Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 19
May 18, 2018
Three Generations in Search of Anne Elliot
In 2014, when I hosted a celebration in honour of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Mary Lu Roffey Redden wrote a guest post on Mary Crawford’s claim that “A clergyman is nothing.” I’m very happy that she agreed to write for this year’s blog series on Persuasion, and that she chose to share a personal story about a pilgrimage she and her mother, her sister, and her niece made to Lyme Regis. Welcome back, Mary Lu! In last week’s guest post, Carol Adams wrote that “On the Cobb, each visitor can appraise the three candidates for the location of Louisa’s fall.” Many visitors, including Mary Lu and her family, focus on the steps called “Granny’s Teeth.”
Mary Lu recently retired as the director of Halifax Humanities 101, a registered charity offering university level, non-credit Humanities education to adults living on low incomes in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has an MA in Philosophy of Religion from McMaster University and she has worked as both a university and community college instructor. She received a Doctor of Civil Law (honoris causa) from the University of Kings College, Halifax, for her work as an advocate for Humanities education.
“I am for Bath. I have always said Bath is incomparable.” With these words from Nick Dear’s screenplay for the 1995 film of Persuasion, three generations of my family decided our itinerary for a ten-day visit to the south of England in 1998. My mother, at age 78, was making her first trip across the Atlantic, as was I, then in my mid-40’s. My older sister and her twenty-two-year-old daughter had both spent considerable time in Europe but neither had done the sort of literary pilgrimage we envisioned.
Four women: one an undergrad in English, one a PhD In English literature, another an MA in Philosophy, and our mom and grandma, probably better read than all of us, but from a family that during the Depression had no money “to waste on educating a girl,” setting out on a journey to discover places dear to Jane Austen. Persuasion was the novel that would dictate part of our itinerary.
I have often wondered just what the appeal of Persuasion is. It is not a sparklingly witty book like Pride and Prejudice, it lacks the intense emotional character of Sense and Sensibility, and it has as its heroine a modest, quiet, overlooked young woman. But thinking back to that trip I have some thoughts. To my mother, whose longing for education was ignored by her six older siblings and her parents, Anne Elliot, “who never seemed considered by the others” (Volume 1, Chapter 2), must have seemed a sympathetic character. To my niece, who was full of excitement that summer, having just met the young man she would marry two years later, the romance of the novel held a strong appeal. For my sister, the English professor, of course any Jane Austen novel is compelling for the beauty of its writing and the depth of its insight. And for me, at the time a stay-at-home mom of children in school, Anne’s quiet life and capacity for reflection paralleled my own rather quiet existence out of the workforce.
Well, yes, we were all “for Bath,” but to be true to the events as they unfold in Persuasion, we headed to Lyme Regis first. Our heads were full of lines from the recent film of Persuasion and while we had each read the novel a few times, as can happen with a film adaptation you like, the dialogue had stuck in our heads supplanting what Jane Austen often left as narrated description rather than direct dialogue.
(In fact, a few years later, my sister was teaching an undergraduate course that included Pride and Prejudice on the syllabus and when she asked her primarily female class to name a scene in the book they particularly loved, a majority of her students described the famous “wet shirt” scene featuring Colin Firth.)
Lyme Regis on a blustering, chilly day in July was both a disappointment and everything we hoped for. The waves were crashing over the top of the Cobb and it was too dangerous for my mother and her middle-aged daughters to try to walk that slippery, wet surface—the very conditions that rendered the high part of the Cobb off limits to the “ladies” in the novel. But my niece could see no reason not to attempt to climb “Granny’s Teeth,” the steps that seemed to be the very ones Louisa Musgrove, also young and impulsive, could not resist. Reciting lines from the film version, I played Captain Wentworth: “No! It is too high!” “Louisa, don’t be so foolish….”
We weren’t just play acting. The steps really are very treacherous and the day being wet and windy made them even more so. I wasn’t just Captain Wentworth at that point, but a concerned auntie worried about my laughing, exuberant niece. Fortunately, she did not meet the fate of Louisa Musgrove and we had a great laugh about our silliness when she jumped down, from one of the lower steps.
It was a lovely moment that we all enjoyed thoroughly in spite of the wind and wet. The next day we set out for Bath from our rented cottage near Salisbury and had a lovely lunch in the Pump Room, where our shared excitement at being in the very room Jane herself had frequented was immense. Three years later, my mother began to show signs of the dementia which ravaged the last 12 years of her life. How grateful we are to have made that trip where all four of us pretended ourselves into a favourite Jane Austen novel. Our experience has probably been duplicated countless times by Jane Austen enthusiasts, and I hope that it will continue to be so for generations to come.
Quotations are from the Penguin edition of Persuasion, edited and with an introduction by Gillian Beer (1998) and from Persuasion, screenplay by Nick Dear (1996).
Twenty-second in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Maggie Arnold, Hazel Jones, and Maggie Lane.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
May 11, 2018
After the Fall
“Falls communicate something, if we are paying attention,” writes Carol J. Adams in today’s guest post on Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Carol’s essay “Jane Austen’s Guide to Alzheimer’s,” in honour of the 200th anniversary of the publication of Emma, was published in the New York Times in December of 2015. Carol is the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory and many other books. You can visit her website and follow her on Twitter @_CarolJAdams. She’s currently completing a memoir of reading Jane Austen’s novels and providing care to elderly patients. I’m delighted to introduce her guest post on Louisa Musgrove and Lyme Regis.
Beechen Cliff. Box Hill. The steps at the Cobb at Lyme Regis.
The notable aspect of each of these locations in Jane Austen’s fiction is that they are actual places. One isn’t confused about where Beechen Cliff or Box Hill is. (They make their appearances in Northanger Abbey and Emma respectively.) But an ongoing debate about the steps that Louisa Musgrove fell from at the Cobb continues. The Cobb has three distinctly different sets of steps to choose from.
Upon arriving at Lyme Regis, Tennyson supposedly asked to be taken to the Cobb so he could see for himself where Louisa Musgrove fell. I wonder to which of the three stairs on the Cobb he was taken.
Like Tennyson, some readers are drawn to the Cobb, a jetty-like barrier providing protection against the winds and waves of the English Channel. John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) describes it as “a long claw of old gray wall that flexes itself against the sea. … [T]he most beautiful sea rampart on the south coast of England … a superb fragment of folk art. Primitive yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo, and pure, clean, salt, a paragon of mass” (Chapter 1).
Austen stages one of the most dramatic moments in her fiction on the Cobb:
There was too much wind to make the high part of the new Cobb pleasant for the ladies and they agreed to get down the steps to the lower, and all were contented to pass quietly and carefully down the steep flight, excepting Louisa; she must be jumped down them by Captain Wentworth. (Volume 1, Chapter 12)
Louisa, thrilled by jumping and being caught by Wentworth, immediately turns around and runs back up the stairs to be jumped down them again. Though Wentworth says he is not ready, she jumps:
she was too precipitate by half a second, she fell on the pavement on the Lower Cobb, and was taken up lifeless! There was no wound, no blood, no visible bruise; but her eyes were closed, she breathed not, her face was like death. The horror of that moment to all who stood around!
There she lies, and who will determine what to do next? Anne, only Anne.
Louisa’s fall raises Anne up.
For the story, it is immaterial from which stairs Louisa precipitately self-precipitated herself. But for some readers, myself included, our love for the novel draws us to the Cobb. The novel prompted me to think about the notable falls in my family. Falls communicate something, if we are paying attention. Falls aren’t only about clumsiness, or bad timing, or vertigo; they may be telling us something about frailty, or emotional collapse, or post-traumatic stress disorder.
Falls ask us to make decisions, to identify resources, to recognize that something significant has changed. Austen captures all this, too, in the dramatic scene on the Cobb.
On the Cobb, each visitor can appraise the three candidates for the location of Louisa’s fall. The first set is a double set of stairs at the “Gin Shop.” My friends and I passed this option quickly; too solid, too stolid, too near the land.
The most popular choice is “Granny’s Teeth,” the second set of steps. (This is the answer offered by no less venerable an institution than the Jane Austen Centre.)
Granny’s Teeth looks like this:[image error]
Okay, maybe a young woman, burdened by the Regency clothing of her time, might have run back up those steps. I—burdened only by a winter coat—certainly did not. (And what does the name of those stairs says about the dental health of elderly women?)
As many have pointed out, Austen describes the stairs as being part of “the new Cobb.” The new Cobb was rebuilt at the end of the eighteenth century after a storm destroyed it. A plaque commemorates its completion.
When Jane Austen visited Lyme Regis in 1803 and 1804, she would have seen the new stairs and the plaque.
Perhaps the party from Uppercross on their first visit to the Cobb went up the first steps, and came down the second (Granny’s teeth). And maybe on the second day they went down the third, the new steps.
We could say it does not matter which stairs were the scene of Louisa’s fall. The steps that really matter are those in our mind, where the event—as with all of Austen’s fiction—really takes place. After the fall, Anne speaks up, reclaims her voice, and begins to control the narrative of her life.
But anyone who stood on that “noble hill,” Beechen Cliff, or experienced the vista from Box Hill, understands the frisson of connection to Austen and her characters. And there at the foot of the steps on the Cobb, we find ourselves head over heels in the novel itself.
We might run up the stairs toward the upper part of the Cobb thinking about Louisa (or a family member). Walking on the upper part of the Cobb, I remembered the dramatic falls of my life. Jane Austen gave me the chance to see them from these heights—and reimagine each of them, first from the Gin Shop, then from Granny’s teeth, and finally from the “new” steps with the turmoil of the sea so close.
But on the lower part of the Cobb, it was Anne, only Anne, who held sway.
Quotations are from the Cambridge University Press edition of Persuasion, edited and with an introduction by Janet Todd and Antje Blank (2006).
All photographs of Lyme Regis are by Carol J. Adams.
Twenty-first in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Mary Lu Redden, Maggie Arnold, and Hazel Jones.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
May 4, 2018
What Anne Knew
“Anne at the beginning of Persuasion has nothing to learn, no knowledge to gain from ‘till this moment I never knew myself’-style epiphanies,” writes Jessica Richard in today’s guest post for the blog series I’m hosting in honour of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.[image error]
Jessica is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She’s the author of The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Palgrave, 2011) and editor of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (Broadview, 2008), and she’s co-founder and co-editor of The 18th-Century Common, a public humanities website for enthusiasts of eighteenth-century studies. It’s a pleasure to introduce Jessica’s guest post for “Youth and Experience.”[image error]
The scholar Eve Sedgwick once lambasted Austen criticism for “its unresting exaction of the spectacle of a Girl Being Taught a Lesson”; critics of a certain era seemed to be obsessed with performing disciplinary-didactic readings of Austen’s works. Sedgwick pulls lines from Tony Tanner to illustrate this, though he’s hardly the only offender:
“Emma… has to be tutored… into correct vision and responsible speech. Anne Elliot has to move, painfully, from an excessive prudence.” “Some Jane Austen heroines have to learn their true duties. They all have to find their proper homes.” Catherine “quite literally is in danger of perverting reality and one of the things she has to learn is to break out of quotations”; she “has to be disabused of her naïve and foolish ‘Gothic’ expectations.” Elizabeth and Darcy “have to learn to see that their novel is more properly called…” (Tanner, Jane Austen [1986], quoted in Sedgwick “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Critical Inquiry 17.4 [1991], with Sedgwick’s emphasis).
Yet Anne Elliot’s learning process does not take place over the course of Persuasion; it does not anchor the novel’s plot; rather it happened before the novel itself begins. Indeed, this significant change in her views—“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older”—is stated but not explained, described but not accounted for. We are told at the outset that “Anne, at seven and twenty, thought very differently from what she had been made to think at nineteen,” but we don’t know exactly when this change took place, what prompted it, what stages of reassessment Anne may have undergone during the eight years “since this little history of sorrowful interest had reached its close” (Volume 1, Chapter 4). It seems clear then that Anne’s lesson-learning is not of narrative interest to Austen. Instead, Anne at the beginning of Persuasion has nothing to learn, no knowledge to gain from “till this moment I never knew myself”-style epiphanies (Pride and Prejudice, Volume 2, Chapter 13).
Not only does Anne already know herself thoroughly at the beginning of Persuasion, understanding completely (now that such knowledge is irrelevant) that an engagement to a man with an uncertain future would have made her happier than the “certain immediate wretchedness” of breaking it off. She also knows Wentworth thoroughly as soon as he crosses her path after an eight-year separation. Anne reads his smallest gestures with complete accuracy. When he declines an invitation to breakfast at Uppercross Cottage, “Anne understood it. He wished to avoid seeing her” (Volume 1, Chapter 7). When Mrs. Musgrove sighs over the fate of her late son Richard, Anne reads in “a certain glance of his bright eye, and curl of his handsome mouth,” Wentworth’s real opinion of the hapless younger Musgrove. “It was too transient an indulgence of self-amusement to be detected by any who understood him less than herself” (Volume 1, Chapter 8). When he silently compels her into the Crofts’ carriage after an exhausting walk to Winthrop, “She understood him. He could not forgive her,—but he could not be unfeeling. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high and unjust resentment, though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer, without desire of giving her relief” (Volume 1, Chapter 10).
When they meet in Bath, Anne comprehends that Wentworth’s “sentences begun which he could not finish—his half averted eyes, and more than half expressive glance,—all, all declared that he had a heart returning to her at least; … She could not contemplate the change as implying less.—He must love her.” And by the evening’s end she understands that “jealousy of Mr. Elliot! … [was] the only intelligible motive” for Wentworth’s hasty departure before the concert concluded (Volume 2, Chapter 8). Every narrative declaration of Anne’s complete comprehension of Wentworth’s inner thoughts is confirmed by subsequent action or by Wentworth himself. Eventually, even Wentworth realizes that Anne has read him thoroughly: “I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine” (Volume 2, Chapter 11).
Yet neither the reassessment of prudence that Anne undertook before the novel began nor her repeatedly demonstrated understanding of Wentworth bring her the tiniest bit closer to happiness. For this she is entirely dependent on the chance circumstances that nudge Wentworth into self-knowledge and consequent understanding of Anne. Luck brought Wentworth back into Anne’s life (through the chance encounter of Admiral Croft and Mr. Shepherd when he was looking for an estate to rent); luck released him from the seemingly inevitable union with Louisa (through her injury and Benwick’s proximity during her recovery). Anne’s passive constancy, her woman’s “privilege” of “loving longest, when existence or hope is gone,” is rewarded by Wentworth’s belated recognition of her merits (Volume 2, Chapter 11). But this happy ending can hardly be said to be earned by Anne through lessons learned. Austen goes out of her way to undermine a didactic interpretation of the novel by making use of the narrative resources of improbable romance (luck, chance) rather than probable realism. And the novel’s concluding paragraph highlights the instability of this happy ending, this romance. No amount of self-knowledge or knowledge of each other can reduce “the dread of future war” that clouds Anne and Wentworth’s horizon.
Quotations are from the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Persuasion, edited by James Kinsley, with an introduction and notes by Deidre Shauna Lynch (2004).
[image error]
“They were divided only by Mrs Musgrove.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)
Twentieth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Carol J. Adams, Mary Lu Redden, and Hazel Jones.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
April 27, 2018
Revisiting Persuasion: Jane Austen on history and History
Today’s guest post is by Daniel Woolf, Professor of History, and Principal and Vice-Chancellor, at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He has previously held positions at Dalhousie University, McMaster University, and the University of Alberta. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Royal Historical Society, he is the author of four books, most recently A Global History of History (2011) and The Social Circulation of the Past (2003), and editor or co-editor of several others, and of many articles and book chapters. He was general editor of the five-volume Oxford History of Historical Writing (2011-12). I’m delighted to introduce Daniel’s contribution to “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”
Over a decade ago I (a historian rather than a literary scholar, and a specialist on a much earlier period of history than Jane Austen’s) published a brief essay in the journal Persuasions addressing the question of how Jane Austen dealt with history (“Jane Austen and History: the Past, Gender, and Memory from the Restoration to Persuasion,” in Persuasions 26 [2004]). In that essay I contended that, notwithstanding the caricature of Austen as being anti-historical (the oft-quoted exchange between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney being the most often cited, though not the exclusive, evidence to support this view), the novelist demonstrates an interest in the past and a reconciliation with it in the course of her novels. I suggested Mansfield Park as something of a turning point, given Fanny’s turn to the role of history-educator late in that novel. Persuasion, I argued, was the culmination in this reconciliation and is the most historical of Austen’s novels, both in the sense that Anne Elliot engages in the forensic work of the historian (“she distrusted the past, if not the present” in evaluating Mr. Elliot’s character) in reconstructing and sorting through conflicting versions of events (as Elizabeth Bennet was able to do before her), and in the sense that Persuasion is the only novel that Austen specifically and deliberately situates in chronologically-specific, historical time.
The former essay focused mainly on Austen’s attitude to what might be called “small h” history, namely the study (it was not yet a “discipline” in any meaningful sense) or writing of history. In the present brief re-exploration of Persuasion, I want to shift the focus slightly to a different subject, namely Austen’s preparedness to engage with “capital H” History. By this I intend (and follow Reinhardt Koselleck’s usage of) the modern popular meaning of “history” as being not simply the representation of the past as a story (its accuracy and artfulness thus matters for epistemology, rhetoric and aesthetics) but the actual cumulative course of events, a transition in meaning that is thought (Koselleck again) to have occurred during the late Enlightenment. I believe it can be argued that in Persuasion, more fully than in the earlier novels, Austen gazes beyond the bubble of middle-class and gentry life and more fully out toward a horizon in which political, social, and economic forces are at work fashioning a world very different from that into which she was born, and very different from that fictional England inhabited by the Bennets, Tilneys, Knightleys, Bertrams, and Dashwoods.
This engagement with “History” as well as “history” is signified very clearly at the novel’s outset in the devastatingly ridiculous portrait of Sir Walter Elliot. Fixated on Dugdale (the seventeenth-century antiquary who first recorded his ancestor’s ascendancy to a baronetcy) and an uninterrupted succession since then, as found in the assorted Debretts and Burkes, Sir Walter is utterly blind to the decline of his own class, and to the social and economic factors that have, quite apart from his own profligacy, brought his family near to ruin. It is of course signified again in Austen’s use of dates to situate her story—Wentworth’s references to “the year six” (Volume 1, Chapter 8) being a case in point. (And the shorthand reference carries a radical association, given the French Revolutionary calendar with which Austen was familiar).
Austen’s novels are often praised for their accurate descriptions of the social world and manners of late eighteenth-century and Regency England—how the country “was.” While the earlier novels certainly depict isolated elements of transition and change, Persuasion is the work that most fully dwells on historical liminality. It is a novel not of was, or even is, but of yet to be: of becoming rather than being. This is true in several different respects. Obviously, several the characters are in process of becoming different versions of their former selves–at least those not immune to reform such as Sir Walter and his sociopathic nephew (“black at heart, hollow and black” [Volume 2, Chapter 9]); William Elliot’s major transition is simply one, outside the narrative, that has made him more like Sir Walter himself in prizing the very “blood and connexion” that he had previously repudiated in favour of money (neither being especially praiseworthy motivations) (Volume 2, Chapter 9). Mary (Elliot) Musgrove stays a silly echo of Lydia Wickham in her annoying insistence on precedence over her mother in law Mrs. Musgrove; eldest sister Elizabeth is and remains by and large a female clone of her father. In contrast, other characters mature. Lady Russell, while remaining wedded to a traditional social order, at least repents with respect to her snobbish advice to Anne, years earlier, that resulted in her engagement to Wentworth being broken. Anne herself is a few years older and wiser (though at 27—the modal age for Austen females—in a different state of transition from maiden to potential spinster), Wentworth less headstrong and more forgiving.
Such character arcs of course occur in the earlier novels, especially among the heroines. What is different here? I suggest it lies, again, in the relation of the novel to external, real historical events and trends. In a political sense, the novel is set exactly during the period of Napoleon’s first exile. England, and Europe, are at that point poised between a period of violent revolution and war, and the prospect of peace and commerce. But the peace is uncertain, and not to come easily, as we and Austen both know. It is a kind of Schrödinger’s cat historical junction in which Napoleonic Europe is simultaneously alive and dead, with the year 1814—explicitly identified, in un-Austen-like fashion, in the first chapter—and, more literally, the exile on Elba, providing the temporal “box” whence the cat might emerge either alive or dead.
But Austen the social observer (and still suspicious of “name and date” history après Catherine Morland) isn’t content to focus on political or military transitions. While the wars provide a convenient plot device (not least in the book’s closing reference to “the dread of a future war”, and the admission that a sailor’s wife is often in the situation of not knowing, for months on end, whether she may be a widow—a further variant on Schrödinger), they are not the focus of the novel, nor its most important historical theme. That, surely, lies in changes to the wider world, such as the economic forces that, for instance, impoverish an invalided widow like Charlotte Smith, brought to ruin by a husband’s colonial speculations, and that creates grasping parvenus like William Elliot. (These are changes which, as William H. Galperin observes in The Historical Austen [2003], are unimaginable in Mansfield Park where “any change, apart from mobility in the most monolithic sense, is plainly out of bounds”).
It is important to note that the coming world is not necessarily better than the old one; Austen is no proto-positivist, nor a Benthamite. Little improvement in the position of women can be either discerned or anticipated in Persuasion, and references to the fortunes to be made in the West Indies—the seat of slavery, which we know Austen disliked—are ambivalent. Yet change the world will, from one dominated not by an old aristocracy and gentry, but by the professions; the down to earth Admiral Croft, a worthy tenant of Kellynch is the prime but not only example. As Robert Morrison observes in the introduction to his edition of Persuasion “the world enshrined in the Baronetage” is beginning to collapse.” An age of reform and empire, which Austen did not live to see, but seems to have sensed, lies ahead, and the future belongs to those prepared to adapt. They will either do useful work for the nation (most notably Croft, Wentworth and most of the naval characters, the agents of England’s transformation into imperial “Britain”), and the entrepreneurially self-made (Wentworth and Croft again), rather than to those who live idly on inherited rank (Sir Walter) nor those who seek to gain such rank through strategic and often loveless marital alliance (William Elliot; Mrs. Clay). Fittingly, the Janus-faced novel that begins in one period of history with Sir Walter gazing into his family past and unable to deal with the present, closes vertiginously poised on the edge of a new era. Austen, the conservative (if always sensitive to inequality and social injustice) depicter of and critic of cultural norms, peers cautiously around the sharp corner of History to become the early nineteenth century’s most subtle prophet of social change.
Quotations are from the Belknap Press edition of Persuasion, edited by Robert Morrison (2011).
Nineteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Jessica Richard, Carol J. Adams, and Mary Lu Redden.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
April 20, 2018
Jane Austen and Adventure
Is Anne Elliot Jane Austen’s most adventurous heroine? This is the question Elisabeth Lenckos addresses in her guest post for “Youth and Experience.” Elisabeth is an author, editor, lecturer, and reviewer currently at work on a novel about Marian Hastings, a seafaring adventuress. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and she has taught fiction and philosophy for seventeen years.
Elisabeth’s Austen-inspired stories were selected in the Chawton House Library Short Story Competition and published in Wooing Mr. Wickham (2011) and Beguiling Miss Bennet (2015). She wrote about Harriet Smith’s “Most precious treasures” for my “Emma in the Snow” blog series, and when I hosted a celebration of Mansfield Park, she contributed a guest post on flattery and charm. It’s a pleasure to share her post on “Jane Austen and Adventure” with you today.[image error]
“If adventures will not befal[l] a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”
Northanger Abbey, Volume 1, Chapter 1
“I can safely say that the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship.”
Persuasion, Volume 1, Chapter 8
Jane Austen and Adventure? But we think of her world as orderly and serene, a place where accidents, hazards, and events of which we have no direction—these are Dr. Johnson’s explanations for the word adventure—rarely happen! What is more, we would not want an Austen lady to suffer mishaps, tempt fate, or place her lovely self in peril, would we? On the other hand, if she doesn’t take a risk and leave the house, isn’t life bound to pass her by?
It almost passes by Emma Woodhouse, who rarely ventures beyond the borders of the Hartfield estate. By contrast, the Dashwood, Bennet, and Price ladies have no choice other than to be housebound; since money is in short supply, they travel rarely and mostly from necessity. Yet, families and friends must be visited; husbands found elsewhere if none offer in one’s village or hamlet; and, as one’s gets older, one’s health must be improved in Brighton or Bath.
Luckily for Austen’s young ladies, her world contains patronesses with a taste for adventure, such as Mrs. Allen in Northanger Abbey, who is keenly aware that a young lady yearns to venture “abroad” and invites Catherine Morland to Bath. Lady Russell in Persuasion neglects her duties towards Anne Elliot, but Mrs. Musgrove corrects her oversight, as she welcomes her into the family, and—so I assume—helps foot the bill for her sojourns to Lyme Regis and Bath.
Could it be that despite her quiet nature, Anne is Austen’s most adventurous principal heroine, as well as—we must look to her future to answer that question—the one who travels more than any other? In the brief space of the novel that tells her story, Anne is transported from Kellynch Hall to her sister’s estate, and hence to Lyme Regis and to Bath; but more importantly, there is the possibility that after her marriage to Captain Wentworth, she will accompany him on his ocean voyages.
Persuasion concludes with a vision of Anne’s married life, a passage that Roger Michell, in his cinematic adaptation of the novel, translates into the romantic image of Anne sailing into the sunset with Frederick Wentworth. Anne has a forerunner: Mrs. Croft, the wife of Admiral Croft, who rents Kellynch Hall from her father. During a dinner at the Musgroves’, Mrs. Croft enthuses about traveling the seas with her husband—the statement I quote above is hers. She reports never feeling sick in their fifteen years of touring together, unless she is parted from him.
Michell depicts this moment beautifully. As Mrs. Croft relates her adventures, Anne listens intently, her eyes sparkling with secret exhilaration. Captain Wentworth’s stories about his exploits as a captain in the navy have preceded Mrs. Croft’s little speech, but her account adds something that Anne has not hitherto considered; that rather than staying home—which Anne later bemoans is the fate of women according to the epics and annals of history—a wife might venture out into the world with her husband.
Venturing out into the world with her husband—those of us who think that this is Anne’s future, might also suggest that it makes Persuasion the most modern and prophetic of Austen’s novels, as it foreshadows the century to come when British women followed their husbands, brothers, and lovers to the far reaches of the globe. During Austen’s time, however, female migration was still very rare. Her aunt Philadelphia Austen Hancock was one of the few women traveling to Madras, Bombay or Calcutta.
According to William Austen-Leigh and Richard Austen-Leigh in Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters: A Family Record, Austen wrote an early sketch about a young woman undertaking the passage to the East Indies, which they believe may have been inspired by her Aunt Philadelphia. However, by the time Austen conceived Persuasion, her seafaring adventuress had transmogrified into a captain’s wife, and luckily so, since Mrs. Croft stands as the one of the most likeable, kind, and honest personalities in Austen’s oeuvre. When she speaks frankly about her devotion to her husband, she reveals to Anne what happiness a woman of spirit might find in an untraditional marriage.
There are precious few happy couples in Persuasion apart from the Musgroves—can it be a coincidence that the most interesting harmonious relationship in the novel exists between a sea captain and his wife? I think not, as Austen considers in her final completed work the partnership of two mature people, who must base their union on something more than mutual attraction. Therefore, I would like to suggest that Anne marries Frederick because she hopes that life with him will be an adventure.
Unlike the women of legend, whom Anne pities in her exchange with Captain Harville, she will not stay home, but sojourn around the world with her man. And if her handling of Louisa Musgrove’s Lyme Regis fall is anything to go by, Anne will do more than rise to the challenge of an adventurous existence. She will come into her own; a woman no longer pitied or overlooked, but remarked upon, deferred to, and admired; in short, a true heroine.
Quotations are from The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford University Press, 1933).
Eighteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Daniel Woolf, Jessica Richard, and Mary Lu Redden.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
April 13, 2018
Sir Walter Elliot Sleeps Through History
Bao Bui is a lecturer in the Department of History at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas, and he has taught courses on American history, international relations, media studies, human rights, gender and women’s history, the politics of food, the history of courtship and weddings, and Jane Austen. At the 2016 JASNA AGM in Washington, DC, he gave a paper on epistolary culture in Emma in which he asked whether Austen sees “the accessible, affordable, and potentially secretive mail as a threat to the orderly world of Highbury and the social environment of its citizens.” The paper was published in Persuasions On-Line: “Epistolary Culture in Emma: Secrets and Social Transgressions.”
Bao studied English literature at Pomona College and his graduate degrees are from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It’s my pleasure to introduce his guest post on Sir Walter Elliot for my blog series “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion .”
In the opening chapter of Persuasion Jane Austen informs us of Sir Walter Elliot’s birth year, 1760. Sir Walter would have spent most of his adulthood living in the shadow of the French Revolution and Napoleonic campaigns. Unlike Continental Europe, Britain saw neither the scourge of large-scale warfare nor sudden, drastic upheavals in the social and political order. Still, the British population, particularly its literate elite, would have no difficulty keeping abreast of the latest news, rumors, and gossip—not to mention the casualty lists—resulting from Britain’s generation-long military struggle against Napoleon. Persuasion opens in the summer of 1814, just months after the Allies have forced Napoleon to abdicate the French throne and go into exile on the island of Elba. The downfall of Napoleon would have dominated the news cycle of the time. Elites and commoners alike would have discussed the news with great interest.
Yet, the opening line of Persuasion tells us that such news did not interest Sir Walter:
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. (Chapter 1)
Sir Walter seems oblivious, if not altogether dismissive, of the much wider world beyond the boundaries of his estate. While millions throughout Europe struggled, fought, and died under some of the most atrocious of circumstances and in titanic battles year in and year out, Sir Walter appears perfectly content to read only the Baronetage, and no more. His curiosity, his mind, and indeed, his attention span, encompass no more than the estate that he inherited. His mental and physical gaze look no further than the multitude of mirrors that surround him in his bedroom, all the better to remind him of divine grace having bestowed on him both “the blessing of beauty” and “the blessing of a baronetcy.” If he gives any thought at all to his servants or the tenant farmers on his estate, he does so only to view them as part of his entitlement. These human beings, who no doubt have friends, families, and acquaintances who serve abroad in the British army and on the seven seas with the Royal Navy, represent to Sir Walter merely the instruments put on earth to perpetuate and signify his most fortunate existence.
Readers of Austen’s time would have no difficult picking up Austen’s deliberate depiction of Sir Walter as a grotesque caricature of self-absorbed aristocratic vanity. One suspects that Lady Russell, for all her class snobbery, reads the papers and knows of events transpiring beyond England’s shores. Persuasion makes it clear that Anne Elliot knows not only the names of naval officers and their deployments, but also that the sailors and ships of the Royal Navy have kept Britain and her civilian population safe from revolutionary blood shedding that has swept across Europe from shores of Portugal to the gates of Moscow. Sir Walter’s thoughts, concerns, and dialogue suggest a vast, unrepentant, unapologetic ignorance of the historical, transformative events transpiring in his lifetime, both in his own country and on the Continent. The only history that interests Sir Walter appears in the Baronetage, where “he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.” In that regard, readers, then and now, must take Austen’s creation of Sir Walter with a grain of salt, for no adult person in England in 1814 could possibly reach such depths of blockheadedness. Jane Austen would have to witness our own present national circumstances in the United States to see a public figure who could elevate both vanity and ignorance to such unbelievable, giddy excess.
Quotations are from the Project Gutenberg ebook of Persuasion.
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“Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)
Seventeenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Elisabeth Lenckos, Daniel Woolf, and Jessica Richard.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
April 6, 2018
“…a something ready for publication…” ~ The Publishing Journey of Jane Austen’s Persuasion
Deborah Barnum wrote about the publishing history of Northanger Abbey in December, at the beginning of my blog series “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,” and now that we’re about halfway through the series, she’s contributed a guest post on the publishing history of Persuasion.[image error]If you missed any of the posts on Northanger Abbey and want to catch up, you can find them all listed here. We’ll spend April, May, and June talking about Persuasion.
Deb is a former law librarian and she’s currently the owner of Bygone Books, an online shop of collectible books in Burlington, Vermont. She’s the Co-Regional Coordinator for the Vermont Region of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), and she compiles the annual “Jane Austen Bibliography” for Persuasions-Online and the Burney bibliography for The Burney Journal. A long-time JASNA member, she serves on the Publications Committee. She’s also a board member of NAFCHL (North American Friends of Chawton House Library). You can find her online at Jane Austen in Vermont. Welcome back, Deb, and thank you for celebrating Persuasion with us!
Here’s the first paragraph of Deb’s post on Persuasion:
I begin with my own prejudice – Persuasion has long been my favorite Austen novel. One cannot dispute the joy of reading Pride and Prejudice; or the laughter at the pure innocence and brilliance of Northanger Abbey; we can sympathize with the moral steadfastness of Fanny in Mansfield Park, savor the (im)perfections of Emma (both the book and heroine!), and revel in that dawning realization that Sense and Sensibility is so much better than at first thought. But it is Persuasion that holds my abiding affection – a novel of second chances, a novel that seems closest in some inexplicable way to Jane Austen herself, a romance where she actually plays out the agony of lost and found love, and so unlike her, a profession of love that she actually doesn’t back off from and leave the reader to their own imaginings!
But here today, I am only going to talk of how it all came to be…
Read the rest on her blog, Jane Austen in Vermont.
[image error]Sixteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by L. Bao Bui, Daniel Woolf, and Elisabeth Lenckos.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
March 30, 2018
The Vanity of Human Riches: A Conversation About Class and Wealth in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion
In today’s guest post for “Youth and Experience,” Deborah Knuth Klenck and Ted Scheinman discuss both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Next week, we’ll turn to Persuasion, with a post by Deborah Barnum on the publishing history of the novel. We’ll come back to Northanger Abbey towards the end of the blog series, in June.
Here’s a photo of Deborah Knuth Klenck visiting Jane Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral in 1992, with her children Ted and Jane.
Deborah was in England that year leading a semester-long Jane Austen Study Group for Colgate University English majors, and, as it happens, she is there again right now, leading her seventh Austen Study Group. She is Professor of English at Colgate, where she teaches classes on Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and other writers. She has spoken at several JASNA AGMs over the years, from New York City to Santa Fe to Lake Louise to Milwaukee, and she’s been a frequent guest at the annual Chapel Hill, NC Jane Austen Summer Program. For my “Emma in the Snow” blog series, she contributed a guest post on long and short speeches in Emma, and what they tell us about Austen’s characters.
Ted is a writer and scholar whose first book, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan, was published earlier this month. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, Slate, and a variety of other periodicals. He’s based in Southern California, where he works as a senior editor at Pacific Standard magazine.
I’ve been reading and enjoying excerpts from Camp Austen and I’m looking forward to reading the book, which Publishers’ Weekly calls “a loving and often humorous tribute to the Janeites of the world.” Here are a couple of excerpts: “How Dressing as Mr. Darcy Taught Me Not to Be an Academic Snob” and “Corsets and Cotillions: An Evening with the Jane Austen Society.” And here’s Ted’s “Guide to Jane Austen and Children.”
In the introduction to an interview with Deborah (“I Think of It as a Mom-oir”), Ted says, “When I began to write a short book about attending a Jane Austen summer camp, I did not anticipate how much the resulting book would be about my mother. In retrospect, it could hardly have been otherwise. … As a kid I read very little Austen, but I knew that my mother loved her and I admired my mother for this love. The novels seemed to promise transport to a realm of refinement and wisdom, and I wanted to go there with her.”
It’s a pleasure to introduce this conversation between Deborah and Ted.
DJKK: The cascade of 200th anniversaries in Austen studies in 2017 culminated in the simultaneous commemorations of Austen’s death and the posthumous publication of both her very first and her very last completed novels. Ted Scheinman and I have been reflecting on these two texts—and bandying words.
Though I have long thought that Emma is, of all the books in the canon, the one that best repays re-reading, this year’s juxtaposition of Northanger Abbey with Persuasion has surprised me. My most recent treats in 2017 were two conferences about Persuasion (the Jane Austen Summer Program at UNC Chapel Hill and the Halifax, Nova Scotia, meeting focused on the Austen family’s ties to the navy—and to Halifax itself), so I’ve chosen to focus on the Persuasion side of this pairing. But there turn out to be many commonalities between Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
The latter book opens with the opening of a book, of course, the Elliot family’s copy of the Baronetage, and with the blunt summary about the baronet himself, “Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character; vanity of person and of situation” (Volume 1, Chapter 1). This detail is the first of what I think of as the many gender displacements throughout the novel. In several events and relationships in Persuasion, it seems that the feminine takes the lead, whether it’s Captain Wentworth comparing his first ship the Asp with an old pelisse, Mrs. Croft taking the reins of the family gig to prevent accidents, or Anne’s statement about authorship “the pen has been in [men’s] hands” being contradicted before she utters it (“[the noise] was nothing more than that [Captain Wentworth’s] pen had fallen down”) (Volume 2, Chapter 11).
When we consider that naval heroes are also more or less pirates, it can be a surprise to find them all so genteel—and gentle.
The novel discusses Sir Walter’s personal beauty much more than any woman’s—which makes one wonder whether Mr. Darcy is wrong about vanity (“a weakness indeed”): perhaps Sir Walter’s vanity is indeed justified (Pride and Prejudice, Volume 1, Chapter 11). We never meet Lady Elliot, of course, but we can still be surprised that, as an “excellent, . . . sensible and amiable” woman, she married Sir Walter at all (Persuasion, Volume 1, Chapter 1). To attract the otherwise discerning Lady Elliot, Sir Walter must have been the George Clooney—or, for an “Austen” reference, the Colin Firth—of his day (and of course, it’s always still “his day”).
We are more accustomed to find sensible men smitten—precisely, in two cases, “captivated,” in fact—by air-headed women (Pride and Prejudice, Volume 2, Chapter 19; Mansfield Park, Volume 1, Chapter 1) than the other way around.
TS: . . . and yet here we find an air-headed man captivated by himself! (One suspects that Sir Walter is susceptible to flattery from a striving lady because he has become so susceptible to his own.) I’d point out that, like Persuasion, Northanger Abbey opens with the opening of a book, or rather of several, in the florilegium of trite wisdom that Catherine’s biographer rattles off in the first chapter. But your remark on the Baronetage makes me think for the first time about how both novels include characters who are addicted to, and seduced by, the wrong kind of book, and are thereby confounded when the world does not conform to their literary expectations.
Speaking of literary expectations, Catherine seems to be half-right when she presumes some sort of Gothic moral decrepitude on the part of General Tilney. While she is wrong to suspect that the General murdered his wife—Henry informs her that he was present for the final days of his mother’s treatment, and that nothing suspicious happened—she is not necessarily wrong in thinking that the General’s relationship with his late wife involved an imbalance of virtue, in much the same way that Sir Walter’s marriage did; as Henry explains with a ginger diplomacy, the General is no gallant, but that Catherine has “’erred in supposing him not attached to her. He loved her, I am persuaded, as well as it was possible for him to—we have not all, you know, the same tenderness of disposition’″ (Volume 2, Chapter 9).
Catherine and the General are suspicious of each other in different ways, and each tests the other at various opportunities. Of course, the General is guilty of precisely what he accuses Catherine of—immoral, calculated fortune-hunting—and one of the most cutting ironies is that Catherine, however addled by novels, is still a better judge of character than the allegedly gimlet-eyed General.
What do you think, Mom? We see similar extended motifs of reversal in Persuasion, no?
DJKK: . . . Indeed. (And “captivated by himself”! Why didn’t I turn that phrase?)
Persuasion’s more obvious reversal is the shift among the social classes: the Crofts moving in to Kellynch Hall as the Elliots retreat to paltry rented rooms in Bath, just as the navy list supplants the Baronetage as the standard reference-book. Sir Walter’s complaints about the ennobling of naval heroes (even “’Lord St. Ives, whose father we all know to have been a country curate, without bread to eat’”) smack of the sort of unforgivable snobbery Emma engages in during her least fine hour—dismissing Robert Martin as one of “’the yeomanry’” (Persuasion, Volume 1, Chapter 4; Emma, Volume 1, Chapter 4). But Sir Walter’s comical mix-up of his ideas about class with his ideas about facial beauty almost blunt his disdain for naval arrivistes. The facial becomes farcical when Mrs. Clay tries to shoehorn herself into a conversation about the detrimental effects of seafaring upon naval officers:
“The sea is no beautifier, certainly; sailors do grow old betimes . . . they soon lose the look of youth. But then, is not it the same with many other professions . . . ? Soldiers, in active service, are not at all better off: and even in the quieter professions, there is a toil and a labour of the mind . . . which seldom leaves a man’s looks to the natural effect of time. The lawyer plods, quite care-worn; the physician is up at all hours, and travelling in all weather; and even the clergyman”—she stopt a moment to consider what might do for the clergyman;—“and even the clergyman, you know, is obliged to go into infected rooms, and expose his health and looks to all the injury of a poisonous atmosphere.”
Mrs. Clay’s fulsome, lengthy speech is a classic: it’s right up there with Mr. Elton’s proposal to Emma. The absurdity of a woman elaborately complimenting a man’s complexion is just the first instance of Mrs. Clay’s speech inverting social norms. Her style betrays her lack of delicacy, too. She repeats herself in a very pedestrian way (“soon lose the look of youth” adds nothing in style or substance to “grow old betimes”). Then, she starts reciting her list of three professions before making sure she has three separate things to say. Bad prose-stylists, overreaching for the cadence of a trio of phrases, often add a synonym of the second thing as a third thing in the list, for the sake of “three-ness.” Flummoxed in mid-speech, Mrs. Clay has used up on the physician words more appropriate for the clergyman, and finds herself at a loss, so that the clergyman’s dangers must become somehow those of a medical man (Emma, Volume 1, Chapter 4; Persuasion, Volume 1, Chapter 3). Her logical conclusion is that only landed gentlemen “’who can live in a regular way’” retain, like Sir Walter, “’the blessings of health and a good appearance to the utmost.’” Somehow, Mrs. Clay reminds me here of Mr. Rushworth as he meets his father-in-law-to-be in the aftermath of the Lovers’ Vows débacle, affirming that, rather than acting, “’I think we are a great deal better employed sitting comfortably . . . doing nothing’” (Mansfield Park, Volume 2, Chapter 1). A fitting “employment,” forsooth!
TS: Yes, and General Tilney seems to share in Mrs. Clay’s superstition about class and appearance; the General scours Catherine’s person and comportment for any hint of money, and finds those hints where he likes. In one passage that feels just a bit creepy, he extols the “’elasticity’″ of Catherine’s walk—an expression I always take less as lechery and more as a sort of classism. Persuasion too contains an important line about elasticity, and what it tells us about character—but crucially, there, it is not the superficial elasticity of the body, but an ″elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried [Mrs. Smith] out of herself, which was from nature alone.″ Anne correctly perceives a sort of moral aristocracy in Mrs. Smith’s elasticity of mind, where the General incorrectly perceives an upper-class breeding in Catherine’s gait.
Of course in Northanger Abbey, the General wishes to court Catherine’s admiration as well. He so enjoys showing off—whether it’s his own figure (“He was a very handsome man, of a commanding aspect, past the bloom, but not past the vigour of life” [Volume 1, Chapter 10]), his newly designed offices, or his succession houses with their pineapples (Volume 2, Chapters 7 and 8), that he sometimes forgets to interrogate Catherine about her family’s—or even the Allens’—finances (Volume 1, Chapter 10). And, as for the presumption that Catherine is the Allens’ heir, the General never questions the source of that story: one would have thought that the General, a man of the world, could see through a “rattle” like John Thorpe!
DJK: Given Sir Walter’s dual shortcomings, “vanity of person and of situation” (Volume 1, Chapter 1), he can easily become distracted from judging Mrs. Clay’s social (“situational”) shortcomings—he even becomes unconscious of her freckles over time: this confusion is just one instance of a curious quality I see in this novel’s treatment of social class. The Elliot family, with the exception of Anne, worry about their status with the anxiety of nouveaux riches, ever eager to assert their superiority: having conceded that he must let his house, for example, Sir Walter immediately demurs absurdly about terms: “’I am not fond of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable’” (Volume 1, Chapter 3). (What would be the correct time for approaching a shrubbery? Need one genuflect before doing so?) This “tenacity,” as Louisa Musgrove describes it, referring to Mary’s insistence on always taking precedence of her mother-in-law, might remind us of another person of high rank behaving badly: Lady Catherine de Bourgh sneers at the Bennets for having no governess (Volume 2, Chapter 6), meddles minutely in other people’s business (recommending shelves for the parsonage closet [Volume 1, Chapter 14]) and laying down the law about how Maria Lucas should pack her trunk [Volume 2, Chapter 14]). She even takes it on herself to predict the weather (Volume 2, Chapter 6). Lady Catherine employs a dedicated aide de camp to support her assertions of superiority: Mr. Collins is tasked to brag about such extravagances as the cost of glazing Rosings’s windows (even though this detail actually betrays how very modern is the late Sir Lewis de Bourgh’s not-so-ancestral pile).
I’ve always found the Elliots’ harping on their status curious, because it’s so inconsistent. Anne seems to be the only family member who feels the “degradation” one would expect, when Elizabeth boasts of having two drawing rooms in their rented accommodation in Camden-place. Even the green-house plants that decorate the card-party must be rented (Volume 2, Chapter 3; Volume 2, Chapter 11). Elizabeth seems as insecure in her status as Mrs. Elton, who cannot mention her brother-in-law’s barouche-landau often enough (the over-precision of the carriage’s description is akin to contemporary brand-name-dropping by status-seekers: “I’m going to the store” becomes “I’m taking the Audi to Whole Foods”). We expect such behavior of Mrs. Elton—who is nothing if not a social climber—but the Elliots are already well up the ladder by birth.
TS: Absolutely—and, in a similar vein, there’s something dispiritingly arriviste about the General’s attempts to impress Catherine with his gardens and his “tolerably large eating room.” He seems to mount a whole production for Catherine’s benefit, a sort of parody of rural conspicuous consumption. He draws her attention to every detail, from the humble (but of course well-designed) offices to the latest in Staffordshire breakfast services, (albeit “quite an old set, purchased two years ago”). It’s worth noting that even Mrs. John Dashwood recognizes the superiority of her mother-in-law’s antique breakfast china, but the General is always after the next, shiniest thing, including Catherine. The General is especially complacent when he gives Catherine the tour of his succession houses, the little hothouses fastidiously maintained at different temperatures (Volume 2, Chapter 8; Volume 2, Chapter 7, Sense and Sensibility, Volume 1, Chapter 2).
Here, I keep thinking of that brilliant Raymond Chandler scene in the hothouse, from The Big Sleep, where Philip Marlowe goes to meet another general, General Sternwood; the General complains that orchids are “Nasty things! Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.” And it strikes me that General Tilney would very much like to keep Catherine safely potted in his house, at a resting temperature of his choosing, another ornament fitting the greatness of his family pile.
DJK: Great comparison! “[T]he rotten sweetness of corruption” seems particularly appropriate, from a Persuasion point of view, when I consider Mrs. Clay—whose surname is “like the flesh of men,” in fact.
When Lady Dalrymple and the Honourable Miss Carteret arrive in Bath and condescend to notice the Elliots, the family’s toadying behavior shocks Anne:
Anne was ashamed. Had Lady Dalrymple and her daughter even been very agreeable, she would still have been ashamed of the agitation they created, but they were nothing. There was no superiority of manner, accomplishment, or understanding.
Anne goes so far in this instance as to discuss her real feelings on the subject with Mr. Elliot:
“I certainly do think there has been by far too much trouble taken to procure the acquaintance. I suppose (smiling) I have more pride than any of you; but I confess it does vex me, that we should be so solicitous to have the relationship acknowledged.” (Volume 2, Chapter 4)
In Persuasion, the truly “superior” people regardless of class are superior in understanding, self-knowledge, and basic good-heartedness: people like the Musgroves senior, or the Crofts, or the impoverished Mrs. Smith, all of whom seem comfortable in their identities. Even Anne’s god-mother, her late mother’s close friend Lady Russell, betrays too much consciousness of her inferiority as “the widow of only a knight”; her “prejudices on the side of ancestry” affect her judgment of Mr. Elliot and her early advice to Anne about Frederick Wentworth (Volume 1, Chapter 1). Fortunately, in the eight years since Anne last followed that advice, she has learned to trust her own better judgment. In fact, Anne’s shift in confidential conversation toward the novel’s end from Lady Russell to Mrs. Smith can be seen to mark another shift in the novel’s treatment of class. Even though she engages in somewhat vulgar gossip, a means of communication she herself compares, in no way apologetically, to a sewer, Mrs. Smith shows more true gentility than her purported social superiors, like Elizabeth Elliot. It is telling to recall Elizabeth’s first, prompt proposal about how the family could try to pay its debts (or at least somehow “retrench”): “to cut off some unnecessary charities” (Volume 2, Chapter 9; Volume 1, Chapter 1). Compare Mrs. Smith, so straitened in her own circumstances: Nurse Rooke has seen the patient through some of the worst of her rheumatic complaint:
“As soon as I could use my hands, she taught me to knit, which has been a great amusement; and she put me in the way of making these little thread-cases, pincushions and card-racks, which you always find me so busy about, and which supply me with the means of doing a little good to one or two very poor families in this neighborhood.” (Volume 2, Chapter 5)
Elizabeth’s abandonment of the lady-of-the-manor’s charitable role reminds me of Mrs. John Dashwood’s petty undercutting of her husband’s intended generosity to his step-mother and half-sisters (with her unforgettable proverb, “’people always live forever when there is any annuity to be paid them’”), even as she seeks the add the latest thing to the Norland estate: a greenhouse (Sense and Sensibility, Volume 1, Chapter 2; Volume 2, Chapter 11). Mrs. Smith’s generosity to those more desperately poor than she (and Nurse Rooke’s shrewd use of occupational therapy for her patient!) show true superiority.
TS: Yes indeed—and in a similar vein, General Tilney’s overweening kindness toward Catherine (insisting, for example, that the Woodston cottage not be pulled down—because Catherine admires it [Volume 2, Chapter 11]) promptly devolves into deep cruelty, once he discovers that she is not the heiress that he’d convinced himself she was. It’s another one of those princesses-turned-out-of-the-castle moments that we associate with fairytales, but which Austen consistently anchors in day-to-day realism (Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park). The General, then, does a supremely cowardly and ungentlemanly thing, using his daughter as a cutout, compelling Eleanor to hasten Catherine out of the house, on the long journey back to her home, alone and without even pocket-money, until Eleanor delicately offers, and Catherine delicately accepts, a small sum to see her on her way.
The General’s meanness—in turning her out; in not providing for her journey; in refusing to write to her himself—is, as his son will later correctly charge, not at all in the character of a gentleman; this bit qualifies less as a class reversal than a basic betrayal of the decency with which the patrician class likes to associate itself. Hearing the story once Catherine returns to Fullerton, her family agrees that “it was a strange business, and that he was a strange man″—the euphemisms that decent people use when talking about indecent ones, however much richer the indecent ones might be.
Of course, Catherine’s mother soon begins to suspect that her daughter’s homecoming malaise is the result of having been raised too high, and recommends wholesome reading to bring Catherine back down to earth: assuming that Catherine, from her time at Bath and then at Northanger, has become addicted to “grand” French bread, Mrs. Morland remarks that “’There is a very clever Essay in one of the books up stairs upon much such a subject, about young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance …. I am sure it will do you good’″ (Volume 2, Chapter 15).
Much like the General, Catherine’s mother begins by believing that her daughter has been seduced by the prospect of wealth and high company, rather than her simply having fallen in love with a modest clergyman. Distrust of graspingness or class aspiration is not limited to the wealthy; and often the more precarious members of the middle class can be quite as suspicious of social climbers as any General Tilney.
Quotations are from the Cambridge editions of Persuasion, edited and with an introduction by Janet Todd and Antje Blank (2006), Pride and Prejudice, edited and with an introduction by Pat Rogers (2006), Mansfield Park, edited and with an introduction by John Wiltshire (2005), Emma, edited and with an introduction by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (2005), and Sense and Sensibility, edited and with an introduction by Edward Copeland (2006).
If you’re interested in the Jane Austen summer camp Ted talks about in his book Camp Austen, you can find more information here: “Northanger Abbey & Frankenstein: 200 Years of Horror,” June 14-17, 2018.
Fifteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: Deborah Barnum’s guest post on the publishing history of Persuasion.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
March 23, 2018
Eleanor and Isabella
Saniyya Gauhar, Mahlia S. Lone, and Laaleen Sukhera are members of the Jane Austen Society of Pakistan (JASP) and contributors to a collection of stories entitled Austenistan, which was published last year by Bloomsbury India and will be published in the UK next month. Amanda Foreman calls Austenistan “a clever, contemporary take on Jane Austen’s work,” Moni Mohsin calls it “Austen with garam masala,” and Rebecca Smith calls the stories “light, bright and sparkling”—she says she “smiled all the way through” the book. “Just as in Austen’s novels,” Smith writes, “we see heroines struggling to control their own destinies instead of being pushed onto the marriage market.”
When I invited Laaleen to contribute to my blog series “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,” she asked if she could collaborate with other members of JASP. Of course I said yes. It’s my pleasure to introduce this co-authored guest post on Eleanor Tilney and Isabella Thorpe by Saniyya, Mahlia, and Laaleen.
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Saniyya, Laaleen, and Mahlia
Saniyya Gauhar is a freelance writer and editor. She graduated from Sussex University and she has worked in corporate law and litigation in London and Pakistan. She was a founding member of JASP. Her contribution to Austenistan is called “The Mughal Empire.”
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Saniyya Gauhar
Saniyya: In Regency society, it was unseemly for women of the upper and middle classes to work and earn a living. For such women, there were two main ways that financial security was assured—they either had to be born into money (like Eleanor Tilney) or marry into it (as Isabella Thorpe aspires to do). This resulted in a society that was obsessed with marriage primarily for material gain and because it was the only “career path” available to women, the matrimonial market was a cut-throat, competitive, social minefield. But the hypocrisy of it all was that it was social suicide for a woman to be seen to want money lest she be branded a gold digger. A woman had to cultivate an aura of innocence, professing to value love and not money. Isabella Thorpe has to tread this minefield, and coming as she does from a humble background, for her the stakes are high. Her main ambition is to marry a rich man—but not to be seen to be doing so. As a result, she comes across as disingenuous, artificial and inconsistent in her words and actions.
She says what society expects: “My wishes are so moderate that the smallest income in nature would be enough for me” (Volume 1, Chapter 15). However, at other moments, she is more practical: “it is not a trifle that will support a family nowadays; and after all that romancers may say, there is no doing without money” (Volume 2, Chapter 3). It is this quest for a grander match that makes her throw caution to the wind by allowing herself to be seduced by Captain Tilney, the heir to Northanger Abbey, thereby jeopardizing her engagement to James Morland, who has “only” four hundred pounds a year. The gamble fails as Tilney discards Isabella and Morland breaks their engagement. Isabella pays a hefty price for her ambitions.
Eleanor Tilney, on the other hand, is a much more balanced, wise and composed character. She is not desperate to marry for money. Nevertheless, her father, the mercenary General Tilney, is determined she must marry a rich man and he blocks Eleanor’s marriage to the man she is in love with. It is only when that same man becomes a viscount that he allows it.
Mahlia S. Lone’s contribution to Austenistan is called “The Fabulous Banker Boys.” She’s a textile journalist and the editor of GoodTimes magazine in Lahore, Pakistan. She also contributes to WWD (Women’s Wear Daily) and other publications. She attended Kinnaird College in Lahore, William Smith College in New York, and Clark University in Massachusetts.
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Mahlia S. Lone
Mahlia: Without the requisite pound sterling, polite society cannot exist and a poor person almost gets denigrated to a position of ridicule. In Northanger Abbey, the three sets of sibling relationships contrast with each other in circumstances as well as manners, personality, and behaviour. While the Tilneys and Thorpes are on either end of the spectrum, the Morlands are in the middle, getting further away from the Thorpes and closer to the Tilneys as the novel progresses. This is just as society expects them to behave, but instead of following conventional societal rules, the Morlands come to this conclusion on their own.
The Thorpes live on the fringes of society. They are “on the make.” No one knows exactly where they come from and they haven’t much money to live on. Isabella uses her wiles to ensnare as eligible a match as she can, but in her overconfidence breaks her engagement with the faithful James Morland when she thinks she can get the more eligible Captain Tilney. However, blinded by ambition and greed, she gets seduced and discarded by the hardened, rakish military man. At the end of the novel, she is poor, disgraced and shunned by polite society, even by sweet, innocent Catherine Morland.
Eleanor Tilney’s situation is the complete opposite of Isabella’s. She comes from a distinguished family with a comfortable wealthy background and was brought up in stately Northanger Abbey. Her position in society is secure and she doesn’t have to scramble for position or marry for fortune. She has nothing to prove to anyone. Austen portrays her as the quintessential Gothic romance heroine who marries a lord at the end of the novel. They are both foils to Catherine’s character. As Catherine gets closer to the more mature Eleanor, she distances herself from the more unsteady Isabella. Catherine’s character evolves and mirrors this shift as she goes from being an inexperienced, highly excitable country girl to becoming a sensible, morally upright and resolute young lady.
Laaleen Sukhera is the editor of Austenistan and the story she contributed to the volume is called “On The Verge.” She has an MSc in Professional Communications and a BA in Screen Studies and Communication and Culture from Clark University in Massachusetts. She’s a communications consultant and writer, and she was the founder of JASP. You can find her on Twitter @laaleen and on Instagram @laaleen_official.
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Laaleen Sukhera
Laaleen: Money and societal expectations go hand in hand in Northanger Abbey, a Regency era practicality that was not often accompanied by romantic love. Catherine Morland has two very different friendships in the course of the novel. She is immediately drawn to the vivacious and somewhat unscrupulous Isabella Thorpe, who is from an unremarkable family. Isabella becomes affianced to Catherine’s brother James when she assumes he has money—and then she encourages her brother John to marry James’s sister Catherine. She acquaints the reader with the qualities of the more arch Regency maiden and proves to be Catherine’s “frenemy.” Her coy behaviour provides a foil to Catherine’s comparative naiveté. Her fall from grace occurs when she sets her cap for someone too high up the social ladder—Captain Frederick Tilney, the heir to Northanger Abbey has no intention of marrying her after toying with her. By the end of the novel, even James Morland with his modest income is beyond her reach.
Higher up the social ladder, Eleanor Tilney is sensible, respectable, and far more eligible. Catherine admires Henry’s sister a great deal and seeks her approval, growing closer to her as she moves away from Isabella. Eleanor herself is not immune to the charms of romantic love. She defies her ferocious father General Tilney with a quiet determination when her proposed match earns his disapproval. However, all this changes when her suitor inherits a title and estate and the General is delighted that his daughter will be a viscountess.
Quotations are from the online edition of Northanger Abbey at Mollands.net.
Fourteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: next week’s post, by Deborah Knuth Klenck and Ted Scheinman, will focus on both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
March 16, 2018
Reading, Misreading, and the Plain Truth
Lyn Bennett is an associate professor of English at Dalhousie University, and her most recent book is Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, 1600-1700 (Cambridge UP, 2018). Her current research focuses on the self-fashioning rhetoric of the professions and, in collaboration with Edith Snook of the University of New Brunswick, on the circulation and production of recipes in early modern Atlantic Canada. She’s also the author of Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth and Lanyer (Duquesne UP, 2004), and her work appears in publications as diverse as Christianity and Literature, Genre, and the Journal of Medical Humanities.
In 2014, in the first guest post for the first blog series I hosted, Lyn analyzed the complexities of the opening paragraph of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. It’s a pleasure to welcome her back with today’s guest post on Northanger Abbey.
Northanger Abbey’s happy ending, as Sara Malton wrote here last week, hinges on the understanding that “even the slightest of texts . . . may have far more historical import than literally meets the eye.” Catherine Morland’s worldview and her expectations, Northanger Abbey makes clear, are very much shaped by the Gothic novels she adores. Influenced especially by Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, our heroine’s fruitful imagination runs free at the Abbey, where she persuades herself that the General, her host and prospective father-in-law, had actually murdered his long-dead wife. It is for this reason, Catherine wrongly infers, that she is suddenly sent unaccompanied home to Fullerton—as much as the novel’s action is precipitated by reading, it is driven also by misreading.
What Catherine does not yet understand is that she is sent packing not because of the story wrought by her over-stimulated imagination, but because of a fiction spoken about her. As Catherine later learns, her unceremonious expulsion had naught to do with her own offense but the General’s discovery that the fortune ascribed to her by the once-hopeful John Thorpe was a fantasy of his making. The damage wrought by boastful braggadocio, Austen makes clear, inflicts not only the self-important and aspirational Thorpe, the “boorish, inattentive reader whose crude nature,” Claire Grogan writes, “is made apparent by his preference for Matthew Lewis’s The Monk” (Introduction to the Broadview edition). It is, we later learn, Thorpe’s tall tale of Catherine’s fortune that misled the General to proceed on “such intelligence” without question. As it turns out, the General is an equally an undiscerning reader: about the intelligence gleaned on Catherine, we are told, “never had it occurred to him to doubt its authority.” A rational and reasonable doubt would, one suspects, have tempered the General’s angry response to the unraveling of a fiction his ambition wished to believe, Catherine “guilty only of being less rich than he had supposed her to be.” Instead, his recognition of faith misplaced in “false calculations” and the resulting belief that Catherine’s “necessitous family” constituted “a forward, bragging, scheming race” who aimed “to better themselves by wealthy connexions” propel him into a rage that proves shockingly uncivil (Chapter 30).
In Henry Tilney, however, Catherine finds a reader more discerning that the lying Thorpe or the too-credulous General. On the walk round Beechen Cliff with the Tilney siblings, Catherine learns that Henry shares something of her own taste in reading. Contrary to her expectations, Henry does not disparage the novel in favour of the “better books” Austen’s heroine supposes him to read in her belief that “young men despised novels amazingly.” On the contrary, Henry defends the often-maligned genre, pronouncing that anyone “who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” The operative word here is “good,” and Henry turns out to be a keen reader of the novelist Catherine so admires. Not only has he “read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works,” he tells his appreciative listener, but he has done so “with great pleasure.” The novel that fuels Catherine’s imaginative fancies during her visit to Northanger seems equally admired by Henry who, having “once begun” The Mysteries of Udolpho, he tells her, the novel he “could not lay down again,” and he was compelled to finish the book in a mere “two days.” It is telling that he also did so most sympathetically, responding, as the attentive reader should, with his “hair standing on end the whole time” and sharing much of it aloud with his sister (Chapter 14).
Sympatico they may be, but Henry’s reading ventures beyond Catherine’s. The history that he is fond of, Catherine complains, she takes up “only as a duty.” Lacking the excitement of the novels she prefers, history offers “nothing that does not either vex or weary.” Androcentric and political, history centres on “The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences,” featuring men who are “good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.” All this, Catherine concludes, “is very tiresome.” Yet Catherine also understands that her impatience with history books denies who she is as a reader: “I often think it odd,” she elaborates, “that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” Recognizing that novels and histories are in some ways not so different, Catherine senses that her distaste for written history is misplaced and contradictory. She does know that the writing of history is to some degree imaginative, and that “The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs” are equally the product of “invention.” And invention, she concludes, “is what delights me in other books” (Chapter 14).
Invention is, of course, the first of rhetoric’s five canons, that which Aristotle describes as “finding the available means of persuasion.” Not to be confused with fabrication, invention is the process of discovering how best to represent the truth one wishes to impart, the persuasive means as crucial to the writing of history as it is to the writing of fiction. For Henry, persuasion depends not on the ingenuity of invention, but on the accuracy he insists upon and for which Eleanor chastises him:
“Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.” (Chapter 14)
Invoking Hugh Blair along with Samuel Johnson, Eleanor complains that her brother’s preoccupation with linguistic precision renders him overly fastidious—or too “nice” in the more precise parlance of an earlier age.
Dr. Johnson is, of course, the author of a famous dictionary and an influential literary critic. Less famous than his contemporary, Blair was in his day well known as the author of the enduringly popular Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Tellingly, Blair is of Henry’s mind in insisting that the first aim of language is accuracy. For Blair, meaning must be illuminated and not obfuscated by the judicious employment of rhetoric’s third canon, and style must not ornament but accurately represent. Plainer is therefore better, Blair argues, for “the richest ornaments of Style only glimmer through the dark and puzzle” when the aim should be “to make our meaning clearly and fully understood” and “without the least difficulty” (Lecture 10). A straight shooter with a low tolerance for obfuscation, obscurity, and imprecision, Henry admires Blair and equally disdains the undisciplined imaginings that prompted his sister to infer that the “expected horrors in London” he discusses with Catherine refer not “to a circulating library” but to insurrection and riot (Chapter 14).
Catherine, Eleanor, and the General are notable mis-readers of texts spoken and written. Henry, who eventually sets all to right, seems to offer a corrective, or at least a counter-balance to the hasty and fanciful inferences of the others. Yet Henry is not exempt from Austen’s readerly critique. It may be that Henry also errs in his unyielding attachment to clear and fixed meaning—and not only in his resistance to the various nuances of an evolving and unfixed “nice.” Upon learning the reason for his father’s change of heart toward Miss Morland, Henry is not dissuaded from his pursuit but instead “sustained in his purpose by a conviction of its justice.” Truth be told, though,
He felt himself bound as much in honour as in affection to Miss Morland, and believing that heart to be his own which he had been directed to gain, no unworthy retraction of a tacit consent, no reversing decree of unjustifiable anger, could shake his fidelity, or influence the resolutions it prompted.
Austen may give us the comic ending we expect, but Henry’s rigid attachment to an ideal of “honour” that at least matches his “affection” lends more than a hint of irony to the narrator’s insistence that “My own joy on the occasion is very sincere” (Chapter 31). With the happy resolution of a plot predicated on misreading—and where the whole truth turns out to be nebulous and complex—Austen leaves us wondering whether we have, indeed, read aright.
Quotations are from the Broadview edition of Northanger Abbey, edited and with an introduction by Clare Grogan, and the Eighteenth Century Collections Online edition of Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belle Lettres (1783).
Thirteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Laaleen Sukhera, Dan Macey, Deborah Knuth Klenck, and Ted Scheinman.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
