a competitive national postgraduate exam (Jean-Paul Sartre came first). She taught at lycée (high school) level until 1943 when she started making a living from her writing.
Despite their circumstances, the two women found common ground through writing. De Beauvoir later said that her first impression of Leduc was of a “tall, elegant blonde woman with a face both brutally ugly and radiantly alive.” But her attention was truly drawn to the manuscript Leduc handed her, titled “Confessions of a Woman of the World.”
De Beauvoir was skeptical. But instead of the “socialite’s confessions” she had been expecting, it was an extraordinary memoir of childhood that enthralled her so much that she read the first half of it without stopping. Determined that it should be published, she arranged for excerpts to appear in Les Temps Modernes, the journal that she had launched with Sartre, and was instrumental in its eventual acceptance by Gallimard in 1946. It was published as L’Asphyxie (later translated as In the Prison of Her Skin and again as Asphyxia).
It was the start of what would become a complex relationship, in which de Beauvoir became not only Leduc’s lifelong mentor and champion of her work, but also her muse and the subject of her unrequited attraction.
The starving woman
From then on, the two met every other week to discuss Leduc’s work. When de Beauvoir was abroad, she would send letters, but whether in person or in writing, she would always ask Leduc the same question: “Have you been working?” Already realizing that Leduc was prone to fits of paralyzing insecurity and feelings of unworthiness, de Beauvoir was determined to keep her new protege writing.
De Beauvoir’s support also extended to the financial: quickly understanding that Leduc’s poverty was a major obstacle to creativity, she arranged a small monthly stipend, claiming that it was paid by Gallimard.
Leduc became infatuated with de Beauvoir and channeled her obsession into a new novel, L’affamée (later translated as The Starving Woman). The novel’s primary theme is hunger and Leduc’s preoccupation with what the narrator calls “the identical mirages of presence and absence.” It begins with the narrator’s encounter, in a café, with a person she calls Madame and goes on to recount the narrator’s fluctuating state of mind as the relationship with Madame evolves.
Alternately close to and distant from Madame, thrown into despair or ecstasy by one meeting after another, the narrator eventually comes to a tentative acceptance of the reality and limitations of the relationship.
The novel also incorporates De Beauvoir’s insistence that Leduc should write: the narrator, conscious of her own perceived shortcomings, seeks out anything that would make her worthy in the eyes of Madame. “Let her order me to remove my shoes, let her order me to run on rocks, on nails, on pieces of broken glass, on thorns.” But what Madame demands instead is the “purgation” of creativity, and in particular of writing.
De Beauvoir described the novel to her American lover Nelson Algren as “a diary in which she tells everything about her love for me. It is a wonderful book.” However, she rejected Leduc’s advances, writing in 1945:
“Despite my colossal indifference, I was very moved by your letter and your journal. You tell me about my loyalty, I admire yours. I believe thanks to our mutual esteem and trust, we will achieve a balance in our relations. It is strange to find out that you are so precious to someone: you know that you are never precious to yourself; there is a mirage effect which will certainly dissipate quickly. In any case, this feeling cannot bother me more than flatter me … I would like you not to be afraid of me anymore, that you get rid of all this fearful side which seems to me so unjustified. I respect you too much for this kind of mistrust, of apprehension, to have any reason to exist.”
Leduc wrote of her devastation, saying, “She has explained that the feeling I have for her is a mirage. I don’t agree.”
. . . . . . . . . .
Learn more about Simone de Beauvoir
. . . . . . . . . .
Far from ending their friendship, however, Leduc’s infatuation only seemed to make it stronger, and De Beauvoir continued to act as a guide and mentor. The two continued to meet every other week, and whenever de Beauvoir was abroad, she sent encouraging and supportive letters to Leduc. From the Sahara, in 1950, she wrote:
“I am wholeheartedly with you in the struggle which you are leading to courageously to write, to live; I admire your energy, I would like this sincere deep esteem to help you a little.”
When Leduc’s novel Ravages had its entire first section censored as obscene for its depiction of a lesbian affair between two schoolgirls, de Beauvoir was “indignant at their prudery, their lack of courage. Sartre too. Do not be broken. You must defend yourself and we will help you…”
The censored novel was eventually published in 1955, while part of the offending section was later published as a stand-alone novella, Thérèse and Isabelle. It was a commercial success, and a film adaptation was released in 1968. But even this was not published in its entirety in France until 2000, and it didn’t appear in English translation until 2012.
Paranoia, depression, and psychiatric treatment
Despite De Beauvoir’s support, Leduc still struggled to achieve the recognition that she wanted and felt she deserved. Her first two books had been well received by other authors such as Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Genet, who said of Leduc, “She is an extraordinary woman … crazy, ugly, cheap, and poor, but she has a lot of talent.”
The critics, though, were not impressed, and Leduc was mostly ignored by the reading public. Despondent and frustrated, she once said, “I don’t think of myself as not understood. I think of myself as nonexistent.”
By 1956, Leduc was suicidal and paranoid. Depressed by poor book sales and plagued by migraines and insomnia, she became convinced that journalists and critics were ridiculing both her creative failures and what she perceived as her ugliness. In desperation, she asked de Beauvoir to help her arrange an “investigation” into this press harassment.
Alarmed, de Beauvoir persuaded her to go to a psychiatric clinic at Versailles. She remained there for six months, her bills paid by de Beauvoir, undergoing electroconvulsive therapy and a “sleep cure.”
Belated success
Over the next few years, Leduc published two more books, neither of which met with much success. Her health remained fragile, and she began to lose faith in writing. It was de Beauvoir, committed to her belief in Leduc’s talent, who encouraged her to write her life story. The result was La Bâtarde, published in 1964 with a glowing preface by de Beauvoir:
“A woman is descending into the most secret part of herself, and telling us about all she finds there with an unflinching sincerity, as though there were no one listening.”
With this book, Leduc finally achieved some of the success she had craved for so long: it sold 170,000 copies in just a few months and was nominated for both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Femina.
“The most interesting woman I know”
It wasn’t entirely a one-sided relationship. De Beauvoir considered Leduc “the most interesting woman I know” and was intellectually inspired by the woman who seemed to encapsulate and embody so many of her philosophical theories. She cited Leduc frequently in The Second Sex and drew on Leduc’s life for the book’s analysis of lesbianism.
In Leduc, she saw a vindication of her own philosophy — that we are all free to choose, no matter our past or previous circumstances. To her, Leduc had overcome the limitations of her childhood by choosing to write, thus freeing herself from the constraints of what life had laid down for her. Leduc, incidentally, challenged this theory, saying that “To write is to liberate oneself. Untrue. To write is to change nothing.”
The friendship between the two women lasted until Leduc’s death in 1972 from breast cancer, but it always defied any kind of neat classification. Despite their closeness, de Beauvoir stated in the 1980s that, “I established a certain distance from the very beginning,” while Leduc admitted in her memoirs:
“I shall never understand the meaning of the word love when it applies to her and to me. I do not love her as a mother, I do not love her as a sister, I do not love her as a friend, I do not love her as an enemy, I do not love her as someone absent, I do not love her as someone always close to me. I have never had, nor will I ever have, one second of intimacy with her. If I could no longer see her every other week, darkness would submerge me. She is my reason for living, without having ever made room for me in her life.”
. . . . . . . . .
Violette
(2013 film) is available to stream on Amazon*
. . . . . . . . .
The complexity and ambiguity surrounding their relationship have proven to be a source of continued fascination: the 2013 film Violette, starring Emmanuelle Devos and directed by Martin Provost, concentrated largely on Leduc and de Beauvoir, and was well received.
And in 2020, when de Beauvoir’s letters to Leduc were sold, auction house Sotheby’s described them as “remarkable … charting a complex and ambiguous relationship…where unrequited amorous passion, tenderness, and mutual admiration tinged with mistrust mingle.”
Perhaps, though, it is best summed up by one of Leduc’s last interviews, given in 1970, in which she poignantly acknowledged, “at the end of my life I will think of my mother, I will think of Simone de Beauvoir, and I will think of my long struggle.”
. . . . . . . . .
Violette Leduc page on Amazon*
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is an author, poet, and artist with a serious case of wanderlust. She is originally from the UK, but has spent time abroad in Europe, the United States, and the Bahamas.
When not traveling or working on her current projects — a chapbook of poetry, “The Cabinet of Lost Things,” and a novel based on the life of modernist writer and illustrator Djuna Barnes — she can be found with her nose in a book, daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Visit her on the web at Elodie Rose Barnes.
. . . . . . . . . .
*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Writing for Madame: The Complex Friendship of Violette Leduc and Simone de Beauvoir appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
