Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 21

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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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.

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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.

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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!

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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!

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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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

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:

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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.”