Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 21
October 27, 2017
Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen: Q & A with Sheila Johnson Kindred
Sheila Johnson Kindred’s biography of Fanny Palmer Austen was published earlier this month by McGill-Queen’s University Press, and she kindly agreed to answer a few questions about the book for my blog. Sheila has done extensive original research on the life of Jane Austen’s naval brother Charles and his wife Fanny, and she has written about the connections between their experiences and Austen’s novels. Her essays have been published in Persuasions and The Jane Austen Society Report, and in a collection of essays called Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, which I edited for the Jane Austen Society.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may remember that in June, Sheila and I gave a paper together at the Jane Austen Society conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia on “Charles and Francis: Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers on the Royal Navy’s North American Station,” and that we created a walking tour that describes Austen-related sites in Halifax. A few years ago, we wrote a paper together called “Among the Proto-Janeites: Reading Mansfield Park for Consolation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1815.”
I’m excited about the publication of Sheila’s wonderful book Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen , and it’s a real pleasure to feature the book on my blog today. Sheila taught for many years in the Philosophy Department at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, and she has spoken at Jane Austen Society of North America AGMs in Quebec City, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, DC, as well as at Jane Austen Society (UK) conferences in Halifax (2005 and 2017) and Bermuda (2010). She lives in Halifax with her husband and their cat.
The launch for Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister is on Monday, November 6th at 7pm at the Central Library in Halifax, Nova Scotia. If you’re in the Halifax area, I hope you’ll come and celebrate with Sheila!
Sarah: I know you’ve been interested in Jane Austen, her fiction, and her family for a great many years, and I know you have a background in teaching and writing about philosophy. What led you to explore the life and letters of Jane Austen’s sister-in-law Fanny Palmer Austen? Did you find that there were connections with your earlier work in philosophy or did you think of this historical research as an entirely new project?
Sheila: Why write a biography of Fanny Palmer Austen? She intrigues me. I came upon Fanny first through extensive research into the naval career of her husband Charles, Jane Austen’s youngest brother. When I considered that she had spent parts of two years, and a tiny part of a third in Halifax, the place I call home, and when a conversation at a JAS AGM encouraged me to look closely at Fanny’s life and letters, I realized this was the very project I wanted to undertake. Thus began a long search for relevant information which has been sometimes frustrating, often rewarding, but on balance more than worth the effort. Fanny has turned out to be a spirited and resilient young woman, a naval wife who loyally supported Charles in his career, and who bravely faced unusual challenges as she made a home for her family both on land and on sea during the later years of the Napoleonic Wars. Additionally, I had the great fortune to view Fanny’s oil portrait by Robert Field during the early years of my research. Here was Fanny as she appeared in Halifax in 1810, the very time I was writing about her; I found a depth of expression in a lovely face. While I was thinking about her and writing about her it was important to have this evidence of her physical presence.
My philosophic background has had considerable influence on how I approached the challenge of writing biography. Extensive experience in teaching argumentation has led to a rigorous attention to matters of evidence. In the search to find out who Fanny was, to determine her personality and character it was important to make claims which were supported by relevant facts and to adjust the strength of those claims in proportion to the support I could muster for them. Seeking to characterize Fanny also brought to mind issues about identity and autonomy, notions which have roots in philosophic discourse.
Doing historical research was not something entirely new as my previous work on facets of Charles Austen’s naval career had required this sort of approach.
Sarah: Fanny was born in Bermuda in 1789 and spent time in Nova Scotia in 1809, 1810, and 1811 before travelling to England where she spent the rest of her life. What can we learn from her experiences in these three places and from her letters?
Sheila: Descriptions of the lives of naval wives during the Napoleonic Wars, who were directly involve with their husbands’ naval careers, are very scant. Fanny’s story, about her experiences on the North American station of the navy and then in English waters, fills a gap in this deficit of information. Much of her story is illuminated by two sets of letters, one from Halifax, Nova Scotia and the other from England.
Fanny’s Halifax letters give an intriguing profile of the Halifax military and social community of 1810. She comments astutely on the social scene and the dynamics of social relationships. She tells us who is there; she speaks of a busy naval port in wartime, and especially of the significance for her when Charles is ordered to transport troops to a potentially dangerous warzone off Portugal, while she is left behind in Halifax.
Her letters from England are more emotionally sophisticated and complex as her duties and obligations have increased. By early 1812 Fanny was making a home for Charles and their three daughters on board a working naval vessel, HMS Namur. She is frank about the challenges and difficulties she faces in this unique situation.
Fanny’s experiences in both Halifax and England shed light on what it was like to be confined by the social and cultural conventions of genteel Georgian society. She was susceptible to the expectations about appropriate behaviour of young women of her class, and she was influenced by the ideology of domesticity to which they were expected to conform. Fanny’s letters show that she recognized the importance of a particular code of conduct but at the same time was developing her own sense of identity and autonomy.
Sarah: What are some of the most exciting things you learned about the relationship between Jane Austen and her “transatlantic sister” Fanny Austen? What did Fanny think of Jane, and to what extent do you think Jane drew on her sister-in-law’s experiences as a naval wife when she was writing Mansfield Park and Persuasion? Did Fanny “glor[y] in being a sailor’s wife,” as Anne Elliot does at the end of Persuasion?
Sheila: Joining the Austen family brought Fanny into a relationship with Jane Austen, a state of affairs that intrigued me. It was exciting to discover how much they were in contact with one another, initially by letter and then in person when Fanny moved to England in 1811. Jane describes Fanny in familiar language in letters to Cassandra. She is referred to as “Mrs. Fanny, one of the “two Fanny’s, “Fanny Senior,” “[Cassy’s] Mama,” and part of the “the Charleses.” On an occasion when they met at Godmersham, Jane describes Fanny as “just like [her]own nice [self].” Fanny’s experiences as a naval wife were, I believe, useful sources for Jane Austen, for naval detail but also as an inspiration for some of the naval wives in Persuasion: most significantly Mrs. Croft, but also to a lesser degree, Anne Elliot and Mrs. Harville. In comparing the experiences of Fanny and Mrs. Croft I found interesting parallels in terms of patterns of travel, worries about their husband’s well-being when they were apart, practical attitudes to matters of everyday living, and much more. I explore these parallels in some detail in Chapter 9 of my book.
Did Fanny “glory in being a sailor’s wife?” Fanny was definitely proud of Charles’s naval accomplishments and she more than likely shared Anne Elliot’s opinions about the virtues of the navy as an institution. Additionally, I think that her close connection with his career, both on land and on sea, made her feel that she too was an integral part of Charles’s naval world. Yet there was inevitably less glory to be had when she was anxious about his well-being and she found their family life constrained by his professional obligations.
Sarah: What is the best advice you have received about writing and editing?
Sheila: Find some willing critical readers. Good feedback is essential to the process of writing.
Follow the advice of Jane Austen who spoke of “lopping and cropping” her manuscript.
Keep asking yourself what is essential.
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Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen, at Bookmark II in Halifax
Thanks, Sheila, and congratulations on your new book!
September 22, 2017
A Sense of an Ending: Persuasion and Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”
On this first day of autumn, it’s my pleasure to introduce a guest post on Jane Austen and John Keats by William Hutchings, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK, where he was previously Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Director of the Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-Based Learning. He has published mainly in the areas of eighteenth-century poetry (William Collins, William Cowper, Thomas Gray, James Thomson) and pedagogy (problem-based and enquiry-based learning). His most recent books are Living Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Living Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He is joint editor of The Cowper and Newton Journal and is a UK National Teaching Fellow.
Here’s a photo of him standing on the Cobb at Lyme:
This guest post is a preview of the blog series I’m hosting in honour of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. The series will launch in December, with guest posts on Fridays in 2018. I hope you’ll join the celebration by reading and discussing the novels with us!
Thank you for sending me suggestions for a title for the series. There are sixty-five possibilities so far (not counting my own uninspired “Northanger Abbey and Persuasion at 200”)—it’s been a delight to read them all and it’s going to be very hard to choose one. Please see last month’s blog post for the invitation to suggest titles. The deadline is the end of September. If I choose the title you suggest, I’ll send you a set of cards featuring photos I’ve taken of Austen-related sites in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Here’s one of those sites: Admiralty House, where Francis Austen lived when he was Commander-in-Chief of the North American and West Indies Station.
And here’s today’s wonderful guest post on Austen and Keats, by William Hutchings:
Two climactic moments in the penultimate chapter mark the reunion of Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth. The first is his powerful letter, silently penned while Anne and Captain Harville debate the strength and durability of men’s and women’s feelings. The second is their intimate conversation on the gravel walk, one of the quietest places in Bath, between the Royal Crescent and Queen’s Parade Place, passing behind Gay Street and The Circus. The two events could not be more differently presented: one an explosive outburst in the first person, the other a contemplative piece of narrative report. Wentworth’s letter makes an obvious dramatic impact, but Jane Austen’s account of their conversation is no less emotionally charged. The scene is introduced by the strong assertion that the “present hour” offers “a blessing indeed,” endowed with “immortality” as a source of “the happiest recollections” their future lives will afford. However, there is no direct speech here. Their words are too intimate and profound for the novel either to intrude or to replicate. The novelist exercises restraint, maintaining a discreet and respectful distance from her characters. Instead, she irradiates the moment, suffusing it with a gentle lyricism, and shaping her narrative into a distinct but fluid expression of gathering achievement.
The first three of the passage’s four sentences are of regularly increasing length—31, 45 and 57 words—as the description dwells on and extends the exquisite moment. The last is shorter—22 words—and brings the whole to its resolution. This four-part structure resembles a relaxed version of a Shakespearian sonnet, with the final sentence in two syntactic sections, each of eleven words, like the two lines of a couplet. The three preceding sections act as the quatrains of a sonnet, each self-contained yet linguistically connected, but with the expanding length readily available to prose, or, indeed, to those forms of irregular sonnet that stretch the fixed structure of the formal sonnet. The three “quatrains” are linked by anaphora: “There they exchanged again,” “There they returned again,” “And there.” The first is in two parts, separated by a comma and conjunction (“but”), placing the present moment of reconciliation against the divisions of the past:
There they exchanged again those feelings and those promises which had once before seemed to secure every thing, but which had been followed by so many, many years of division and estrangement.
The bi-partite structure of the sentence is gently sustained by balancing phrases (“feelings and promises,” “division and estrangement”) and grammatical repetition (“which had,” “which had”). Verbal repetition then transfers the emotional weight to the sentence’s second half through the regretful sighing of “so many, many years.”
The second sentence continues the present/past comparison, but now decisively shifts the weight towards the present as their reunion exceeds in happiness their first union:
There they returned again into the past, more exquisitely happy, perhaps, in their re-union, than when it had been first projected; more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character, truth, and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting.
Jane Austen carefully fuses depth of feeling and rational consideration. After a delicately placed “perhaps,” a modest qualification appropriate for two people who have learnt from experience that confidence in present joy can prove all too premature, the first “more” is expanded into a sequence tempering rhapsody with reflection: “more tender, more tried, more fixed.” Where “more tender” delicately sustains the emotional level of “exquisitely happy,” “more tried” hints at an increase in maturity that is confirmed in the longer, emphatic and precise phrasing of “more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character, truth, and attachment.” This trio of “more’s” is matched by three abstract nouns: “character,” “truth,” “attachment,” so that the entire lengthy phrase manifests the poise of a mature relationship. The concluding terser summary of what maturity has brought (“more equal to act, more justified in acting”) admits ethical language (“justified”) into a further assertion of balance, between readiness to proceed and actual performance. Being equal to the task is conveyed in an exact grammatical equivalence of phrase: “more” plus adjective and verbal form. Ripeness encompasses all, emotion, thought and action.
The third and longest sentence is the climax of the whole:
And there, as they slowly paced the gradual ascent, heedless of every group around them, seeing neither sauntering politicians, bustling house-keepers, flirting girls, nor nursery-maids and children, they could indulge in those retrospections and acknowledgments, and especially in those explanations of what had directly preceded the present moment, which were so poignant and so ceaseless in interest.
The first adverb (“slowly”) stretches time to fill the event with breath, life and experience, and so with rich material for later memories. Its complete clause (“as they slowly paced the gradual ascent”) links time to place and quietly encompasses the familiar metaphor of life as a journey, “gradual ascent” implying that their future, like any future, will not always be easy, will not always tread “equal” ground, but that it will also enable them to look back just as the present allows them now to reflect on the past (“retrospections”). The quality of the present moment lies fittingly at the heart of this climactic sentence, their experience of lovers’ self-absorption rendered in the most discreet of fashions, by listing the kinds of fellow-strollers whose lives pass by unnoticed. These others are described in generalised plural nouns and generic, and mildly humorous, participial adjectives: “sauntering politicians.” The present participles also imply fleeting superficiality, the lives of those for whom this moment on the gravel walk is of no real consequence. Politicians have nothing meaningful to do and girls flirt, while for Anne and Wentworth this is an occasion of the highest significance and the utmost seriousness. The relative precision with which their feelings and thoughts are conveyed is set in relief against the vagueness of the generalised plurals: these are the kinds of people and activities that are commonly found on the walk—habitual details—whereas for one couple the event is unique and unforgettable.
The final sentence defines the moment in exact time, as inscribing it in a mental diary to be re-read and fixing it in a wider context:
All the little variations of the last week were gone through; and of yesterday and to-day there could scarcely be an end.
“Variations” of the past week, its changes and uncertainties, are the events narrated in preceding chapters: their chance meeting in Molland’s confectioners shop, the concert in the Assembly Rooms. The second clause concentrates on the key particulars of “yesterday” and “to-day,” when time has attained its climax. Yesterday includes the scene in the White Hart Inn where Anne obliquely conveys her real feelings by declaring her preference for attending the theatre rather than a social gathering where William Elliot will be present. Today, of course, means the build-up to Wentworth’s letter. But these are more than events to be recorded in a diary. They occupy a space that endows them with endless significance for the couple. This present moment is the fulfilment, the achievement of their lives. So it is that Anne and Wentworth stand outside the daily trivia of commonplace activities. The transformation of Anne from the excluded, marginalised figure within her family is complete.
That evening, in the commonplace setting of a card party in Camden Place, Anne is “glowing and lovely in sensibility and happiness.” She has been touched with rosy hue. That last phrase is Keats’s, from the final stanza of his “Ode to Autumn”:
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.
Keats got the idea from a walk he had taken on a temperate September day in 1819 through river meadows between his lodgings in Winchester and the church of St Cross, a mile or so south. Two days later, in a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds dated 21 September, he wrote an account of his walk and how he came to compose the ode:
Somehow a stubble plain looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look warm—this struck me so much in my sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.
Keats’s lines in the poem magically transform the declining day and year into a temporary glow reflecting both at their zenith. His phrasing is elliptical, compressing the whole sky and earth into a single moment of outstanding natural beauty. Clouds in a barred formation absorb and reflect the setting sun’s light, which colours with a soft, warm glow (“bloom”) the stubble-plains. Autumn is suffused with the tints of rosy summer. As in Housman’s wonderful phrase “aftermaths of soft September” (in “Tell me not here,” Last Poems 40), the warmth of the moment revives life and youth, as an aftermath is a second blooming of a once-reaped field.
Anne’s decline into pallid autumn is reversed by the rosy hue of renewed love, of rediscovered summer. When all hope had seemed to have gone, a series of events, (beginning, perhaps, when the sea-air of Lyme restored colour to her complexion and attracted to her the notice of William Elliot as their paths crossed) raised the possibility of a second blooming of a seemingly lost love. Keats’s lines are hauntingly precise yet fragile in their beauty. The stubble-plains, evidence of a lost summer, are, as with a delicate kiss (“touch”), warmed for a brief moment in the waning day. In only a few lines the poem will end with the famous “gathering swallows” that “twitter in the skies,” presaging departure. For Anne Elliot, Jane Austen writes in the novel’s final paragraph, “dread of a future war was all that could dim her sunshine.” Place conjoins the two authors, but time separates them. Keats’s walk on the nineteenth of September 1819 took him past the west front of Winchester cathedral and down College Street, where, two years earlier, Jane Austen had departed life. Neither knew of the other’s existence. However, both touched their final great work—Jane Austen’s last completed and most poetic novel, Keats’s last written poem for his 1820 volume, published less than a year before his death in Rome—with the glorious poignancy of autumn.
Quotations are from the Chapman edition of The Novels of Jane Austen, vol. 5, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1933); The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970); The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958).
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I invite you to subscribe by email or follow the blog to read the upcoming series of guest posts celebrating 200 years of Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. You can also follow along by connecting with me on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter (@Sarah_Emsley).
August 25, 2017
Blog Series Celebrating 200 Years of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion
[image error] I’m organizing a blog series in honour of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion and I need help with a title, please! Longtime readers of this blog will remember my unimaginative titles for “Pride and Prejudice at 200” and “The Custom of the Country at 100.”
Twice, now, I’ve been saved from a third title that’s “very dull indeed”: in 2014, Laurel Ann Nattress proposed “An Invitation to Mansfield Park” and in 2015-16, Nora Bartlett offered “Emma in the Snow.” I’m grateful to both for their creative suggestions.[image error]
What do you think would work well for this new series on Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, dear readers? I’d love to hear your ideas! Please comment on this blog post or email me (semsley at gmail dot com).
If I choose the title you suggest, I’ll send you a set of cards featuring photos I’ve taken of Austen-related sites in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. (For details about places Charles and Francis Austen and their families visited in Halifax, please see the walking tour Sheila Johnson Kindred and I created earlier this year: “Austens in Halifax.”)
[image error] The series will begin in December 2017. I’m thrilled to announce that contributors include Carol Adams, Stephen Ahern, Maggie Arnold, Elaine Bander, Deborah Barnum, Gisèle Baxter, John Baxter, Lyn Bennett, Diana Birchall, Serena Burdick, L. Bao Bui, Carol Chernega, Christy Ann Conlin, Natasha Duquette, Lynn Festa, Susannah Fullerton, William Hutchings, Syrie James, Hazel Jones, Theresa Kenney, Laaleen Khan, 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, Margaret C. Sullivan, Judith Thompson, Deborah Yaffe, Kim Wilson, and Daniel Woolf.
On the first day of autumn this year, September 22nd, I’ll share a preview of the series, with a guest post on Persuasion and John Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” by William Hutchings.
I’m excited to share all these posts with you and I’m looking forward to conversations about both novels. I’m very much hoping the series title will be more interesting than “Northanger Abbey and Persuasion at 200.” Please help!
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Black Rock Beach, Halifax, Nova Scotia
August 18, 2017
Jane Austen and William Cowper
Today’s guest post on Jane Austen and William Cowper is from Christine Grocott, who attended the Jane Austen Society of the UK conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia in June. Chris is a member of the Northern Branch of the Jane Austen Society and she lives in Stockport, England, near Manchester. I’m delighted to introduce her, and I’ll let her tell the story of how she came to write this guest post, which is a kind of sequel to the post I wrote in June about a Jane Austen poetry reading in the Halifax Public Gardens. I’m very pleased that she sent me what she wrote about Cowper, along with some wonderful photos.
Chris studied French and European Literature at Sussex University and she was a modern languages teacher for thirty-five years. She tells me her “home is not ‘five miles from Pemberley,’ to quote from the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice,” because the Pemberley scenes were filmed at Lyme Park. Chris is a volunteer at Lyme Park and she says visitors come to the beautiful house from all over the world, looking for Mr. Darcy. This year, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, there have been several events in the House and grounds, including Regency dancing and readings from Austen’s novels.
The first Jane Austen novel Chris studied was Persuasion, and she says it’s still her favourite. She’s been a member of the Jane Austen Society since 1985 and she attends conferences and events both nationally and locally. She compiles Jane Austen-related quizzes for Impressions, the newsletter of the Northern Branch of the Jane Austen Society. A few examples: “Jane Austen’s Children—Naughty or Nice,” “If Ebay existed in Regency times,” “Jane Austen and the Name ‘Anne,’” and “Jane Austen’s Married Ladies.”
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Chris reading in the Halifax Public Gardens (photo by Susan Kerslake)
Having looked out a poem by Jane Austen’s favourite poet, William Cowper, to read in the beautiful Halifax Public Gardens on Sunday 25th June, I was annoyed with myself when I could not find the materials I had brought all the way from Manchester, England. Fortunately, Sarah lent me a poem and I had such a lovely experience reading one of Jane’s mother’s comic poems in front of the bandstand.
Typically, I found my notes the next day and so at Sarah’s suggestion, now that I am back home after a three-week trip in the Canadian Rockies and Alaska, I would like to share an extract from the poem with you.
The Task, by William Cowper, was published as A Poem in Six Books in 1785 after a friend of Cowper’s called, coincidentally, Lady Austen (but no relation to Jane) set him a sort of challenge to write a poem in blank verse about nothing more than a SOFA!! He took the Task on and came up with the six poems from his reflections and musings as he sat on his sofa in front of the fire.
Extract from Book IV, The Winter Evening, from The Task, by William Cowper:
Me oft has Fancy ludicrous and wild
Soothed with a waking dream of houses, towers,
Trees, churches, and strange visages, express’d
In the red cinders, while with poring eye
I gazed, myself creating what I saw.
Nor less amused, have I quiescent watch’d
The sooty films that play upon the bars,
Pendulous and foreboding, in the view
Of superstition, prophesying still,
Though still deceived, some stranger’s near approach.
‘Tis thus the understanding takes repose
In indolent vacuity of thought,
And sleeps and is refresh’d. Meanwhile the face
Conceals the mood lethargic with a mask
Of deep deliberation, as the man
Were task’d to his full strength, absorb’d and lost.
Thus oft, reclined at ease, I lose an hour
At evening, till at length the freezing blast,
That sweeps the bolted shutter, summons home
The recollected powers; and, snapping short
The glassy threads with which the fancy weaves
Her brittle toys, restores me to myself.
It is The Winter Evening, Book IV which Jane Austen uses in Emma when she has Mr. Knightley quote a line from it to himself. He thinks he has seen signs of an intrigue between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax as he observes them exchanging looks and glances at a dinner party but is not sure whether it is just his imagination like Cowper’s in front of his fire seeing images in the flames:
When he was again in their company, he could not help remembering what he had seen; nor could he avoid observations which, unless it were like Cowper and his fire at twilight,
“Myself creating what I saw,”
brought him yet stronger suspicion of there being a something of private liking, of private understanding even, between Frank Churchill and Jane.
(Emma, Volume 1, Chapter 5)
Of course, we later discover that Mr. Knightley was not imagining what he saw and was right all along about the couple who are secretly engaged.
I have been to Cowper’s house in Olney in Buckinghamshire, England and seen the fireplace where he would sit and gaze into the fire almost in a trance and can imagine Jane Austen herself sitting in front of the fire in Chawton Cottage, her own imagination creating the wonderful characters in her books as she gazed into the flames.
Jane Austen and her family were enthusiastic readers aloud of poetry and prose in their private family circle, so it is not surprising that in Sense and Sensibility she has the romantic perfectionist Marianne Dashwood criticise poor Edward Ferrars behind his back for his failure to read Cowper properly. (Though, since this is a Jane Austen novel, we find Marianne’s remarks say as much about her character as they do about Edward’s!) Marianne exclaims, “Oh! mama, how spiritless, how tame was Edward’s manner in reading to us last night! … If he is not to be animated by Cowper!” (Sense and Sensibility, Volume 1, Chapter 3)
Perhaps, then, it was just as well that I had misplaced Cowper’s beautiful poem, as I am sure I would not have done it justice on that lovely sunny June evening in the Public Gardens in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Better that you read it to yourselves on a summer day, or on a chilly winter evening in front of a roaring fire!
Photos of Lyme Park, by Peter Howard:
Photos of Cowper’s house, Olney, Buckinghamshire, by Chris Grocott:
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Cowper described this building in the garden as his “verse manufacturey.”
August 4, 2017
Searching for Maud in the “Emily” Series
It’s a pleasure to introduce Melanie J. Fishbane’s guest post on L.M. Montgomery’s journals and her “Emily” books. Melanie is the author of Maud: A Novel Inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery, which was published by Penguin in April. Publishers Weekly calls it “a delightful debut novel,” and Karen Krossing writes that “Fans of Montgomery’s novels will adore this exploration of her bosom friends, her handsome and teasing suitors, her rigid grandparents, and the challenges she faced in pursuing her dream of becoming an author.”
Melanie has an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and an MA in History from Concordia University, and she often lectures on children’s literature and L.M. Montgomery. Her essay “‘My Pen Shall Heal, Not Hurt’: Writing as Therapy in L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes Are Quoted” was published in L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-1942, edited by Rita Bode and Lesley D. Clement (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). She says she’s been obsessed with Montgomery since she first read Anne of Green Gables when she was in Grade Six. She’s a freelance writer and social media consultant, and she teaches English at Humber College. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their cat, Merlin. You can find her on Twitter @MelanieFishbane and on Facebook.
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Photo by Ayelet Tsabari
Last week, Melanie visited Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island to read from Maud, and she and I had a fantastic time touring literary sites in Halifax with my friend Marianne Ward, a freelance editor and a long-time fan of Montgomery’s novels. Here are a few photos from that rainy afternoon, and, at the end of this post, from Melanie’s readings in the Halifax Public Gardens and at Mabel Murple’s Bookshoppe & Dreamery in River John, NS.
First, the Old Burying Ground, fictionalized as “Old St. John’s Cemetery” in Anne of the Island. Anne’s friend Priscilla says, “a few years ago they put up a beautiful monument to the memory of Nova Scotian soldiers who fell in the Crimean War. It is just opposite the entrance gates and there’s ‘scope for imagination’ in it.”
Of course I had to point out Government House, across the street from the Old Burying Ground, because it’s on the “Austens in Halifax” walking tour that Sheila Johnson Kindred and I wrote and posted on my website a few weeks ago:
The house on Church Street where L.M. Montgomery lived when she was working in Halifax at The Daily Echo. Looks as if it’s still for sale. Anyone want to buy it and turn it into a museum?[image error]
The Forrest Building at Dalhousie University, fictionalized as Redmond College in Anne of the Island:
The final stop on our tour was Point Pleasant Park. Montgomery found her walks at Point Pleasant provided consolation when she missed her Prince Edward Island home, and she mentions the park, its shore road, and its pavilions in Anne of the Island. Here’s a photo of Melanie (on the left) and Marianne at Point Pleasant, along with another photo that I took on a different visit to the park last week.[image error]
Melanie and Marianne and I didn’t have time, unfortunately, to visit the building Montgomery worked in when she wrote for The Daily Echo in 1901-02, but Melanie and I did get there this past Monday, after her reading in the Public Gardens.
The building is now the home of The Old Triangle pub, and it’s where we hold meetings for our Project Bookmark Canada Halifax Reading Circle. Marianne is a member of the group and it was her brilliant idea a couple of years ago that we should meet there because of the literary connection with Montgomery.
I was thrilled to hear the announcement last week that the first Bookmark in PEI is for one of L.M. Montgomery’s poems, “The Gable Window,” and that it will be unveiled at her grandparents’ homestead, known as The Site of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Cavendish Home, on June 24, 2018. I think it’s wonderful news, and I’m excited about future Bookmarks across Canada, especially in Nova Scotia and PEI.
(If you’re interested, you can read more about our Reading Circle in this article on the Project Bookmark website: “Reading Circles Link Readers Across Canada.” There are a couple of photos of the homestead in a blog post I wrote a few years ago about “L.M. Mongtomery’s Literary Pilgrimage to Concord, Mass.” And there’s more information about Montgomery-related sites in Halifax on my “L.M. Montgomery in Nova Scotia” page.)
Here’s Melanie’s guest post:
One of the first images that came to me when I began writing Maud: A Novel Inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery was of Maud throwing her journal into the stove and watching it burn. She was fourteen. Having kept a journal since I was fourteen (and having read it since), I can imagine wanting to burn away certain trivialities. (Don’t worry, I haven’t.)
The journal that L.M. Montgomery burned, however, was one that she had kept since she was nine. While she says in her new journal that she burned it because it had trivial musings about the weather and it was “also very dull,” she also writes that this time, “I am going to keep this book locked up!!” (The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889-1900).
It made me wonder: Why? Why would Montgomery want to keep her new journal locked up with such urgency the idea required not one, but two exclamation points!! (And we all know what Mr. Carpenter—in the “Emily” books—thought of those!!)
I discussed this question with one of my writer friends, who reminded me that some stories are easier to write about in fiction. Even if diaries are supposed to be private in nature, there is a possibility that they will be read. Montgomery scholars Elizabeth Waterston and Mary Rubio have discussed Montgomery’s revisions to her journals, and the special instructions about their publication that she left for her sons to read after she died. So, again I wondered: What was too painful for Montgomery to write about in her journal? Even when she was revising it? Or, had it been there and it was too painful to revisit it?
While I always think it is dangerous to see direct connections between an author’s life and fiction, I do think there are some truths in these connections. And Montgomery encouraged readers to see these links between her life and art, particularly in her autobiography, The Alpine Path. Readers continue to make these links, and they travel from all over the world to visit her fictional worlds in real places.
So, I returned to her fiction, looking for clues about Montgomery’s writing process and the questions she had about writing, trying to answer not just the question about why she might have burned her journal, but the other hidden truths, the things that the journals weren’t saying.
The Emily books became very important in this process because my novel was a portrait of the artist as a young woman. I returned to Emily to see if I could learn more about Montgomery as a teenager. As Alice Munro points out in the afterword she wrote for Emily of New Moon, the novel’s central focus is “the development of a child—and a girl child, at that—into a writer.” Montgomery had said that the Emily novels were more autobiographical than the Anne novels. Writing is essential, as Emily says to Mr. Carpenter at the end of the novel (in italics—good thing it was just dialogue as we know what her teacher thought of those in print), “I have to write—I can’t help it at times—I’ve just got to.” This idea echoes something Montgomery wrote in a letter to G.B. Macmillan about the urge to write and how the only thing she ever wanted to do was write. It was part of the narrative of her experience, of how she wished people to see her—and maybe how she wished to see herself.
Bringing these ideas back to my fictional character based on a real person meant that I had to take all that I learned and allow her voice to tell me who she was and what she wanted. Perhaps it was too painful to write in her journal about it being discovered by one of her family members? Maybe Montgomery felt something sacred had been tarnished, just as Emily felt after her Aunt Elizabeth read the private letters she wrote to her father after his death. While it might be those long-lost journal entries were really about the weather, I had to wonder if there was more in them that Montgomery had burned away when she was fourteen. Perhaps she wrote about her time living at Aunt Emily’s, or what happened with Izzie Robinson, or how long it had been since she had seen her father. We will never know. But writing historical fiction allowed me to consider these questions and delving into the Emily series helped me find those aspects, while (I hope) being true to the character I had created.
Melanie reading in the Halifax Public Gardens:
Photos from last week’s reading at Mabel Murple’s Bookshoppe & Dreamery in River John, Nova Scotia:
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Sheree Fitch introduces Melanie’s reading
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That’s me on the left, with Melanie (and Maud) in the middle, and Naomi MacKinnon (of consumedbyink.ca) on the right
A couple of photos I took on opening day at Mabel Murple’s, in early July:
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[image error]A beautiful display of copies of Melanie’s novel Maud at Mabel Murple’s:
July 28, 2017
A Visit to Green Gables
[image error]I went to Prince Edward Island last weekend and visited Green Gables for the first time in a few years. I’ve been thinking about L.M. Montgomery’s early years as a writer, because I’ve been reading a new collection of her work called After Many Years: Twenty-One “Long-Lost” Stories, edited by Carolyn Strom Collins and Christy Woster. (Montgomery published hundreds of stories and poems—I hadn’t realized just how high the number was—before Anne of Green Gables appeared in 1908.) And I was thinking of those early years because this week, Melanie J. Fishbane, author of Maud: A Novel Inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery, is visiting Nova Scotia and PEI. Melanie’s novel focuses on Montgomery as a teenager, dreaming of future success as a writer: “Similar to Jo March in Little Women, Maud imagined herself writing sweeping epics and articles for newspapers, or traveling to the great cities of the world, and making something of herself.”
On Tuesday, Melanie and I spent a rainy afternoon touring sites in Halifax that Montgomery was familiar with when she lived here in 1895-96 and 1901-02, including the Old Burying Ground, Dalhousie University, and Point Pleasant Park. Melanie will be reading from Maud in the Halifax Public Gardens on Monday, July 31st, at noon. She’ll also be signing books and reading in Summerside, Park Corner, and Charlottetown, PEI today and tomorrow, and then signing books in Halifax on Sunday—full details about her events in the Maritimes are listed on her website. Next Friday, I’ll share with you a guest post Melanie wrote about Montgomery’s diaries and her “Emily” novels, along with some pictures from our tour of LMM-related sites in Halifax.
For now, here are some of the photos I took last weekend in PEI. Despite the huge crowds of people touring Green Gables and walking on the trails, I managed to get a few pictures without any people in them. It’s amusing to look back at these pictures now, as they make the place seem so quiet and peaceful, when in fact it was quite noisy and busy. I can hear my daughter saying, “Quick, quick! Take the picture now! Oh, no!! There’s another person.”
Here are my photos of the Gardens of Hope and the Clyde River, at the PEI Preserve Company in New Glasgow, where it really was quiet. The restaurant and shop were busy, but at that hour in the evening—the best hour for photography, but perhaps also for eating the Preserve Company’s famous raspberry cream cheese pie—there were only about half a dozen people in the garden.
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Sunset at Stanley Bridge:
The kitchen window, “Anne’s room,” the sewing room, the garden, Lovers’ Lane, and the Balsam Hollow Trail at Green Gables Heritage Place, L.M. Montgomery’s Cavendish National Historic Site of Canada:
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“May I call it—let me see—Bonny would do—may I call it Bonny while I’m here? Oh, do let me! … I like things to have handles even if they are only geraniums. It makes them seem more like people. How do you know but that it hurts a geranium’s feelings just to be called a geranium and nothing else? You wouldn’t like to be called nothing but a woman all the time. Yes, I shall call it Bonny.” (Anne of Green Gables, Chapter 4)
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“Anne’s Room”
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July 14, 2017
Austens in Halifax, Nova Scotia: A Walking Tour
Jane Austen died two hundred years ago this month, on July 18, 1817. Readers around the world are commemorating the anniversary with exhibitions, lectures, conferences and other events, and above all—I hope—by reading and rereading her novels.
A few weeks ago, the Jane Austen Society of the UK held a conference in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Austen’s novels Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, to discuss connections between the Austen family and Halifax, and to honour Jane Austen’s literary achievement in this anniversary year.
Sheila Johnson Kindred and I gave a lecture on the story of Jane Austen’s two naval brothers, Charles and Francis, and the time they spent in Halifax between 1805 and 1811 (Charles) and between 1845 and 1848 (Francis). To complement the lecture, we prepared a walking tour of sites in Halifax that were familiar to Captain Charles Austen and Admiral Sir Francis Austen and their families. I promised to share the walking tour online as well as at the conference, and I’m pleased to say that it’s now available on a new “Austens in Halifax” page on my website. It’s also possible to download and print a PDF of the walking tour.
At the conference, we heard lectures by Cheryl Kinney (“Persuasion: Engineered Injury” and “Jane Austen: Her Doctors and Her Death”), John Mullan (“The Hurry of Northanger Abbey,” “What Matters in Jane Austen?” and “Persuasion and Self-Delusion”), and Peter Sabor (“Jane Austen and Canada: from Anna Lefroy to Joan Austen-Leigh” and “Jane Austen and America: The first fifty years; from 1817 to the late 1860s”). I gave a second lecture on “Anne Elliot’s Ambitions” and Sheila’s second lecture focused on “Fanny Palmer Austen: The Story of a North American Naval Wife.”
Sheila’s biography of Fanny Austen, Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen, will be published this fall by McGill-Queen’s University Press. The book includes the letters Fanny wrote while she was with her husband Charles in Halifax, and it features rarely seen illustrations.
It was a pleasure to visit many of the sites mentioned in the walking tour during the week-long conference, including Citadel Hill, Government House, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, St. Paul’s Church, and Admiralty House.
There are many photos on the “Austens in Halifax” page, and in two blog posts I wrote in June, “Austens in Bermuda and Nova Scotia” and “Reading Jane Austen’s Poems in the Halifax Public Gardens.” I’ll include a few more photos here, all of which I took during the JAS conference.
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Jane Austen’s niece Cassy was baptized in 1809, and her nephew Charles John Austen, Junior married Sophia Emma Deblois in 1848:
Admiralty House (now the Naval Museum of Halifax), where Admiral Sir Francis Austen and his family lived when he was in Halifax, Nova Scotia as Commander-in-Chief of the North American and West Indies Station, 1845-48. The first photo is the view from the front steps of the house:[image error]
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June 30, 2017
Reading Jane Austen’s Poems in the Halifax Public Gardens
Last Sunday, on a warm summer evening during the Jane Austen Society of the UK conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, members of the JAS UK and the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Nova Scotia Region read poems by Jane Austen and other members of her family at an event in the beautiful Halifax Public Gardens. The reading was hosted by the Friends of the Public Gardens and organized by Janet Brush. Audience members were encouraged to read as well, from work by Austen or other poets, and they chose poems by such writers as William Blake, John Donne, and Sir Walter Scott. Janet invited me to say a few words about Jane Austen’s poetry at the beginning of the reading, and I decided to post what I said here on my blog as well.
The JAS conference was splendid, and I’m grateful to Patrick Stokes for organizing it and inviting me to give two lectures. I’ll include a few photos from the conference at the end of this blog post, and in July (as promised earlier this month) I’ll write a separate blog post that includes the “Austens in Halifax” walking tour Sheila Johnson Kindred and I prepared to accompany our lecture on “Charles and Francis: Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers on the Royal Navy’s North American Station.”
First, though, here’s what I said about Jane Austen’s poems. This is a slightly longer version of what I said at the poetry reading.
Jane Austen is not usually thought of as a poet. Many of her readers don’t know about her poetry at all—what they know are the “big six” novels, the novels that have made her famous around the world: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, which were published between 1811 and 1817, the year she died.
The 200th anniversary of her death is next month, on July 18th, and there are events planned in England and around the world to commemorate the occasion, including the conference here in Halifax this week. Members of the Jane Austen Society of the UK have come here to talk about Austen’s novels and about the Austen family’s connection with Nova Scotia. Although Jane Austen herself never visited Halifax—never left England, in fact—two of her brothers were in the Royal Navy and they and their families visited a few times.
Jane Austen is probably best known for creating Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, the heroine and hero of Pride and Prejudice, and that’s partly because the famously “light & bright & sparkling” novel (as she referred to it in a letter to her sister Cassandra on February 4, 1813) has been adapted for film and television several times. But her other works, including her poems, her letters, and the stories and plays she wrote when she was very young, are also well worth our attention, and they give us a richer, fuller picture of her as an artist.
Several of the Austens wrote poetry. There are many poems by Jane’s mother and her older brother James, and there are also riddles and charades composed by other members of the family, including her nieces Fanny Knight and Anna Austen, and her brothers Henry, Charles, and Francis (or Frank).
Charles and Frank are of particular interest to us here in Halifax, because they’re the ones who spent time here when they were posted to the Royal Navy’s North American Station.
Captain Charles Austen was here several times between 1805 and 1811, during Jane Austen’s lifetime, in the years before her two naval novels, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, were published, and she was inspired by his experiences when she created the naval characters in those two novels.
Frank—Admiral Sir Francis Austen—was here many years after her death, when he was Commander-in-Chief of what was by then known as the North American and West Indies Station. He lived in Admiralty House, in the naval yard, which is now the Naval Museum of Halifax.
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We visited Admiralty House on Sunday afternoon, just before the poetry reading in the Gardens.
The Austen family wrote poetry to entertain themselves and their friends, not for publication. Jane Austen once said, when she was encouraged to write a historical romance, “I could no more write a romance than an epic poem” (in a letter written on April 1, 1816). David Selwyn, editor of the Collected Poems and Verse of the Austen Family (1996), has suggested it is “only in an ironic sense that she saw herself as a poet.”
She did not write epic poetry, and she did not, as far as we know, seek to publish her poems. Yet I’m inclined to agree with the argument the Canadian literary critic George Whalley proposes in an essay called “Jane Austen: Poet” (published in Jane Austen’s Achievement [1976], edited by Juliet McMaster). Whalley says she is a poet not primarily because she wrote verses—though she did, and they are clever and entertaining, as you’ll hear in a moment when we read some of them.
Instead, Whalley invokes the Greek root of the word “poet,” poiein, which means “make, do, fashion, or perform,” and he suggests Jane Austen is a poet because she is a “maker” in words, a maker of tragedies as well as of comedies. She is an artist, a creator, a maker with a poetic vision, in her novels, which are her greatest achievement.
(I say more about Whalley and the idea of Jane Austen as a poet in my essay “The Tragic Action of Mansfield Park,” which was published in Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park [2014], edited by Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire. An earlier version of that essay appeared in Persuasions On-Line.)
At Sunday’s reading, I chose to focus on three of her poems: “My dearest Frank,” “In measured verse,” and “Winchester Races.” I’ll quote a few lines from them here.
The first poem is a letter Jane Austen wrote to congratulate her brother Frank on the birth of his first son in the summer of 1809. She and her sister Cassandra and their mother had recently settled in a cottage in the village of Chawton, in Hampshire. Frank’s wife and daughter were in nearby Alton, and Frank himself was away on a voyage to China when his son was born. Charles Austen and his family were in Bermuda in 1809, and he brought his wife Fanny and their first baby, Cassy, to Nova Scotia for the first time that fall. (Cassy was baptized at St. Paul’s Church in Halifax on October 6, 1809.) In the last lines of the poem, Jane imagines that perhaps Charles and his family will return to England and settle in the Great House at Chawton, which belonged to her older brother Edward:
You’ll find us very snug next year;
Perhaps with Charles & Fanny near—
For now it often does delight us
To fancy them just over-right us.
I love the fact that North America features so prominently in the second poem I read, “In measured verse,” which Jane Austen wrote for her niece Anna: there are references to “Ontario’s lake,” “Niagara’s Fall,” and “transatlantic groves.” While Jane Austen herself didn’t visit North America, she travelled vast distances in her imagination. She said of Anna that “Her wit descends on foes and friends / Like famed Niagara’s Fall.”
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I couldn’t resist including this photo I took last summer when my family and I visited Niagara Falls.
The last poem I read was the last one Jane Austen wrote before she died in July of 1817. She died in Winchester, England, at the age of forty-one, and her beloved sister Cassandra was with her in her final days and hours. Even though she was very ill and must have known she was dying, she chose to write a comic poem. It begins,
When Winchester races first took their beginning
It is said the good people forgot their old Saint
Not applying at all for the leave of St Swithin
And that William of Wykham’s approval was faint.
She wrote it on July 15, St. Swithun’s Day, and she died three days later.
Christy Ann Conlin was the next reader. She read Jane Austen’s “Ode to Pity,” along with a brief excerpt from her novel The Memento. The novel is set in Nova Scotia, at a grand estate called “Petal’s End,” and the descriptions of the estate and garden, “Evermore,” were inspired by Christy Ann’s visits to Uniacke House, Prescott House, and the Halifax Public Gardens, as she discussed in a piece she wrote for my blog last September. The young heroine, Fancy, reminds me of Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland, who thinks with delight of all the gothic horrors that might await her at Northanger Abbey. The crucial difference here, in The Memento, is that Fancy hasn’t simply imagined the stories that haunt the Parker family and their servants at Petal’s End, and Christy Ann’s novel turns out to have even more in common with the ghost stories of Edith Wharton than it does with Austen’s novels.
Janet Brush read Jane Austen’s “Oh! Mr Best, you’re very bad,” we listened to readings from Blake, Donne, Scott, and others, as I mentioned above, and several JAS and JASNA members read from other poems by Jane Austen and her family. Christopher Smith from the JAS amazed and delighted the audience with a dramatic recitation, in French, of two fables by La Fontaine. It was an informal and fun reading, and by the end we were passing around a copy of David Selwyn’s edition of the Collected Poems and Verse of the Austen Family, taking turns choosing what to read next.
Many thanks to everyone who participated, and to Janet and the Friends of the Public Gardens for choosing Jane Austen’s poetry as the theme of the June reading, timed to coincide with the JAS conference. There are more readings planned for July 21st, August 18th, September 23rd, and October 21st, all from 6 to 8pm at the bandstand, to continue the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Public Gardens.
Here are some of the photos I took at the Jane Austen Society, UK conference in Halifax, “Transatlantic Perspectives on Jane Austen: 200 Years of Persuasion,” 20-27 June 2017. We toured Uniacke House on Friday:
We visited Luckett Vineyards and Grand Pré National Historic Site on Saturday:
[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]The farewell dinner was held at the Halifax Citadel:
[image error][image error][image error][image error] And here’s one last photo of the Halifax Public Gardens:
June 9, 2017
Austens in Bermuda and Nova Scotia
Later this month, Sheila Johnson Kindred and I are giving a joint lecture for the Jane Austen Society, UK conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia on “Charles and Francis Austen: Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers on the Royal Navy’s North American Station,” so I’ve put together a collection of photos of Austen-related sites in Bermuda and Nova Scotia. Jane’s younger brother, Captain Charles Austen, served on the North American Station between 1805 and 1811, and one of her older brothers, Vice Admiral Sir Francis Austen, was Commander-in-Chief between 1845 and 1848, long after Jane’s death in 1817.
Sheila and I are writing a walking tour that highlights places the Austen brothers and their families saw or visited during their time in Halifax, and I’ll post more details about that next month. In the meantime, I want to share some of the photos with you. I took all the photos of places in Halifax and my sister-in-law Laura Baxter took the photos of places in Bermuda.
Sheila recently completed a biography of Charles Austen’s Bermuda born wife Fanny Palmer Austen. Her book Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen will be published in October by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Sheila and I have collaborated on many Austen-related projects over the years (including an essay called “Among the Proto-Janeites: Reading Mansfield Park for Consolation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1815,” which was published in Persuasions On-Line after we presented it at the 2014 JASNA AGM in Montreal), and I am thrilled to announce the news about her book. I know it will be essential reading for anyone interested in Jane Austen, as Sheila traces through Fanny’s life story the relationship she built with Jane and the influence she may have had on Jane Austen’s fiction, especially the creation of the female naval characters in Persuasion.
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Belcher’s Marsh Park in Halifax, NS. A photo from our co-authored paper “Among the Proto-Janeites.” This land was part of the Birch Cove estate that Sir John and Lady Sherbrooke leased from Halifax merchant Andrew Belcher in 1811.
I’ll include details about Sheila’s articles on the Austens at the end of this blog post, for anyone who wants to consult back issues of Persuasions while we wait for October to read Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister. Congratulations on your book, Sheila! I’m looking forward to conversations about the Austens in Bermuda and Nova Scotia at the conference, and I can’t wait to see the book in print.
First, a few photos from St. Georges, Bermuda, where Fanny Palmer was born, and where she and Charles Austen were married in St. Peter’s Church in 1807:
Photos of Halifax, Nova Scotia:
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The Halifax Town Clock on Citadel Hill, given to the city by Edward, Duke of Kent
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The Dockyard Clock, now located on the Halifax waterfront
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, where Charles and Fanny Austen’s daughter Cassy was baptized in 1809:
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Government House, Halifax, where Charles and Fanny Austen danced at a ball in 1810
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Admiralty House, where Francis Austen and his family stayed when they were in Halifax in the 1840s
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Looking across to McNabs Island, in the Halifax Harbour, from Point Pleasant Park
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Georges Island, Halifax Harbour
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Georges Island, and McNabs Island in the distance
For further reading
There’s more information about the Austen family’s Nova Scotia connection in Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, a collection of essays I edited for the Jane Austen Society, UK after the 2005 conference here in Halifax. The book includes the lectures Peter W. Graham, Brian Southam, Sheila Johnson Kindred, and I presented at the conference.
Articles by Sheila Johnson Kindred:
“Charles Austen: Prize Chaser and Prize Taker on the North American Station 1805-1808” in Persuasions 26 (2004): 188-94.
“Charles Austen’s Capture of the French Privateer La Jeune Estelle.” Jane Austen Society Annual Report (2006): 50-53.
“Two Brothers, One City: Charles and Francis Austen in Halifax, Canada” in Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, ed. Sarah Emsley. Chawton, Hampshire: Jane Austen Society, 2006. 9-21.
“Jane Austen’s Naval Brother Charles on the North American Station” in the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society Journal 10 (2007): 25-46.
“The Influence of Naval Captain Charles Austen’s North American Experiences on Persuasion and Mansfield Park” in Persuasions 31 (2009): 115-29.
Coming this fall! Sheila Johnson Kindred’s book about Jane Austen’s sister-in-law Fanny Palmer Austen:
Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming October 2017.
June 2, 2017
First Impressions: Jane Austen’s radical female friendship
Congratulations to Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, whose book A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf was published yesterday by Aurum Press. Emily and Emma wrote a guest post on “The Challenge of Friendship” for “Emma in the Snow,” the blog series I hosted last year for the 200th anniversary of Austen’s Emma, and it’s my pleasure today to share with you their guest post on the friendship between Jane Austen and Anne Sharpe.
On their blog, Something Rhymed, Emily and Emma write about friendships between women writers (including Nora Lefurgey and L.M. Montgomery, Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson, and Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, to name a few), and they often feature guest interviews and blog posts by contemporary women writers. I asked if they’d write about their own friendship as part of this guest post on Austen and Sharpe, and here’s what they had to say:
The two of us met right at the beginning of our writing journeys, during a time when we were still secretive about our fledgling work. In fact, it took us a year before we admitted to each other that we were writing in our spare time. Since then we have helped each other with the many uphill struggles and shared every moment of celebration. This got us to wondering whether our favourite writers of the past had enjoyed the same kind of support. Lots of male duos came to mind: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But we struggled to come up with many examples of female literary friendship because women who write are often cast as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses: Jane Austen cooped away in her country cottage, Charlotte Brontë roaming the moors with only her sisters for company, George Eliot too aloof to need the advice of another woman who wrote, and Virginia Woolf protecting her space at the top. Our own friendship taught us to question these portrayals, and so we set out to discover whether behind each of these great women was another great woman.
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Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
I’ve been following Something Rhymed for a long time, and I’m looking forward to reading A Secret Sisterhood.
Here’s the press release for the book :
Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend; think Byron and Shelley, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the world’s best-loved female authors are usually portrayed as isolated eccentrics. Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney seek to dispel this myth with a wealth of hidden yet startling collaborations.
A Secret Sisterhood looks at Jane Austen’s bond with a family servant, the amateur playwright Anne Sharp; how Charlotte Brontë was inspired by the daring feminist Mary Taylor; the transatlantic relationship between George Eliot and the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe; and the underlying erotic charge that lit the friendship of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield – a pair too often dismissed as bitter foes.
Through letters and diaries which have never been published before, this fascinating book resurrects these hitherto forgotten stories of female friendships that were sometimes illicit, scandalous and volatile; sometimes supportive, radical or inspiring; but always, until now, tantalisingly consigned to the shadows.
A Secret Sisterhood evolved from the authors’ own friendship. Their blog, Something Rhymed, charts female literary bonds and has been covered in the media and promoted by Margaret Atwood, Sheila Hancock and Kate Mosse, showing that the literary sisterhood is still alive today.
Emma Claire Sweeney has lectured at City University, New York University in London, the Open University and the University of Cambridge. Her work has won Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund and Escalator Awards, and has been shortlisted for several others, including the Asham, Wasafiri and Fish. She writes for newspapers and magazines such as the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, The Times, and Mslexia. Her debut novel Owl Song at Dawn was published by Legend Press in July 2016. The novel has been shortlisted for the BookHugger Book of the Year Award, and Emma has been named an Amazon Rising Star and a Hive Rising Writer.
Emily Midorikawa lectures at City University and at New York University’s London campus. She has taught at the University of Cambridge and the Open University, as well as writing for the Daily Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday, The Times, Aesthetica and Mslexia. Her memoir ‘The Memory Album’ appeared in Tangled Roots, an Arts Council-sponsored collection that celebrates the stories of mixed-race families. Emily is the winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize 2015, and was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition. She was a runner-up in the SI Leeds Literary Prize, judged by Margaret Busby, and the Yeovil Literary Prize, judged by Tracy Chevalier.
And here’s Emma and Emily’s guest post on Austen and Sharpe:
The day we first met occupies an important place in both our memories. It was back in the summer of 2001 and we were among a group of British graduates at a training weekend, preparing for our new posts as English teachers in rural Japan. While Emily remembers feeling an instant connection, Emma couldn’t tell whether we’d come to dislike each other or end up the best of friends.
We feel so grateful that our younger selves took the path that led to friendship, even though we didn’t fully understand what drew us close. Back then, we scarcely admitted our dreams of authorship even to ourselves, but we now look back on this first meeting as the point of departure on a journey that would take us, sixteen years on, to the publication of our first co-written book.
In A Secret Sisterhood we explore the literary friendships of celebrated female writers – relationships that have been consigned to the shadows while the bonds between male writers have hogged the limelight.
We discovered that Charlotte Brontë met her writer friend, the straight-talking Mary Taylor, at a Yorkshire boarding school; George Eliot first encountered Harriet Beecher Stowe by reading the American author’s bestselling works; and Virginia Woolf was introduced to fellow modernist Katherine Mansfield in the Oxfordshire home of a well-known literary hostess. But we struggled to work out when Jane Austen first met the woman who would become her staunch literary ally.
The received wisdom is that Jane met Anne Sharpe, the governess who penned plays in between teaching lessons, during the summer of 1805. They forged their unlikely friendship, so the story goes, inside the walls of Godmersham Park, the abode of Jane’s wealthy brother and Anne’s employer.
But a governess friend named ‘Miss Sharpe’ first crops up in Jane’s correspondence in the spring of that year (21–3 April 1805). Surprisingly, an annotation tucked away at the back of the authoritative edition of Jane Austen’s letters insists that this Miss Sharpe could not possibly be the same woman who taught Jane’s niece – a Miss Sharpe who would feature in Jane’s next surviving letter (24 August 1805), and whose name would litter the rest of Jane’s missives.
The first governess friend of the name “Miss Sharpe” cannot be Anne Sharpe, apparently, because she and Jane could not yet have met. There’s no evidence that Jane had paid a visit to her Kentish relatives during the fifteen months of Anne’s employment. And Anne must have been holed away in Godmersham throughout that time.
But this, in fact, was not the case. The metal-clasped diaries and wax-sealed letters of Jane’s niece Fanny reveal that, during the spring of 1805, her teacher was away from home. These unpublished manuscripts show that Anne’s month-long absence coincides with a time when Jane was moving house.
This was a period ridden with trepidation for the Austen women. The death of Reverend Austen had not only robbed them of an affectionate husband and father, they’d also lost a major source of income. Unable to continue to afford their tenancy of Green Park Buildings, Mrs. Austen and her two daughters removed themselves to poky rented rooms in a busy part of town.
Since Fanny waved off her governess during the week commencing 18 March and Anne didn’t return for almost a month, it seems possible that Edward sent her to assist the Austen women with their move, and that Jane and Anne grew fond of each other far from the watchful eyes of the owners of Godmersham.
If so, this would not have been the first time that Anne had been told to cancel lessons and fit herself around the family’s other plans. She was regularly instructed to work outside the schoolroom: sent to drop off the boys at their boarding schools at the beginning of term and pick them up at its close, and called on at times to chaperone her employer’s guests on their journeys too.
To have been a fly on the wall when Jane and Anne first met, to watch as their relationship transformed from that of employer and employee to a deep bond between two women who wrote.
Both were enduring difficult times during the spring of 1805. Anne suffered persistent headaches and eye problems that must have hampered her attempts at devising plays, and Jane – still unpublished at this stage – had not been able to concentrate on her new novel during the months since her father died.
It’s tempting to imagine that the pair’s shared love of literature sustained them through such difficult times and that their first flicker of friendship brightened each other’s lives.
In the years to come, these women would find all sorts of ways to support each other’s endeavours – Anne offered Jane astute critiques of her novels and Jane acted in one of Anne’s household plays – but, on this occasion, the pair could no sooner have become acquainted than they would have been forced to part ways. Anne had to return to her post at Godmersham and Jane had to endure her shrunken circumstances in Bath.
Jane did see some opportunities in her newfound impoverishment. It offered the perfect excuse to invite her childhood friend Martha Lloyd to join the new household – a plan Jane and her sister had plotted behind the backs of their relatives. Martha’s meagre finances could supplement the Austen women’s funds and her skills as an amateur cook and apothecary would come as welcome indeed. But, more than anything, it was her friendship they held dear.
Friendship was also at the heart of another of Jane’s schemes. That first mention in the surviving letters of a governess called “Miss Sharpe” gives the impression that Jane had been looking for teaching work in Bath on the woman’s behalf. If this governess friend was indeed the Anne Sharpe who taught Jane’s niece, such an endeavour would surely have involved Jane going behind her brother’s back.
This version of events exposes the myth of Jane as a conservative maiden aunt, devoted above all else to kith and kin. Here was a much more rebellious woman, someone prepared to flout social conventions by treating a family servant as an equal; someone ready to show disloyalty to her brother by prioritising the needs of a female friend.
Quotations are from the Oxford edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (4th edition, 2011) and details included in this post are drawn from the unpublished letters and diaries of Fanny Knight housed at the Kent History and Library Centre.
