Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 20

Revisiting Northanger Abbey

“There was no reason to think she would grow up to be anything out of the ordinary,” says Lisa Pliscou on the first page of her new picture book biography of Jane Austen. Brave Jane Austen: Reader, Writer, Author, Rebel will be published next week by Henry Holt/Macmillan, and you can read more about it (and see a few sample pages) on Lisa’s website.[image error]

I really enjoyed Lisa’s book Young Jane Austen: Becoming a Writer, which I wrote about when it was published in 2015 (“Imagining Jane Austen’s Childhood”), and I’m excited about her new book.[image error]

Lisa writes for children and adults, and her other books include a novel, Higher Education, which David Foster Wallace praised as “an authorial coup.”

Congratulations on Brave Jane Austen, Lisa! And thank you for writing today’s guest post for my blog series “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”

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Seeing “The Graduate” again decades after an initial viewing is, appropriately enough, like attending a college reunion. Films are in a sense like old friends, and revisiting them years later inevitably raises the question of whether what you once enjoyed still brings you pleasure.

– Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2017

I have a wonderful time on my first visit to Northanger Abbey.

All is light and bright and sparkling.

I take great pleasure in Austen’s skill at creating characters who—with their virtues and flaws, mannerisms and idiosyncrasies—come alive in their authenticity. They reach across the span of time and place: these are fully recognizable people.

Too, I enjoy how Austen pokes fun at the literary excess of her era’s Gothic novels. Her voice is deft, witty, engendering an almost conspiratorial quality which invites the reader to share in her solipsistic worldview.

In this atmosphere of camaraderie, then, how easy to feel sympathetic interest in the artless Catherine Morland. How easy to fall under the spell of Henry Tilney’s wit and charm. To sail lightly on the story’s surface, drawn along by its author’s dazzling self-assurance.

I surrender to Northanger Abbey just like Catherine giving her heart to Henry: speedily, entirely. Naively. The ending satisfies. General Tilney is routed by his son Henry’s defiance, there is reconciliation, there is a wedding.

Everybody smiles.

*

I visit Northanger Abbey again.

The story is the same, but it’s I who am different.

The writing I still love, but the ending now troubles me. It seems thin, rushed.

I remember watching The Graduate a second time, after a long interval, and being struck by that indelible moment when Ben and Elaine are sitting together at the back of the bus and their triumphant exuberance begins to fade. All at once I—a more thoughtful, more sophisticated viewer than when I first saw it—realize that I’m watching not just a biting comedy but also, possibly, a tragedy.

I recall Joan Aiken’s razor-sharp portrayal of Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars in her odd, bleak novel Eliza’s Daughter: theirs was a marriage made in the face of devastating family disapproval, and she shows them, years later, ground down by endless drudgery and genteel poverty.

I picture Catherine and Henry at their wedding.

They stand before the minister. The happy couple. Henry victorious, Catherine amazed by her good fortune.

The bells ring.

My mind ranges back, into the narrative, thinking about these two characters. These two people.

*

Henry Tilney’s ardor, the narrator bluntly—slyly—remarks, is the direct result of hers for him:

I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought.

It is, perhaps, a precarious foundation for a union which must endure till death arrives to sever it.

How long will Henry sustain these feelings for a girl who, though she is sweet-natured and affectionate, doesn’t equal him in intellect or sense of humor? Will he come in time to treat her with the same scornful disdain Mr. Bennet displays toward his wife?

As for Catherine: how long will she continue to uncritically adore a man who is fond of correcting and informing? A young woman of eighteen may be a very different person at twenty-eight or thirty-eight; in maturity will she resent the role of acolyte? If, that is, she survives the many years of pregnancy and childbearing which—“poor animal,” as Austen once described such a woman—is likely to be her lot.

I wonder.

And now my mind stretches ahead, uneasily.

*

I return again to Northanger Abbey.

I know, now, a great deal more about the life and times and writings of Jane Austen. I know that she wrote it as part of a remarkable creative burst after the abrupt departure of Tom Lefroy—a young man she liked, though the depth of her affection remains a mystery—in the summer of 1796, when she was twenty-one.

Austen began with First Impressions, a romance, in the fall and finished it the next summer. (The title would eventually become Pride and Prejudice.) A few months later she returned to an earlier work, Elinor and Marianne—a debate of sorts, as Claire Tomalin says in Jane Austen: A Life—and renamed it Sense and Sensibility. The following year, extending her artistic range yet further, she wrote a first draft of Susan, a satirical project, which she would revise a few years later, in 1802, in the aftermath of Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal and her rejection of it. This manuscript she now called Northanger Abbey.

I read.

The story is the same, but it’s I who, again, have changed.

*

I go deeper. Penetrating the sparkling surface and diving down. Here there is light and darkness mingled.

I hold in my mind, this time, the genius of its young author and her incandescent creative growth. I hold in my mind, now, the multiple layers of Northanger Abbey. Austen’s witty meta-level defense of the novel, during a time in which it was often seen as a suspect, inferior, even morally dangerous genre. Her brilliance in locating the true psychological horror not in an old Radcliffian chest but in the very nature of General Tilney. Her sly, defiant subversion of tropes and expectations. She gives over to us a love story as a sweet fillip, legerdemain, which doubles in on itself: reader, here it is, the comic romance plot, the conventional engine, but you won’t be distracted, will you? Because there’s a lot more going on here. Do you see it? Here, in the present moment, look closely, and stay with me, a writer in the bloom of health, youth, infinite promise. Here is my wit, my persuasion, my shrewd divining of human nature, my joke, my riddle, my laughter.

*

Northanger Abbey isn’t perfect—no book is—and it has weaknesses. Limitations. But it’s also a work which, in its beguiling complexity, effortlessly sustains multiple readings. New interpretations. Fresh insight.

I will return again.

I wonder what I’ll find?

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Sixth 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 Leslie Nyman, Gisèle Baxter, and Theresa Kenney.

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 ).

 

“Miss Morland; do but look at my horse”: Horses’ John Thorpe Problem

Kate Scarth is the Chair of L.M. Montgomery Studies and Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture (ACLC) at the University of Prince Edward Island. Her research focuses on English and Canadian literature written from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century and she’s particularly interested in fiction about urbanism and the environment. Her book Romantic Suburbs: Fashion, Sensibility, and Greater London (under contract with the University of Toronto Press) has a chapter on Jane Austen’s Emma and suburban space. She is also leading a digital humanities, public engagement project, which includes a mobile app and website supporting a literary walking tour of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Kate wrote a guest post for my “Emma in the Snow” series a couple of years ago, on “Highbury Heights; or, George and Emma Knightley, Suburban Developers,” and I’m very happy to welcome her back with this post on the horses in Northanger Abbey.

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Photo by Mike Needham

John Thorpe is the co-villain of Northanger Abbey. He is the man whose avarice, then spite, leads to the lies that cause General Tilney to commit his own villainous act: throwing Catherine out and getting her as near to being the hard-done-by Gothic heroine as she ever gets. Thorpe, like Emma’s Mrs Elton, talks endlessly about carriages (his gig and horses replace her sister’s barouche landau). Their obsession with commercial goods negates actual conversation and relationships. For Thorpe, women are to be talked at about gigs and horses, while men are only potential buyers of horses and dogs. Thorpe is also a Mrs. Elton-style foil whose bad qualities actually highlight the other characters’ own shortcomings, namely their own conspicuous consumption: Isabella’s focus on a rich husband with a ritzy Richmond villa, Mrs. Allen’s dress fixation, and even the heroine’s immersion in Gothic novels. Case in point: on the way to Blaise Castle, “Thorpe talked to his horse” and Catherine “meditated” on Gothic architecture (“broken arches,” “false hangings,” and “trap-doors” [Chapter 11]).

Thorpe’s gig couldn’t go anywhere without his horses, of course (not even part of the way to Blaise Castle), and so we’re going to follow his advice and “look at [his] horse.” Horses in Austen’s novels and in the Regency period more generally are, of course, ubiquitous, but often unacknowledged. Horses do the heavy lifting whenever a person is travelling and whenever a letter is sent (in this novel, horses connect Fullerton, Bath, Northanger, Woodston, and London). Here I’ll briefly shift focus to horses with a gesture that others, like Jo Baker in Longbourn, have made with servants, other vital but liminal presences in Austen’s work.

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“The boldness of his riding.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (Mollands.net).

Exceptionally in Northanger Abbey, horses are brought to the fore via Thorpe’s conversation and actions. This spotlight is undesirable, given the violence and crass commercialism with which he treats them. And yet, an animal rights narrative in Northanger Abbey emerges with Thorpe’s treatment of animals and its divergence from other characters’ and especially the successful hero-suitors’ relationships with horses.

One way that Austen champions animals is by linking the treatment of women and animals (thereby anticipating twentieth-century feminists and animal rights activists). For example, Thorpe’s gig is a Gothicized space for both Catherine and his horse. For both, the gig is a space of captivity described with Gothicized language of danger, death, and violence. Catherine’s first view of the gig is of “a most knowing-looking coachman with all the vehemence that could most fitly endanger the lives of himself, his companion, and his horse” and “the horse was immediately checked with a violence which almost threw him on his haunches” (Chapter 7, my emphasis). Later when Thorpe is driving Catherine, violence is again emphasized, as he warns, “You will not be frightened, Miss Morland…if my horse should dance about a little at first setting off. He will, most likely, give a plunge or two” (Chapter 9). Catherine “was too young to own herself frightened,” but everything goes smoothly: the never humble Thorpe assures “her that it was entirely owing to the peculiarly judicious manner in which he had then held the reins, and the singular discernment and dexterity with which he had directed his whip” (Chapter 9). Thorpe’s gig then is a Gothicized space for the horses, one in which they are forcibly and violently contained—with harnesses, reins, and whips—for most of their lives.

As well as Austen’s violent language here, carriages are also staples of the Gothic and sentimental genres, as vehicles used to kidnap heroines (Austen jokingly alludes to the typical advice a heroine would receive before heading out into the world: “[c]autions against the violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young ladies away to some remote farmhouse” [Chapter 2]). Thorpe enacts a domesticated, everyday version of the Gothic villain. He gets Catherine in his gig by lying to her, then keeps her in it through physical force (refusing to stop the gig when she asks). He also makes her a conversational captive, forcing her to listen to his insistent bragging about said gig and horse, while not considering that she might have her own conversation or ideas. This scene highlights unequal, and highly gendered, access to mobility and voice.

Thorpe’s mistreatment of horses adds a sinister layer to his behaviour towards our heroine. Indeed, his reckless driving could physically endanger her and merely riding with a man in an open carriage could damage her reputation (as Catherine’s guardians, the Allens, belatedly decide). Indeed, Thorpe does have the power to damage Catherine’s reputation (at least with General Tilney), destroy her happiness (temporarily stalling her happy ending with Henry), and open her up to physical and sexual violence (when his lies lead General Tilney to fling her out into the world).

Thorpe’s deficiencies reveal Northanger Abbey’s connection between equine care and proper masculinity. His horse obsession extends to his clothes, which resemble a groomsman’s or coachman’s, a not so subtle dig at his dubious claims to the title of gentleman. And Northanger Abbey relays a message that, unlike Thorpe, hero-gentlemen treat animals, well, gently. For example, while Austen tells us little about Eleanor Tilney’s husband, we do know that his servant left a farrier’s bill (Catherine’s imagined mysterious manuscript), reading “To poultice chestnut mare” (Chapter 22). While we see Thorpe abusing horses, in this brief glimpse of Eleanor’s future husband, Austen chooses to cast him as a man paying to ease a horse’s ailment.

Then, of course, there is Henry Tilney, the novel’s hero. On the journey to Northanger, his driving is explicitly contrasted with Thorpe’s: “so nimbly were the light horses disposed to move …. But the merit of the curricle did not all belong to the horses; Henry drove so well—so quietly—without making any disturbance, without parading to her [Catherine], or swearing at them [the horses]: so different from the only gentleman-coachman whom it was in her power to compare him with!” (Chapter 20). Catherine, of course, is in love, but the treatment of horses (no whips, no swearing, no disturbances) here marks the make of the man. Reinforcing Henry’s relationship with animals are the companionable dogs that are an ubiquitous highlight of the visit to his Woodston home.

Northanger Abbey shows that the conduct towards subordinates, i.e., horses, indicates how one will treat others in one’s power, including wives in the Regency period. But what if instead of thinking about how men’s conduct towards animals illuminates their treatment of women, we look at it the other way around and instead zero in on the horse’s plight? Thorpe’s horse actually has it much worse than Catherine, who unlike him and indeed unlike the typical Gothic heroine, never faces actual physical danger. While when Thorpe drives, people, himself included, are at risk, only the horses receive physical blows and so come closest to injury (Thorpe takes horses plunging to the ground as a matter of course). Catherine’s interactions with this boorish brute last only a few awkward afternoons and dances, but the horse has no such escape, does not get to retreat to idyllic Woodston. Austen presents an exemplary model of the treatment of animals in Henry Tilney, while clearly presenting animal rights as an unresolved, ongoing issue as long as the Thorpes of the world live to drive another day.

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“Pray, pray stop, Mr. Thorpe.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (Mollands.net).

Fifth 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 Lisa Pliscou, Leslie Nyman, and Gisèle Baxter.

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 ).

The Eyes of Society

Today’s guest post on Northanger Abbey is by Serena Burdick, author of Girl in the Afternoon: A Novel of Paris. Serena graduated from The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in California before moving to New York City to pursue a degree in English Literature at Brooklyn College. She currently lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband and two sons, and she says her “passion for theater, writing, the visual arts, Edouard Manet and the Impressionist movement” inspired her to write Girl in the Afternoon, her debut novel. Heather Webb calls the novel “a provocative tale of family secrets, betrayal, and the renewal of self-discovery.”

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If you’d like to know more about Serena’s work, you can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and/or visit her website, where she tells the story of a childhood in which she “lived in books of the past,” and wanted, “more than anything else, to actually be Anne of Green Gables and Laura Ingalls.” I’m delighted to introduce her contribution to “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”

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Oh, the problem of the dress! She shakes her head in dismay. Silk is only appropriate for certain occasions. Muslin is lovely, but it frays terribly when washed. And then, of course, if it is to be muslin, which one should she choose: spotted or sprigged? The mull, the jackonet, or the tamboured?

“What gown and what head-dress she should wear on the occasion became her chief concern” (Northanger Abbey, Chapter 10).

At first glance, Jane Austen’s heroine in Northanger Abbey, Catherine, appears to be the quintessential teenager. Clinging to her girlfriend’s arm, glancing coquettishly over her fan, musing wistfully over anything said in her direction. And yet Austen—even though she understands the pressure a young lady faces to behave appropriately, dress perfectly, present herself with ease and grace, and flirt to perfection—is clearly poking fun at the emotional drama arising in an overly active imagination of a young girl working hard to be the perfect heroine.

How one dressed was always the first impression: who was wearing what, which girl had on something new, or significantly impressive. And then there was the challenge of wearing a dress, and of making it through an evening without the embarrassing mishap of a tear, a spill, or a stain. “Mrs. Allen congratulated herself, as soon as they were seated, on having preserved her gown from injury” (Chapter 2).

Of course weather was a chief concern regarding attire. If it rained on the day of an afternoon walk, the walk was delayed until the ground was dry enough not to muddy the bottom of a skirt. The day Catherine expects Mr. and Miss Tilney to accompany her in an afternoon stroll, she watches the rain through the windows with much anxiety. They will not come for her in such weather, and even if it clears up it is unlikely they will come out so soon after, for fear of the mud.

These are the trivial incidents that can send Catherine into a whirlwind of emotions. She is either the happiest creature in the world, or the most wretched. Her wild and lurid imagination throws her into tears over the merest suspicion of impropriety, or into fits of delight over faint possibilities.

At the root of these seemingly minuscule anxieties, especially ones concerning appearance, is the fear of being judged by others. “Confused by his notice, and blushing from the fear of its being excited by something wrong in her appearance, she turned away her head” (Chapter 10). Catherine is constantly watching out for what someone else might find wrong with her; how she might not be being good enough, or where she will make a mistake. Nineteenth century society dictated that people rarely said what they really felt, even in matters of triviality. This often led to a tangle of confusion in matters of love and engagement. The confusion, in turn, gave way to the constant torment of not being able to express oneself properly, or truthfully. “So fearful was she of not doing exactly what was right, and of not being able to preserve their good opinion” (Chapter 20).

Subtle behaviors became even more important. When a lady felt something, she was expected to keep it to herself until the gentleman showed his affection first. “Man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal” (Chapter 10). Catherine’s greatest agony is over her affection for Mr. Tilney, but she doesn’t dare express it. The only thing she can do is put herself in his path hoping to gain his attention, which circles back to the excruciating importance of her attire, appearance, and charm—her basic tool kit as a woman. Her flawless conduct is her only chance of not offending the man she loves, and thereby losing the attention she so desires.

Catherine is highly aware of the hasty opinions and false conclusions she has made about others. When she rides away in the carriage with the Thorpes, she passes the Tilneys without stopping—oh, what will they ever think of her? How is she to explain it was not her fault, that Mr. Thorpe would not stop the carriage? When the Allens tell her they do not think it proper for a young lady to ride around in open carriages with men they are not related to, she is mortified that she has done something improper without even knowing it.

Even though it appears that Catherine has nothing better to do with her time than throw herself full force into the drama of her own story of petty perfectionism—and the flawless dress—these seemingly trivial concerns were a matter of survival: a woman’s only hope in life was on the arm of a respectable man. Without money from either the family you came from, or the family you married into, you were stranded. It is with humor that Austen illustrates this reality in Catherine’s life, a reality that was not unique to our heroine, but something all nineteenth century young women faced.

To be the perfect heroine is to be the perfect woman. To be the perfect woman is to find the perfect husband. At every moment a woman’s reputation is at stake. The eyes of society peer from every corner of every room. To slip up, to say the wrong thing or wear the wrong dress, is to no longer be respectable or desirable, which our exemplary Catherine knows only too well.

Quotations are from the Norton edition of Northanger Abbey, edited by Susan Fraiman (2004).

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Fourth 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 Kate Scarth, Lisa Pliscou, and Leslie Nyman.

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 ).

Northanger Abbey’s Scare Quotes

Happy New Year! It’s a pleasure to introduce Lynn Festa’s contribution to “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”

(If you missed the first two posts in the series, you can catch up here: the first one was by Deborah Barnum, on the publishing history of Northanger Abbey, and the second was by Peter Sabor, on Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice of the Author.”)

Lynn was JASNA’s North American Scholar at the 2014 AGM in Montreal, and she gave a fascinating lecture on “The Noise in Mansfield Park.” She suggested that the novel is “Austen’s noisiest book, filled with clamor and disharmony” (Persuasions 36 [2014]). I love what she said about the way Austen invites us to listen carefully, to remember that “the right to hear and to be heard is not impartially distributed.”

Lynn is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, and the author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, as well as of articles on the slave trade, the history of human rights, wigs, dogs, the eighteenth-century novel, and Jane Austen. Today’s guest post on Northanger Abbey addresses the question of what it means to learn by memorizing quotations.

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Early in Northanger Abbey, Austen’s narrator tells us of Catherine Morland’s youthful reading preferences:

[P]rovided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she never had any objection to books at all. But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories, with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives. (Volume 1, Chapter 1)

If Catherine’s preferences in leisure reading—“all story and no reflection”—indicate the appetite for plot that drives the Gothic reader, her subsequent embrace of higher-minded texts is prompted not by a revolution in taste but by the mandatory curriculum for a wannabe heroine. The embattled Gothic protagonist, after all, must be able to deliver her lines on cue—and where do these conveniently apropos quotes come from, after all? Exposing the labor behind the Gothic heroine’s cultural literacy, the narrator offers a sampler of the great wisdom Catherine has harvested from the works of great authors and set aside for future use:

From Pope, she learnt to censure those who

   “bear about the mockery of woe.” 

From Gray, that

   “Many a flower is born to blush unseen,           

   “And waste its fragrance on the desert air.” 

From Thompson, that—

   “It is a delightful task   

   “To teach the young idea how to shoot.” 

And from Shakespeare she gained a great store of information—amongst the rest, that—

“Trifles light as air,   

   “Are, to the jealous, confirmation strong,   

   “As proofs of Holy Writ.” 

That

   “The poor beetle, which we tread upon,   

   “In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great   

   “As when a giant dies.” 

And that a young woman in love always looks—

   “like Patience on a monument   

   “Smiling at Grief.”  (Volume 1, Chapter 1)

Misquoted, condensed, and veering precariously close to clichés, Catherine’s catalogue of portable bromides converts the national poetic canon into an inexhaustible trove of trite sayings—so many platitudes plucked from their original contexts and stored up in wait for an occasion to which they may be triumphantly applied. In exposing the ease with which the artifacts of high culture—the male poets Pope, Gray, Shakespeare, Thomson—may be reduced to quotable quotes, Austen savages a literary hierarchy that unquestioningly values the writings of men—or even anthologies recycling their words—over the novel.

Quotations reproduce received wisdom with an impersonality that pretends to universality. They offer a fast-track to wisdom or a shortcut to the appearance of it. But quoting may not display our refined taste or education. Instead, it may become the quasi-automatic disgorging of partially digested required reading, revealing us to be the vacuous parrots of wisdom that is not our own. (I’m thinking of you, Mary Bennet.) Yet what should we make of Austen’s mockery of literary quotation in a novel that parodies the conventions—and clichés—of a genre? Northanger Abbey, after all, is a book that repeatedly quotes the Gothic genre it affectionately parodies, mercilessly using the genre’s figures and conceits against it.

Northanger Abbey is, I think, fascinated by the question of quotation—in part because Austen recognizes that we are all quoting others, all the time. Cultural literacy involves the recognition (and quotation) of the already known. Henry Tilney’s much-vaunted cleverness is ultimately as derivative and formulaic as Catherine’s beloved Gothic; his disquisition on the picturesque is a jumble of jargon—“fore-grounds, distances and second distances—side-screens and perspectives—lights and shades.” Henry traffics in more sophisticated clichés, but they are clichés nonetheless, an elaborated set of conventions, no better and no worse than those governing the Gothic mode. All education involves quotation: the adaptation of others’ language and ideas for ourselves. Yet, when (and how) do the words we quote become our own? Seen from one angle, Catherine’s education in Northanger Abbey involves learning to quote something—someone—different, replacing one set of clichés with another. Yet Catherine must also learn the difference between naïve and skeptical quotation—the difference between simple iteration of someone else’s words or ideas and repetition with a critical eye.

Although Catherine is invited to reject the Gothic in favor of more refined pleasures, Austen recognizes that the Gothic also involves a form of cultural literacy—conventions that make visible distinctive aspects of the world.  Catherine’s quotation of the Gothic—her application of its clichés to the world she encounters—offers language for states of being that seem otherwise inexpressible and creates communities (mainly of women) who recognize the same allusions. For if quotations at times short-circuit the intellectual and emotional labor required to know how one feels or what one thinks, at others they lend words that enable us to give voice to otherwise inexpressible sentiments or feelings. Indeed, one might say that quotations serve as vessels—even crypts—that contain meanings or histories that may supersede the understanding or intentions of those who wield them. Gothic, indeed!

When we quote, we speak someone else’s words, and words repeated often enough start to erase the quotation marks, making the words our own. In written texts, we use quotation marks to designate the transition from one person’s speech to another separate people and to distinguish levels of discourse in the novel by separating the narrator’s voice from that of a character. Yet we should recall that Austen’s most famous contribution to the novel is Free Indirect Discourse, which erases the division between the narrator’s and character’s speech, excising the quotation marks that separate off one voice from another. Not least of the Gothic hauntings in Northanger Abbey issues from the narrator’s dissolution of the quote marks that separate the character’s mind from the narrator’s knowledge and commentary, a doubling of voices that suggests the permeability of the barriers between our mental worlds.

While Free Indirect Discourse removes the quotation mark and thus erases the division between a character’s thoughts or words and those of her narrator, Austen in Northanger Abbey is also fascinated by the assertive marking of the fact of quotation—by what we now call scare quotes. We might say that the quotable quotes from Pope, Gray, and Cowper, with which we began—like her quotes from the Gothic—are surrounded less by quotation marks than by scare quotes. Quotation marks designate words as belonging to one person, one text, as opposed to another; scare quotes (whether as a typographical “feint” or an air-quoting gesture) convey knowingness or skepticism: a common ironic distance from the naïve affirmation that something exists. Yet scare quotes are also a sign of dependency. We retain an expression and put quote marks around it because the term or concept seems in some way indispensible: we may not quite know what to do with a term around which we put scare quotes, but we can’t quite do without it. If, for example, we put scare quotes around a term like the “Gothic,” we change it from the actual world to which language refers, to something already marked off as, if not necessarily fiction, then not simply and self-evidently there.

The point I am trying to make is that Austen’s quotations from the Gothic in Northanger Abbey are surrounded not so much by quotation marks as by scare quotes. In nesting quotations from Shakespeare, from Pope, from Gray, and Cowper in a text in which she repeatedly quotes from mass-market Gothic romances, Austen wants us to see through the Gothic and its conventions, but she also wants us to see that quotations shape—and are shaped by—the world in much the same way as these lofty lines culled from great works of literature by men. Indeed, the Gothic perhaps has more than these great canonical poets to tell us about the work done by quotation and cliché in fashioning our everyday lives—for if the Gothic frequently lapses into cliché, it also has a meta-critical relation to it. In offering a parade of quotable quotes, Austen puts scare quotes around quotations, holding them up for mockery, to be sure, but also enabling us to reflect on the ways our worlds, whether we are readers of Shakespeare and Austen, or Radcliffe and Lewis, are pasted together from language that is never just, never fully, our own.

Quotations are from the Oxford edition of Northanger Abbey, edited by James Kingsley and John Davie, with an introduction by Claudia Johnson (2008).

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“The luxury of a … frightened imagination over the pages of Udolpho.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)

Third 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 Serena Burdick, Kate Scarth, and Lisa Pliscou.

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 ).

Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice of the Author”

Today’s guest post for “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion” is by Peter Sabor, Professor of English and Canada Research Chair at McGill University. Peter’s publications on Jane Austen include an edition of her early writings, Juvenilia (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Manuscript Works, co-edited with Linda Bree and Janet Todd (Broadview, 2013), and The Cambridge Companion to Emma (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is also Director of the Burney Centre at McGill.

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Henry Austen

Last June, he gave two excellent lectures at the Jane Austen Society, UK conference in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The first was on “Jane Austen and Canada: from Anna Lefroy to Joan Austen-Leigh” and the second was on “Jane Austen and America: The first fifty years; from 1817 to the late 1860s.”

It’s my pleasure to introduce Peter’s guest post on Henry Austen’s memoir of Jane Austen.

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The first words that the fortunate first readers of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion read at the end of 1817 were not by Jane Austen but by her favourite brother Henry, her elder by four years, in a prefatory “Biographical Notice of the Author,” dated 13 December. While preserving his own anonymity, describing himself only as the “biographer” and as “the relator of these events,” he made his sister’s identity public for the first time, expressing his hope, in the opening paragraph, that “a brief account of Jane Austen will be read with a kindlier sentiment than mere curiosity.”

Like all biographers, Henry Austen had an agenda. One of his aims was to draw the attention of his readers to his sister’s previously published novels: the “merits” of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma are proclaimed in the first paragraph. He did not mention Austen’s manuscript fiction—“Lady Susan,” “The Watsons” and Sanditon”—having no intention of seeing it into print. Nor, for the same reason, did he notice the existence of the three juvenile notebooks: “Volume the First,” “Volume the Second,” and “Volume the Third.” Instead, he confined his attention to the books that his sister had “sent into the world,” comparing them boldly to those of the then far more highly regarded Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth (both novelists whom Austen herself admired profoundly). Again alluding to best-selling novelists such as Burney and Edgeworth, or indeed Walter Scott, Henry contends that Austen’s works “may live as long as those which have burst on the world with more éclat.”

Henry informs his readers that “some of these novels had been … gradual performances,” rather than works first written in the “pleasant village of Chawton.” Intriguingly, he does not specify that Austen’s first two published novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, together with the newly published Northanger Abbey, are the performances in question, although Austen herself, in her prefatory “advertisement” to Northanger Abbey, points out that “this little work was finished in the year 1803.” No literary critic, Henry has little else to say about Austen’s novels, although he does observe that “her power of inventing characters seems to have been intuitive, and almost unlimited,” adding that “she drew from nature; but, whatever may have been surmised to the contrary, never from individuals.” By dwelling on Austen’s powers of invention, Henry could forestall complaints from readers who, inevitably, would find themselves traduced in the novels: there was no shortage of garrulous Miss Bateses or sycophantic Mr Collinses in England.

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Henry’s second objective in his memoir was to portray Jane Austen as a woman of varied accomplishments, not merely as a novelist. She was attractive, he claimed, and her features revealed the “cheerfulness, sensibility, and benevolence, which were her real characteristics.” Elaborating on this idea, Henry alludes to lines by John Donne—“her pure and eloquent blood / Spoke in her cheeks” (“Of the Progress of the Soul. The Second Anniversary, 1612)—declaring that his sister’s “eloquent blood spoke through her modest cheek.” Her voice was “extremely sweet,” and she “delivered herself with fluency and precision, … excelling in conversation as much as in composition.” Austen was, according to Henry, talented as an amateur artist, musician, and dancer. She admired landscapes both in nature and art, and “at a very early age she was enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque”—in sharp contrast to the untutored heroine of Northanger Abbey. Henry also has some interesting remarks on Austen’s reading, noting that “her favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse.” Among the novelists, she held Richardson in the highest regard, and especially esteemed Sir Charles Grandison: “she did not rank any work of Fielding quite so high.”

Another of Austen’s accomplishments singled out by Henry was her prowess as a correspondent. All her letters “came finished from her pen,” and “she never dispatched a note or letter unworthy of publication.” In a postscript to the “Biographical Notice” dated 20 December, just days before the first appearance of the novels it introduced (their precise date of publication is uncertain), Henry furnishes samples of Austen’s epistolary powers through excerpts from two of her letters: to James Edward Austen, 16-17 December 1816, and to an unnamed correspondent, probably Frances Tilson, 28-29 May 1817—for which his memoir is the only source. The excerpt from the first letter contains Austen’s celebrated remark on herself as a miniaturist, working on “a little bit of ivory, two inches wide,” and producing “little effect after much labour.” For all his praise of his sister’s novels, it seems unlikely that Henry could grasp the extent of the irony here: little effect, indeed.

For Henry, who had been ordained and appointed as curate of Chawton in December 1816, much the most important aspect of Austen’s life was her strong Christian faith. Even on her death-bed, he writes, “neither her love of God, nor of her fellow creatures flagged for a moment.” Winchester Cathedral, her burial place, “does not contain the ashes of a brighter genius or a sincerer Christian”: significantly, the sentence ends with what Henry clearly regarded as the more important of the two terms. Similarly, he devotes the final paragraph of his piece entirely to spiritual matters and is evidently writing as a parson here. Jane Austen was “thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God, and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature.” Although everything we know of Austen’s acerbic wit from her novels and letters belies these words, Henry presses on to a strange conclusion: “her opinions,” he declares, “accorded strictly with those of our Established Church.” The word “strictly” is especially jarring: Austen’s opinions, of course, were her own.

In 1833, Henry’s essay was reprinted under a different title, “Memoir of Miss Austen,” preceding a new edition of Sense and Sensibility published by Richard Bentley. For its second appearance, fifteen years after its initial publication, Henry revised his piece considerably. As well as adding material, he also omitted some of what Kathryn Sutherland aptly terms his “lighter and more intimate touches.” In 1833, Austen’s dancing no longer figures and an account of her writing comic verses on her deathbed is, regrettably, dropped.

In a letter of 4 October 1832, Henry wrote to Bentley: “I heartily wish that I could have made it richer in detail but the fact is that My dear Sister’s life was not a life of event” (for the full text of the letter see Deirdre Le Faye, “Jane Austen: New Biographical Comments,” Notes and Queries n.s. 39.2 (1992), 162-63). The letter clearly reveals Henry’s authorship of both the Biographical Notice and the revised memoir, but only in 1892 would this become public knowledge—as Juliette Wells demonstrates in a newly published article (“A Note on Henry Austen’s Authorship of the ‘Biographical Notice,’” Persuasions On-Line, 38.1, Winter 2017). Wells also conjectures that Cassandra Austen might have contributed, “perhaps quite substantially,” to the Biographical Notice. Here she develops a suggestion by E.J. Clery, in her fine biography of Henry (Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister, 2017), that his piece “bears the mark of more cautious influences.” There is, however, no evidence to support this claim. The “Biographical Notice,” as Henry himself admits in his letter to Bentley, failed to provide much detail about Austen’s life, but its failings cannot be attributed to another’s hand. Despite her obvious fondness for Henry, Clery summarizes his memoir of Austen as, for the most part, “buttoned-up sentimental hagiography.” Yet for all its flaws, it would remain much the fullest available source of information on Austen until 1870, when it was at last superseded by the Memoir of Jane Austen written by Henry’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, a work that has numerous shortcomings of its own.

Quotations are from the Oxford edition of J.E. Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen and other Family Recollections, edited and with an introduction by Kathryn Sutherland (2002), and the Cambridge edition of Northanger Abbey, edited and with an introduction by Barbara Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye (2006).

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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 in January: guest posts by Lynn Festa, Serena Burdick, and Kate Scarth. In the meantime: Happy holidays!

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 ).

Pump Rooms and Gothic Terrors: How Northanger Abbey Came to Be

Today is Jane Austen’s birthday and it’s also the first day of my new blog series, “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.” Many thanks to Deborah Barnum of Jane Austen in Vermont for writing about the publishing history of Northanger Abbey. I’m thrilled to introduce her guest post on “Pump Rooms and Gothic Terrors” today.

The series will run from now until the end of June, with approximately three months of guest posts on Northanger Abbey, followed by approximately three months of posts on Persuasion. Most of the time, the posts will be scheduled for Fridays, although in the last week we spend on each novel, there will be a few extra posts. Deb will be back to talk about the publishing history of Persuasion in the spring.

Here’s the full list of contributors: Carol Adams, Maggie Arnold, Elaine Bander, Deborah Barnum, Gisèle Baxter, John Baxter, Lyn Bennett, Diana Birchall, Serena Burdick, L. Bao Bui, Christy Ann Conlin, Natasha Duquette, Lynn Festa, Marcia McClintock Folsom, Susannah Fullerton, William Hutchings, Hazel Jones, Theresa Kenney, Sheila Johnson Kindred, Deborah Knuth Klenck, Maggie Lane, Elisabeth Lenckos, Dan Macey, Rohan Maitzen, Sara Malton, Ellen Moody, Leslie Nyman, Lisa Pliscou, Mary Lu Redden, Jessica Richard, Peter Sabor, Paul Savidge, Kate Scarth, Edward Scheinman, Judith Sears, Kerry Sinanan, Laaleen Sukhera, Margaret C. Sullivan, Judith Thompson, Deborah Yaffe, Kim Wilson, and Daniel Woolf.

Both William Hutchings and Ellen Moody wrote about Persuasion and autumn, and I’ve shared their guest posts here already: “A Sense of an Ending: Persuasion and Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn,’” by William Hutchings, and “‘For there is nothing lost, that may be found’: Charlotte Smith in Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” by Ellen Moody. Thank you again to Adam Q for suggesting the title of the series, and thank you to Sue Wilson Knopp for designing the image below, adding the title to my photograph of Black Rock Beach in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I’m looking forward to celebrating the 200th anniversary of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion with all of you over the coming months! Later this month, I’ll have a guest post from Peter Sabor, on Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice” of his sister, and then in January we’ll begin our discussion of Northanger Abbey itself. Happy Jane Austen Day and Happy Holidays!

Here’s the first paragraph of Deborah Barnum’s guest post on the publishing history of Northanger Abbey:

Today is Jane Austen’s birthday, and what better way to celebrate than to begin Sarah Emsley’s blog series on “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion“ – a collection of essays by various scholars and Austen bloggers to be posted over the next several months – today starting here with a post on the very bumpy convoluted journey of Northanger Abbey into print. Austen would be 242; her Northanger Abbey and Persuasion joint publication will be 200 on December 20th. Lots of reasons to celebrate!

Read the rest of Deb’s long, fascinating, and beautifully illustrated post here, on her blog Jane Austen in Vermont. [image error]

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 Peter Sabor, Serena Burdick, Kate Scarth, and Lynn Festa.

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 ).

“Born again”: Valancy’s Journey from False Religion to True Faith

Here’s one more post on L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle before my new blog series on Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion begins. It’s rare for me to post two days in a row, but I’ll be back again tomorrow—on Jane Austen’s birthday—with a guest post from Deborah Barnum on the publishing history of Northanger Abbey. Please join us then for the official launch of the series!

Today, I’m delighted to share with you my friend Maggie Arnold’s guest post on false religion and true faith in The Blue Castle. Maggie has written for my blog before, on “Discerning a Vocation in Mansfield Park—But Whose?” and on “Emma Woodhouse as a Spiritual Director,” and she’s writing a guest post on Persuasion for the new series.[image error]

The Rev. Dr. Maggie Arnold is the Associate Rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Medford, Massachusetts. Her book Christ’s Chosen Preacher: Mary Magdalene in the Era of Reformation will be published in the Fall of 2018 by Harvard University Press. She lives in Brookline, Mass., with her husband and children.

(I should note—for anyone who hasn’t read The Blue Castle yet—there are spoilers ahead.)

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“Fear is the original sin,” says Barney Snaith, defining the theology of The Blue Castle (Chapter 5). Ostensibly a coming of age story and a romance, the book contains a parallel passage between false religion and true faith. As Valancy moves from her unhappy, constrained life with her family in town she also rejects the hypocritical religion of her childhood. As part of finally becoming an adult, she discovers a grown-up faith as well, in which she encounters the sacred in nature and in authentic relationships.

The false religion of the Anglican Church in Deerwood is evident in the gloomy piety of Valancy’s family. Prayer should be long and mournful, as Aunt Wellington thinks, and the religious images Valancy’s mother keeps in their home are mawkish and sentimental. The institutional church is personified by the sternly disapproving rector, Dr. Stalling. At their first meeting, he judges Valancy for a superficial error—wearing a hat in church—and mistakes her for a boy. Her female identity is invisible to Dr. Stalling, whose misogyny is further revealed by his belief in a celibate clergy, and by his condemnation of the town’s “fallen woman,” Cissy Gay.

The theology of the Stirlings and Dr. Stalling is one of appearances and human works. It takes place indoors, in manmade spaces and hidebound social structures in which one’s worth is proved through conformity masking a fierce, Darwinian competition. In this anxious creed, idleness is the cardinal sin; as a child, Valancy must record her wasted moments and pray over them on Sundays. A loss of one’s position in society is scarcely less threatening. When she has left her family Dr. Stalling attempts to bring her back, but he is concerned only with the veneer of respectability, and he warns her to beware of what people are saying about her.

Fear of other people’s opinion is precisely the prison that Valancy has escaped, and she has no intention of going back. She was always more interested in honesty than in the piety of outward appearances. As a child, she prayed as she was instructed, but quietly corrected her petition to God afterwards, to reflect her real feelings and the truth of the situation. After her great shock, when she has learned that she is going to die, she forgets that it is Sunday and reads a forbidden John Foster book, beginning her movement from a religion of rules and self-denial to a faith rooted in joy. Her diagnosis frees her to do a real act of charity, caring for the notorious Cissy Gay. During this time she begins to attend the Free Methodist Church. Its pastor is notably different from Dr. Stalling. He is humble, with very little status in the community, living in “a shabby little house, in an unfashionable street” (Chapter 26). Most importantly, he is sincere: “Old Mr. Towers believed exactly what he preached and somehow it made a tremendous difference” (Chapter 20).

When she marries Barney/John Foster, and begins to explore the wilderness outside of town, Valancy at last finds a direct encounter with the sacred. She has already read, in one of Foster’s books, that journeys into the woods must be “reverent.” To be reverent in The Blue Castle means setting aside greed and ambition (the evils that ruined Barney’s own youth), entering into the natural world not to exploit it, but with an attitude of worshipful adoration. “It is of no use to seek the woods except from sheer love of them.” If we come in that way, they will “give us such treasures … as are not bought or sold in any marketplace.” Then we will hear the “unearthly music” of the “immortal heart of the woods” (Chapter 3). Each sunset is “a few minutes of transfiguration and revelation.” Each season brings new epiphanies. In the fall “the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes.” In the winter “The shadows cast by the pale sunshine were fine and spiritual. ‘Come away,’ said Barney, turning. ‘We must not commit the desecration of trampling through there’” (Chapter 31). In contrast to her previous religion, these gifts are unearned, there is no competition, no calculated exchange, only grace. And unlike her stifling childhood home, their cottage in the forest is porous, linked to the outdoors by an oriel window (from a former church!). “When the sunsets flooded it Valancy’s whole being knelt in prayer as if in some great cathedral” (Chapter 28).

Through the course of the novel, Valancy’s relationships are transformed, from empty and unfulfilling formalities to authentic bonds of love and mutual companionship. Accompanying this personal evolution is a spiritual one. The false religion of Valancy’s youth is likewise replaced with a true faith, marked by honesty and humility, real care for others, and profound experiences of the majesty and mystery of Creation. As Valancy confesses in her happiness, “I understand now what it means to be born again” (Chapter 30).

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Olmsted Park, Brookline, Massachusetts. Photo by Maggie Arnold.

More blog posts on The Blue Castle:

Bethie Baxter: “Valancy Stirling’s Inner Life”

Sarah Emsley: “‘Going in for realities’ in L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle”

Grab the Lapels: “The Blue Castle #Reading Valancy” and “#ReadingValancy discussion post for those who have read The Blue Castle”

My Book Strings: “Like a Warm Hug: The Blue Castle #ReadingValancy”

Covered in Flour:

Naomi MacKinnon (Consumed By Ink): “5 Reasons Why I Shouldn’t Like The Blue Castle #ReadingValancy”

Miss Bates Reads Romance: “Opening-Line Mini-Review: L. M. Montgomery’s THE BLUE CASTLE”

Rohan Maitzen: “My First Romance?: L.M. Mongomery, The Blue Castle”

Brona’s Books: “The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery”

“For there is nothing lost, that may be found”: Charlotte Smith in Jane Austen’s Persuasion

When latest Autumn spreads her evening veil,

And the grey mists from these dim waves arise,

I love to listen to the hollow sighs,

Thro’ the half-leafless wood that breathes the gale….

I want to share Ellen Moody’s guest post on Persuasion and the poetry of Charlotte Smith while it is still autumn (in my part of the world and Ellen’s, that is). My blog series celebrating the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion will begin officially on Jane Austen’s birthday, December 16th, but I don’t really want to wait to get started, as I’m excited about celebrating these two books with all of you.

The blog series now has a title—you may remember I was seeking advice back in August—and I am delighted to announce that it will be “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.” Many thanks to everyone who sent in suggestions! It was extremely hard to choose from among more than 60 possibilities, and it took me three months. Thank you as well to the friends and family members who helped me decide. Special thanks to Adam Q for this beautiful title that captures elements of both novels (Catherine’s youth; Anne’s experience) and of Jane Austen’s career (because she composed Northanger Abbey in her youth and Persuasion towards the end of her life). As promised, I will be happy to send you a set of “Austens in Halifax” cards, Adam. Please email me (semsley at gmail dot com) to let me know where to send them.

It’s a pleasure to introduce today’s guest post by Ellen Moody. Ellen taught in senior colleges for more than thirty years, and for the past four she’s been teaching at two Oscher Institutes of Lifelong Learning attached to two of these colleges, George Mason and American University. Two years ago, she received the Leland Peterson award from the Eastern Central region of ASECS for long service.

Ellen has published essays and reviews on Austen, the eighteenth century, and film adaptations. You can also find her online, if you haven’t already, at jimandellen.org and reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com. Her timelines drawn from Austen’s novels are well-known and often cited, along with her other work about Austen and her contemporaries. For four years, she blogged separately on each of Austen’s letters, alongside related texts such as The Austen Papers.

Ellen says she hasn’t stopped reading Jane Austen since she was twelve. She tells me her e-text editions of later eighteenth-century French novels influential on Austen, Isabelle de Montolieu’s Caroline de Lichtfield and Sophie Cottin’s Amelie Mansfield, have been commended for use in French reviews. Her most recent publications are on Charlotte Smith—last year, the first scholarly affordable paperback since the early nineteenth century of Smith’s Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake was published by Valancourt Press. Her essay “The Global Charlotte Smith: Migrancy and Women in Ethelinde and The Emigrants,” will be published next year in Placing Charlotte Smith, edited by Jacqueline Labbe and Elizabeth Dolan. 

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What though the sea with waves continuall

Doe eate the earth, it is no more at all,

Nor is the earth the lesse, or loseth ought:

for whatsoever from one place doth fall

Is with the tyde unto another brought:

for there is nothing lost, that may be found.

(Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 5, Canto 2, in Emma Thompson’s Screenplay for Sense and Sensibility [1995])

It will come as no surprise to readers that yet another writer finds Austen’s texts comment centrally on a nearly universal aspect of human experience: autumn. I am aware there are people on the earth who live in continually summer or winter worlds, but am taking the view that such folk visit other regions. All of Austen’s mature novels, and not a few of her unfinished fragments and juvenilia, engage with and show an ambiguous relationship with autumn; none more centrally than Persuasion. Four of the novels begin in autumn; four end there, and autumn draws Austen to describe it, as we see in Sense and Sensibility when Elinor remarks to Marianne: “It is not everyone who has your passion for dead leaves” (Volume 1, Chapter 16), almost against her will.

In one of the earlier seasonal and well-known reveries in Persuasion, we find a striking revision of a famous sonnet by Charlotte Smith. The “pleasure” (italics Austen’s) of Anne’s walk on a “fine November day” among people she feels somewhat uncomfortable with must be (she tells herself) to view “the tawny leaves and withered hedges,” and to repeat to herself “some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.” Alas, she finds she cannot shut out Wentworth’s conversation with Louisa about people who prove themselves indecisive and anxious over the future, clearly a reference to or coming out of a memory of how she once behaved to him, the basis of her rejection of him. Will she, nill she, “The sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by, unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth, and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory” (Volume 1, Chapter 10).

These passages encompass a pointed rewrite of an early thematically central poem in Charlotte Smith’s then famous Elegiac Sonnets.

Written at the close of Spring.

The garlands fade that Spring so lately wove,

Each simple flower, which she had nursed in dew,

Anemonies, that spangled every grove,

The primrose wan, and hare-bell mildly blue.

No more shall violets linger in the dell,

Or purple orchis variegate the plain,

Till Spring again shall call forth every bell,

And dress with humid hands her wreaths again.—

Ah! poor humanity! so frail, so fair,

Are the fond visions of thy early day,

Till tyrant passion and corrosive care

Bid all thy fairy colours fade away!

Another May new buds and flowers shall bring;

Ah! why has happiness—no second spring?

(Sonnet 2)

Then in the next paragraph, Anne finds herself in a meadow constructed from “large enclosures, where the ploughs at work and the fresh-made path spoke the farmer counteracting the sweets of poetical despondence, and meaning to have spring again” (Volume 1, Chapter 10). Indeed for some readers amid all the loss, aging and actual death, depressions in Persuasion, one lesson it teaches is the buoyancy of the human spirit irresistibly and against great odds, given some luck, and irrespective of other relationships or obligations, seeks and sometimes finds or creates for itself true self-renewal. Of Mrs Charles Smith, Anne Elliot remarks: “Here was that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself, which was from Nature herself. It was the choicest gift of Heaven” (Volume 2, Chapter 5).

Austen’s relationship with Charlotte Smith displays analogous ambiguities. One of several women novelists cited inside her fiction, Smith is the only one where explicit concrete details and titles from Smith’s novels appear, not once but twice: Emmeline in “The History of England” and Ethelinde in “Catherine, or the Bower” (Minor Works). Mary Lascelles was the first to note Austen’s possibly pervasive debt to Smith (and Radcliffe); William Magee meant to exhaustively catalogue Smith references across Austen’s oeuvre; Lorraine Fletcher demonstrated persuasively that the central situation and scenes between a hero, Willoughby, and a heroine modeled the anguish of Marianne before her Willoughby’s public snubbing or her in Sense and Sensibility is Smith’s Celestina. If you accept the argument that known tragic facts about Charlotte Smith are replicated in the situation of Mrs Charles Smith (Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography [1998], Chapter 6), including crippling lameness and an inability as a woman to act for herself in a lawsuit (see my blog, Charlotte Smith’s Collected Letters, Reveries under the Sign of Austen, Two), Charlotte Smith might seem the presiding genius loci of the novel. Captain Benwick habitually reads and finds comfort in Byron and Scott’s historical romance verse, as apparently does Anne herself, together with “such works of our best moralists, such collections of the finest letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and suffering” as she thought might “rouse and fortify” his grieving mind to endurance” (Volume 1, Chapter 11). But it is the realistic texture of Smith’s sonnets and her insistence that she cannot forget her past, her refusal to be consoled that until near its end Persuasion repeatedly calls to mind. I limit myself to the opening and closing of Smith’s characteristic Sonnets 32 and 42:

When latest Autumn spreads her evening veil,

And the grey mists from these dim waves arise,

I love to listen to the hollow sighs,

Thro’ the half-leafless wood that breathes the gale:

For at such hours the shadowy phantom pale,

Oft seems to fleet before the poet’s eye;

Strange sounds are heard, and mournful melodies,

As of night-wanderers, who their woes bewail!…

But no gay change revolving seasons bring

To call forth pleasure from the soul of pain!

Bid Syren Hope resume her long-lost part,

And chase the vulture Care—that feeds upon the heart.

The works Anne refers to as useful in checking and controlling our love of strong feelings in ourselves aroused by literature probably include Samuel Johnson’s Ramblers, and memoir-novels like Smith’s own but also say Burney’s novels, Frances Sheridan’s (the novel Sidney Biddulph, 1761, which has reconciliation out of near disaster at its close), and novels by French women very popular in the period: Madame de Genlis and Sophie Cottin wrote two she refers to in other novels, respectively, Adele et Theodore in Emma (Englished as Adelaide and Theodore, or Letters on Education [1782; translated 1783], ed. Gillian Dow, Pickering and Chatto [2007]), and Amelie Mansfield in Mansfield Park [see my etext edition]).

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Nick Dear in his screenplay for the quietly emotionally effective 1994 BBC Persuasion (directed by Roger Michell, featuring Amanda Root as Anne, and Ciarán Hinds as Wentworth) rewrote moments of this thread in Austen’s text at crucial moments viable for film as lived out by the principal characters. In Bath, given the slightest opportunity to speak, Wentworth says to Anna of Benwick’s marrying out of his grief: “but Benwick—he’s something more. He’s a clever man, a reading man—and I do view his—I mean that he—suddenly attaching himself to her like that! A man in his situation! With a broken heart! Phoebe Harville was wonderful and he was devoted to her. A man does not recover from such devotion, to such a woman!—he ought not—he does not.” To which Root as Anne replies, a few scenes later, and herself having but an indirect prompting and but a moment to snatch: “All the privilege I claim for my own sex—and it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it—is that of loving longest, when all hope is gone.” We see Hinds as Wentworth responding: “at times during this debate … listening intently, and at times writing fast” (Persuasion: A Screenplay [1996]). Simon Burke’s screenplay took this further, to a high emotional pitch of stark anguish and half-crazed joy in an extraordinarily moving realization by Sally Hawkins (2007 BBC Persuasion, directed by Adrian Shergold, with Rupert Perry-Jones as Wentworth), for which there is much warrant in Austen’s text. In Austen’s Persuasion we move from the fraught first meeting of Wentworth and Anne in Bath to her return home for a “perusal” of his letters. A few chapters later (though close in time) Anne learns from Mary’s needling letter that Wentworth is “unshackled and free;” this is followed immediately by her father’s castigation of her defiant visit to her friend, Mrs Smith, where she learns of Mrs Smith’s dire situation and we and she hear Mrs Smith’s reflection, e.g, “There is so little real friendship in the world.” Then under pressured from Lady Russell to consider marrying Mr Elliot in order to become Lady Elliot of Kellynch; Anne, nonetheless, at the mere news Benwick is not to marry Louisa Musgrove, gives way to “feelings” of “joy, senseless joy.” (Volume 1, Chapter 6 and Volume 2, Chapter 17). As with the interaction between Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s 1995 Miramax Sense and Sensibility, and the marvelous film and Austen’s novel; after viewing the two Persuasion films, one cannot read Austen’s last mature nearly finished book in quite the same spirit again.

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This situation of seemingly diametrically opposed points of view fragilely reconciled, is important because it’s typical of Austen’s novels, and thus puts before us in this brief close reading of the novel in context, why people debate so intensely with opposed inferences about her work and life too. We also see here an instance of Austen’s subtle skill in using the techniques of intertextuality. In a fascinating lecture I heard last night (November 17, 2017, at the Library of Congress) at the Washington Area Print Group, in a regional monthly meeting of people associated with Sharp (spelled out The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing), Antony W. Lee’s “Rambler 2 and Johnson’s Dictionary: Paratextual and Intertextual Entanglements with Pope, Statius, Dryden, Gay, and Milton,” Professor Lee suggested (himself quoting Herman Meyer, from The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel) that “the charm of quotation emanates from a unique tension between assimilation and dissimilation.” Austen makes Smith’s texts and her very life story link closely with a new environment (Austen’s Persuasion), but remains detached (as do the quotations from Byron and Scott and allusions to Johnson among others), permitting us to radiate them into Austen’s novel as well as (if we think about it), making us judge these other authors by Austen’s perspective (I paraphrase and add to what was said in this paper and a discussion afterward).

She leaves her stamp on these great poetic texts in her great creative poetic novel. And on us too. She takes (as she said in a poem she composed shortly before her early death) her immortal destructive, conquering and influential place in the traditions of literature, art and film. Is there a better way for ourselves enjoy and contemplate the autumnal November day I’m writing this blog in than studying Jane Austen’s Persuasion?

Quotations are from the Oxford edition of Jane Austen’s novels, edited by R.W. Chapman (1933), and from Stuart Curran’s edition of The Poems of Charlotte Smith (1993).

Valancy Stirling’s Inner Life

My sister Bethie Baxter objects to my criticism of Valancy Stirling’s lack of ambition. She read the blog post I wrote last week, “‘Going in for realities’ in L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle,” and she wrote to tell me what she thinks of Valancy’s passion for reading and her “inner, creative, intelligent life.” And then she agreed to let me share her analysis here, as a guest post for The Blue Castle readalong that my friend Naomi MacKinnon and I are hosting this month. (Naomi wrote about the book on Monday: “5 Reasons Why I Shouldn’t Like The Blue Castle #ReadingValancy.”)

In this post, Bethie mentions that she doesn’t have a copy of the novel with her—she’s writing about the book based on what she remembers from reading it many times over the years. The copy she used to have was one she borrowed from me, maybe about twenty years ago, and I’m delighted that she has derived so much pleasure from it. She’s read it so many times that the cover and the first several pages are falling off, and I don’t mind that at all because it’s evidence of her love for the book.

I’ve reread Montgomery’s Anne and Emily books over the last few years, but I didn’t notice my copy of The Blue Castle was missing until Naomi suggested last spring that we read it together. Bethie kindly returned my book and she has since moved from Boston, Massachusetts to Bonn, Germany with her family. I’m thinking I’ll send the book back to her after the readalong, although she insists I ought to keep it because it matches my other McClelland and Stewart “Canadian Favourites” editions of Montgomery’s novels. I think she should have it, because while I do love the novel, she loves it more than I do!

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I’m really pleased to have this chance to share Bethie’s writing with you today. I have always thought of her as the Elizabeth Bennet of our family, because she’s lively, witty, and very, very smart, and also because her name, Elizabeth Baxter, is so similar. (I haven’t yet figured out parallels for the rest of our family.) For years, I’ve been impressed with my sister’s astute insights about the novels of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and L.M. Montgomery, three of my favourite writers. Bethie has an MA in Classics from Dalhousie University and she’s currently working on a PhD at Boston University, writing a dissertation on metaphors for poetic creation in the lyric poetry of Pindar.

Bethie tells me she has mostly classical texts with her in Bonn—”and not nearly enough novels!!!”—so I’m planning to send a few other novels to her when my parents go to Germany for Christmas. (Hi Mom and Dad, I know you read the blog, and I hope you won’t mind packing some extra books in your suitcases next month….) Fortunately, Bethie has all of Jane Austen with her—“Brought her in my suitcase,” she says. “Could not have waited the 6-10 weeks for the shipment to arrive. So far I have reread Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion (maximum comfort needed for extreme life changes).”

What shall I send her? Do any of you want to suggest some of your favourite novels? I’ve thought of Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War (my favourite novel of 2016). And I’ve been rereading Carol Shields recently—Small Ceremonies, Larry’s Party, and Unless—so maybe I’ll send a couple of her books, too.

In my blog post last week, since I didn’t have any photos of what November looks like in the Muskoka region of Ontario, I included some of my photos of November in Nova Scotia. For this week’s post, I asked Bethie to send some pictures from Bonn. She took these yesterday when she went for a walk in the fields near her house. And at the bottom of the post I’ll add a picture of that much-loved edition of The Blue Castle, which I now think of as hers instead of mine.

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From the letter Bethie wrote to me earlier this week:

I enjoyed seeing your recent blog about The Blue Castle. As you know it has long been a favourite of mine. I wonder, though, if it is fair to say that Valancy isn’t courageous like Anne or Emily because she aspires only to take control of her own happiness, and does not also pursue education and a literary career as they do. For one thing, their circumstances are so different. She is not an eleven-year-old girl, she is (she thinks) an old woman, standing at the end of life, standing at death’s door. Doesn’t ambition (literary or otherwise) require hope for the future? Valancy has none.

She also has never met anyone in her life who would foster or respond to or encourage any sign of intelligence in her. Even orphaned Emily, who might seem to have no one, and many against her, always has the memory of her father. Her father took her creative talents seriously when she was a small child and that support powerfully fuels her ambition as she grows up. Emily also then eventually meets with a whole cast of sympathetic characters who nourish her ambition in valuable ways (Cousin Jimmy, Teddy, Mr. Carpenter…). In contrast, Valancy’s childhood and indeed her whole life have passed, and not once has she met with a single creative, sympathetic soul that responds to her own. What would that be like? What kind of ambition would be possible given that experience?

(A warning for those of you who haven’t yet reached the end of the novel: there’s a plot spoiler ahead, so you may want to stop reading here.)

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I also think it would be wrong to assume (as I think the critic you quoted does) that Valancy’s romantic daydreams are the only (paltry) evidence we have of her inner, creative, intelligent life. Valancy doesn’t write, but she does read, and she is a dedicated and passionate reader. It is her one act of rebellion, even when still under the power of her controlling family, to take out library books! When she is not permitted to read novels, she turns to the philosophical nature writing of John Foster (or is it Forster? I don’t have a copy at hand). These books have been the only thing sustaining her through the narrow ugliness of her life.

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I have always thought that it is a not very well-kept secret that the real identity of the mysterious John Foster (?) is not, after all, Barney, but Lucy Maud Montgomery herself. The elusive figure of the nature writer within the story provides the opportunity for Montgomery to infuse this novel particularly with a kind of writing that is important to her (and that she is especially good at). Those brilliant and shimmering, transcendent nature passages of “John Foster” are (for me) at the core of who Montgomery is as a writer. They are also the sort of passages that an Anne or an Emily would write. Valancy is their reader. And she is a good reader. She is an appreciative reader, receptive to the illumination and joy her reading brings her. I don’t think we should take this as “silence” on the education of women.

I’ve also always thought that The Blue Castle would make a great film. To me, the novel is so bright it’s basically already a screenplay. A few Canadian actors and some Ontario scenery are all that’s missing…

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More information about The Blue Castle readalong: “An Invitation to Read The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery”

Blog posts on the novel:

Naomi MacKinnon (Consumed By Ink): “5 Reasons Why I Shouldn’t Like The Blue Castle #ReadingValancy”

Miss Bates Reads Romance: Opening-Line Mini-Review: L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle

Rohan Maitzen: “My First Romance?: L.M. Mongomery, The Blue Castle”

Brona’s Books: “The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery”

“Going in for realities” in L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle

“Valancy was in the midst of realities after a lifetime of unrealities,” writes L.M. Montgomery in her 1926 novel The Blue Castle (Chapter 17). Her heroine rejects the colourless, conventional life she’s been leading and decides to speak the truth and pursue independence. Her mother reports that she’s said “I’ve been keeping up appearances all my life. Now I’m going in for realities. Appearances can go hang.” “Go hang!” her mother repeats in astonishment (Chapter 15).

Faced with the news that she has just one year to live, Valancy chooses to shape the story of her life, instead of continuing to allow her mother and other relatives to control everything. As Elizabeth Waterston writes in Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery (2008), “She opts not to languish, but to live her own life, a mark of her modernity.”

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Valancy may be modern in this, and ambitious about taking control of her life, but in other ways she is far less ambitious than some of Montgomery’s other heroines, such as Anne Shirley and Emily Starr, both of whom are ambitious about their education and professional accomplishments as well as about personal happiness. Valancy is ambitious about finding love—she despairs that “no man has ever desired her” (Chapter 1)—but while she is a reader, she’s never had any professional ambitions. Laura M. Robinson writes that “The only ambition [Valancy] has is tied up in her Blue Castle in Spain, a reference to her constant daydreams of riches and lovers which enable her to tolerate desperate daily conditions in her ugly home with her ugly room and her unloving relatives. The novel is silent, at best, on higher education for women” (“‘A Gift for Friendship’: Revolutionary Friendship in Anne of the Island and The Blue Castle,” in L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-1942, edited by Rita Bode and Lesley D. Clement [2015]).

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My friend Naomi and I are hosting a readalong for The Blue Castle this month (see my post from last spring, “An Invitation to Read The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery,” and Naomi’s post from a few weeks ago, “The Blue Castle Readalong: #ReadingValancy”). Please join us, by commenting on her blog and/or mine, by discussing the novel on social media, or by writing your own blog post (please send us the link!).

When I write about Montgomery’s novels, I usually try to illustrate blog posts with photos from trips to Prince Edward Island (or, in the case of Anne of the Island, Nova Scotia), but The Blue Castle is set in Ontario, and I haven’t been to the Muskoka Lakes region that inspired the setting for this novel. I suggested to Naomi that we read the novel in November because of this beautiful passage about November at Mistawis:

November—with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes—days full of a fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines. Days with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise. Days when an exquisite melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake. But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees. What cared they? Old Tom had built his roof well, and his chimney drew.

“Warm fire—books—comfort—safety from storm—our cats on the rug. Moonlight,” said Barney, “would you be any happier now if you had a million dollars?” (Chapter 31)

I don’t have photos of Ontario’s “fine, pale sunshine” or “turquoise skies,” so I’ll include a few photos of Nova Scotia in November instead.[image error]

I hadn’t read The Blue Castle since I was about twelve, and I didn’t remember very much about the story. The only thing that really stuck with me over the years was the letter Valancy receives from her doctor, in which he tells her she has a dangerous form of heart disease, and only a year to live. I didn’t remember any details about the terrible way her relatives treat her, or about her romance with Barney Snaith.

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On this reading, I was especially interested in the many references to “reality” and “unreality.” Valancy leaves behind that “lifetime of unrealities” to look for “reality.” When Barney accepts her proposal of marriage, however, he says contradictory things. He wants them to be honest with each other: “we are never to pretend anything to each other”; “we’ll never tell a lie to each other about anything—a big lie or a petty lie.” But he also says, “I have things I want to hide”; “You are not to ask me about them.”

I was a little surprised that Valancy accepts these conditions without question (even though she also makes her own condition, that he must never speak of her illness). They begin their marriage promising to be open and honest about everything, except about the things that will always be kept secret. And I was surprised that she doesn’t resent the time he spends shut up in “Bluebeard’s Chamber.” She isn’t even very curious about what he does during those hours. When she thinks of it at all, she speculates that “he must be conducting chemical experiments—or counterfeiting money.” Yet “she did not trouble herself about it,” because “His past and his future concerned her not. Only this rapturous present. Nothing else mattered” (Chapter 29). However, it isn’t just in the past that he locked himself in this room for hours at a time—this is something he’s doing in the present, with no explanation for why he spends all this time away from her. Given that she’s so concerned with “reality,” why doesn’t the truth about what he’s doing matter more?[image error]

It was fascinating to learn that Montgomery said she was sorry she’d finished writing The Blue Castle: “It has been for several months a daily escape from a world of intolerable realities,” she wrote in her journal (quoted by E. Holly Pike in “Propriety and the Proprietary: The Commodification of Health and Nature in The Blue Castle,” in L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys). She was writing about Valancy finding happiness with Barney at a time when she herself was extremely worried about her husband’s mental illness. Her work on The Blue Castle also helped her postpone her work on the third and last novel in the “Emily” series, as I mentioned when I wrote about Emily’s Quest in the spring.

(A note for those of you who haven’t finished reading The Blue Castle yet—I’m about to talk about the ending, so you might want to stop reading at this point….)

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Montgomery escaped her own “intolerable realities” by inventing a happier story, a happier reality, for Valancy. She put off writing a conventional happy ending for Emily, and focused instead on this new novel about a heroine who rejects convention and revels in her discovery of “a world which had nothing in common with the one she had left behind.” I read Jane Urquhart’s biography of Montgomery last spring and I returned to it after I read The Blue Castle, because I remembered her argument about the contrast between Montgomery and Edith Wharton: she writes that “while Wharton would be able to look deeply into the dark heart of North American rural severity as well as into urban privilege in her writing, Lucy Maud Montgomery would never, in her novels, be able to confront head-on the sometimes grim realities of her own existence” (L.M. Montgomery [2009]).

“The absolute freedom of it all was unbelievable,” Valancy thinks of her marriage to Barney. “They could do exactly as they liked” (Chapter 28). It is all a bit unbelievable, in the end, with all the references to “perfect happiness” (Chapters 21, 22, and 27). Valancy is so happy, in fact, that “her happiness terrified her” (Chapter 45).

In Magic Island, Waterston lists several of the books Montgomery read while she was working on The Blue Castle, one of which was Jane Austen’s Emma. It seems to me that there’s an echo of Austen’s language in this last paragraph of The Blue Castle: “She was so happy that her happiness terrified her,” Montgomery says. The last sentence of Emma refers to “the perfect happiness of the union” between the heroine and hero. And Austen’s Persuasion ends with Anne Elliot’s happy marriage and her fears for the future: “the dread of a future war” is “all that could dim her sunshine.” Emma is perfectly happy; Anne is happy and also worried. Valancy, who at the beginning of The Blue Castle learned to conquer her fear, is so happy she’s terrified.

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Some of the passages I want to remember:

“Valancy did not persist. Valancy never persisted. She was afraid to.” (Chapter 1)

“Fear is the original sin,” wrote John Foster. “Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something.” (Chapter 5)

“I’ve had nothing but a second-hand existence,” decided Valancy. “All the great emotions of life have passed me by. I’ve never even had a grief. And have I ever really loved anybody?” (Chapter 8)

“After all, Valancy must be both mad and bad.” (The judgement of Olive, the “wonder girl of the whole Stirling clan,” in Chapter 21)

Valancy’s conversation with Uncle Benjamin after she’s announced her marriage (Chapter 27):

“Say ‘damn’ and you’ll feel better,” she suggested.

“I can express my feelings without blasphemy. And I tell you you have covered yourself with eternal disgrace and infamy by marrying that drunkard—”

“You would be more endurable if you got drunk occasionally. Barney is not a drunkard.”

And her exchange with Cousin Sarah, later in that same chapter:

“I’m glad I never had any children,” said Cousin Sarah. “If they don’t break your heart in one way they do it in another.”

“Isn’t it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up?” queried Valancy. “Before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. That would be worth the pain.

Barney to Uncle Benjamin (Chapter 28):

“I have made her happy,” he said coolly, “and she was miserable with her friends. So that’s that.”

Uncle Benjamin stared. It had never occurred to him that women had to be, or ought to be, “made happy.”

The passage about November:

“Warm fire—books—comfort—safety from storm—our cats on the rug. Moonlight,” said Barney, “would you be any happier now if you had a million dollars?”

“No, nor half so happy. I’d be bored by conventions and obligations then.” (Chapter 31)

As Barney comes to know Valancy better, he begins to think she’s too good to be true: “Sometimes I feel you’re too nice to be real—that I’m just dreaming you” (Chapter 34). Still, he eventually acknowledges that she has “made me believe again in the reality of friendship and love” (Chapter 42).

[image error]Blog posts on The Blue Castle:

Rohan Maitzen: “My First Romance?: L.M. Mongomery, The Blue Castle”

Brona’s Books: “The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery”

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